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his duty, as minister of God and son of Adam, to go abroad on this earth, and kill and steal to the full limit of his capabilities; and who felt it likewise his duty "to register the true and whole history of that his voyage, with as great indifferency of afiection as a history doth require, and with the plain evidence of truth," — this right rare and thrice worthy gentleman, as he would say of his captain, saw strange things in California ; that is to say, things strange to those who know California, but credible enough three hundred years ago to those who were never nearer to the spot than its antipode. In July of 1579, the pirate, as his preacher says, was met by peculiar and nipping colds. The natives, he affirms, "vsed to come shivering to vs in their warme furres, crowding close together, body to body, to receiue heate one of another." Oh! "how vnhandsome and deformed appeared the face of the earth it selfe ! " Birds dared not leave their nests after the first egg was laid until all were hatched; but nature had favored these poor fowl, so that they might not die in the operation. The causes of these phenomena he next explains on scientific principles. Because Asia and America are here so near together, and by reason of the high mountains and the like, "hence comes the generall squalidnesse and barren- nesse of the countrie; hence comes it that, in the middest of their summer the snow hardly departeth euen from their very doores, but is neuer taken away from their hils at all ; hence come those thicke mists and most stinking fogges." Inland the country was better. "Infinite was the company of very large and fat Deere, which there we sawe by thousands . . , besides a multitude of a strange kind of Conies . . . his tayle like the tayle of a Rat." The savages were exceedingly edified by the words of the preacher, by his psalm-singing, and his reading of the scriptures ; so much so, that when the gentle pirates took their leave, "with sighes and sorrowings, with heauy hearts and grieued minds, they powred out wofuU complaints
