Pedro bay, Ferrel again found Indians who told him by signs that "they had passed people like the Spaniards in the interior." Two days later, on Saturday morning, "three large Indians came to the ship, who told by signs that men like us were traveling in the interior, wearing beards, and armed and clothed like the people on the ships, and carrying cross-bows and swords. They made gestures with the right arm as if they were throwing lances, and went running in a posture as if riding on horseback. They showed that many of the native Indians had been killed, and that this was the reason they were afraid." A week later, October 7, the ships anchored off the islands of Santa Cruz and Anacapa. The Indians of the islands and also of the mainland opposite, near Santa Barbara or the Santa Clara valley, gave the Spaniards additional descriptions of men like themselves in the interior.
The rest of the year 1542 was spent in this locality, off the coast of southern California, and then the voyage northward was resumed. Many points on the land were touched, although San Francisco bay quite escaped observation. Just before a severe storm, in which one of the vessels was lost, forcing him to turn back, Ferrel observed floating drift and recognized that it meant the neighborhood of a large river, but he was driven out to sea before reaching the mouth of the Columbia. The return voyage was uneventful, and the surviving vessel reached the harbor of Natividad in safety by April 14, 1543.
VILLALOBOS SAILS ACROSS THE PACIFIC
Cortes and Alvarado had both conceived plans more than once to equip a great expedition in New Spain and cross the South sea to the isles of the Western ocean. After the death of Alvarado, Mendoza adopted this scheme, and commissioned Ruy Lopez de Villalobos to take command of some of the ships of Alvarado and sail westward. He started on All Saints day, the 1st of November, 1542, with 370 Spanish soldiers and sailors aboard his fleet. January 22, 1547, Friar Jeronimo de Santisteban wrote to Mendoza "from Cochin in the Indies of the King of Portugal." He stated that 117 of the men were still with the fleet, and that these intended to keep together and make their way as best they could home to Spain. Thirty members of the expedition had remained at Maluco, and twelve had been captured by the natives of various islands at which the party had landed. The rest, including Ruy Lopez, had succumbed to hunger and thirst, interminable labors and suffering, and unrelieved discouragement—the record of the previous months. This letter of Friar Jeronimo is the only published account of the fate of this expedition.
The brief and gloomy record of the voyage of Villalobos is a fit ending for this story of the Coronado expedition to Cibola and Quivira, of how it came about, of what it accomplished, and of what resulted from it. Nothing is the epitome of the whole story. The lessons which it teaches are always warnings, but if one will read history rightly, every warning will be found to be an inspiration.
