California's Untold Maritime History (Part 1) with author Eric Plunkett

Join host Damian Bacich and guest Eric Plunkett as they dive into the fascinating early maritime history of California. 

Plunkett reveals surprising details about Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's 1542 expedition, including his connection to Cortez and the fall of Tenochtitlan. Learn how Cabrillo documented Chumash village names that remained unchanged for centuries and how Native American trade networks helped Spanish explorers communicate across vast distances. 

Discover lesser-known stories of the Manila Galleons, shipwrecks, and a possible "California Cabeza de Vaca" - a Spanish pilot who may have walked from Northern California back to Mexico City in the 1580s. 

This episode challenges common assumptions about early California history and reveals the complex web of exploration, trade, and cultural exchange that shaped the region long before the mission era. 

Eric Plunkett is a historian based in San Juan Capistrano specializing in early California exploration and indigenous history.

Transcript

Eric Plunkett: 0:00

All of the indigenous people across the Southwest had extensive trade networks and they shared information. And simultaneously with the Cabrillo Expedition, about the same time, you have Coronado inland. And you have one of the supply ships, well, a couple supply ships that were going up the Sea of Cortez. They go all the way up, uh, in between Baja California and the Mexican mainland. They get to about where the, uh, Colorado River is emptying out the delta. They get up in that region and they're trying to supply the Coronado expedition, which is traveling around inland. Well, that information had traveled all the way to the Chumash villages on the west coast of the United States, what's today's United States. And so they tell Cabrillo and his men,"Hey, there are people who look like you traveling about a week or so inland..."

0:54

Welcome to California Frontier, the show about the often overlooked and unexpected early history of the place we call California. I'm your host, Damian Basich.

Damian Bacich: 1:13

to see you, Eric. It's been, uh, what

Eric Plunkett: 1:17

Very good to see you, Damian. Yeah.

Damian Bacich: 1:21

saw you or

Eric Plunkett: 1:22

talking about a week

Damian Bacich: 1:23

That's right. You were, you were climbing up a mountain, right? You were, you were hiking, you were climbing up a mountain. That was great. That was great. And one of your explorations.

Eric Plunkett: 1:33

I know we were having this full conversation while I'm out, out in the hills and it's like, Hey, Hey Damian, here's one of the mission villages. You know, you can see this here, you in the background. So it was really

Damian Bacich: 1:42

Yeah.

Eric Plunkett: 1:43

Yeah.

Damian Bacich: 1:43

It was really, it was really cool. And you were, um, you were telling me about, about some interesting, I mean, this is just like I said to you, this is just a great, I think every so often, We should just catch up. We should hear about like what you're doing. I can share what I'm doing and just, uh, you know, share with people out there these cool and interesting things that are happening. So yeah, you told me you're, you're working on something right now, but I don't, I don't remember a hundred percent what it was, what it is. And just to remind people, you are down near San Juan Capistrano in Orange County.

Eric Plunkett: 2:19

that's right. Yeah. I'm down in San Juan Capistrano. And so, yeah, like you, Damian, it's like, uh, we just have tons of projects that are constantly going on. And, uh, you know, one of your other, um, guests was, uh, Dr. Marie Duggan. She's a friend, both of ours. And she, uh, she was able to very graciously send me scans of the San Juan Capistrano mission, San Juan Capistrano account books. So it's been really fun because I've been able to go through those, do some translations and some of the artifacts that are there at the mission. You know, may show up in those account books. So trying to date those and kind of tell more of their stories. So that's one of the things I'm working on. Um, and then the other thing, uh, I mean, well, among many things, another thing I'm working on is, um, constantly working on early exploration of California, you know, with an emphasis on working towards the portal expedition, which I I've already written about. in my neck of the woods in Orange County, but trying to write about, you know, the entire kind of expedition is a goal of mine. And to write about the entire Port de Law expedition kind of requires a full, you know, kind of overview of Spanish involvement with California going all the way back to the 1500s. And so a lot of what I've been working on lately has been trying to put that whole story together. And it's kind of this, Huge, interesting story right from the get go, um, that, uh, you know, I, I don't know if people aren't all that aware of it, but there are many details I think that aren't out there that are really extraordinary and really are like, you can't believe these stories really happened, but they, there are a bunch of them and it goes all the way back to, uh, the Cabrillo expedition. And so starting with there, and there's just a bunch of really interesting stories carrying out throughout the 1500s and through to the Vizcaíno expedition in the early 1600s.

Damian Bacich: 4:13

Yeah, you told me. Now, okay, so the Portola Expedition happens in 1768 69 and the first, uh, let's see, we have Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo who comes into San Diego Bay. and then up the coast in 1542, and then Biscayno in 1602, but you were telling me about some other things that were happening in the 16th century. I thought, frankly, here's my ignorance, I really thought that, um, that, that Cabrillo was the only, uh, Spanish, uh, Portuguese explorer coming into California in the 16th century. But you said that there were other, other expeditions going on.

Eric Plunkett: 4:58

Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, we know about Portola because that's when the Spanish came here permanently. And that's in, like you said, 1769, 1770. That's when the first missions are founded in Alta, California. Today's the state of California. But, you know, going back from 1769 all the way to Cabrillo in 1542, You have the Cabrillo expedition has some incredible story elements that I think a lot of people aren't aware of that are really worthy of note. And I'll, I can go over some of those. But after Cabrillo, you have a consistent kind of Spanish, you know, touches on California. And in a couple of cases, you actually have land Short land expeditions in California by the Spanish, two of them. Um, and then in addition to that, you also have the Sir Francis Drake, um, you know, uh, working for England who's here in 1579. So there's a whole story here and I, you know, I don't know how you wanted the conversation to work, but I can start at Cabrillo and kind of just walk through and tell you about, about all of them.

Damian Bacich: 6:06

Yeah, let's do that. That sounds great. Let's start with Cabrillo and let's walk through.

Eric Plunkett: 6:11

Wonderful. Well, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. First, you, uh, pointed out that, yes, we, uh, researched by, you know, Wendy Kramer is kind of determined that she was, you know, he was, um, uh, he was certainly associated with Spain, possibly from there, but, uh, recently we also found that there's other research that supports the idea that he may have been Portuguese and that's something that goes back to, uh, the early 1600s, you know, that there was, um, Herrera had mentioned that he was Portuguese and he very well may have been born in Portugal. But Cabrillo is amazing because he was a crossbowman. With Cortez in the battle of Tenochtitlan, which is Mexico city in 1520 and 1521. And so, just an

Damian Bacich: 6:56

young that, when happened too?

Eric Plunkett: 6:59

yeah, he was super

Damian Bacich: 7:01

a he like We

Eric Plunkett: 7:06

who was the governor of Cuba. At least, uh, that's what we think. Um, uh, and Harry Kelsey wrote a great biography about him. You can read about it. It's really amazing. So he was involved with the earliest. You know, Conquistadors, you know, like in throughout Central America. And he was involved with going into Guatemala under Alvarado. Um, he was involved with a lot of really interesting early stuff. And so what happens is The, um, you know, I don't know how many people are aware of these things, but Cortez himself, after taking over Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, um, he gets into a lot of different things, and one of the things he gets involved with is he establishes a very short lived colony in Baja, California. Called Santa Cruz, which is in today's La Paz. That's in about 1535, but at the same time, the first viceroy of new Spain, right, the King's kind of right hand man in the Americas, in North America. Um, Mendoza gets here in 1535, gets to the Americas. And so now things start to kind of organize. So instead of like the conquistadors taking things over now, it's like, okay, the King's going to start actually having bureaucrats who are, who are, Um, you know, organizing everything here. And so Mendoza gets in to place and right as he gets into place, he first of all pulls Cortez and Santa Cruz. He, he ends that whole endeavor. Um, but then thereafter he starts to have more interest in things about the northern frontier, right? I mean, if you think about it from the Spanish perspective, they had Tenochtitlan and South America, Pizarro and the Inca. And so it was this idea that there are these other civilizations off to the north. That have value that and and then you have the the merging seven cities, right? Myth and you know, um, the amazing, you know, Panfilo, uh, Panfilo Narvaez and you have, uh, he's doing an expedition in what is now the Southeast United States. It goes all wrong, you know, they get shipwrecked and you know about Cabeza de Vaca, who ends up kind of walking back to Mexico City, exploring a bunch of the southern and southwestern United States on his way. And of course, when, you know, what emerges is there's something to the north, something with, you know, there are other civilizations to the north that have a lot of riches. And this is what leads to the Coronado Expedition, 1540. And it's also what kind of leads to Cabrillo. And so Cabrillo is going up along the northwest coast. He's actually part of a double pronged expedition. The other, uh, uh, expedition leader was Villalobos, who went west to the southeast, um, to southeast Asia, to the, to the so called Spice Islands. And among the Spanish, their thinking was that, you know, the Pacific Ocean wasn't this big, large thing, but that North America and southeast Asia actually kind of connected. So Cabrillo was going to go up to the northwest coast, and the idea was that he would meet, possibly, in Southeast Asia, where these islands were. And that's why he ends up setting up camp on San Miguel Island, which is the westernmost channel island. And they're way out there, and there are people on the expedition, there are Spanish on the expedition, who had already been to Southeast Asia previously. And so they're kind of saying, yeah, I think, I think this is kind of about where, you know, we're close to Southeast Asia and they're nowhere near it. They're across the Pacific Ocean. But that's kind of what the expedition's about. They're, they're really thinking that they could find a trade route over to Asia. And this would be the completion of kind of the Columbus dream, right? If you go back into the 1400s, Europe had been cut off from trade With Asia, you know, you have, uh, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the fall of, um, Istanbul at, at the time, um, Constantinople, uh, in the mid 15th, uh, 15th century. And so there was this kind of break in European Asian trade. So the whole idea was that if they could find a water route over to Asia, this trade could continue. That's what Cabrillo's doing, but his expedition's unreal. I mean, there's unbelievable things that they, they discover, um, for the Europeans. Uh, one of the things that they're most impressed by are the Chumash. They see the Chumash houses and it's, they're like, wow, these guys are way advanced and they have these amazing, these tomahawk canoes and they're beautifully made. And the cool thing is, is that they had obviously been ordered to write down the names of the villages. of the Chumash villages. And I think that's because they were looking for these seven cities, you know, Cibola or Chibola. I've, I've always read it. Do you know how to pronounce that by the way? Is Chibola? Cibola. There you go. Um, and so, yeah, Cibola. And so he's writing down these village names and some of them were the exact same village names that Damian was 200 plus years later, when Port de Law gets there in 1769, during the mission era, it's the same village names, you know, Point Mugu and, uh, Limu, for the name of Santa Cruz Island, the biggest of the, uh, Channel Islands. And, you know, we can actually see in this written document, the summary of the Cabrillo expedition. You can see those very village names, those Chumash village names, and this is unique. None of the other early expeditions wrote down the village names. Um, After port to law, you would have excursions out into the surrounding country around the missions, and they would write down village names. And you know, those are the kinds of source material that we have for helping identify some of those villages. But for 1542 to have village names written down is really something. And um, so that's one of the amazing things about this. One of the other amazing things about this is that Cabrillo does something that it's just a sentence. But it's an amazing sentence. Um, you know, he's, he's sailing up the coast of California. This is the first time the Spanish have been here, and so everything's new, and they don't really understand the scale of how big the Americas are. And he gets to the Santa Clara River Valley, which is, uh, he gets near Ventura, which there is a Chumash village there called Sisolop, or Shisholop. It's, it's kind of spelled in different ways. And around there, he seems to ascend. Two Spaniards on an overland expedition to the Colorado River. Expedition, I should say, they're just, they're being sent with a letter. And what precipitated this is that all of the indigenous people across the Southwest had extensive trade networks and they shared information. And simultaneously with the Cabrillo Expedition, about the same time, you have Coronado Inland. And you have one of the supply ships, well, a couple supply ships that were going up the Sea of Cortez. They go all the way up, uh, in between Baja California and the Mexican mainland. They get to about where the, uh, Colorado River is emptying out the delta. They get up in that region and they're trying to supply the Coronado expedition, which is traveling around inland. Well, that information had traveled all the way to the Chumash villages on the west coast of the United States, what's today's United States. And so they tell Cabrillo and his men, Hey, there are people who look like you traveling about a week or so inland. And, uh, so Cabrillo hears this and he goes, I'm going to send these two guys with a letter to tell them that we're here. And, uh, there's some debate about whether he actually did, trying to understand, you know, that, that sentence, but it seems that he actually did send these two people inland. And if they had gone inland, we can kind of get a sense of where they went because we know what those indigenous trade routes looked like, and we can kind of follow them. So it's just, it's just one of these amazing stories that, you know, gets, it doesn't get much, Attention, but you know, these are the two earliest ostensibly Europeans to ever go inland and, you know, in, into the, off the, the coast of California. Um, it's, it's an amazing story and to, on the other side of it, another thing that doesn't get a lot of. attention, but I think it's worthy of mentioning. Cabrillo takes a couple of Chumash individuals back to Mexico City. Uh, we don't know they got back, um, but he certainly took them with him. And, uh, so, you know, I love thinking about these stories because they're just unbelievable stories thinking about, okay, Chumash individuals being taken. All the way, possibly, to, you know, to Nochtitlan, right, in the 1540s. So, the Cabrillo Expedition has all these wonderful stories associated with it. And, it's truly a remarkable expedition. I mean, the amount of information they were able to get at that early of a date is, is unreal. And then, to cap it all off, Cabrillo dies in California. He dies probably on San Miguel Island. And so, you know, this whole, the story of the conquistadors, right? This whole idea of the fall of Mexico, and it's like one of the greatest events in the history of, of the world. And one of the individuals who was in that, buried here in California, right? So, from the, from a very early year, California is a part. of this story. And so it goes all the way back to 1542. We

Damian Bacich: 16:23

don't really that think

Eric Plunkett: 16:24

I, uh, yeah it's, it's a, it's an amazing, thing to consider. Yeah.

Damian Bacich: 16:33

And

Eric Plunkett: 16:33

the story continues on.

Damian Bacich: 16:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. No, what you said about the, the, the names of the villages, the Chumash villages is really interesting because As I mentioned to you when we talked about this last week, that means that there's a real continuity of centuries, right? The same village is there clearly, uh, at least a couple of hundred years, but maybe longer, right? And so it gives you an idea, at least to, to somebody, um, who's not an expert on, on Native life. But when you think of, uh, California Indian tribes or Indian, um, communities, we're often talked, we're often told about hunter gatherers, right, or tribalists or things of that nature. And you, the idea you have is that there weren't permanent settlements or hardly any permanent settlements, but when you have a place a village that that has a name and it's there for over 200 years and it probably existed for much longer. I mean, that really gives an idea of a real permanence of, um, of a civilization, a permanence of a, of a society.

Eric Plunkett: 17:54

I, I, I totally agree. And to some extent this should be expected because the material culture of the Chumash was so advanced. You know, much later when Portola gets there, one of the, the, uh, the military engineer who's with him, who keeps a diary, Miguel Costanzo. He writes in his journal, this is in 1769, that these, these wood plank tamal canoes that they have, that they are, they are taking from the mainland near Santa Barbara in the Santa Barbara region. They're going all the way to the islands, the Channel Islands, which is unreal to do trade. He says, uh, that their, their construction is so impressive that he goes, even a carpenter with the best tools. from Spain could not make this, right? It's like, this is so wonderful. And so the continuity of the villages, to me, it's like, right, the village names are still there back then, because they'd been there for a very long time. Because the, you know, and the, the society had been around for a very long time and that's their material culture suggests that that was the case and they were extremely important, not only in that region in Santa Barbara, but the, the Chumash who are populating in that area, like they are part of a trade network that we know goes all the way throughout the Southwestern United States. Right? I mean, we know from Korea. Um, because they knew about all what was going on inland, but they're, they're also trading with the islands to the people's South and North. We find the shell, the bead money that they're producing there. That's found all throughout my area down through orange County and even further South. So, so yeah, the continuity of the villages, it's like something that all of us can just get our, you know, to get our heads around. They were part of an extensive network of villages that had been there for a very, very long time. And the Cabrillo expedition, this, what we have, the summary journal proves that. So it's, uh, it's, it's extremely fascinating. It's, it's unbelievable. And we're very lucky that those village names were preserved. Because the Vizcayaño Expedition didn't write those village names down. The Portola Expedition journals don't write those villages down. So we have just these precious few. But, you know, it really authenticates what we do have from the Cabrillo Expedition, which I'll go into. What little we have from it. The summary document that we have. It has these village names. It has the island names. And so we can really go, hey, this is a legitimate document.

Damian Bacich: 20:30

Yeah. Okay. So, so then let's talk a little bit about what comes, what comes after Cabrillo.

Eric Plunkett: 20:37

Absolutely. So the Spanish kind of lose interest with California. It's way up to the north. Um, they didn't find the seven cities. They didn't find an obvious passage over to Asia. Uh, they didn't find another passage, which was the Strait of Aneon or Aneon, which would go across the northern part of North America, maybe connect back over to They were really just getting to know the area. But then what starts to happen is this whole idea of connecting a trade group between Mexico and Asia becomes more and more important because the trade route that is along the sea that goes around bottom of Africa, Cape of Good Hope from Asia back to Spain. You pass through a lot of areas that have civilizations and so it's, it's very dangerous. And so the idea of getting there by sea becomes more and more interesting, uh, to the Spanish. So by the 1550s, you have, um, you have individuals who are working in today's Mexico, new Spain, trying to find a way to make this happen. And by 1565. They, you know, they, the Spanish have found a trade route that goes from mainland Mexico, today's mainland Mexico, getting over to the Philippines, which is where they establish a colony there. And so then it becomes, the question becomes, can we get from the Philippines back to Mexico? Because the idea would be that you could take silver and gold from the Americas. Take that across to the Philippines, trade it for, for goods from Asia, which would be, you know, uh, silks and, uh, ceramics and, uh, the items of that nature, gold too, um, and spices, and then you could get that back to Mexico. And then via Mexico, you could get it all the way back to Spain. So in 1565, the first ship does this, that gets from the Philippines back to Mexico. And to do that, they have to go along a north, the northern pacific current. That northern pacific current takes ships It's a long time. It's many months at sea, but it takes them to what is today Northern California. And so they first sight land in Northern California. And one of these first ships that does this is actually the second ship ever to do it. And it was in the year, uh, 1565. Um, when they get to California, a report is made by a man named Father Urdaneta that he says, yeah, when they first got to California, they sighted the island of San Salvador. The island of San Salvador was named by the Cabrillo Expedition and Father Urdaneta is the guy who wrote the summary of the Cabrillo Expedition that came down to us. And so he uses the name San Salvador, which was the island today of Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. And he uses that, he, actually Cabrillo had named that after his ship, the San Salvador, which they have a model of at the Maritime Museum in San Diego. So Urdaneta And the ships coming back, they keep, they start citing California in 1565. Fast forward, and in 1578, you know, now you have ships going each year taking, you know, usually precious metals from Mexico over to Asia, loading them up with Asian goods, and then taking this northern current back to Mexico, and on the way they site California. They become known as the Manila galleons, right? This is kind of the emergence of the Manila galleons. Well, in 1578, one of these galleons actually, um, it, uh, goes aground in Baja, California. And there has been some wonderful work. Uh, they found all sorts of ceramics in the, the, the beaches there. Um, the location is kind of a secret, but you know, this was a big deal. And the name of the ship was the San Juanillo. And this was a big loss because this was the dream of Europe to get some kind of trade route with Asia and they finally achieve it. And here's one of these big ships coming back and it, and it literally goes aground and the loss of all the crew and none of the material got back to Mexico. And this was also how Mexico city was gaining power. Mexico city was kind of a middleman between Asia and Spain, right? And so, you know, if you're the middleman in a trade network, you usually do well. So one of these ships goes aground In 79, Sir Francis Drake, right? England's at war with Spain. He comes up the Western coast of the Americas and he, uh, you know, he comes all the way up, he's actually looking for enough, he's looking for the Northwest passage, right? He's trying to get the Strait of Aneon to get back to England. Maybe you can go around the top of, uh, North America. Of course, it's way far North and very, very cold. And so he doesn't get there, but he comes. And he lands in California in today's, probably, in today's Drake's Bay, uh, just north of San Francisco. And you know about that story. So now you have the English here, right? So the Spanish lost a ship in 1578. The English get here in 1579. And there's a crazy story with Sir Francis Drake. Another story that a lot of people don't know about, which is just an unbelievable story. It's California's Cabeza de Vaca. Like I mentioned earlier, Cabeza de Vaca had done that big walk from the Southeast United States all the way through the Southwest back to Mexico over a period of a couple years. He finally arrived in Mexico City in like 1536, and I think the expedition left in like 1528, so it was a long one. But! Sir Francis Drake is here in 79, 1579, and with him we know on record was a pilot named Morera. Morera was on, we have that on record. Well, this little tale gets passed down, and in 16, the 1620s, we have a letter, that was from a guy in Mexico who heard it from one of the members of the later Vizcaíno expedition, Father Ascensión, that there was a guy who apparently was on Sir Francis Drake's expedition, apparently his name was Moreno, Morena, so N de Morena, which was very much like Morera, one of the pilots, who was sick, and so Drake left him in Drake's Bay. for kind of left him for dead, um, uh, when Drake left in 1579 from Drake's Bay. And apparently Moreno walked back to Mexico over a period of four years. And we have this document from the 1620s. Um, and uh, along the way he apparently sees this huge arm of the sea. It's like either Sia Cortez or he's talking about San Francisco Bay, right? Um, and you know, there's these kinds of analyses or fun things to think about. Like, did he think that the San Francisco Bay connected all the way to, to the Sia Cortez? And that's where the myth of the island of California came from. There's all these things that have come out of it. It's a story that's been told. Pretty hard to believe, but um, but it is something that we can't disprove. And so as historians, we get to kind of have fun on this playground and thinking of this guy walking back to Mexico City. So he's kind of California's Cabeza de Vaca. And uh, we, there's might be more information out there somewhere about him, but we haven't been able to get more. That's basically all we know is that there's this story, but it's dated to the early 1600s that he, that, that apparently this report gets written. We know the report was written then. about him getting back in 1583.

Damian Bacich: 28:10

It also makes you wonder. Why was what from his name seemed to be a Spanish guy on Drake's ship? I wonder if he was a prisoner that that he had captured because Drake was a privateer, right? He was trying to sink Spanish ships. Maybe he was somebody who had been taken hostage or who had survived a shipwreck and he decided okay, we don't we don't need this guy anymore. We're gonna leave him here.

Eric Plunkett: 28:39

it's, it's a great question. And one thing that I've noticed about maritime, you know, kind of the, the culture and just the makeup of, of the people who are on these ships, even in the 1500s, these were extremely diverse crews from, from the very earliest days. And I'll get more into that in just a minute. When I talk about another, uh, expedition to California. Um, They were extremely diverse crews. And I think the idea was that he was Spanish of some kind and, um, he may have defected from Drake and he did, you know, walk back to Mexico city. He wasn't trying to get back to England, you know, he, he obviously wanted to leave, you know, you, you can try to make these inferences, but it's a really good point, you know, and, uh, I, it's, it's not. It's probably something we can know more about by looking at the cruise, but yeah, the earliest crews are usually pretty diverse. And even though England and Spain had this constant conflict going on throughout this era and beyond. It just wouldn't surprise me if that you would have kind of mixed crews. And we know later on that that would happen, but, um, this is an early version of it.