Historic Background

In 1579, before Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or New
Amsterdam were settled, Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, careened
and repaired his ship, the Golden Hind, on the shore of what is now
Drake's Bay, an indentation on the California coast just north of the
Golden Gate. This was nearly two hundred years before Padre Junipero
Serra led his band of zealots and soldiers up out of New Spain into Alta
California.

At Drake's Bay the chaplain of the Golden Hind held the first religious
service in the English language on the American continent--a service
that is commemorated by a Celtic cross set up on a hill in Golden Gate
Park, San Francisco. Though close by, Drake did not find the Bay and
site of San Francisco.

It was not until October 31, 1769, that the peninsula and Bay of San
Francisco were discovered by an expedition headed by Don Gaspar de
Portola, Governor of Baja or Lower California. This expedition had set
out overland from San Diego for the purpose of locating Monterey Bay,
discovered in 1603 by Sebastian Vizcaino, Portuguese navigator in the
service of Spain.

Six years after the Portola discovery, Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed the
first vessel, the San Carlos, through the Golden Gate. The following
year the first permanent settlement by white men on the site of San
Francisco was made when Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza established a
military post at the Presidio beside the Golden Gate. In this same
month, July, 1776, the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. But
there was no thought then that the embattled farmers of the Atlantic