without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men as by their utmost certainties. the persistent belief of the ancient geographers in the existence of the straits of anian, the traditional north-west passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of the california coast a century or so before it was of any particular use to anybody. it led also to the bluest bay. viscaino took possession of it for philip of spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years before the franciscans planted a cross there under viscaino's very tree. during all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back the brilliant waters. there is a figure of immensity in this more terrifying than the mere lapse of years. not how many times but with what sureness for [64] every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase along the white line of the breakers. we struggle so to achieve a little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at monterey it is given away.
the bay lies squarely fronting the pacific swell, about a hundred miles south of the golden gate, between the horns of two of the little tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the pajaro and the salinas. from the south the hill juts out sharply, taking the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is blunted by the mountains of santa cruz. the beach is narrow, and all along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and mesembryanthemums. the waters of the rivers are set back by the tides, they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. for miles back into the valleys of pajaro and salinas, blue and yellow lupins continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. they climb up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little seaward against the diminished surf. then the equinoctial tide rises against the land that the lupins have taken [65] and smooths out their lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
the valley of the salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given over to farming and to memories of our lady of solitude lying now as a heap of ruins in a barley field. it is a place set apart, where any morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little, brooding hills to rest.
gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. one has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
it is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered pajaro into the shut valley where dozes the little town of san juan bautista, taking on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. here it was that the magic muse of music came into the country. it came in a little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one [66] benjamin dobson of 22 swan street, london, in the year 1735, but of all its history until it was unpacked from mule-back by padre lausan in 1797, there is not a word current. our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the padre set it up in the hills and played, "the siren's waltz," "lady campbell's reel," and all its repertoire of favourite london airs, of which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the one called "go to the devil." which only goes to prove that the spirit of the franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious fear of the noise box, was to come to mass to hear it as often as possible. there remain three old volumes of music written later for the mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the indians so much or so raised their spirits as "the siren's waltz." no doubt its inspiriting strains added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only local resistance opposed to the american invasion, for it was on the gavilan heights above the little town that frémont, on the tallest tree that he could find, raised the stars and stripes, gallantly if somewhat prematurely. it was from san juan that castro's [67] men marched to the final capitulation of cahuenga, and finally from here the last remnant of the old life drains away. one hears the echo of it faint as the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the translucent air.
returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the point of pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of the coast barriers. the point, which is really a peninsula, is one of the most notable landmarks between point conception on the south and fort point at san francisco. its lighthouse stands well out on a rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and santa cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. a windy bay at best, deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of monterey have other values than the colourist finds in them. sardines, salmon, cod, tuna, yellow tail run with its tides. at most seasons of the year whales may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. at one time the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebræ that border certain of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio dealer. lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and [68] out of the harbour, butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed boats of the japanese and chinese abalone gatherers. thousands of purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed orientals draw up out of the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. they go creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the gabble of the gulls. so in their skin canoes and balsas the indians must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. even at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence. far inland, past the sierra wall even to the country of lost borders, i have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for and treasured by a people to whom the "big water" is a half-credited traveller's tale.
about five hundred yards outside the surf, from laboratory point, circling the peninsula to mission [69] point on the south, the submerged rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. every year it is combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown, sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. here the ancient murrelet fattens for the long flight to the alaskan breeding-grounds, and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and beetle whirring wings. long triangular flights of curlew drop down these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from fishing. sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls, glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in the spring. when the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. they stretch out in close [70] order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the ruffling water between point pinos and the anchorage. but any attempt to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the bays of carmel and monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
after storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches, thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying, feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. the island rocks standing within the surf, from the point of pines all down the coast to point sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. watchful and black against the guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep; turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops, they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young. warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of voracious sea anemones. other rocks, white with salty [71] rime, are given by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of this coast. moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.
other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of monterey have left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in a night of storm. buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the ancient teakwood hull of the natala, the ship that carried napoleon to elba. it brought secularisation to the missions also, after which unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the shore. just off point lobos, the japanese divers after abalones report a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a chinese junk blown out of her course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the new world. strange mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and once we found on the tiny strand below pescadero, a log of sandal-wood with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
most mysterious of all the hints held by the [72] farthest west—for behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is east!—of a time before our time, is the monterey cypress.
across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles, cuts in the little bay of carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand. two points divide it from the racing pacific, the southern limb of punta pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of lobos—lobos, the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. now on these two points, and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the trees that might have grown in dante's purgatorio, or in the imagined forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of blake. blake, indeed, might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an english terrace, for the monterey cypress is quick-growing for the first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but only here on the point and south to pescadero ranch do they grow of god's planting. with writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. incredibly old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their nut-shaped, woody cones—the spirit [73] of the ancient rocks come to life in a tree. grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. their flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or the winter surf bursting high in air. or one could steal through their thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks and warnings of a world half made. the oldest of the cypresses are attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. it creeps along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.
the pines of monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific, quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among the old in rural neighbourhoods. they [74] grow freely back into the hills till they are warned away from the cañons by the more sequestered palo colorado. the monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a faint rustling echo of the ocean. the hill above monterey, crowned with them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and sparse-limbed to be interesting. the oaks do better by the landscape, all of the encinas variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. there are no redwoods on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from palo corona on carmel bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of friars walking against the wind. on the santa cruz coast, and in small groups near carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the genus pasania, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than siam. how it came here, survivor of an [75] earlier world, or drifting in on the changing japanese current, no one knows. apparently no one cares, for the only use the santa crucians have found for it is to tan shoe leather.
three little towns have taken root on the peninsula: two on the bay side, the old pueblo of monterey with its white-washed adobes still contriving to give character to the one wide street; pacific grove, utterly modern, on the surf side of punta de pinos, a town which began, i believe, as a resort for the churchly minded—a very clean and well-kept and proper town, absolutely exempt, as the deeds are drawn to assure us, "from anything having a tendency to lower the moral atmosphere," a town where the lovely natural woods have given place to houses every fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with lines of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and rosy pinks of geraniums and pelargoniums in a kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a town where nobody would think of living who wanted anything interesting to happen to him. above it on the hill, the presidio commands the naked slope, fronting toward santa cruz, raking the open roadstead with its guns. it was under this hill on the harbour side, where a little [76] creek still runs a rill in the rainy season, that viscaino heard the first mass in california, and nearly two hundred years later, padre serra set up the cross.
on june 30, 1770, that being the holy day of pentecost, was founded here the mission of san carlos borromeo, afterward transplanted for sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on carmel river. the town is full of reminders of the days of the spanish occupation, when it was the capital of alta california. old gardens here have still the high adobe walls, old houses the long galleries and little wrought-iron balconies; times yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and still the speech is soft.
it is also possible to buy tomales there and enchiladas and chile concarne which will for the moment restore your faith in certain conceptions of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
half a mile back from the beach, and divided from the town by the old cemetery, in a deep alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter resorts of the world, hôtel del monte. i can recommend it with great freedom to those curiously constituted people who have to have an excuse for [77] being out of doors. the del monte drives and golf links are said by those who have used them, to provide such excuse in its most compelling form. those who suffer under no such necessity will do well to take the white road climbing the hill out of old monterey, and drop down the other side of it into carmel.
from the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far to the north under a violet mist, is pure greek in its power to affect the imagination. its blueness is the colour that lies upon the gulf of dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on salonica, lepanto, the hill of athens. you are reconciled for a moment to the chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the spanish occupation. they could never have lived up to it.
but once on the carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very poignantly. the bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the connoisseur's collection,—blue like the eye of a peacock's feather, fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a great cat sleeping [78] in the sun. carmel valley breaks upon the bay by way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the purple inlet. it is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland. above its source the peaks of santa lucia stand up; for its southern bulwark, palo corona. willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters.
where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea, sits the mission of san carlos borromeo, once the spiritual capital of alta california. here junipero serra, and after him the other padre presidentes, held the administration of mission affairs, and from here he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from san diego to solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. here on the walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with his own hands the burning heart, the symbol of his own inward flame. here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel side of the altar. it is reported that his last act was to walk to the doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under the august sun, on the [79] heaven-blue water and the white hands of the surf beating against the cliffs of lobos; looked on the fields and the orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down and slept. it is further reported in the annals of the mission that it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a relic of the blessed remains. had i lived at that time i should have been among them, for he was a great soul, and have i not felt even at this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! san carlos is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the faith: the ancient pear trees are still in bearing, the wild mustard yellows in the fields, its architecture still betrays the uncertain hand of the savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills linger still some indians whose garbled greeting is a memory of the ama dios which the padres taught them. until a few years ago the prayer-post, a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of the franciscans carved around it, still stood on the hill at the end of the path their devout feet made, resorting to it for courage and consolation. these [80] mementos fade, but year by year the impress of the great spirit of serra grows plainer, like one of those trodden paths of long ago which show not at all if you seek them in the grass or near at hand, but from the vantage of palo corona are traceable far across the landscape.
the modern carmel is a place of resort for painter and poet folk. beauty is cheap there; it may be had in superlative quality for the mere labour of looking out of the window. it is the absolute setting for romance. no shipping ever puts in at the singing beaches. the freighting teams from the sur with their bells a-jangle, go by on the country road, but great dreams have visited the inhabitants thereof. spring visits it also with yellow violets all up the wooded hills, and great fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. summer reddens the berries of the manzanita and mellows the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny saffron. strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off deep-sea disturbance and shake the beaches. suddenly, on the quietest days, some flying squadron of the deep breaks high over lobos and neighs in her narrow caverns. blown foam, whipped all across the pacific, is cast up like weed along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a [81] winged motion. whole flocks of these foam-birds may be seen scudding toward the rock-corners of mission point after the equinoctial winds. other tides the sea slips far out on new-made level reaches, and leaves the wet sand shining after the sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of the abalone.
the forests of point pinos are sanctuary. it is still possible to hear there at long intervals the demoniac howl of the little grey dog of the wilderness, "brother coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the jack dullard of indian folklore, and sometimes in the open country below point lobos to see one curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of the hills. any warm afternoon, by lying very still a long time in the encinal, one may observe the country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the grass in summer, slipping from shade to shade. sometimes if startled he will turn and face you with his blinking, yellow, half-hypnotic stare before he returns to his unguessed errand. any morning you may find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of baby palms pressed downward in the dust, the tracks of the friendly little racoons who may be heard bubbling in the shallow cañons any moonlight night. often i have left a cut melon under [82] my window for the sake of seeing, an hour after moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the pink heart, spatting one another for helpings out of turn, keeping, in spite of the little gluttons you know them to be, a great affectation of daintiness. the night-cry of these little creatures is difficult to distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl, who on the undark nights of summer skims the low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice and gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses. every sort of migratory bird that passes up and down this coast lingers a while in the neighbourhood of monterey, and some species, like the point pinos juncos, take from it their distinctive name. but if, when you walk in the woods, the stellar jay has first sight of you, you will find them singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen of the pines permit nothing to pass them unannounced. of all the wood-folk, the wise quail alone ignores their strident warnings. the quail have learned not only the certainty of safety but its absolute limit. i have seen whole flocks of them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public lands to a point not out of gunshot but within the forbidden ground, from which they send back soft twitterings of defiance. it is not, however, their [83] habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to cover, moving with a peculiar elusive rhythm, like the rippling of a snake. this plump little partridge, for it is only in the common speech that he becomes a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral—cheerful, social, strong in the domestic virtues; his crest not floating backward in warrior fashion, but cocked forward over an eye, he has all the air of the militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but finds that running matches better with his inclinations. just at the end of rains, before mating begins, hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock on open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn and ceanothus ring with their soft spanish cuidado!—have a care!
three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination—that which we have already taken to the hills of salinas and the little town of san juan, the road to carmel valley, and the adventurous trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past sur and pieoras blancos. the valley road turns off at the top of the divide between carmel and monterey; it passes on the landward side of the mission into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward tasajara, [84] the place of springs. here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country." deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no roof but the windy tent of stars. years since there used to come out of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but i fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded pines.
the coast road, after it leaves point lobos behind, goes south and south, between high trackless hills and the lineless pacific floor. from the point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and disappear in narrow cañons down which, it is reported, immeasurable redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. dim, violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. now and then one ventures in that direction as far as arbolado, to return prophesying. but the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned possibility.
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