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TWO DAYS BEFORE THE SEA: A lot has changed in the 165 or so years since Richard
Henry Dana sailed, 60 miles north of San Diego, into the harbor
now named after him. The bluff, however, still rears up above the
jetty where a modern replica of his ship, the Pilgrim, bobs at anchor.
It doesn't take much imagination to see Dana and his shipmates and
Father Serra's missionary Indians dragging their flats of cowhide
to the edge and tossing them skittering down the cliffs to the beach
280 feet below. |
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Dana was a Harvard law student when
an attack of measles undermined his health. He felt two years in the
outdoors might restore his vitality, as Teddy Roosevelt similarly
thought when 50 years later he also became ill. Teddy would go off
to the Dakotas but Dana went off to sea and in the year 1835 was abeam
the shores of what then was called San Juan. In his best-selling book,
Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, he recalls: "Coasting
along a quiet shore of the Pacific, we came to anchor in twenty fathoms
water, almost out at sea, as it were, and directly abreast of a steep
hill which overhung the water, and was twice as high as our royal
masthead." |
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Beyond the cliff, the sailors found -- a mile or two
inland -- the Mission San Juan Capistrano still significantly damaged
from the 1812 earthquake 23 years before, but standing and ready to
supply cowhides in trade at the rate of $2 a hide exchanged for a
75c trinket from Boston. Dana writes he was amused supply ships could
sell the locals shoes for $3 or $4 that had been cut in Boston from
their own herd's hides, in effect "having been carried twice
round Cape Horn." |
| Around the time of Dana's visits
to San Juan, the mission was more than a church, it was the entire
village of about 1400 "converted Indians" and as many as
30,000 animals. The hides were dried, stretched to prevent shrinking,
folded once lengthwise and transported by oxen cart to the cliffs.
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At low tide when they were heaved over the edge on to the beach below, they would sometimes catch in bushes on the cliffs. When Dana recounts how he once hung down the bluff on a pair of topgallant-studding sail halyards to save a half dozen hides, he never knew that one day he would be part of California's coast history.
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