Here in 1602, eighteen years before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on the bleak New England coast, came Sebastian Vizcaino, riding his galleon on the half-moon of Monterey Bay. He could do no more at the than set up a cross; to claim Cajifornia for Spain; to describe the harbor for the benefit of future cxplorers; and to sail away. For nearly zoo years the occupation of Alta California remained unattempted. That it was fi nally brought about was due to the energy, valor and genius of one man, the founder and president of the Franciscan missions. Junipero Serra.
Like the great Drake, Vizcaino missed altogether the superb harbor of San Francisco; and when finally it was discovered by PortolA it was stumbled upon in the search, so long fruitless, for Monterey, which was designed to be and which became during the Spanish occupation, the capital of the province and the centre of Serra's missionary activities.
Rushing up from San Diego, Serra landed at Monterey in 1770—a man of fifty-seven—to begin the toils which ended fourteen years later, when with the words "now I will sleep," the wornout but dauntless old man laid himself upon his plank bed and died. He had had a little while before a terrible moment of spiritual desolation when the cry "I am afraid! I am afraid I" was wrung from him; but his fear gave way to peace.
He died like the soldier he was. Refusing to receive the last sacraments in bed, he insisted upon going to the church, where he administered the Viaticum to himself.
"Since I am able to walk," he said, with mingled pride and humility, "there is no reason why the Master should come here."
It was a magnificent ending to a life abounding in such incidents. For during the fourteen years in which he had limped on foot from end to end of California, founding missions, baptizing the Indians, and confirming (by special Papal brief) his neophytes, his courage had never once faltered. He had been obliged to contend with the despondency of weak, and the officiousness of unsympathetic, military governors, with the incompetent Rivera and the overbearing Fages; and even with the lack of adequate support from the Franciscans in Mexico., Moreover Indian revolts constantly threatened the life of the little colony; so that the Spanish captains were several s upon the point of abandoning what seemed to be a too difficult undertaking; but Serra's unswerving persistence, his prayers and threats and wheedlings just managed to save the enterprise that was the darling of his heart.
His great compassion for souls had driven him in late middle life from Spain, where he had been distinguished as a preacher and professor, to work among some of the most degraded savages to be found in the whole world.
They were dirty and lazy and stupid and treacherous; but Serra loved them. He found them to be, at least, gay and good-humored; they became his children; and he saw, even in the beetling brows and the crafty eyes under the tangled masses of verminous hair, so many images of Christ. He was a man hard on himself—while in Spain he used to scourge himself '~pon the bare shoulders with a chain in the pulpit—and in California he managed to 'ombine private penance with a startling object lesson on Hell by burning his breast with a lighted torch. He was a man who could be stern towards others—as Rivera found to his cost, when he was excommunicated —but to the Indians he was always the gentlest and most patient of fathers.
To this man, one of the greatest of all missionaries and the true founder of California, the world is only now beginning to do justice. His missions were allowed to fall into decay: Cannel itself crumbled, and the rain soaked through the neglected adobe walls, and any local farmer who wanted timber for a barn helped himself to the beams of the church. Even the grave of Serra was lost amid the general ruin. Bayard Taylor, writing in 1849, thought that it was somewhere in Carmel churchyard; others invented a legend that the body had been carried back to Spain. But nobody was sufficiently intercstcd in the matter to make investigations until, on July 3, iBBa, Father Casanova dug and found the sacred bones upon the gospel side of the altar in Cannel mission. Since that Serra has steadily risen in glory. Carmel church has been restored; and Serra has come to be regarded, even among Protestants, as the local saint. This mounting wave of enthusiasm was displayed during a week in October, 1918, when the whole pcninsula devoted itself to cclcbrathig the honor of thc Franciscan friar whom Cannel's mayor somewhat quaintly described as "one of the most disdnguishcd citizens of our town." This recognition has been followed by the recent celebration which I have just attended.
To a considerable extent Serra's honor is due to the fortunate accidciit that, despEte the decline of Monterey from its former pride, Cannel has been settled by a colony of painters and writers seeking a quiet refuge from the busy world. At least half of its rapidly increasing inhabitants profess a virtuous scorn of all materialism. And though Carmel as a centre of creative genius has been r a t h e r disappointing, in spite of the high hopes at first entertained for its Forest Theatre, there is at least enough good taste there to appreciate the mission, and enough information to appreciate Serra. Elscwhcrc these qualities do not generally prevail. At Monctery it would be difficult to persuade the people to give up the twiddly stenciling on the walls of their mission and to submit to its thorough restoration. And the splendid tiles of the old mission of San Gabriel were actually sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad, and now compose the roof of the station at Burlir.game. But at Cannel there is a genuine love of the mission church and of its founder.
Monterey, however, celebrated the pilgrimage in its own fashion. The town was brilliant with the colon and the costumes of Spain. Girls in yellow silk and black mantillas danced in thc streets with soldiers in icathern doublets and peaked hclmcts. Every young man rew whiskers and dressed like a toreador. The very policemen directed the traffic gorgeous in scarlet velvet, slashed with gold.
13 Yet it is Carrnel, after all, that is the real centre of the cult of Serra, as it is Serra's shrine. Despite the little houses of shingle or beaver-board and plaster that dot its woods of pinc and live oak hung with Spanish moss, one may still walk upon a deserted beach, as Serra must often have walked, and see the brisk sandpipers running up to the edge of the waves that rIpple in from a placid sea. There Serra must have seen, as I saw, under a sky of rose and pale gold, while the sun sank beyond the rocky promontory and the dark trees, a round moon rising over the sand dunes, so large and low that it seemed to be a lamp hung among the lupin.
The mission church, howcver, is away from the main sweep of the bay, and lies in a valley where the river slides out slowly to the sea. It is said, with I know not what truth, that the spot closely resembles Cannel in the Holy Land. Certainly, the name was given by the Carmelice friars who accompanied Vizcaino, and appears in the. chronicle they wrote, and they may have known the Mount Ca rme 1 in Palestine, where this great order of mystical prayer and p0etry was founded ten or twelve centuries ago. But then, Carmel, California is a spot prolific in myths. It is, for instance, asserted that the "Monterey Cypress," with its branches fantastically twistcd by ocean storms, is the cedar of Lebanon. Behold the ciuberancc of local pride! For the Monterey Cypress is certainly not a cedar—it is indigenous; and Cannel was probably so named because of the word's significance.
The woods stop short at this valley, and the fields slope down gently where the mission stands, redtiled, with its two short bell towers, and the solid front that belies the appcararxce of the interior.
One is conscious of the simple awkward strengthof the buIldIng. The men that constructed this church were not architects; they were priests, assisted by a few soldiers and by Indian neophytes. It all sprang from the necessity of doing the best with the materials—the blocks of adobe mud, burnt in the sun and coated, as a protection against the rain, with whitewashed plaster; and the soft yet durable stone cut from a mountain side three miles away and carried with cnormous difficulty to the mission site. Thcse builders used what few instruments and opportunities were at hand experimentally. Yet they worked with no touch of diffidence and therefore beauty came into all that they did—indeed it could not help coming upon work so artless and so sincere.
But now, with the erection of the new mortuary chapel to Serra, unveiled this week (October 12) by the representative of the King of Spain, Cannel mission has lost and not gained. The official plan is to complete the whole courtyard of buildings that originally adjoined the church. If that should be done the chapel might harmonize with the general scheme. But I doubt whether the plan will ever be carried out. It will call for a good deal of money, and there is now no practical need for the square of cells and store rooms that stood there in Serra' s time.
Nor can I feel happy about the sarcophagus inside. It has been and will be extravagantly praised. And nobody can deny that it has been competently, if somewhat unimaginatively treated. But the sarcophagus is, to begin with, a sham; for Serra's body is still lying by the altar in the mission. It is cut from California marble. On it, cast in bronze, Serra lies in his Franciscan habit; and against his feet crouches a bcar cub. On the base are medallions of Pope Pius VI and King Charles IV, supported by emblematic figures of Indiane, neophytes, soldiers and friars; while a bronze frieze depicts various incidents in the missionary's life. But around the sarcophagus stand more than life-size figures of three friars in attitudes of lively sorrow. All the figures have been modeled fairly well. But the effect is that of an agitated crowd; and distracts attention from the main figure. The harmony is destroyed by pretentiousness.
In the chapel is an altar surmounted by a large crudfix carved in wood and colored—like the sarcophagus, the work of Jo Mora. One indignant word more needs to be said about the way the Monterey Chamber of Commerce exploited the Pilgrimage. Father Ramon Mestres, in charge of Monterey and Cannel missions, wished to have the celebration in August1 the anniversary of Serra's death. But he was overborne by business men who saw an opportunity of bringing a crowd to the peninsula during a slack season.
There is, I suppose, no help for this sort of thing. We must extract what consolation we can from the reflection that it all might have been very much worse; that the monument itself is, despite its lack of repose, better than I, for one, expected to see; and that, no matter what is done to hint, Serra, with his passion and his compassion, his fierceness and his tenderness, his sanctity and his sagacity, is much too great a man for modem vulgarity or commercialism to spoil.
