traversing residence districts and scenic routes, unfolding views of hills, forests, parks, forts, lighthouses and seals on rocks lashed by surf.

Between the Ferry Building and the ocean front—what a sweeping canvas it would take to suggest all this even in broad outline!

The "ships, towers, domes, theatres" which Wordsworth saw from
Westminster Bridge in London are here, and so are the added motifs of
San Francisco's own song of seduction.

Sea Glamour

Ever has the glamour of the sea enveloped San Francisco. From the sea came Don Juan Manuel Ayala in the San Carlos in 1775, charting a course through the fog and opening the Golden Gate. From the, sea also came the Argonauts, transforming the somnolent Yerba Buena into the city, of San Francisco. And from the sea, up to the time of the railroad, came practically all of the goods with which the merchants of the city did business. Today with the sea ebbs and flows the tide of wealth that makes San Francisco the key port of the Pacific. The banks and exchanges of California and Montgomery streets, the foreign trade and insurance offices of Pine street, the downtown skyscrapers—all reflect in some way San Francisco's debt to the sea.

From the sea also comes health. The breezes that blow from it and the fogs that drift down over the ridges combine to give San Francisco a paradoxical climate—winters as warm as those in the south and summers that are matchless for their exhilarating coolness.

San Francisco shows a higher per capita industrial output than any other
American city of its class because of its ideal working conditions.

A city conscious of its obligation to the sea, San Francisco has always been interested in its waterfront, which perpetuates Spanish origins in its expressive name of Embarcadero—the embarking place.

The skyline of the city is no longer stenciled by the towering masts of sailing ships discharging or loading cargo, or lying in the stream or in Richardson's Bay awaiting charters, as in the days when wheat was king of California's great central valley. The virility of the waterfront of San Francisco, however, is as persistent as in the age that provided Frank Norris with his epic themes.

The masts and yards of older outline have given place to stubby cargo booms of liners, freighters and tramps of multiple flags and nationalities. Along the Embarcadero they disgorge upon massive concrete piers silk, rice and tea from the Orient, coffee from Central America, hemp and tobacco from the Philippines, and all manner of odds and ends from everywhere. On the piers commodities are piled in apparent confusion, yet each lot moves with precision in or out of yawning holds at the shrill blast of the foreman's hoist whistle.

Along the Embarcadero you may see craft of every rig under the sun from a Chinese junk to a Transpacific passenger liner. Human types are even more contrasting, knots of Chinese and Singalese strolling behind South Sea Islanders, Portuguese or Cornishmen, whose speech recalls snatches you may have heard on the East India Dock Road in London.

Jack London heard and answered the call of the sea from the Embarcadero of San Francisco, and Stevenson found the atmosphere of his Wreckers there.

Sailors—trade winds—ships—what lurking thoughts of adventure, realized or denied, do they not summon in all of us?

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 coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement on the Pacific.

In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.

Things moved slowly in those days—so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.

Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was something to be done when there was nothing else to do.

From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main roads trailed off through the sand dunes. One went to the southwest, winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government. Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence's separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue at Miguel Noe's rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the Mission Dolores.

To this port came occasionally a Yankee whale ship for fresh water, or some enterprising trader with shawls and combs and trinkets for the women, to barter for hides and tallow with the dons from the south and the great interior ranchos.

Up the coast some Russians had established a settlement, much to the disquiet of the authorities, who looked upon this as an encroachment of barbarians menacing Spanish power. Rezanov, plenipotentiary of the Czar, was a man of charming personality, however, and was able to lull the suspicions of the indolent Spanish officials and lay his plans for a coup that never took place. From afar Britain looked with interest upon this strip of coast with its matchless harbor, and regretted that Drake had not discovered it when he wintered his ship close by in 1579. Thus Yerba Buena sprawled and dreamed in the sunshine, unmindful of the web of destiny being woven about it.

Followed then the war with Mexico and