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A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770. By Juan Crespi. Edited and translated by Alan K. Brown. (San Diego: San Diego State University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 848. $60.00.)
Spanish settlement in the modern State of California, immediately following expulsion of Jesuit missionaries from Baja California in 1768, was primarily a task of the Franciscan Order. The triumvirate of initial establishment in Franciscan California consisted of friars Junípero Serra, the founder; Francisco Palóu, the chronicler; and Juan Crespí, the explorer. While Serra is well known internationally, and Palóu locally, Crespí is relatively unknown other than to historians. To some degree this is the result of Palóu's and Serra's writings having been published in English translations by such scholars as Herbert E. Bolton, Maynard J. Geiger, O.F.M., and Antonine Tibesar, O.EM., while, prior to the work reviewed herein, the complete diaries of Juan Crespí's travels in Alta California have been available only in manuscript form in Spanish in the Curia Generalizia Ordinis Fratrum Minorum, Rome, and Archive General de la...