CHAPTER V 



THE ISLE or SUMMER 



OVER three hundred years ago, Cabrillo, the 

 famous Captain of Cortez, rounded up his 

 caravel in Los Angeles harbor, then but an 

 inlet, and rode out a southwester there. The recital 

 says, "Being in this part [San Miguel], they passed a 

 very great tempest, but on account of the part being 

 good, they suffered nothing." 



Here Dana landed in 1835. His ship was too large 

 to enter the laguna and she lay offshore, ready to slip 

 out into the channel and go to sea if the wind rose. 

 In his "Two Years Before the IMast," he describes how 

 the hides were tossed over the cliffs, and carried out 

 to the ships; and his later experiences with the Spanish 

 owners of California. 



Another era has arrived, and we see the great harbor 

 of the city of Los Angeles, seventeen miles away, a 

 city of over three hundred and fifty thousand people. 

 The old laguna is now the inner harbor, lined with 

 ships from all over the world; and reaching out into 

 the old anchorage of Cabrillo, Vizcaino, and Dana is a 

 modern breakwater, built by the Government at a cost 

 of five million dollars, beyond which another will go, 

 costing as much more, forming, at old San Miguel 

 (San Pedro), the great harbor of Los Angeles, one of 

 the finest in the world. 



It is here — the old port of San Pedro — that the 



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