54 
S € E NES IN THE PACIFIC. 
rusted, that the absence of locks would have been an on- 
portant item in estimating their value. 
We passed this valorous body, ascended a flight of stairs, 
and entered the presence of governor Juan Baptiste Alva¬ 
rado ; a well-formed, full-blooded, Californian Spaniard, five 
feet eleven inches in height, with coal-black curly hair, deep 
black eyes, fiercely black eye-brows, high cheek bones, an 
aquiline nose, fine white teeth, brown complexion, and the 
clearly marked mein of a pompous coward, clad in the 
broad-cloth and whiskers of a gentleman. 
When we entered he was sitting behind a kind of writ¬ 
ing-desk, at the farther end of the room. He rose as we 
entered, and received us with the characteristic urbanity of 
a Spanish body without a soul; waved us to chairs, when 
he would have seen us tumbling from the balcony ; smiled 
graciously at us with one corner of his mouth, while he 
cursed us with the other; seated himself, laid up his arms 
and hands on the upper shelf of his abdomen, and asked if 
the ship had anchored ! 
El Goubernador had sundry reasons for making this inquiry 
concerning the Don Quixote. The chief one, however, was, 
that he and his officers, like all their predecessors, had been 
in the habit of looking on the arrival of a ship in the port of 
Monterey as a discharge of debts and a license for new levies 
on their credit. Let it not be supposed that I believe a Cali¬ 
fornian Spaniard is ever so far false to his nature, as to wish 
his debts paid, while his credit will supply his wants. My 
investigations into the character of his progenitors both In¬ 
dian and Spanish, will always preserve me from such an 
error. Nor would I have it believed, that the transplanted 
chivalry of the Andalusians does not absolutely boil and 
bubble, at the bare thought of not being able to plunder from 
the rest of mankind a gentleman’s living. Any such impeach¬ 
ment of the sagacity and scrupulousness of these men would 
be a wrong against which my sense of justice would most 
vehemently protest. In plain words, then, at the time the 
