Two hundred and fifty years ago, at roughly the same time that Thomas Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, a Spanish navigator named José de Cañizares was busy charting the depths and contours of the San Francisco Bay in this 1776 map. Acquired in the late 1980s from a private collector, Cañizares’s ink and watercolor map is one of the many treasures held in the Bancroft Library.
For centuries, European mariners had sailed past the narrow, often fog-shrouded Golden Gate, oblivious to one of the world’s great natural harbors. It was only discovered in 1769 by Gaspar de Portolá’s overland expedition. San Francisco itself would be officially founded on June 29, 1776, just days before the colonies broke from the British crown.
Cañizares’s map, thought to be among the first of the Bay, left the landscape empty but for the newly established outposts of the Spanish empire, the Presidio and Mission Dolores. No hint is given of the Ohlone people for whom European settlement would prove disastrous.
