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.