Looking from the bay, past the fortified islands of the city, one may see San Francisco to the west, rising in airy beauty on clustered gray hills. At night the city hangs against the horizon like a lower sky, pulsing with starry lamps. By day it stretches in profile long and undulating, with spires and domes climbing up the steeps from a shore lined with the shipping of every nation--felucca, ironclad, merchantman, junk, together with bevies of tiny busybody craft, all of them circled and followed by slow-swinging gulls. [Illustration VIEW NORTHWEST FROM SPRECKELS' BUILDING.] For years after the magnificent, all-inclusive claims of the Cabots at Labrador in 1497, nothing was known of the west coast of North America. Cabrillo felt his way along it in 1542, claiming it for Spain. In 1579, Francis Drake, fleeing from plundered Spanish galleons, tarried for repairs beside Cape Reyes, the Cape of Kings, and claimed the country, as New Albion, for Elizabeth of England. Although anchored in a cove within a mile of San Francisco Bay, he doubtless sailed away without guessing its existence behind the forest-covered mountains. In 1602, Vizcaino, charting the west for Spain, as Gosnold was mapping the east for England, made stay in Drake's old anchorage, and named it the Port of San Francisco. Notwithstanding the reiterated desire of the Spanish Crown that Mexico, or New Spain, should set about colonizing upper California, it was not till 1769 that the work was begun. Spain needed a harbor in which to retire on the way from the Philippines. The Russian fur-traders were heading down the coast. The French and the English were rumored to be nearing from the east. So it behooved Spain to be on the alert to maintain her right to the new territory. José de Galvaez, _Visitador_ of Spain, who had been sent to Mexico with powers extraordinary, "to examine and reform all branches of government," seized upon the project of colonization, and found the administrator of his plans in Padre Junipero Serra, of fragrant memory,--a Franciscan monk, who had all his life passioned to save Indians as a Tamerlane would have passioned to destroy them. Spain's plan of colonization comprehended a triple series of establishments: the ecclesiastical or the mission, the military or the presidio, the civil or the pueblo. The theory of colonization carried the idea of a military and a religious conquest of the new lands. The Indians, whenever belligerent, were to be overcome by force; but as far as possible, they were to be drawn into the mission life by peaceable expedients.