Following the series of explorations which culminated in the Anza Expedition of 1776, little further official notice was taken of the East Bay counties until approximately 1794. There is an item in the Bancroft Library Transcript series (hereafter designated Bancroft Transcripts, or Bancroft Trans.), consisting of a letter from Fages to Moraga, January 23, 1783 (Prov. Rec., III: 83), noting that the latter had pursued the "indios gentiles Serranos" who had killed 18 head of livestock belonging to the Mission of San José. It is probable that many other unrecorded punitive expeditions were being undertaken throughout the two decades from 1775 to 1795. In 1793 there was activity along the coast, in the course of which Lieutenant Francisco Eliza spent approximately two weeks exploring the Bay, but the documents available (Cutter, 1950, p. 29; Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico, Ramo Historia, Vol. 71, Expediente on Matute and the Bodega Settlement, and Account by Eliza, dated November 4, 1793, at San Blas) include no details of topography, vegetation, or ethnography worth recording. Late in the following year, 1794, trouble began with the natives of the Contra Costa. The immediate cause appears to have been the zeal of the missionaries to push conversion in the area. On November 30, 1794, the military commander at San Francisco, Perez-Fernandez, wrote to Governor Borica (Bancroft Trans., Prov. St. Pap., XII: 29-30) that "the missionaries of San Francisco have requested an additional two or three men for the guard in order to go from Santa Clara to the other shore, in a northerly direction, as far as opposite the port [of San Francisco] to make conquests of the heathen...." The request was refused for reasons which in themselves throw light on the status of the East Bay natives: 1st. Because it is almost unknown country: there are indications that the heathen who occupy it are uncooperative. 2nd. He [the Commandant] does not believe that a priest, with two or three soldiers and some Christian Indians, constitutes a party sufficiently strong to cross and camp overnight in strange territory. 3rd. Although the Fathers believe this to be a favorable opportunity, because the heathen lack food, having lost their crop due to the severity of the drouth, and this will facilitate catching them, he does not have the means at his disposal for expeditions of this type. Nevertheless, such forays were already in progress, for Perez-Fernandez reported that the Fathers at San Francisco "sent by sea to the islands and other shore opposite the mouth of the port some Mission Indians in rafts of tule on the 4th of this month to capture heathen." One of the rafts was carried as far out to sea as the Farallones, and two men were lost.