About 1545 began the Dark Ages in the history of northwestern Mexico; the excursion of Guzman, and the journeys of Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos and of Coronado himself, died out of the memory of the solitary adventurers and scattering settlers who slowly infused Spanish culture and a strain of Caucasian blood into the Sonoran province; even the route taken by Coronado’s imposing cavalcade was lost for centuries, to be retraced only during the present generation, largely through the determinations of Simpson, Bandelier, Winship, and Hodge.[35] It is true that Don Francisco de Ibarra penetrated the territory in 1563, and remained until rumors of gold in other districts drew him elsewhere; it is also true that Captain Diego Martinez de Hurdaide pushed into the province in 1584, and entered on a career of subjugation, waging persistent war with the Yaqui, which resulted in the acquisition of the territory of Sonora by treaty April 15, 1610;[36] yet few records of exploration or settlement were written before the advent of the Jesuit missionaries, toward the end of the seventeenth century. [35] Op. cit., pp. 29-73. [36] Sonora Histórico y Descriptivo, por F. T. Dávila, 1894, p. 8. Still more astounding was the eclipse of knowledge of the gulf. Despite Ulloa’s survey of the entire coast, recorded in an itinerary so detailed that every day’s sailing may readily be retraced, and despite Alarcon’s repetition of the surveys and extension of the discoveries far up Rio Colorado (where his work was verified by that of Melchior Diaz), a mythic cartography arose to shadow knowledge and delude exploration for a century and a half; for “upon the authority of a Spanish chart, found accidently by the Dutch, and of the authenticity of which there never were, or indeed could be, any proofs obtained, an opinion prevailed that California was an island, and the contrary assertion was treated even by the ablest geographers as a vulgar error”;[37] and a mythic strait formed by cartographic extension of the Gulf of California indefinitely northward haunted the maps of the seventeenth century. This error was adopted by various geographers, including Fredericus de Witt in 1662, Peter van der Aa in 1690, and even Herman Moll so late as 1708; but it was consistently rejected by Guillaume Delisle and other French geographers. The myth “was finally punctured by Padre Kino in 1701; though even he and all his erudite co-evangels were apparently unaware that his observations only verified those of Ulloa, Alarcon, and Diaz. [37] A Natural and Civil History of California; translated from the original Spanish of Miguel Venegas; London, 1759, vol. I, preface. During the stagnant sesquicentury 1545-1695 there was little record of the Seri Indians, though that little indicates recognition of their leading characteristics and their insular habitat. Writing especially of the Yaqui before 1645, Padre Andrés Perez de Ribas declared (freely translated):