I attended the keel laying of the replica of the ** San Salvador,** in San Diego bay. The event was replete with speeches and toasts. I thought the comment by the Chief of the local Kumeyaay Indian tribe, Anthony Pico, said it best: "When the San Salvador showed up on our shores in 1542 to us it was an alien space ship."

Sixty-five years before the first English settlement on the North American continent, eighty years before Mayflower crossed a much smaller ocean to New England; Europeans sighted, charted, and made first contact with the native inhabitants of what would one day be the west coast of the United States. When the small San Salvador entered the harbor now called San Diego, the galleon was perhaps the most powerful vessel in the Pacific Ocean.