IN THE BEGINNING...
Many ancient artifacts have been discovered on the Sea of Cortez. Prehistoric bird and shark teeth (some estimated to be ten million years old), pottery shards and arrowheads have been found. The Sea of Cortez (also called the Gulf of California) was created around 15 million years ago when violent earthquakes erupted along the San Andreas fault. The mountainous west coast of Mexico lifted and tore along the edge forming the Baja Peninsula. Thus created was a chasm up to two miles deep, into which flowed the Pacific. Over millennia, the waters became rich in plankton and bait fish, and the combination attracted over 800 species of fish.

Modern scientists have confirmed there is an "ocean river" streaming across the Pacific, and a branch of this "equatorial [or Japanese] current" lands squarely on Baja. Good for fish, and later, the Spanish galleons beating their way past British buccaneers.

The first visitors were not Spanish nor British, however. Before them came a Buddhist monk, Hoei Sin, who came all the way from China and found a strange new world in 449 B.C.

But he wasn't the first, either. Four Indian tribes must claim that honor, and only one, the Pericu, dominated the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Thought to come by sea from an island in the Pacific, the Pericu were primitive to the degree their only dwellings were twig and bark barely one-person-sized sleeping domes. It's difficult to believe these people were around at the same time as those great builders -- the Aztecs and Mayans.

The Pericu lived on the fruit of the pitahaya cactus and fish in the sea. They were strong, tall and healthy and demonstrated great resistance to fatigue -able to out-run and out-swim their non-brothers.

HERE COME THE SPANISH...
Then came the Sixteenth Century and Cortez's occupation of Mexico. In 1530 Baja experienced the first recorded landing of Europeans. A Spanish sailor had fomented a mutiny, sailed into La Paz Bay, and the Indians murdered him for his arrogance. The Indians made a habit of this and, considering the fate of the Indians elsewhere in the "New World", perhaps they were totally justified.

On numerous occasions the Spanish were foiled in their attempts to explore the peninsula. Even when it became known that a wealth of pearls was to be had in the gulf, the normally avaricious Spanish could not overcome the hardship and suffering enough to retrieve nature's loot.

However, a yearly round trip route for Spanish galleons between Acapulco and Manila proved very profitable indeed, and the town of Cabo San Lucas developed into an important landfall.

Then, in the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries the Spanish found something else beyond hostile territory and even more hostile Indians to frustrate them. British privateers, with the encouragement of Good Queen Bess, learned to hide in the coves lining Chileno Bay and lay in wait for the treasure laden galleons. One, Cromwell by name, had the eerie luck to be always favored by the winds. Ever since, whenever there was a favorable wind, it was called the "coromuel", the local version of his name. He was said to have left behind a fortune in buried treasure still sought today. The natives say, "Only the coromuel will tell you where the treasure is buried."

And the Indians certainly did not like the missionaries. During the great Pericu Uprising at the Cape in the 1730s, Jesuit Fathers Carranco and Tamaral, both mission founders (the latter the founder of the town of San Jose del Cabo... one of the two towns of "Los Cabos", the other being Cabo San Lucas) were murdered by the Indians. The Franciscans and Dominicans fared no better.

It wasn't long before all three orders, in search of less harsh living conditions (and, one suspect, more amenable Indians), wound their way much further north, into what is now the US state of California, to found longer-lasting missions... and convert more docile Indians. The Pericu had a point. Not only had they been on the land 5,000 years before the arrival of the Jesuits, they eventually were decimated by the Spanish-borne diseases smallpox, measles and syphilis.

Obviously, the Mexicans, therefore, had nothing to love the Spanish about, and the beginning of the Nineteenth Century saw the Mexican Wars of Independence. As a consequence, the Spanish -- including the missionaries -were thrown out. In 1858 lower California went one step further and declared itself an independent territory of Mexico. It wasn't until 1975 that the Baja California Sur territory became a state.

THEN CAME THE AMERICANS...