Page 17 - LLR-Exploration II

Legend of Queen Califia

An excerpt from Deep California by Craig Chalquist, PhD

Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human Notes:
memory.... I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, ________________________
which was very close to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise. This island was inhabited by black
women, and there were no males among them at all, for their life style was similar to that of the ________________________
Amazons. The island was made up of the wildest cliffs and the sharpest precipices found anywhere in
the world. These women had energetic bodies and courageous, ardent hearts, and they were very ________________________
strong. —The Exploits of Esplandian
________________________
At the time of Governor Cortés’s failed voyages north of New Spain a popular knights-in-armor fantasy novel
________________________
circulated around Europe and then around the New World thanks to the printing press established in New
Spain at the end of the 1530s. In a fictional reworking of the Crusades, The Exploits of Esplandian (Las Sergas ________________________
de Esplandian) by Garcia Rodriguez Ordoñez de Montalvo portrayed a pagan attack on Constantinople and
its defense by brave Christian knights. One of these, the hero Esplandian, teamed up with his father to face ________________________
off against the Californian warrior women. Among the gold-armored inhabitants of the isle buzzed fabulous
griffins, condorlike Arabian birds who dropped conquistadors from high up and ate them. They also ate the ________________________
Amazons’ male children. Cervantes apparently thought little of the book and its utopian fantasies; in Don
Quixote, the curate and the barber consigned it to a bonfire. ________________________

Cortés usually gets the credit for applying the name of the fictional realm to what he thought a vast island to ________________________
the north, but the name first appeared in Preciado’s version of the 1539 diary of Ulloa. It’s likely it was
________________________
bestowed in bitter irony over the contrast between the conquistador-killing coast and the legendary
Terrestrial Paradise everyone had been looking for since Marco Polo’s 1298 Book. It was said that exiled
________________________
Adam and Eve watered this Paradise with rivers of tears.

The Esplandian went on:

At the time when all of the pagans’ grandees left with those very large fleets, as the story has
already told you, there reigned on California Island a queen in the flower of her youth who was
bigger and more beautiful than the other women on the island, and she conceived a grand design to
achieve great deeds. Moreover, of all who ruled that seigniory before her, she had more bold energy
and more fire in her brave heart than any of the others. When she heard that most regions of the

17