Original Journal Is a Page of History No One Will Publish

Since it was written in 1769, the journal in which Juan Crespi jotted down his impressions of unexplored California has seemed condemned to obscurity.

Although Crespi is famous for keeping a diary detailing the first European expedition through California, little of what he wrote on his 2,600-mile trek is known. The diary credited to Crespi, long used by scholars studying the early exploration of the state, is a heavily edited version that deletes much of the excitable Franciscan’s lyrical descriptions.

His original, deemed too wordy for 18th-Century tastes, was doomed to languish in the archives of the Catholic Church.

Now, more than two centuries later, Ohio State University professor Alan Brown has rediscovered Crespi’s handwritten journal and translated it from the original Spanish into English, providing a wealth of new information about California before the arrival of European settlers.

“It’s great stuff for research,” said Harry Kelsey, retired curator of history at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and now a researcher at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. “Not just for knowing when things happened, but exactly where they happened and what the country looked like and how they acted. It gives us the firsthand accounts, finally after all these centuries.”

But, like Crespi before him, Brown has been unable to get the complete diary published. Bits and pieces have appeared in various scholarly articles written by Brown, but several publishers have rejected the complete text in the 30 years since he began translating it.

“It puzzles me, frankly,” said Brown, who stumbled onto various copies of the diary in the Mexican National Archives in Mexico City, the archives of the Catholic Church in Rome and--of all places--the manuscript room of the New York Public Library.

Experts familiar with Brown’s scholarly work said it was first-rate. They suggested a variety of reasons for his inability to get the diary published.

Some speculated that original historical documents such as journals do not have enough general interest to justify the cost of publication. Others said that since the journals now widely used were translated by Herbert Bolton, considered the dean of California history, there is an unwillingness to challenge his academic authority on the subject.

Sheila Levine, executive editor of the University of California Press in Berkeley, said Brown’s translations would be “a perfectly appropriate project,” but she could not explain why the publishing house has twice rejected the manuscripts.

UC Press’ rejection was only the most recent in a series that began back in 1769.

When Crespi returned from his trip, he was told to shorten his diary because his rich, repetitive style was unfashionable in the 18th Century. Although he labored for a year to prepare a final draft, he did little to shorten his work.

His superior, Junipero Serra, wrote in June, 1771: “He belabors the topic, but on some occasions when I tried to assist while he was writing the journal, so he would not linger over details, repetitions and superlatives, immediately he became upset and asked was he not to tell the matter as it was and as it had happened? And so I left him to follow his own course.

“In my opinion, what it needs in order to be published is for someone to take on the task of shortening it a certain amount and of giving it a more natural and flowing style. . . .”

That task fell to Francisco Palou, a fellow Franciscan and childhood friend of Crespi.

“Unfortunately, Palou has a very flat style and he’s not good on details,” Brown said. “Details annoy him. His editing of Crespi seems to go along those lines.”

Palou’s versions, later incorporated into a larger volume on California history, survived, but copies of Crespi’s original were dropped in the archives and forgotten. One copy went to Rome. Another stayed in Mexico City. A third was salvaged from the archives in the mid-19th Century and ended up in the New York Public Library.

“It would be a real loss for California history if this never gets published,” said Mike Engh, a professor at Loyola Marymount University.