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Show 492 VISIONARY COMMERCIAL PROJECT. cheating; and also if any one of the expedition do a wrong thing, let him be punished right before the gentiles themselves, in order to give them satisfaction. To this advice am I bound by the loud complaints made to me by the Noches and Quabajais Indians, as I said in the Diary. If successful be the attempt to possess this river perhaps will it be possible to descend thereby to the Tulares, and through these in small boats to San Francisco, which would be of great avail for the commerce even of China, 40 whose ship, arriving at San Francisco, could take its goods by way of the Puerto Dulze41 and Tulares to the disemboguement of said great river, and by this upward for New Mexico. Supplying in this manner the missions of the interior with the commerce of China by way of this river, and that of Spain by that of the Missisipi, then could happy be these Provincias Internas. 42 • Referring to the Spanish galleon that came each year from Manila of the Philippines by way of Cape Horn to Spain, and was required by royal reglamento to touch at some Califomian port. The scholiast notes in the margin, " Projecto de comercio de Manila con el Nuevo Mexico." 41 The Bay of San Francisco was sometimes called Puerto Dulze; and it would appear from the context that the " great river" which Garces had in mind was the San Joaquin, of which he had acquired some notion when he was in the Tulares. " The dreamer in his cell at Tubutama was conceiving in the womb of imagination that transcontinental traffic to the realiza- |