North to California is the stirring history of how the conquerors of Mexico, starting with the great conquistador Hernán Cortés himself, built the ships and led the expeditions that discovered California in the sixteenth century. First the “island” of Baja California was discovered and then later expeditions journeyed up the Pacific coast to discover Alta California. California, its magical name derived from a romantic tale of chivalry popular among the conquistadors, is the daughter of the long-ago conquest of Mexico. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, the discoverer of Alta California, was a tough Castilian kid off the streets of Seville who rose out of the conquest of Mexico City, a Stalingrad with swords, to become one of the top conquistador commanders in the conquest of Guatemala under the famed Pedro de Alvarado. Where did Cabrillo die? A gravestone marked JRC and discovered in 1901 on Santa Rosa Island becomes the touchstone for recasting the place of Cabrillo's death to Santa Rosa Island instead of San Miguel Island, as popularly believed. The Cabrillo story finishes with the daring voyage led by his successor, Bartolomé Ferrelo, as he leads his two ships far out into the Pacific on the Long Tack and then rides a winter storm north to Point Reyes. The two ships then battle winter seas north to the California-Oregon border before returning to Mexico. The tale then shifts to the Spanish conquest of the Philippine Islands. The success of the conquest was only assured upon completion of the epic voyage of the galleon San Pedro in the first-ever return voyage across the North Pacific to Acapulco. This first Manila galleon was under the command of its sixteen-year-old captain, Felipe de Salçedo, and the navigational guidance of the aging friar Andrés de Urdaneta. Protecting the lucrative trade route from Manila to Acapulco was the reason for the next major voyage of exploration to California under adventurer Sebastián Vizcaíno. Vizcaíno gave most of the place names to the California coast. Later he led an important embassy to Japan in an attempt to negotiate an amicable trade relationship between Japan and Spain. After Vizcaíno's voyage, the viceroy in Mexico made a cold-eyed geopolitical calculation to leave California unsettled so that European pirates could not use it as a base from which to attack the Manila galleons.