Noticia de la California (Madrid, 1757), from the manuscript of Miguel Venegas

The three-volume Madrid printing of 1757 that first put California before a European reading public, edited from a manuscript history written in Mexico in 1739 and from other relations. Its ethnographic pages map the peninsula's languages with unusual care about what a name means, and print, inside quotation marks, the cosmology of the Perícues and of the Loreto nation in their own terms - including a spirit who sends the epidemics.