A diary kept by Father Crespí on his toilsome march from Velicatá to San Diego is full of quaint and curious entries, monotonous in its religious reiterations, but touching in its simplicity and unconscious testimony to his own single-heartedness and patience. The nearest approach to a complaint he makes is to say that "nothing abounds except stones and thorns." When they journey for days with no water except scanty rations from the precious casks they are carrying, he always piously trusts water will be found on the morrow; and when they come to great tracts of impenetrable cactus thickets, through which they are obliged to hew a pathway with axes, as through a forest, and are drenched to the skin in cold rains, and deserted by the Christian Indians whom they had brought from Lower California as guides, he mentions the facts without a murmur, and has even for the deserters only a benediction: "May God guard the misguided ones!" A far more serious grievance to him is that toward the end of the journey he could no longer celebrate full mass because the wafers had given out. Sometimes the party found themselves hemmed in by mountains, and were forced to halt for days while scouts went ahead to find a pass. More than once, hoping that at last they had found a direct and easy route, they struck down to the sea-shore, only to discover themselves soon confronted by impassable spurs of the Coast Range, and forced to toil back again up into the labyrinths of mesas and cactus plains. It was Holy Thursday, the 24th of March, when they set out, and it was not until the 13th of May that they reached the high ground from which they had their first view of the bay of San Diego, and saw the masts of the ships lying at anchor there,--"which sight was a great joy and consolation to us all," says the diary.
They named this halting-place "Espiritu Santo." It must have been on, or very near, the ridge where now runs the boundary line between the United States and Mexico, as laid down by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is a grand promontory, ten miles southeast of San Diego, thrusting out to sea; bare of trees, but matted thick with the dewy ice-plant, and in early spring carpeted with flowers. An ugly monument of stone stands there, bearing the names of the American and Mexican commissioners who established this boundary line in October, 1849. It would seem much more fitting to have there a monument bearing the names of the heroic men--friars and soldiers of Spain--who on that spot, on May 14, 1769, sang the first Easter hymn heard on California shores.