Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (Portuguese: João Rodrigues Cabrilho; born 1499, died January 3, 1543) was a navigator and explorer, known for exploring the West Coast of North America on behalf of the Spanish Empire. Cabrillo was the first European explorer to navigate the coast of present-day California in the United States.

Nationality

Cabrillo's nationality has been debated for centuries. He was described as Portuguese by Spanish chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas; in his Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano, written 60 years after Cabrillo's death, Herrera referred to Cabrillo as Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo Português. The Portuguese claim him as a national hero, and several locations in Portugal claim to be his birthplace. However, the source for Herrera's description is unknown, and some historians have long believed that Cabrillo was from Spain. Harry Kelsey, in his exhaustive 1986 biography Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, writes that Cabrillo probably was born in Seville, Spain. In 2015, Dr. Wendy Kramer, a Canadian researcher, investigating a series of Spanish legal documents from a 1532 lawsuit, found that one of the witnesses in the lawsuit was named Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. That witness testified under oath that he was born in Palma de Micergilio, a town in the province of Córdoba in Spain. Other details of the witness's biography match known facts about the explorer. Several historians of Cabrillo hailed the discovery as a historic find supporting the idea that Cabrillo was Spanish. However, a leader of San Diego's Portuguese community cautioned that the new evidence must be carefully evaluated, and requested that copies of the documents be turned over to the Portuguese government for study.