Spanish discovery , built in 1865 The first European known to have landed in Baja California was
Fortún Ximénez. In 1533, shortly after the conquest of
Tenochtitlan,
Hernán Cortés sent two ships,
Concepción, under the command of captain and commander of the expedition, , and
San Lázaro under Capt. Hernando de Grijalva, to explore the
South Seas of the Pacific Ocean. The ships set out 30 November 1533, to travel north along the coast of
New Spain from present-day
Manzanillo, Colima, in search of two ships that had been lost without a trace on a similar voyage the previous year. By 20 December the ships had separated;
San Lázaro, which had gone ahead, waited three days for
Concepción and after no sighting of its companion vessel, Capt. Grijalva dedicated himself to exploring the region and discovered the
Revillagigedo Islands. On board the
Concepción, Ximénez, the navigator and second in command, led a revolt in which Capt. Becerra was killed in his sleep by Ximénez. Also the crewmen loyal to the murdered captain were attacked and later rebel sailors abandoned both the wounded navigators and the
Franciscan friars accompanying the expedition on the coast of present-day
Michoacán. Ximénez sailed to the northwest following the coast and at some point turned west and reached a bay that is now the port of the city of La Paz. Ximénez thought that he had found an island, and never knew that it was a large
peninsula. There he met natives who wore few clothes and spoke an unknown language; their culture was very different from that of the inhabitants of the Mexican highlands. The crews of his ships saw the "scantily-clad" women and raped them. The Spaniards soon became aware of the large pearls that the natives extracted from the pearl oysters abounding in the bay, and proceeded to plunder the people and rape the women. The
Baja California peninsula, the
Gulf of California (also known as the
Sea of Cortez), and the states of
California,
Baja California and
Baja California Sur, bear the name today. The city was founded in 1720. Between 1768 and 1803, Franciscan missionaries established political and religious jurisdiction over Baja California Sur, including La Paz, shaping both settlement and Indigenous relations. From 10 January 1854, to 8 May 1854, La Paz served as the capital of
William Walker's Republic of Sonora. The project collapsed due to lack of US support and pressure from the Mexican government to retake the region. == Geography ==