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Llanos-Cárdenas expedition begins mapping Matagorda Bay
On this day in 1690, the ship Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación
anchored off Cavallo Pass, the natural entrance to Matagorda Bay, and its crew
began mapping the bay. The ship was under the command of Francisco de
Llanos, and the mapmaking was assigned to the engineer Manuel José de
Cárdenas y Magaña. The expedition had left Veracruz on October 12. Its
mission was to evaluate the environs of the defunct French Fort St.
Louis as a site for a Spanish presidio, to seek a water route to the new
San Francisco de los Tejas Mission, and to map Espíritu Santo (i.e.,
Matagorda ) Bay. The expedition determined that neither the Lavaca River
nor the Colorado afforded a water route to the mission. The
reconnaissance map--one of a series of Spanish cartographic
representations of the Texas coast--gave twentieth-century historian
Herbert E. Bolton reason to place the site of Fort St. Louis on Garcitas
Creek in Victoria County.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- LLANOS-CARDENAS EXPEDITION
- LLANOS, FRANCISCO DE
- SPANISH MAPPING OF TEXAS
- CARDENAS Y MAGANA, MANUEL JOSE DE
- FORT ST. LOUIS
- BOLTON, HERBERT EUGENE
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Austin African-American colleges merge (1952)
- Pioneer German authors killed by Indians (1845)
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