The mystery about California, from Sir Francis Drake’s landfall in 1580 forward, was whether it was an island or part of the North American mainland. In 1728 the Atlas could only say that “there is as yet no certainty whether ’tis an Island or a Continent.” From the merchants’ point of view, the question was unimportant, because California had nothing to offer in terms of trade: “there is on it neither House or Town, Man, Woman or Child of any European Race, but a poor, ignorant, wild and untractable People, who live hard to Extremity, the Country being very barren, uncultivated, and wild to all Comers.” In the Atlas’s “Description of the Coasts of America,” California comes last and, apparently, least, as the narrator concludes, “I have now done with America.”