On September 28, 1542, a navigator named Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo brought three ships through the entrance of this bay and dropped anchor at the rocky tip of what we now call Point Loma. That day, Cabrillo became the first European to land on the coast of Alta California — the region that would eventually become the state of California.
He was sailing under the Spanish flag, commissioned to find the Strait of Anian — the legendary northwest passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He didn't find it. He found instead a broad, sheltered bay unlike anything the Spanish had charted this far north on the Pacific coast.
He named it Puerto de San Miguel. Not San Diego — that name came sixty years later, in 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed the same coast and renamed nearly every landfall he encountered. Puerto de San Miguel became San Diego de Alcalá, in honor of a Franciscan friar canonized forty years earlier. Cabrillo's original name disappeared from the maps.
Cabrillo never made it home. He spent the winter exploring the California coast, turned back south toward Mexico, and died on one of the Channel Islands in January 1543, likely from complications after breaking his arm during a skirmish. He was buried somewhere on the islands; the exact location is not known.
His expedition's records were written up by the fleet pilot, Bartolomé Ferrer, who continued the voyage after Cabrillo's death. The journals are preserved. They describe this bay as a good port, with fresh water, and people on the shore. What those people — who had lived here for thousands of years — made of three Spanish ships is not recorded.
At the very tip of Point Loma, inside Cabrillo National Monument, a stone statue of Cabrillo stands overlooking the bay entrance — sword in one hand, eyes on the Pacific he crossed. The monument is maintained by the National Park Service. From the overlook, you can see both sides of the peninsula: the bay on one side, the open Pacific on the other.
On September 28 of each year, the anniversary of the landing is observed at the monument. In 1913, it became one of the earliest national monuments established on the West Coast.
The rocky point itself, Ballast Point, takes its modern name from the practice of ballasting ships — filling their holds with the heavy granite cobbles that covered the shoreline, then dumping them when cargo came aboard. Sailing ships from around the Pacific spent time here for centuries before the Navy arrived. The cobbles they left behind are still there, somewhere below the submarine piers.
From the water, Ballast Point is where the bay stops and the Pacific begins. The Navy's security perimeter starts at the shore, but the view from JADA's deck reaches all the way to the stone figure on the ridge — the same ridge where the first European stood on this coast, 480 years ago, and looked at the same water you are sailing on now.
Sources: National Park Service (Ballast Point, Cabrillo National Monument); History.com, "Spanish Explorer Sails into San Diego Bay, September 28, 1542"; Naval History and Heritage Command.
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