José de Gálvez, 1st Marquess of Sonora

With the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Baja California peninsula, Gálvez engaged the Franciscan Order to take over the spiritual affairs of the missions there. Even after the arrival of Junípero Serra and his fellow Franciscan friars, the Spanish military — having evicted the Jesuits from the missions they had established — continued running the missions' practical business. In 1768, Gálvez toured the Baja chain of missions. Angered over the sloppy administration he found there, he reprimanded the soldier commissioners stationed at the missions. In August, he signed a decree turning all of Baja's missions — except mission Loreto — over fully to the Franciscan friars. He banned card-playing and gambling at mission settlements. Overruling the Franciscans' appeal for clemency for miscreant soldiers, Gálvez punished most of them by assigning them to the upcoming expedition to Alta California — and discharged the rest from military service.[9]

Continuing to manage Baja California affairs into 1769, Gálvez sought to balance scarce natural and human resources in the fragile chain of missions: Some missions lacked enough land and water to sustain all their Indian converts; other missions, endowed with ample land and water, lacked enough workers to cultivate their fields. Gálvez ordered Indians moved from one mission to another — despite the Indians' reluctance to leave their home villages — to correct such imbalances. He also had some young Indian orphans sent to Loreto for training in handling coastal boats and ships. Gálvez worked with the Franciscan president of the Baja missions, Junípero Serra, in his projects to improve the lives of the natives, whom he called "the poor Israelites." Yet he insisted that Baja Indians pay the royal tax, standing by his order despite Serra's efforts to persuade him that collecting such a tax would prove impractical.[10]

Ambitious to reinvigorate the imperial fortunes of New Spain, Gálvez proposed consolidating and developing the far northwest under a huge governmental unit to embrace the regions of Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the Californias — including claimed but unsettled upper (Alta) California. Playing on long-standing fears in Spain's ruling circles that rival powers would muscle in on territories Spain claimed along the Pacific coast, Gálvez spread rumors of schemes by the British and Dutch rulers to add California to their own empires.[11] Then, when a report arrived from the Spanish ambassador in Russia that Catherine the Great planned to establish settlements down the California coast towards Monterey, Gálvez trumpeted the Russian threat. King Carlos gave the go-ahead, and Gálvez prepared a series of expeditions of soldiers, sailors, artisans, Christian Indians and missionaries to push north into unexplored upper California. In 1768, Gálvez sailed from San Blas to Loreto to finish planning the coming year's expeditions.

To free the Franciscan missionaries from their posts in Baja California, Gálvez called upon friars of the Dominican Order to take charge of the Baja missions. Gálvez assigned Junípero Serra to head the missionary team in the Alta California expedition — without bothering to ask padre Serra if he agreed to his new mission.[12] As it turned out, Serra, eager to pioneer in evangelizing Indians in Alta California, readily joined in. Gálvez established a naval base at San Blas and, in 1768–9, organized sea and land expeditions up the California coast to the projected Spanish outpost at the harbor named Monterrey (originally spelled with a double "r") by Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1603. Gaspar de Portolá, governor of Las Californias, commanded the second overland expedition. Closely attending to the logistical details of the expeditions, Gálvez issued thorough instructions to the key officers and technicians. He ordered Miguel Costansó, the young engineer and cartographer, to make observations of the ports of San Diego and Monterey, compare his findings with the older sailing charts, draw new maps, and examine the countryside around both ports. Gálvez issued further instructions for building a proper fortification at Monterey; reconnoitering the ports of Monterey and San Francisco; and preparing detailed accounts destined for top officials in Mexico and Spain.[13]

On January 9, 1769, Gálvez, padre Serra and town dwellers gathered on the shore of La Paz to bless and send off the San Carlos, the expedition's flagship captained by Vicente Vila, a native of Andalusia. The hastily built galleon San Carlos, along with the two ships to follow — the San Antonio and San José — had arrived from San Blas leaking, requiring repairs at La Paz bay. Gálvez personally superintended the repairs and loading of the San Carlos, carrying some of the mission furniture aboard with his own hands.[14] In his speech on the shore, Gálvez proclaimed that the ship's crew, including Franciscan friar Fernando Parrón, had the mission of planting the holy cross among the Indians at Monterey. In the name of king Carlos and viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix, Gálvez urged the explorers to keep peace among themselves and respect their chaplain, padre Parrón. When the San Carlos set sail, Gálvez followed in a launch to see the ship round Cabo San Lucas.[15]

On February 15, Gálvez dispatched the San Antonio, the second ship of the sea expedition, from Cabo San Lucas. Captain Juan Pérez, a native of Palma de Majorca, commanded the San Antonio. Franciscan friars Juan Vizcaíno and Francisco Gómez served as chaplains.[16] The third ship, the San José, disappeared at sea on the way to San Diego.[17]

While Gaspar de Portolá prepared his overland expedition to San Diego, Gálvez issued him strict instructions:

...To prevent difficulties and disaster in the outcome, the most prudent supervision must be exercised. Therefore, I charge you with zeal and vigilance to maintain the most exact discipline over the soldiers of the expedition as well as over the muleteers, especially from the frontier on, so that the Indians will be well treated. The soldiers are to be punished as in the case of an irremissible crime if they offer any affront or violence to the women because, besides being offenses against God, such excesses committed by them could also bring disaster to the entire expedition.[18]

Gálvez then cautioned Portolá to travel slowly, to reduce the chances of Indian resistance. He wanted the expedition members to demonstrate to the Indians the advantages they would gain by living under the sovereign protection of the Spanish king.

The commander of the first overland expedition, Fernando Rivera y Moncada, was waiting at Velicatá, 350 miles south of San Diego. Gálvez had ordered captain Rivera to requisition horses and mules from local Baja California missions without endangering their survival, giving the missionaries receipts for the exact number of animals taken. Those missions would later get restocked with animals shipped from Mexico across the Gulf of California. Franciscan friar Juan Crespí, chosen as chaplain and diarist for the Rivera party, left his post at Mission La Purísima to join Rivera at Velicatá.[19] On March 24, 1769, Rivera, Crespí, 25 leather-jacketed soldiers, 42 Baja Christian Indians, and 3 muleteers began their journey, driving a large herd of cattle, horses and mules. They arrived in San Diego on May 14, where the San Carlos and San Antonio awaited them.

Meanwhile, the second overland party, headed by Portolá, gathered in Loreto, around 900 miles south of San Diego — with instructions to follow the Rivera party to San Diego. The Portolá expedition included Franciscan missionaries headed by Junípero Serra. The expedition founded the Mission San Diego de Alcalá and the Royal Presidio of San Diego in July 1769 at San Diego. Portolá then continued north to explore the Alta California coast and re-establish the port of Monterey visited in 1602 by Sebastián Vizcaíno.

In November 1769, the Portolá expedition discovered San Francisco Bay before returning to San Diego. A second trip in 1770 led to the establishment of the Presidio of Monterey and Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (Mission Carmel). Although Gálvez — in arguing for his plan to expand into San Diego and Monterey — had projected that Alta California would eventually prove a great source of revenue for the Spanish crown, the region wound up running an annual deficit during most of its years under Spanish rule.[20]

Historians James Rawls and Walton Bean call Gálvez the most effective visitador (inspector general) in the history of New Spain. They attribute Spain's expansion into Alta California to his intense personal ambitions. "…Although he was a brilliant, forceful, and generally successful administrator," write Rawls and Bean, "he was also unusually vain, selfish, ruthless, deceitful and unstable. It was, indeed, because of Gálvez's possession of this very combination of qualities that the occupation of San Diego and Monterey, long considered and periodically given up as hopeless, actually materialized."[21]

Gálvez returned to Spain in 1771. In 1769 he collapsed mentally and physically, attributed to overwork and the conflict with the indigenous in Sonora; although he recovered, "the end of the visita was clouded." He returned to take up his position on the Council of the Indies to which he had been appointed in 1767.[22]