Daily Inspiration Quote by Junipero Serra

A single, flat line that lands like a body count. Junipero Serra is doing clerical logistics here, not lyricism: inventorying ships and manpower with the cool precision of a man trained to turn catastrophe into a reportable detail. The sentence is built around an almost bureaucratic contrast - "two vessels" sounds orderly, even hopeful - then it snaps shut with "without sailors", the human cost arriving as an afterthought. The parenthetical mass death, "all having died of the scurvy, except two", is delivered in the same grammatical register as a missing crate.

That composure is the point. Serra wrote from within Spain's imperial mission system in Alta California, where Franciscan evangelization rode in the wake of military and maritime infrastructure. Scurvy was the empire's recurring, mundane horror: not a battle, not martyrdom, just the slow consequence of long voyages, bad provisioning, and institutional inertia. By naming it so plainly, Serra signals his audience (colonial officials, fellow clergy, administrators) that this is not an existential crisis but a solvable supply problem.

The subtext is also theological and managerial. Death is folded into "here are" - as if mortality is another condition of fieldwork, to be absorbed so the mission can proceed. There's no elegy, no outrage, only the implication that the project must continue despite the corpses. In that restraint you can hear the broader colonial mentality: suffering rendered legible only when it affects operations, and compassion disciplined into paperwork.