Daily Inspiration Quote by Junipero Serra

A quiet line like this can do a lot of rhetorical laundering. Serra frames his arrival as a simple accounting of who got there first, “by sea and land,” then drops the only exclusion that matters: “except those who have died.” On the surface, it’s travelogue piety - the cleric noting predecessors, acknowledging mortality. Underneath, it’s a colonizing checklist rendered in the calm register of a man trained to see providence in logistics.

The phrasing converts violent disruption into orderly succession. “Those who had set out before me” implies a shared mission, a relay race of righteous effort, not an invasion. The symmetry of “sea and land” reads like the map-making language of empire: routes, categories, coverage. People become movements; movement becomes legitimacy. And then death enters as a bureaucratic footnote - the absent are simply not present to be counted.

That’s the subtextual power: the sentence draws a boundary around whose lives are narratable. It implicitly centers Spanish and ecclesiastical actors (the “we” of the expedition) while making Indigenous presence vanish by omission. Even the mention of the dead can work as moral insulation, a nod to human fragility that sidesteps the question of why so many bodies would soon accumulate in and around the mission system.

Serra, a cleric, writes as if spiritual purpose cancels out political consequence. The intent is to record continuity and reassure superiors of momentum. The context - Spain’s mission-and-military expansion in Alta California - makes the calmness chilling: when conquest is narrated as itinerary, domination can feel like destiny.