Time & Perspective Quote by Junipero Serra

Misery shows up here as bookkeeping, and that chill is the point. Serra frames human suffering in the passive voice of providence: people "got daily worse", bad water and cold do the damage, and death is treated as an almost administrative outcome that would have happened "if" fortune (or God) hadn’t intervened. The sentence reads like a field report, but it’s also a moral alibi. By presenting catastrophe as environmental inevitability narrowly avoided, Serra subtly shifts attention away from leadership decisions, planning failures, or the coercive machinery of colonization that brought vulnerable bodies to the brink in the first place.

The phrase "they must all have perished" does heavy rhetorical lifting. It’s speculative, absolute, and dramatic, enlarging the danger so the eventual "discovered the port" lands as rescue-and therefore as validation. Survival becomes proof of rightness: the mission continues because it was spared. That’s a common colonial narrative move, turning logistics into destiny and hardship into sanctification.

Context matters: Serra is writing in the world of Spanish missionary expansion in Alta California, where journeys, supply lines, and settlement sites were often brutal gambles. As a cleric, he’s trained to read events as signs, and he’s also positioned to persuade superiors that the enterprise is worth supporting. The subtext is clear: conditions are dire, but the project is still divinely and strategically viable-so keep funding, keep marching, keep building.