Wedding of WILLIAM EDWARD PETTY HARTNELL + MARIA TERESA de la GUERRA: planned for ‘Santa Barbara on the last day of April 1825′

+++  The wedding of William Edward Petty Hartnell and Maria Teresa de la Guerra was planned to take place in Santa Barbara on the last day of April 1825, when the bride would be sixteen and the groom just turned twenty-seven.  ++  Don Guillermo had little time for singing and dancing with his future relatives in the spring days that preceded his wedding.  In the first place, there was the necessity of preparing a proper home in Monterey for his bride of distinguished family and luxurious upbringing.  He now had the aid, in this personal project as well as in company business, of a good-natured Scotsman named David Spence, sent up from Lima in September.  McCulloch had introduced him as “my friend Mr. Spence, who you will find of the greatest service to you.”  This proved always to be true.  ++  Don David was not well educated.  His letters show him to have been coarse in language, sometimes in thought; rather disrespectful of women; and something of a gossip.  But he had common sense, rare versatility, and unfailing patience with the recalcitrant or lazy Indians on whom Californians depended for all domestic service and manual labor.  As Don Guillermo himself once said, in dealing with these “enemies of work, there is nothing else to do but have patience.”  Spence even could be trusted with the management of the Monterey office, when his employer was called away on business trips or to attend festivities in the south.  ++  Second in importance, of the many tasks to be done before the wedding, was the necessity of coming to an understanding with Begg and Company as to the scheduling of company ships’ visits to California.  Repeatedly blamed for mismanagement and lack of exertion because of the long detention of vessels on the coast, Hartnell finally blew up, from fear that the continuance of inopportune arrivals would imperil the company’s success as well as his own hopes for financial independence.  He wrote to Mr. Begg:  ++  ’We on our part are fully convinced that the great losses which the California establishment has sustained ought much more to be attributed to the dispositions which have been taken in LIma than to any want of attention of ourselves. …’  +++