Dona Teresa’s opinion of Count de Mofras is the lowest on record. Others range from the mild opprobrium of vecino Alvarado to enthusiastic French reviews of his Travels on the West Coast. Senor Alvarado said:
‘He is a youth of good literary reputation, of an impetuous character and generous instincts; but unfortunately he arrived among us imbued with false ideas about our character. He believes that the inhabitants of this country are brutal Indians whose duty it is to prostrate themselves before him.’
The Count’s own words bear out Alvarado’s opinion and show a contempt not only for the Californians but for their brothers living in an adjacent land:
‘I have recently visited a large part of Mexican territory and found the moral and political conditions deplorable; the people possess all the worst qualities of the Spaniards and few of their virtues. On all sides disorder, decay and corruption to exceed anything known in Europe prevail. The North Americans, the English, and the Russians do not conceal their designs on upper California . . . . Obviously France never has been in a more propitious position than she is now to replace the deplorable loss of Canada and Louisiana. Already mistress of the Marquesas and Tahiti, she could materially enhance her power by assuring herself of one of the Sandwich Islands, by purchasing the settlement at Port Bodega [Ross] which would be a preliminary step toward acquiring the entire harbor of San Francisco, the key to the Pacific Ocean; by grouping around this the French-Spanish Catholics of the country, by opening to our countrymen who are constantly going out to settle in the United States, Buenos Ayres, and Chile, a vast field for national colonization and by establishing on a continent over which our flag has long floated, a new French America!’
[Pages 258 - 259 of Susanna Bryant Dakin's 1949 history of Alta California: The Lives of William Hartnell]
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