by Friar Antonio de la Ascencion, aboard the Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno's 1603 expedition. De la Ascension wrote in his diary, "Six leagues before reaching Punta de los Reyes (Point Reyes) is a large island, two leagues from land and three leagues northwest of this are . . . seven farallones close together." It is believed that probably for the next two centuries after their discovery, their rather ominous appearance, lying just off the entrance to San Francisco Bay, most likely caused the earlier mariners to prefer to skirt far to the west and offshore from the entrance to the bay, thus leading to the much later discovery of the San Francisco Bay by land over two centuries after the 1542 discovery of the islands. In 1769, the bay inlet was finally discovered soon after an overland sighting of the bay was made from what is now the Pacifica area. In the years following the discovery of the islands, during the maritime fur trade era, the islands were exploited by seal hunters, first from New England and later from Russia. The Russians maintained a sealing station in the Farallones from 1812 to 1840, taking 1,200 to 1,500 fur seals annually, though American ships had already exploited the islands. The Albatross, captained by Nathan Winship, and the O'Cain, captained by his brother Jonathan Winship, were the first American ships sent from Boston in 1809 to establish a settlement on the Columbia River. In 1810, they met with two other American ships at the Farallon Islands, the Mercury and the Isabella, and at least 30,000 seal skins were taken. By 1818, the seals diminished rapidly until only about 500 could be taken annually and within the next few years, the fur seal was extirpated from the islands. Whether the northern fur seal or the Guadalupe fur seal were the islands' native fur seal is unknown, although the northern fur seal is the species that began to recolonize the islands in 1996. On July 17, 1827, French sea captain Auguste Duhaut-Cilly sailed by the southernmost Farallon Island and counted the "crude dwellings of about a hundred Kodiaks stationed there by the Russians of Bodega...the Kodiaks, in their light boats, slip into San Francisco Bay by night, moving along the coast opposite the fort, and once inside this great basin, they station themselves temporarily on some of the inner islands, from where they catch