Death
Just seven weeks after arriving on the mainland, Juana Maria died. Modern analysis suggests she contracted dysentery, but Nidever claimed her fondness for green corn, vegetables and fresh fruit after years of little such nutrient-laden food caused the severe and ultimately fatal illness. Before she died, Father Gonzales baptized and christened her with the Spanish name Juana Maria. She was buried in an unmarked grave on the Nidever family plot at the Santa Barbara Mission cemetery. In 1928, a plaque commemorating her was placed at the site by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Juana Maria's water basket, clothing and various artifacts, including bone needles which had been brought back from the island, were part of the collections of the California Academy of Sciences, but were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Her cormorant feather dress was apparently sent to the Vatican, but it appears to have been lost.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.”
—William Empson (1906–1984)
“Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)