History
Archeologists have found traces of human occupation on San Clemente Island dating back 10,000 years.
Later inhabitants left trade materials from the northern islands and from the mainland, including Coso obsidian from the California desert. It has not been established what tribe the recent inhabitants belonged to, although the Tongva, who are well attested from Santa Catalina Island, are the most likely candidates. The Chumash, who occupied the northern Channel Islands, may have influenced the inhabitants. Evidence of battles; 'the skeletons of dozens of men piled, one upon another' were also noted on San Clemente and San Nicolas.
The first European to sight the island was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542, who named it Victoria. It was renamed by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino, who spotted it on November 23, 1602, Saint Clement's feast day. It was used by ranchers, fishermen, and smugglers during the 19th century and into the 20th century.
In 1835, the whaleship Elbe of Poughkeepsie, New York, under Captain Josiah B. Whippey (or Whipple), hunted sperm whales as far north as "St. Clements Island" (San Clemente Island). The American steamship Lansing, as well as the steam-schooner California, both anchored in Pyramid Cove, on the south side of San Clemente Island, to process blue, fin and humpback whales caught by their "killer boats" (steam-driven whale catchers)—the former between 1926 and 1930, and the latter between 1933 and 1937. In 1935, the Norwegian factory ship Esperanza caught blue whales as far north as San Clemente Island.
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“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)