A SPANISH shipwreck which inspired a blockbuster Steven Spielberg film has been found off the coast of the USA – a whole 329 years after it sank without trace, believed destroyed by fire in the ocean wilderness thousands of kilometres from civilisation.
The Santo Cristo de Burgos vanished in 1693 close to Astoria, Oregon, although the part of the world where it met its fate was not known about until less than 40 years ago.
After the approximate location of where the earth swallowed the galleon up was worked out, the tale of its sticky ending would go on to become the cult movie The Goonies, directed by Richard Donner, in 1985.
Anyone who saw this box-office hit will remember that it told of the adventures of a group of kids from Astoria seeking a sunken pirate ship loaded with treasure off their nearest beach.
In real life, neither the galleon nor the haul of gold and jewels on board were ever found – until earlier this week, according to a report in National Geographic.
Risky rescue
Remains of the boat turned up in a sea cave near Manzanita, Oregon, and were recovered in a highly-delicate, hazardous and emergency operation involving archaeologists, police, and search and rescue teams from various local and State organisms.
Washington State Department of Transport archaeologist and chairman of the Marina Archaeological Society (MAS), Scott Williams, said he was 'impressed and relieved' after the successful recovery of the Santo Cristo de Burgos – some 15 years after his team started hunting for it.
About a dozen wooden beams from the galleon, which was on its way from The Philippines to México when it vanished off the face of the earth, are among the parts found in the underwater caves.
Early international trade in colonial times
At the time of its sinking, both these countries were Spanish colonies, and the ship was loaded up with a valuable cargo of Chinese silk, porcelain, and blocks of beeswax for making candles.
Described as a 'Manila' galleon, named after the Philippine capital, the Santo Cristo de Burgos was made from a type of extremely hard-wearing wood – tough enough to cope with the perilous conditions of the Pacific Ocean crossing.
'Manila' ships made annual trips between The Philippines and México from 1565 to 1815, when international trade had just started to take off on planet earth.
Although wooden galleons would, of course, eventually be superseded by much stronger and safer versions, the fact that very few sunken 'Manilas' have been found following a 250-year period of constant commercial voyages shows they were the result of a highly-sophisticated feat of technological engineering for the time.
Only three are known to have gone down off the west coast of the entire American continent – one near Oregon in the north-west, one off the shores of California, and another off Baja California, in México.
So far, the Santo Cristo de Burgos is the only one whose parts have been recovered – the others are still missing.
“Our ancestors knew what they were talking about”
Along the Oregon coast, the Santo Cristo de Burgos has long been known as the 'beeswax shipwreck', given the nature of its cargo – a substance which was traded by local Native American tribes at first and, later, by the British and other European colonisers.
Beeswax was highly-sought after in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Spanish colonies – it was produced by the Apis Mellifera, or Western Honey Bee, from Asia, which is not native to and not often found on the American continent, but as lots of candles were needed for Catholic church services as well as for general lighting, transporting of it to South and Central America and what is now the USA was constant.
Parts of the galleon had been seen floating near the coast decades ago – shards of blue and white bone china, and a section of the upper deck briefly seen in a river near Manzanita in the 1920s – but the existence of the ship and its sinking is only known about today thanks to the ancient tradition of oral history: Local tribes telling the tale to each new generation about how a 'foreign ship' went down off the Oregon coast, and how the crew survived, managed to reach dry land and then settled for good in the area.
Now the Santo Cristo de Burgos' remains have been located, this 'confirms that our ancestral people knew what they were talking about', says Robert Kentta, head of cultural resources at the Siletz Confederate Tribes and member of the Siletz Tribal Council.
This said, when the white colonisers started arriving in the area, the Native Americans' stories about the shipwreck began to be somewhat embellished, with more and more hyperbole about the nature of the valuable treasure troves on board.
Centuries of local legend, treasure hunts...and Hollywood movies
Local legends about galleons and hidden treasure, and cases of people going out to search for them, regularly appeared in Oregon newspapers towards the late 20th century, eventually inspiring Spielberg in creating The Goonies.
The MAS was set up in the first few years of the 21st century, with Scott Williams and his colleagues analysing thousands of shards of porcelain collected by nomads and travellers over the years, leading them to conclude it was made during the Kangxi period, between 1661 and 1722.
They also examined blocks of beeswax which turned up on the coast, finding they had a Spanish commercial stamp imprinted onto them.
All this brought Williams and the MAS to the conclusion that the fragments they were studying had come from one of the two 'Manila' galleons that disappeared locally – the Santo Cristo de Burgos, in 1693, and the San Francisco Xavier, which vanished in 1705.
After the storm: Ship 'could not have survived the tsunami'
Initially, they were convinced the shards had come from the latter, given that an earthquake off the USA's west coast in 1700, reaching 9 on the Richter scale, caused a tsunami – and if the Santo Cristo had been in the area when it sank, this catastrophic sea surge would have destroyed any bits of it still left.
But a geological investigation revealed that the area near the river Nehalem where the bone china and beeswax were found was, in fact, beneath the sediment left by the eight-metre (26-foot) waves that battered the coast, meaning the mystery ship carrying these goods when it ran aground must have already been there before the year 1700.
A catalogue of Spanish ships published in the 1930s – which is frequently consulted by marine archaeologists – claimed the Santo Cristo had caught fire in the middle of the Pacific, meaning nobody suspected it was anywhere near the US coast, or that any parts of it would have survived.
But a group of volunteers crowdfunded an exhaustive inquiry into Spain's Naval archives and discovered a very different version of what happened to the Santo Cristo: Despite a full-scale international search commissioned by the Crown, the galleon was on record as having 'simply disappeared'.
How the researchers finally identified the ship came down to the actual trees it was built from – their analyses revealed the Santo Cristo was constructed using the anacardiaceae, or cashew tree, a tropical hardwood most typically found and used in Asia, and radio-carbon indicators dated it to approximately the year 1650, which would coincide in time with when the Santo Cristo was made.
The next step was to find the rest of it, along with the fragments of wood, beeswax and porcelain – a somewhat dangerous quest, since the only ways to get into the sea caves in Manzanita are by water, or by making a perilous climb down the rocks at lowest-possible tide.
During their thorough scrutiny of the caves in summer 2020, the MAS team worked out the wooden beams had been dragged there by the tsunami in 1700, rather than this being the site of the original sailing accident.
End of three centuries of searching
Like practically every other activity on earth at the time, the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to further probes for a while, and after the situation began to return to normal, turbulent weather conditions over several months meant various missions were aborted.
The MAS did not get there until this week, congregating on an empty beach at sunrise.
All the beams were rescued safely and fully intact, and the collective sigh of relief afterwards was very audible and heartfelt.
“It was amazing to achieve such a complex operation, which was made possible entirely thanks to great teamwork, cooperation and an exceptionally professional approach on the part of all those involved,” said lead archaeological researcher Jim Delgado.
Now, the galleon parts are held at the River Columbia Maritime Museum in Astoria, where they are being painstakingly scrutinised, preserved, and catalogued.
Every single chunk of wood, of every size and shape, found in the cave will be thoroughly scanned, and the images shared with experts in 'Manila' galleons worldwide, to help contribute to specialist knowledge about how these exceptional ships, way ahead of their time, were built.
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