The searches lasted 16 years and radiocarbon tests confirmed it: the beams found off Nehalem Bay belong to the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish ship that sailed from Manila and was swallowed by the Pacific Ocean in 1693.
More than a ghost vessel, a Phoenix-Arab vessel: “that there is, everyone says it», ma no he knew where the remains of the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a 17th century Spanish galleon that left Manila and vanished in the Pacific more than three centuries ago with its exotic
laden with tea china and Chinese silk, tiles
tiles
and beeswax blocks. At least until today.
Now a group of marine archaeologists and researchers seem to have reasonable certainty that the sixteen large remains of wood found on an Oregon beach, at the mouth of the Nehalem River and 11,000 kilometers from the port of Manila where the ship had embarked, are what what’s left of it.
The discovery excites above all the (many) fans of the Goonies
a 1985 blockbuster from a story by Steven Spielberg in which a group of kids, right in Oregon, hunt for the treasure of a seventeenth-century vessel, sunk not far away.
The ship in the film, the «Inferno», was built especially for filming and then destroyed, although in working order, due to lack of owners; the Santo Cristo de Burgos, later renamed Beeswax Wreck, that is “relict of beeswax”, has had a story cloaked in many more mysteries.
The Oregon setting of the film was not accidental. On the beaches of the Nehalem Bay area, 65 kilometers from Astoria where the adventures of the Goonies
have been taking place, for a long time the ocean has brought to shore pieces of blue and white tiles or bites of beeswax. So much so that it has been at least since 2006 that a team of specialists now coordinated by Search Inc., a local cultural agency, has been working to find what remains of the galleon. The first to care, then, was
archaeologist Scott Williams, of the Washington State Department of Transportation, intrigued by a conversation between two friends about a mysterious vessel. It was to the point that, with other researchers, he founded a “Society of Maritime Archeology” specifically to study the fragments of porcelain and blocks of wax that have emerged over the decades. The seals on the wax left no doubt: it was Spanish merchandise. The possible galleons, which disappeared between Manila and Acapulco in the period to which the analysis of the carbon of the finds referred, that is between 1650 and 1750, were but two: the Santo Cristo de Burgos, vanished in 1693, or the San Francisco Xavier, disappeared in 1705. The second was then discarded: the remains came from a sedimented area after a tsunami that took place in 1700. They had therefore sunk first. Much time was then spent refuting an erroneous notion of historians: that the Holy Christ was burned. But the Spanish naval archives speak of “disappearance”. Finally, two years of pandemic have slowed down an already slow process for researchers’ skepticism.
A fisherman, now 49, named Craig Andes and a big fan of the Goonies
, was long ignored by the Society itself when it speculated that the sixteen wooden beams protruding from the water, embedded in a cave in Nehalem Bay, came from the wreck. Nobody believed that those beams, so well preserved, had been soaked in salt water for 300 years. But the area at the mouth of the Nehalem is not very saline; and radiocarbon left no doubts. The beams were recovered in June, in a daring undertaking (weighing 136 kilos). Now, the Company announced, they will be made available to scholars of galleons from all over the world. And in the future, who knows, fans of the Goonies.
July 13, 2022 (change July 13, 2022 | 23:03)
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