Washed Up

by Skye Moody

  Neptune’s Lost and Found

  From The Week magazine of September 9, 2005, comes a flotsam tale with a happy ending. In the summer of 1966, sailor James Lubeck, while kneeling on his sloop, accidentally dropped his wallet into the waters off Marblehead, Massachusetts. Lubeck’s wallet contained cash, three hundred-dollar checks, and ten—yes, ten—credit cards. Thirty-nine years later, twelve miles off the coast of Gloucester, Antonino Randazzo, a commercial fisherman, netted the plastic wallet insert with the credit cards. Randazzo took the time to track down Lubeck and returned the credit cards. Fortunately for Lubeck, fish don’t steal identities.

  On April 27, 1985, the Associated Press reported the arrival in Los Angeles of a Vietnamese refugee family to a “tearful welcome from an American couple whose bottled message floated 9,000 miles to the shores of Thailand.”

  Dorothy Peckham and her husband, John Henry Peckham, had offered in that bottled message to sponsor a Vietnamese family’s immigration to the United States. Hoa Van Nguyen, a former soldier in the Vietnamese Army, was walking on a beach in Thailand when, he says, a “sixth sense” told him to pick up a bottle he had spied on the tide line. The message Nguyen found inside was the Peckhams’ offer to sponsor immigration to the United States. Not long afterward, Nguyen arrived in Los Angeles with his wife, their sixteen-month-old baby, and Nguyen’s younger brother. At their first meeting, Nguyen presented the Peckhams, who had worked through a relief program, with a picture he had made while in a refugee camp in Thailand.

  In early September 2005, as floods from Hurricane Katrina still choked a devastated New Orleans, Curt Belton, a Department of Fish and Wildlife agent, reported that rescuers in a boat found a wine bottle adrift on floodwaters along Canal Street in the city’s central business district. Inside the bottle was this message: “To Whom it may concern: Please send with immediately, ice cold chest of Coors Light. I’m out at this time. Down to wine. Some shrimp and oysters would also be appreciated. Thank you.”

  When rescuers located the sender, he was relaxing on his front porch with a bottle of wine. He told them he had enough wine for “quite a few days.” He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Love Gone Adrift

  In December 2004, Mary Fulton of Rockaway Beach, Oregon, set out for a walk with her two dogs, heading for nearby Nedonna Beach. Nedonna is a dune-covered beach frequently lashed by major Pacific storms. A storm had just passed and Mary kept high to the dunes to avoid the unstable wet sand. Keeping her head bowed against the wind, she spied something poking out of the sand. It looked like a brown bottle. She wondered if it might be a very old bottle, maybe one of those mouth-blown bottles, a collector’s item.

  “I saw this brown bottle half poking out of the dunes, and then I saw it had a cork,” Mary told me. “I picked it up, thinking maybe it was an old bottle, but it had a seam in it, so it wasn’t very old. There was something inside, looked like paper. The cork on the bottle wasn’t unusual; it didn’t look old.

  “There was something else inside the bottle besides the paper. I thought maybe it was sand. I opened the bottle.”

  Mary read me the note from inside the bottle. It said, “These things were given to me by my lover+friend. I cannot truly return to my husband 100 percent if I keep them. Since you have found them they are yours. The diamonds are real. Enjoy them like I can’t.”

  Along with the note was a pair of earrings, a ring, and a tennis bracelet. “The earrings were just simple heart-shaped, with a small diamond in them,” she said. “The ring was real soft, like the metal wasn’t worth much.... The tennis bracelet is gold with what my friend tells me are diamonds. I know this lady who has a tennis bracelet just like it, and she said she believes it’s real diamonds.”

  I asked Mary why she hadn’t had it appraised.

  “I’m not a diamond person, for one thing,” she said. “And I’m not a tennis bracelet person. I guess I’ll do that someday. But for me, the excitement was finding the bottle with a note in it.”

  The note Mary found included a list:

  Dancing

  Fall leaves—N. E.

  Disney World

  Europe—(Great Britain)

  Caribbean

  Mt. Rushmore

  Apt. Lake Forest

  Sears Tower

  CU do corike (Could this mean “See you do karaoke”?)

  First snow.

  Messenger to a postmodern world, Mary Fulton, accidental flotsamist, is content knowing she helped a tortured love triangle complete its tragic journey. Love delivered to the sea may go unrequited, yet a message in a bottle, awash in passion, returned to land, offers the world’s lovelorn a shred of kindness.

  III. FLOTSAM’S EVOLUTION

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown

  T. S. ELIOT

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  So I said to my psychiatrist, “I’m not sleeping nights. This elusive floating stone keeps me awake. Why did I leave it on the beach to wash out on the tide?”

  The doctor didn’t want to hear about floating stones. I pleaded, desperate to talk about it. He suggested I go to a rock person.

  “I don’t know any rock persons,” I said. “Why won’t you discuss it with me?”

  “Because,” said the shrink, “you shouldn’t waste your money. My fees are high. Let’s talk about what’s important to your mental health.”

  “But this floating stone is critical to my mental stability,” I said. “It’s bad enough that I didn’t keep it, only took its picture. Now I’m obsessed with its image. I can’t stop looking at it. And whenever I bring it up in public, people just stare right through me, like you’re doing now.”

  “You’re obsessed with images in general,” said the shrink. “And most of them are figments of your imagination.”

  “I am not imagining the floating stone,” I said. I reached into my purse, fished out a picture of the stone and handed it to the doc. He studied the picture for all of five seconds—maybe ten—then flicked it back to me. Stared some more, silently.

  “Well,” I said. “Now do you see it’s real?”

  “It’s displacement,” he said. “The stone represents your mother’s womb. You’re displacing your anger at her for banishing you from that secure existence afloat in the uterine sea.”

  “Did you say ‘displacement?’”

  “Transference, I meant transference.”

  “But that’s spot on,” I said. “Displacement is the theory that explains how objects like my stone float on water. You see, when an object weighs ...”

  “Time’s up, Popeye.”

  Lagan Loot

  Remember Scrooge McDuck? His fabulous treasure store? The Spanish chests overflowing with diamonds, pearls, golden goblets, gold and silver coins stacked to the rafters? Remember the pirates kidnapping little Huey, Dewey, and Louie, holding them hostage and demanding Scrooge’s treasure for the release of his nephews? And did Uncle Scrooge relinquish his pieces of eight to buy his nephews’ freedom?

  The comics of yesteryear taught generations of America’s youth, including me, about buried treasure along its coastlines. Donald was my preferred duck, but Uncle Scrooge had the dinero, so I indulged in the old moneybag’s adventures, too. My favorite characters were those swarthy-skinned, stubble-faced, handkerchief-head pirates who perennially—often inexplicably in a landlocked urban setting—raided Scrooge McDuck’s treasure vaults. But where did it all come from? Sunken treasure, of course, as indicated by the exotic paraphernalia tucked among the loot. Byzantine crosses, Celtic crosses, Maltese crosses—I think the animator had a cross fetish—great teetering stacks of pieces of eight straight off the old galleon trade, chinoiserie, and all manner of exotica as fabulously illustrated by a Hollywood animator whose longest journey had probably taken him once to Bakersfield. What all this Scrooge material did for me was excite my flotsam genes,
sending me straight down to the tide line to search for the first sign of buried treasure—a piece-of-eight silver coin.

  The idea that you could beachcomb yourself to riches made sense to young dreamers in the land of free enterprise, a continent ringed with unimaginable sunken treasure whose clues wash up along its beaches often enough to sustain the dream even today. Silver and gold coins from shipwrecked galleons have for centuries washed up along the coastlines of North, Central, and South America, the greater numbers found on beaches in Florida and the Caribbean. Scrooge’s treasure was real, after all, and as salvage technology improves, more lagan is pulled from coastal waters, proving at least some of the legends of sunken treasure are real.

  But the closest I got to that New Spain silver and gold was in the sixties in Mexico City, where I lived and studied (or pretended to) for a time, and on my frequent excursions to the Mexican west coast. In Mexico City I nearly overdosed on silver and gold rococo Guadalupe shrines and gained an appreciation for Mexico’s ultimate victory over the Spanish. If this much gold and silver remains in Mexico, I wondered, how much more was looted and carried away on Spanish galleons? The next question followed logically: Where’s the stuff that didn’t make it to Spain? And so a trip to the coast seemed in order.

  In Acapulco I learned more about hammocks and piña coladas than I learned about sunken treasure, at a museum dedicated to Spanish galleon wrecks, where shades of Scrooge McDuck’s pirate nemeses haunted me as I viewed real treasure chests overflowing with real pieces of eight and golden goblets and, yes, even crosses and pearls. It didn’t occur to me at the time—this was during my peyote era—that much of what I was viewing wasn’t Spanish, nor in any way European in origin, but Asian. Fast forward to 1974, which was the year I first visited China.

  As a China watcher for thirty-two years, frequently on site, I’ve come to understand what all that Chinese silk and porcelain are doing in the Acapulco Maritime Museum. This is lagan of the first order, the stuff every Scrooge McDuck fan ever dreamed of, and it truly did come from sunken ships lying within a beachcomber’s reach along the coastlines of both American continents. Much of it still lies beneath the seas, too deep and too far out at sea to recover. Most of it, though, forms a rich girdle that hugs the coast close enough to shore to cause a shipload of deep-sea entrepreneurs to sweat bullets competing for the lost lagan of long ago, which may have been the title of a Scrooge McDuck adventure.

  Treasure Runners: Shaking Lagan Loose on the Tides

  For centuries, beachcombers have found gold coins washed up on beaches. Americans are particularly lucky; more gold and silver coins are buried in the ocean sand on North and South American coastlines than anywhere else in the world. And they keep washing up: All it takes is one good hurricane, a little luck, and being first on the beach after the storm. Serious flotsamists know that the best time to search a strandline is during a storm and, like the mail carrier, weather doesn’t deter them.

  While Spanish conquerors were looting silver and gold in New Spain, back home, in the mid-1550s, the shipbuilder Alvaro de Bazan de Sevilla had perfected the design of a new type of warship, the galleon. The fabulous new ships were perfectly suited to transport New World riches back to Europe. Alas, their eventual downfall was partly due to a policy no sane mariner would have concocted: A Spanish galleon’s captain was not the ship’s final authority; he answered to a naval officer who may have had no major seagoing training or experience and to other ship’s officers. In what must have mimicked a Monty Python moment when danger arose—threatening weather or attacking pirates or privateers—the captain was subject to rule-by-committee, often resulting in fistfights, bloodied noses, broken jaws, and even murder and mutiny. But until the rule by consensus debacle eventually proved disastrous for Spain and its fleets, much of the New World’s riches rode Spanish galleons across the high seas and into the arms of Spanish nobility.

  The galleons carried both treasure and heavy armament and proved strong defenders of the king’s treasure during times of territorial wars, often fought on the high seas, and increasing skirmishes with pirates. Formidable when encountered, the Spanish fleets soon became the stuff of legend, as much for its unimaginably rich cargo as for the galleons’ threatening presence on the horizon. And those sunken treasures that went down with their ships: Over the centuries violent storms have churned up the ocean beds, sending artifacts from those shipwrecks adrift on the tides, some of the lost treasure eventually washing ashore. Time, tides, and shifting sands have alternately buried and unburied the artifacts. Flotsamists know that every beach holds potential treasure, but some coastal waters, like those off Coin Beach, Delaware, are richer than others.

  One autumn day in 1979, at Delaware’s Coin Beach, a very determined fourteen-year-old youth named Dale Clifton Jr.—no doubt a Scrooge McDuck comics reader—stood on the strandline and vowed to find a coin washed up from an old shipwreck. If you’re searching for a coin, certainly Coin Beach is the place to start.

  “Took me one year and two months,” says Dale Clifton today. “Then one blustery December day, I reached down into the sand and plucked up a 1785 King George. I’ve been salvaging from shipwrecks ever since.”

  The 1785 King George III halfpenny that fourteen-year-old Dale Clifton found ignited a passion in the young man that has burned for twenty-five years and shows no signs of cooling. Clifton taught himself to scuba dive. He became an avid beachcomber. Soon he had collected enough shipwreck artifacts to open a museum, and so he did. Since the first coin, Clifton has salvaged Spanish and Inca gold, gold bars, goblets, jewelry, silverware, porcelain dishes, weapons, and more than 200,000 coins from dozens of shipwrecks off Delaware and Maryland. Working with dive crews, he has located and painstakingly recorded details of shipwrecks, including their crews and passengers, as well as reclaimed the victims’ personal property.

  Scouring beaches, collecting flotsam, often using metal detectors, and diving to shipwrecks both in Delaware Bay and off the Atlantic shore, Clifton has made sure the shipwreck treasures are preserved for future generations. With colleagues from the Delaware Discover-Sea Shipwreck Museum, which he founded, the undersea detective has also conducted controlled archaeological digs along the shoreline, discovering how colonial American beach folk lived and related to the sea. The Discover-Sea Shipwreck Museum on Fenwick Island, Delaware, one of the world’s few lagan museums, houses thousands of articles of salvage from these shipwrecks and beach digs, and is so historically rich and hip it has been the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary. Personal items of victims lost at sea triggered in me a sense of grieving over people I’d never met. Seeing their clothing, jewelry, personal journals, and such intimate items as grooming tools brings them back to life. These artifacts, Clifton says, remind him that the most important treasures salvaged from sunken ships are the memories of passengers, often entire families, who died heartbreakingly close to shores they had dreamed of calling home.

  Some estimates put the number of shipwrecks off the eastern Florida coast alone as high as three thousand ships, several hundred of those being Spanish treasure ships, many partially or completely buried under sand. Discoveries of shipwreck flotsam are no longer common along Florida’s beaches, but Web sites devoted to salvaging buried treasure report occasional finds of a gold coin, or a gold filigree Spanish cross pendant, plucked out of Florida’s white sands.

  Not only Spain lost ships along the U.S. Atlantic Coast; over the centuries, vessels of British, Dutch, Russian, and other national origin, carrying passengers and rich payloads, have gone down in heavy weather within a few miles of the coastline, their sea graves never discovered. One of Dale Clifton’s ongoing searches is for the Juno, a ship reportedly carrying twenty-three tons of silver when it went down along Delaware’s Delmarva Coast.

  On October 1, 1802, the Juno departed San Juan, Puerto Rico, with nearly a thousand passengers. A week later she encountered rough seas and foul weather at 33 degrees north latitude. Against a stiff
nor’easterly she struggled northward along the East Coast, and on the morning of October 24, the crew was relieved to spot an American schooner, the Favorite , which responded to the Juno’s distress flags. Together for the next two days, the ships struggled up the coast. Then, on the night of October 27, the weather turned foul and the Favorite lost sight of the Juno.The Juno was never seen again, nor has her silver bounty been recovered. But with new diving and salvaging technology, Clifton believes the ship may eventually be located and its treasure recovered.

  Twenty-three tons of silver. Even platinum snobs can appreciate this picture.

  In 1565, Spanish shipyards in the Philippines began building the legendary galleons, only these vessels were outfitted for trade between Manila and New Spain, the east-bound galleons crossing the Pacific to make port at what is now Acapulco. Maintaining the European galleon design, the Manila galleons were built of Asian hardwoods like teak and mahogany, and planking was lanang wood, with a surface hard enough to withstand a cannonball shot. Beachcombers for centuries have been finding pieces of lanang and teak along North America’s West Coast beaches, and residents often speculate about the Spanish treasure ships built from those woods.

  Manila to Acapulco was, at that time, the longest navigation distance in the world. These nine-thousand-mile sailings generally took four to seven months. Besides importing Asia’s finest products, the fleets also delivered Chinese merchants and Filipino sailors to the Americas. Ship captains understood the North Pacific’s surface currents and knew how to take advantage of the trade winds. Still, crossing the Pacific Ocean, even on a mighty galleon, was a life-or-death roll of the dice, one of the greatest risks a person ever encountered. Even the most privileged passengers endured hardship and unsanitary conditions in confined spaces on ships that often carried as many as a thousand passengers. One galleon’s log from a crossing between New Spain and Manila notes that a Spanish noblewoman, reacting to conditions aboard ship, went mad and jumped overboard to her death. Meanwhile, pirates, privateers, and enemy navies lurked in the ocean along with the spectre of deadly hurricanes and typhoons, disease, and starvation. Sorry to say, rats, too, though not listed on a ship’s manifesto, rode the high seas carrying deadly cargos of germs and disease.