by Skye Moody
The Manila fleets carried treasure from the Orient, including copra (dried coconut kernels used to make oil), chinoiserie such as China silk, porcelain, gold (found in small quantities in China but not much valued there), ivory, jade, pearls and gemstones, mercury, ginger, cowrie shells, and myriad Chinese consumer goods, which gave rise to the term “China trade.” Some shipments included opium. Today, I own an opium pipe acquired in China by a British mariner ancestor. It still works.
Reaching port at Acapulco, the galleons’ exotic cargo was unloaded and dispersed among Spanish merchants and wealthy families. The galleons were then reloaded with silver mined in Latin and South America for the return voyage, or, if time was of the essence, sent on the next outbound fleet. According to many estimates, about one-third of the silver mined in Peru and Mexico eventually traveled the Spanish Manila galleons to Asia. In Manila, silver was delivered to Chinese buyers, or to Chinese merchants as payment for exported goods. Furthermore, much of the imported chinoiserie traveled overland across New Spain to its Atlantic ports, where it once again was loaded onto Spanish galleons, this time en route to Spain. This explains why shipwreck salvage expeditions in the Atlantic Ocean have found Asian goods aboard wrecked Spain-bound galleons. Including opium pipes.
Poor navigational skills and treacherous weather weren’t the only obstacles to safely crossing the great oceans. Pirates, freebooters, and their semi-legal counterparts, privateers, lurked in the oceans, waiting to attack anything Spanish, for Spain ruled the Caribbean’s bounding main and the Pacific’s China Trade route, holding a monopoly on trade with the Americas. But by the end of the eighteenth century, Spain was in such heavy financial debt that frequently its fleets were escorted back to port by warships of the debtor nations. In 1778, the last flota sailed; soon thereafter, Spain officially opened trade in its American colonies. Soon, British and American vessels began wrecking in storms off the Pacific Coast, and even as the New World’s settlers began documenting each new disaster, the legend of Spanish treasure wove itself deep into the natives’ psyche.
Whose Beeswax?
In 1813, Alexander Henry, chief trader of the Northwest Fur Trading Company, writing about trade between whites and native tribes at Fort Astoria on the North Pacific, described a party of Indians offering beeswax for trade. Apiculture not being a native pastime, Henry and colleagues inquired from whence came the beeswax. The natives talked about a shipwreck off the coast south of the Columbia River, now Oregon, and described what might have been a Spanish galleon. They told stories passed down by their ancestors of beeswax floating ashore in big chunks. Soon the white settlers joined the natives beachcombing along the northern Oregon coast.
Slabs of beeswax, one measuring 24 inches by 16 inches by 4 inches, were found south of Astoria on a sandbar at the mouth of the Nehalem River. According to J. S. Diller of the U.S. Geologic Survey, who prepared a report on the beeswax dated 1895, some of the beeswax was buried in deep sand at the current high tide level. Some chunks weighed as much as seventy-five pounds, while others were smaller and shaped like candles. Diller’s local guide, identified as a Mr. Edwards, reported that he had personally dug up almost three tons of the wax, some from as deep as ten feet beneath the sandy surface. (Shifting tide lines and beach erosion have buried the site of the Edwards dig beneath more sand.) By 1908 reports of beeswax finds along the Nehalem’s mouth reached a total of twelve tons, including a shipment of six tons reportedly sent to Hawaii in 1847. Numbers had been carved into the larger pieces, perhaps identifying the galleon they came from, along with markings resembling religious symbols—crosses, for example. Legends of Spanish galleon beeswax spread along the Oregon coast; meanwhile, skeptics rolled their collective eyes.
Then, in 1961, a popular West Coast flotsamist, Burford Wilkerson, of Tillamook, Oregon, produced a sample of the beeswax he’d found washed up on a beach and subsequently had it carbon-14 dated. Test results put the year of origin of the beeswax at 1681, plus or minus 110 years. A chemical analysis Wilkerson had done identified the wax as being of Asian origin.
Authentication of the beeswax as Spanish galleon cargo incited a wave of beachcombing for more treasure. A list of missing Spanish Manila galleons was drawn up. Six galleons from the Manila fleet (five of them named for Spanish saints) had been lost at sea between 1571 and 1791: the San Juanillo, San Antonio, San Nicholas, Santo Cristo de Burgon, San Francisco Xavier, and Pilar. The San Francisco Xavier, lost at sea in 1705, is thought to be the galleon carrying the beeswax; whether it sank at sea or wrecked on the rocky Oregon coastline before going down is still unknown. Other evidence of the galleon wreck included Chinese porcelain shards dating from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). But the discovery nearby of teak timbers and a ship’s hull built from other exotic woods may, some experts claim, be evidence not of a galleon wreck, but of yet another Asian junk that had traversed the Pacific Ocean, whether or not its navigator had intended to sail that far.
The flotsam remains of at least sixty East Asian junks have been plucked out of the Pacific Ocean or have stranded on beaches as far north as Siberia and as far south as Southern California. Twenty-seven of the wrecked junks were discovered floating at sea, while the remainder washed up in the Aleutian Islands chain, along Alaska and the Pacific Coast, and in Hawaii. Artifacts from the wrecks have been dated from 1617 to 1876. While this evidence demonstrates that drift objects off the Japanese coast can get caught up in the clockwise circular North Pacific currents, it doesn’t explain the beeswax. In the 1870s, historian S. A. Clark, while exploring the Nehalem River mouth, documented at least two shipwrecks there, but neither could be definitively identified as Spanish.
In spite of no definite proof a Manila galleon—or galleons—wrecked near the Oregon coast, Burford Wilkerson’s carbon-14-dated beeswax silenced the cynics. Meanwhile, discoveries nearby of exotic driftwood, teak in particular, from ships’ hulls and housings have since fueled beachcombers’ fantasies, and believers in Spanish treasure are the first out on Nehalem spit following a good storm. Flotsamists know that powerful rollers can uncover tons of sand in one good Pacific storm, setting long-buried artifacts afloat.
Loaded with treasures from the Orient, or from the plundered mines of Central and South America, the sunken Spanish galleons on both American coastlines provide tantalizing fodder for individual beachcombers, and, too, for organizers of million-dollar treasure hunting expeditions. The Internet offers dozens of Web sites of diving pros raising funds to salvage shipwrecked vessels, and most concentrate on the Atlantic Coast, where divers less civic minded than Delaware’s Dale Clifton trace a piece of lagan to its lucrative underwater source for the sole purpose of striking it rich.
Pirates, Pillagers, and Mooncussers
Pirate legends abound in oceanside communities. A famous tale from Oregon tells of William Charles Morgan, who from 1645 to 1657 worked the piracy route along the North American Pacific coastline in his schooner the Inferno. One-Eyed Willie, as he was known from Baja to Canada, got his nickname by losing an eye while battling the Spanish Navy.
One-Eyed Willie had a Mexican lover whom he deserted when she became pregnant, reportedly with his child. Willie wasn’t only insensitive; he also had a mean streak: Legend claims Willie was the brains behind the invention of execution by plank walking. So meticulous was he about the Inferno’s upkeep, Willie worried that tossing prisoners overboard would damage his ship’s hull, so he rigged the gangplank over the side, its end hanging far out over the water, and ordered his prisoners to walk to the end and keep walking. He should have patented the gimmick because it made quite a splash in the pirate trade.
British Naval officers wrote in their diaries of confrontations with One-Eyed Willie, including claims the Brits sunk the Inferno at sea. However, other documents record that the Brits drove the Inferno into a bay on the Oregon coast, at what is now Ecola State Park; firing explosives, the Brits collapsed the cliffs around the Inferno, but Willie and his crew allegedly survived, living in c
liffside caves, where they buried their treasure.
In 1935 a gentleman by the name of Chester Cobblepot publicly claimed to have located One-Eyed Willie’s treasure; Cobblepot subsequently vanished and rumor had it he had eloped with the treasure and was living grandly in some exotic locale. But in 1985, youths exploring a series of coastal caves found Cobblepot’s remains. Cobblepot apparently had been the victim of a cave-in. The youths also claimed they found the Inferno intact in an underground cavern. Another great flotsam story, but was it true or merely the stuff of teenage fantasy?
News reports from the time speculate that the reason the Inferno couldn’t be located by later investigators was that the tide swept into the cavern and pulled the Inferno back out to sea. Then in 1998 at Loomis State Park in Washington State, a mass of flotsam comprised of splintered wood, human bones, and tarnished brass washed up along a hundred-foot length of tide line. Some claimed the debris came from atop a cliff, from a beach shanty, but the shanty site was never found. Others insist it’s the wreckage of the Inferno.
Shortly after the flotsam washed up, coastal residents started reporting sightings offshore of the Inferno and its crew, ghostly apparitions of starving men clinging to a three-masted schooner sailing at full mast, usually at night and usually enveloped in the typical gray haze along the Pacific Northwest Coast.
One-Eyed Willie’s hidden treasure has never been recovered, but flotsamists frequently visit Ecola State Park, many of them armed with metal detectors.
According to Cape Cod legend, in 1715 a young English sailor named Samuel Bellamy persuaded a wealthy New Englander to finance a salvage operation off Florida’s coast. Evidence of ill-fated Spanish galleons had washed up on Florida beaches, and Bellamy wanted to follow the flotsam to sunken treasure. Before leaving Cape Cod on his adventure, Bellamy bragged to Maria “Goody” Hallet, one of the Cape’s great beauties, that he would return eventually as captain of the world’s tallest and longest sailing ship. Failing to locate sunken treasure, and loath to return to Cape Cod in shame, Bellamy turned to piracy, soon earning the moniker Black Bellamy. In less than a year, Black and his formidable crew of pirates had waylaid and plundered over fifty sailing ships.
One morning off Cuba’s coast, Black and his crew seized a three-masted galley, the Whydah, complete with a shipment of thousands of gold and silver coins, ivory, and indigo. At one hundred feet in length, the Whydah became Black’s flagship, and he set sail for Cape Cod to show Goody Hallet what he’d brought home. But the Whydah was a top-heavy vessel, susceptible to high winds. In April of 1717, Black’s ship encountered a storm with seventy-mile-an-hour gale force winds and forty-foot waves. The Whydah capsized and broke in two.
Black went down with the ship, but two of his crew survived—an Indian pilot who is lost to history and a Welsh carpenter named Thomas Davis, who, unsurprisingly, gave full account of Black Bellamy’s adventures and ultimate demise. Black lives on in the hearts and folklore of Cape Cod, and in 1984, deep sea explorer Barry Clifford discovered the Whydah, the first authenticated pirate shipwreck off the North American coastline.
Flotsam, jetsam, and lagan offer vital clues to the sea’s secrets. Sometimes a piece of lagan leads to the solution to an ancient maritime mystery. Take the mystery of the Spanish galleon San Martin, swamped and sunk during a violent storm in 1618. The San Martin’s remains lie somewhere off the Florida coast. But where? After centuries of gold coins washing up along Florida’s Wabasso Beach, the San Martin’s hull was discovered in the 1960s when two young lobster fishermen found four cannon submerged in shallow water. When raised, one cannon revealed its date of manufacture as 1594. Beneath where the cannon had lain submerged was the hull of the San Martin, five hundred to fifteen hundred feet offshore of Wabasso Beach. Professional salvagers brought up more of the San Martin.
Then in 1993, Kane Fisher, working the site of the shipwrecked galleon, hit the flotsamist’s jackpot. Fisher found the ship’s astrolabe, dated 1593. Astrolabes measure latitude by sighting the angle of the horizon from the sun at its azimuth. Before the sextant was invented in the 1730s, and the chronometer in the 1760s, a mariner’s chief navigational device was the astrolabe.
The wreck of the San Martin today lies about a thousand feet to the south of Disney’s Vero Beach Resort in relatively shallow seas. When beachcombing the area, flotsamists should remember that all that glitters is not gold, and the coin you may snap up off the strand is as likely to bear the image of Scrooge McDuck as that of a Spanish king.
Even their name is terrifying: mooncussers. They pillaged and plundered ships after luring them into wrecking by placing phony guide lights on shore. Mistaking the shore lights as benevolent guides, many a ship’s captain went astray, crashing his vessel on rocky shoals or headlong onto the beach. The mooncussers then swarmed over the wreckage, pillaging its hold and robbing its corpses of their jewelry.
In 1835 a violent storm off New Jersey’s coastline caused a large number of shipwrecks. In the shore town of Barnegut, rumors spread that some locals had been mooncussing. In Trenton a grand jury was formed to address the matter; it brought indictments against forty people. Among the mooncussers were two justices of the peace who were charged with plundering cargo and materials off the James Fisher and the Henry Franklin, two ships that wrecked off Barnegut.
On February 28, 1835, the Key West, Florida, daily Inquirer , savoring an opportunity to admonish stuffy northerners who had lately been warning of Florida’s mooncussers, wrote in a scathing editorial: “We have seen numerous accounts of the shocking depravity of the persons engaged in wrecking on the New Jersey shore, and we believe that those upon Long Island are not much better. Cargoes are pillaged, passengers and others robbed, and an utter disregard of all the moral qualities of our nature manifested, and that, too, in a section of the country which is thought to be particularly enlightened, and where the laws are looked upon with peculiar reverence. Truly gratifying is it to have in our power a comparison between the acts of those engaged in ... responsible business on the coast of Florida, and the acts of these wreckers of New Jersey and New York.”
In 1846 another storm wrecked several ships along the New Jersey coast. Newspapers ran grisly stories of those who perished and blamed the shipwrecks on the same gang of Barnegut mooncussers. The newspapers reported that the mooncussers ignored the injured and drowning passengers, turned their backs on castaways, and later demanded money as ransom for delivering to families the corpses of their loved ones. Several news articles accused Barnegut residents of shining lights to mimic the Barnegut lighthouse and confuse the ships’ navigators. The governor of New Jersey called for an investigation. The conclusion: No evidence proved mooncussing had occurred.
All along the Eastern Seaboard, residents of seaside villages had only limited equipment and resources for saving shipwrecked passengers. Many legends of great heroism by shore residents have been passed down in coastal lore. On the other hand, stories abounded of bodies washing up and being stripped of clothing, jewelry, and other valuables. Soon, nickel novels and cheap magazines began publishing mooncusser stories, including a novel by Charles E. Averill, Ship Plunderers of Barnegut, in which Averill called the village the “scene of the dread deeds of death and depredation upon the unfortunate castaways of the sea.” Averill’s book was a best-seller.
In 1939 a New Jersey physician, Dr. Newell, invented the “lifeline” device for saving victims of shipwrecks. Newell’s lifeline was fired from a shoreside cannon to the ship in distress; passengers lucky enough to grab and hang on were then dragged safely ashore. New Jersey, especially humiliated by the Barnegut mooncussers, became known for its efforts in saving victims of maritime disasters.
The Victorians
The reader may recall an earlier reference to my night in Leonard Bernstein’s bed, wherein I commented that the maestro’s bunk ranks second in my personal World’s Best Beds ratings, first place awarded to the moss bed I often enjoy in Rome. The Rome bed is inside a palace n
either near to nor far from the Pantheon. A mattress made of Irish moss flotsam has no business popping up in a palace, even if it is Rome. But there it is. The popular travel guide and television personality Rick Steves once managed to tease from my tight lips—tight on scotch—the palace’s name, but he failed to extract the exact whereabouts of the special bed. An Irish moss bed is a thing of beauty, meant to share only with one’s most intimate friends. Steves, a veritable treasure trove of European history, is a likable guy, but he’s always outing these precious secret places in his guidebooks. I won’t have ten million tourists sharing my Irish moss bed.
Sea moss flotsam is a far superior stuffing than feather down, which holds moisture and often assumes a musty, mildew odor. Sea moss, once dried, does not attract moisture and so remains mildew free and seems to survive what beds must through the ages, with rather more resiliency than down. I do not know the age of the Irish moss bed in the Roman palace, though I suspect it dates back to Victorian times, which is where all this moss flotsam is leading us.
In the 1890s, in summer, the Victorian woman’s preferred flotsam was sea moss. As it floated ashore, ladies in long skirts and wide aprons quickly gathered it up from the tide line and placed it in their aprons or gunny sacks to carry home, where it was laid out in the sun to dry. Once the green and brown mosses had dried, the ladies stuffed it inside silk pillow casings, which they then embroidered, often with clever images of seashells or nostalgic beach scenes. Crafted at summer’s end at the ladies’ seaside homes, the pillows traveled along with their makers to their town homes, where the mosses’ fresh sea scent reminded a reclining lady of her summer idyll, no doubt bucking up her spirits during those nasty urban winters.
