Mystery of the Oregon Coast’s 1693 “Beeswax” Wreck Finally Solved?

No one believed Craig Andes when he said he found pieces of a shipwreck that resisted discovery for centuries in sea caves north of Manzanita on the north Oregon coast. But Andes, a commercial fisherman based in Tillamook County and an avid beachcomber, persisted. Samples of the timbers he found sticking out of the sand in the caves were eventually tested in 2022 and dated. The timbers are now believed to belong to the wreck of Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon also known as the Beeswax for the valuable wax that formed part of its cargo.

Built in the Philippines, the Santo Cristo de Burgos left Manila in 1693 loaded with fine Asian trade goods and likely wrecked on Nehalem Spit after a journey across the Pacific. Almost nothing is known about the fate of the people aboard. Oral traditions among tribes suggest there was some contact with survivors. A tsunami that struck in 1700 further scattered the wreckage. For centuries, artifacts associated with the wreck have washed ashore on local beaches — porcelain and pottery, chunks of beeswax — but the final resting place of the wreck remains unknown. The timbers Andes found will finally give marine archaeologists a chance to study pieces of the galleon itself.

Since 2015, at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria has been base for the Maritime Archaeological Society (MAS). “Shipwrecks hold a special place in peoples’ imagination,” says MAS president Chris Dewey, an adjunct instructor of anthropology and archaeology at Clatsop Community College. “They bring together the romance of the sea and the mystery of how the vessel met its ultimate fate,” he added. There are over 3,000 wrecks on the on the Oregon coast, but only 143 have been properly documented. His members are particularly interested in the “Beeswax Wreck,” Oregon’s oldest and most mysterious wreck.

Over the centuries, Spain’s maritime empire grew, peaked and collapsed. the waves on which it was built devoured hundreds of ships and thousands of people, swallowing gold, silver and emeralds and scattering spices, mercury and cochineal to the currents. Since 1700, big lumps of beeswax and shards of Chinese porcelain have washed ashore on Nehalem Spit, but the actual site of the wreck remains unknown. These items were collected by Native Americans for over a century before the first pioneers settled on the coast and noticed this near the mouth of the Nehalem River. By the late 1800’s, amateur historians understood this wreck was unique because its cargo pointed to a date in the late 1600s, and the remnants of its cargo seemed to indicate an abundance of luxury goods.

Written reports of the wreck being sighted at very low tide continued until 1926. Since then, beachcombers have occasionally found balls of wax—one as far south as Florence. Like the fur trade that followed in the late 1700’s, beeswax was needed in Europe to meet a demand for a product that gave status to the upper classes. The furs were for gentlemen’s top hats–the wax was for candles for church services and the homes of the wealthy. Fortunately, the bigger pieces were marked with Spanish shipping symbols, which helped to date the wreck. (These marks can be clearly seen on a big chunk on display in the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum.)

In the last year, the vessel has been identified as a Spanish galleon, the Santo Cristo de Burgo, which sailed from Manila in the Philippines in July 1693 carrying around 75 tons of beeswax. This ship was was one of hundreds engaged in the “Manila Spice Trade,” a circular trans-Pacific route that was discovered in 1565 after several failed attempts. Reasoning that the Pacific might have the same weather system as the Atlantic, two ships sailed further north past the east coast of Japan to reach the 38th parallel where they found the steady west winds they were seeking. Over the next 250 years, a total of nearly 300 galleons departed from the Philippines for Acapulco on this grueling northern route.

Without a way to accurately find their longitude, they let the prevailing wind carry them toward the NW coast of the Americas, with the intention of turning south towards Mexico long before they sighted the coast. The galleons were heavily loaded and slow moving, so the journey took about six to nine months each way while the crew risked death by storm, shipwreck, starvation, scurvy, poor navigation or even pirates. (The Nehalem beeswax wreck must have encountered some issue that forced it to sail or drift onto the shore.) When the galleons arrived in Acapulco, they were unloaded and the cargo separated and re-packed into pannier bags that were carried across Mexico by mule train to the capital and then on to the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico where they were re-loaded onto ships of the Spanish Atlantic fleet bound for Cadiz in Spain.

On the outward leg from Acapulco, the ships carried Mexican silver, and crops like sweet potatoes, tobacco, chickpea, chocolate and cocoa, watermelon, plus vines and fig trees. They also loaded some goods from Europe like wine and olive oil, and metals goods, especially weapons and armor. Only a few ships were at sea each year, but it took a big fleet to keep the goods flowing. This route was used to finance the mighty Spanish empire in the Americas. Successful trading could return vast wealth to the Spanish nobles who ran this system, but every few years a galleon was lost, which meant a huge financial loss and a long pause in communications with the royal officials who ran the entire operation from Madrid.

This trade was the basis of the first global trade network, and the forerunner of the route taken by the American fur-trading ships that charted the MW coast in the late 1700’s. Now it is the marine highway that brings Chinese imports to the USA! The Spanish culture ministry has identified 681 Spanish wrecks in the Caribbean and Central America, dating from 1492 to 1898. It found that 91 % of ships were sunk by severe weather – mainly tropical storms and hurricanes – 4 % ran on to reefs or had other navigational problems, and 1.5% were lost to naval engagements with British, Dutch or US ships. A mere 0.8% were sunk in pirate attacks.

It was the Mexican Revolution in 1812 that finally brought the trade to a halt, and began the downfall of the far-flung Spanish colonies. Two hundred years later, one of the MAS researchers found the ship’s manifest in the royal archives of Seville, Spain. It lists 215 officers and crew members, 62 who weren’t Spanish but a mix of people from the Philippines, China, Malaysia etc.. There were 16 passengers, all clergy or military men. The ship was about 150-feet long and weighed as much as 2,000 tons. The captain was listed as Don Bernardo Iñiguez del Bay, a Basque nobleman. “The cargo they carried speaks of a massive amount of trade,” said one of the researchers. “But it’s not just about products and trade. These ships were also carrying ideas. We were surprised to find a lot of boats loaded with religious objects – relics, decorations and even stones to build churches.”

“The fact that a ship that wrecked on the Oregon coast in prehistory has been known for over two centuries, is remarkable, but now we know not only which ship but also who was on it,” said Scott Williams, an archaeologist who has been researching the shipwreck for more than a decade and is the director of the Beeswax Wreck Project. “This supports the Nehalem tribe’s oral histories, which tell of about 30 survivors of the wreck, all of whom were men and some of whom had long hair in ponytails, which may have been some of the non-Spanish deckhands,” Williams pointed out during a panel discussion.

He explained that beeswax was preferred for candles over smoky tallow, or rendered animal fat. “There were no native honeybees in the New World. The churches in Mexico had to get wax from someplace and the large Asian honeybees produced a lot of beeswax. As soon as the Northwest fur traders came into the country, the Indians were trying to trade beeswax to them. They said it was from a shipwreck,” he said. One interesting idea the team has studied is that the great tsunami of 1700 would have proved significant in displacing the wreck and carrying fragments of cargo further up Nehalem Bay.

These points are explained further in a special issue of the National Geographic magazine, which had exclusive rights to the story.

More information is at http://maritimearchaeological.org/