Dominick Cross

dcross@theadvertiser.com



Our story begins in January 1784, when Spain’s well-armed Brig of War, El Cazador, left Vera Cruz, Mexico with a bounty of current and newly minted Spanish Silver Reales, some 18 tons’ worth. The treasury was bound for New Orleans in an effort to shore up a lagging New World economy by replacing Spain’s nearly useless paper currency with the silver.

El Cazador never made it.

It’s a mystery, dubbed as “the shipwreck that changed the world,” with tentacles that touch Spain, France, the Louisiana Purchase and, yes, the making of a nation.

As a result, and despite Spanish efforts to the contrary, in 1800, Spain had to let go of the vast area known as the Louisiana Territory and return it to France. Three years later, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson agreed upon what’s known as the Louisiana Purchase.

As you know, the rest is history in the making. A keen and lifelong interest in history may have solved the mystery of a shipwreck now 232 years old.

In time, a long time in fact, the treasure eventually made it to shore. But that didn’t happen until 1993 after it was found by The Mistake, a fishing trawler, about 50 miles south of Grand Isle.

And, no, that is not the rest of the story.

Because while the shipwreck and its treasure, including 18 cannons and other objects, have since been retrieved from 300 feet down in Gulf of Mexico, the major question remains: How did El Cazador sink?

That’s where Buz Bullock of Lafayette comes in.

Bullock’s interest in El Cazador’s disappearance would put him on a decade-long journey of research.

“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved history,” said Bullock, CPA/Controller, Doerle Food Services. “I don’t know why. I always made good grades in history even when I was struggling in other classes.”

READ HIS COMPLETE RESEARCH HERE

But it all began mundanely enough one evening in 2004 as he watched a marketing show selling coins from El Cazador.

“They were selling these silver coins that had come up from the ship and talked about how it had a big effect on Louisiana history,” said Bullock. “I just wanted a piece of Louisiana history. It sunk right off the coast. They say New Orleans, but I think it might be a little closer to Port Fourchon/Grand Isle.”

Bullock’s interest didn’t end with the purchase of the coin.

“I just became fascinated with it and I started studying it,” Bullock said, which led to 10 years of research. “I’ve gone on every site the Internet has — probably 600-700 sites — and no one had any idea what caused the ship to sink.”

Theories include pillaging pirates, but the ship was well-armed for that very reason.

“A brig can normally get by with 20-some men, but the military ships would carry 80. So it’s not something a pirate ship would’ve wanted to take on,” said Bullock.

Bullock said if pirates did take down the ship, chances are loose lips would’ve bragged about it.

“I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but it’s not something they would’ve preferred,” he said. “Pirates were obviously braggarts; they drank a lot, they partied, they probably talked. No one has ever said, ‘Oh, yeah, I was with this ship that took out the El Cazador.’ ”

Not only that, what about the loot?

“Why would you sink a ship and not take any of the treasure — most of the treasure was just down there, from what they could tell,” said Bullock.

And if the ship ran into a storm, multiple anchors would’ve been deployed trying to keep the ship into the wind, and, there would’ve been a debris field. Not so the case with El Cazador.

“It just seemed to go straight down,” said Bullock.

The notion of a hurricane is unlikely because El Cazador went down in February 1784, and climate change had yet to be a factor like it is today.

However, climate possibly played a part in the sinking.

Bullock began looking at the weather at the time, including an old Farmer’s Almanac and a history book from the 1800s by historian Charles Gayarre, “and what I found was that there were ice floes coming out of the Mississippi River,” he said.

“A lot of times, earlier Louisiana history is somewhat glossed over because they’re trying to cover almost 300 years,” said Bullock. “But when he wrote the book, he was only trying to cover 150-170 years. So he’s focusing more on those Spanish and French governors and digging a little deeper.”

Bullock said, in the book, there was “some pretty detailed information” from a French agent named Villars, who was a commissioner.

“I guess it was during the age of scientific discovery, the late 1700s, and this Villars was keeping really accurate records of temperatures,” said Bullock. “So they got very accurate readings.”

The winter of 1784 was extremely cold due to the Laki volcano in Iceland the previous summer, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. In North America, reports have the Charleston Harbor in South Carolina freezing over and people ice skating on it.

“It really messed things up,” said Bullock. “It didn’t hit the southern United States until around October when the El Cazador left New Orleans (for Vera Cruz). There was frost, but it wasn’t that bad. There was frost, so it was cold, but it wasn’t anything that amazing.”

READ MORE ON THE SINKING HERE

But come the New Year, Villars “measured the ice floes and wrote all of this down,” said Bullock. “This was a very odd occurrence. Matter of fact, this has only happened twice on the Mississippi River in known history.”

The other time the river froze was in 1899. It took place further up river.

“They have pictures of the 1899 one and steamboats were just crushed,” said Bullock. “Even ones that tried to get near the bank, even though the ice was just moving one knot, it just crushed them. It sunk them.”

All this got Bullock to thinking about El Cazador’s fate.

“If (ice floes) could do something like that to a boat on the river that was trying to avoid it,” said Bullock, “what would it do to a sailing ship that would sail into it at maybe three or four knots – especially a small ship of only 90 feet?”

With that in mind and weather records at his fingertips, Bullock forged ahead. He learned the ice formed up the river and by the time it got past New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico, it began to break up.

“I’m a CPA. I took all the measurements. I did basic geometry of the ice,” he said. “We’re talking about – you wouldn’t believe how much ice – almost a 200-mile stretch up the Mississippi River. It’s a half a mile wide.

“So you’re talking about 100 square miles of ice,” Bullock said. “He said most of the (units of ice) were up to 12-30 feet.”

Bullock said Villars took temperature measurements that showed it dropped some 30 or more degrees in two hours.

“He didn’t talk about any hail or anything,” said Bullock. “It sounded like people were going outside, so I don’t see it as being kind the kind of a storm that would sink a ship like a hurricane.”

Unaware of what exactly the freakish weather wrought, El Cazador approached Louisiana.

“It might have encountered some real cold weather,” Bullock said. “But there wouldn’t have been any ice floats out there at the time.”

But once the ship got closer to the tip of Louisiana’s boot at the 28th latitude, the gods of history convened.

“At the same time — and here’s your smoking gun — here comes the El Cazador,” said Bullock. “He’s maybe 10 miles, 20 miles or so inside the 28th latitude. And all of a sudden it sinks like a lead balloon.

“This ship sank right where multiple reports were coming in that ice was being encountered within the 28th latitude,” he said.

This is, of course, a theory brought forth by Bullock. But it’s one that Robert Westrick, senior marine archaeologist at Oceaneering International, can see as having happened.

“I thought it was very interesting. It was something I never even imagined,” said Westrick. “The whole theory that he threw out there of striking ice in the Gulf of Mexico, I was kind of like, ‘What’s this guy talking about?’ And then I read through it and looked at his sources.

“It’s a circumstantial argument. I don’t think you could ever prove or disprove something like that beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “But, a circumstantial case, I think he makes a pretty good argument.”

Westrick had to rid his mind of icebergs.

“You think of iceberg, you think of the movie ‘Titanic’ and the giant, huge iceberg,” he said. “But if it was river ice, like he said, it would’ve been brown and at night and only 5-6 inches above the surface of the water.

“I mean it’s river ice, it’s not an iceberg. It would’ve been impossible to have seen something like that,” said Westrick. “And if the ship hit something like that, that’s right where it would’ve ripped it right down below the waterline and it's really easy to see how a ship like that would’ve sank.

“It could’ve happened very quickly and why there were no survivors,” he said.

Unlike a lot of sunken ships, there’s usually a trail of debris on the bottom. With El Cazador, it was all in one place.

“Most shipwrecks we deal with, they run aground, they strike bottom, hit a reef and start spilling out their contents,” Westrick said. “In this particular case, there’s nothing anywhere near — a shoal, a reef — anything like that that it could’ve hit. It’s just kind of out there in the Gulf.

“So, I think his theory is as good a theory as anything I’ve ever heard,” he said.

As a professional marine archeologist, Westrick knew about El Cazador.

“I’m pretty familiar with it,” he said. “I’ve collected shipwreck information. I’ve got files on shipwrecks and a library full of shipwreck books, so I was familiar with the story of when it was found.

“But as far as the sinking,” he said. “I never really put a whole bunch of thought into it until I started corresponding with Buz.”