(This is a painting of Portuguese carracks, similar to galleons, dating to about 1540. These were the style of ships that most of Europe was building at the time, says Washington archaeologist Scott Williams, who's heading a volunteer search party for the shipwrecked Santo Cristo De Burgos off Manzanita. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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Another piece of the puzzle of the “Beeswax Wreck” is now in place, this time adding the names of those who perished or became stranded when a Manila galleon went down along Oregon’s coast.

The new finding comes from the research of Ronald Spores, emeritus professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University and now a resident of Depoe Bay.

Spores joined a group of volunteers digging into local lore of a galleon sinking off Manzanita in 1693. Through the centuries, intriguing bits of its cargo, including beeswax, have washed up on north coast beaches. Historians believe the galleon is the Santo Cristo de Burgos from Manila in the Philippines, then a Spanish colony.

Last month, as Spores was poring yet again over 2,000-pages of 17th-century records from the archives of Seville, Spain, he realized he’d overlooked one very important document. Spores accessed the Archivo General de Indias online.

“Somehow I had missed the manifest, which is buried way toward the back of it,” he said. “I said, ‘Whoa, what a minute.’ We have the full personnel manifest. All the crew, the sailors, the soldiers, the deck hands, the passengers. It comes to a total of 231 names.”

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(People have discovered remnants from what is believed to be the Santo Cristo de Burgos galleon from Manila for centuries. This is Nehalam's "Beeswax Beach" circa 1953. Oregonian File Photo/1953)

The finding adds a human element to the story, said Scott Williams, who has been involved in researching the shipwreck for more than a decade.

“The fact that a ship wrecked on the Oregon coast in prehistory has been known for over two centuries,” Williams said, “but now we know not only which ship but also who was on it.”

The manifest lists 215 officers and crew members, 62 who weren’t Spanish but a mix of people from the Philippines, China, Malaysia and other cultures. There were 16 passengers, all clergy or military men, returning to Mexico or other parts of New Spain.

No women were aboard.

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(Bronze chest handles found in Manzanita in 1913. Courtesy Beeswax Wreck Project.)

“This supports the Nehalem 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,” said Williams, a Washington archaeologist serving as the principal investigator of the Beeswax Wreck Project.

“Imagine being one of those survivors, lost in an unknown and strange land, knowing there was little or no hope you would ever return to your homeland. What did they do? How did they cope and survive?”

He noted a carving in a rock at Oswald State Park, just south of Manzanita: Someone carved the initials "HM" in old style lettering.

“Although we'll never know for sure, one of the Spanish seamen was named Hernando Munoz,” Williams said. “Could he have survived and carved those initials into the rock?”

And that raises yet another question: Could there be descendants still living in the area?

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(Chinese porcelain bowl fragments from the wreck. Courtesy Beeswax Wreck Project.)

Spores, an ethnohistorian whose work has focused primarily on 16th and 17th century Mexico and Spain, believes it’s likely that some of the survivors may have settled and had children here. But tracking them down would be exceedingly difficult with such little to go on and probably not the best use of researchers’ time at this point, he said.

Other researchers also found the manifest and wrote about some of the passengers and crew in a special summer edition of the Oregon Historical Quarterly devoted to the Beeswax Wreck.

The manifest is yielding other clues, as well, that may help identify the ship if it’s ever excavated. For instance, Williams noted that the names include 31 gunners on board.

He believes the ship carried cannons. In the course of his research, he’s come upon two 19th century news accounts mentioning people finding two cannons -- one was iron and spotted on a Nehalem beach and the other was brass and found on the beach at Oswald West State Park. Neither account mentioned what became of the cannons.

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(Oregonian graphic/Eric Baker/2005)

The Santo Cristo de Burgos was among a fleet of galleons that ran a regular trade route from Manila to Acapulco, also a Spanish port, for about 250 years, from the 1500s through the 1800s. Once a year, a ship would set sail from the Philippines carrying luxury goods from Asia to sell in Mexico. It made the return trip loaded with silver.

Some of the goods commonly found on the galleons were bees wax, porcelain, spices, unfinished and finished silk, stoneware to store water and other liquids, jewelry and hair combs.

The Santo Cristo de Burgos initially left Manila in 1692.

“They hit a storm in the Marianas,” Spores said. “All three masts were taken down and they had to jury-rig.”

It took the crew six months to unload, then repair and refurbish the ship, which would have been as tall as six stories high, 150-feet long and weighing as much as 2,000 tons.

“One year later in July 1693, they were already to go again,” Spores said. “They took off on July 3. They were headed for Acapulco.”

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(Tim Stentz, a member of the Maritime Archaeological Society, pilots the group's underwater robot in the rocks off of Oswald West State Park in a search for the wreckage. Photo by Edward Stratton/Daily Astorian via AP/2017)

It was usually a rough trip – six months to Acapulco, sighting land at what’s now Mendocino, California, then coasting down to Mexico.

Researchers don’t know why the galleon was off the coast of Oregon but theorize it may have become disabled in a storm or suffered some other trouble.

The first written record of the shipwreck came from fur traders who wrote in 1813 that Native Americans had brought blocks of beeswax to trade, but they noted there were no native honey bees in the territory.

When questioned, the Native Americans told the story that had been passed down for generations of the wreck off the coast. Over the years, other people have reported seeing remnants of the ship at the mouth of the Nehalem River just south of Manzanita, with the last credible account coming in 1926.

Likewise, beachcombers have found all manner of artifacts believed to be from the ship.

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(A large chunk of beeswax washed ashore from the shipwreck sits on display at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria. Photo by Olivia Dimmer/Staff/File/2017)

“Every year to date, there have been pottery, coins, and wood artifacts we are very confident are associated with the wreck, although we have not found the actual wreck site itself yet,” Williams said.

The efforts to learn more about the ship are now under the auspices of the Maritime Archaeological Society (

), a registered nonprofit dedicated to maritime archaeological research in the Pacific Northwest, he said.

The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade ended in 1812 with the Mexican War for Independence from Spain, leaving three galleon wrecks on the entire west coast of North America — the Beeswax Wreck, one off Baja and one off the Northern California coast.

The one off Northern California hasn’t been found, but artifacts wash up. The one off Baja has been found and is currently being investigated, Williams said. The location is protected by the Mexican government.

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(Scott Williams (left), the lead investigator for the new expedition to find the wreck, examines a hunk of beeswax washed ashore from the wreck. Photo by Olivia Dimmer/Staff/File/2017)

Shipwreck buffs tend to focus on the missing treasure, but more important is the history and what it means to our culture today, Spores said.

“It’s the journey together of three continents, the trade between the Old World and America,” he said. “It is of tremendous importance because not much is known.

“It’s something that affects us as Oregonians. We need to know it, to understand it. We’re looking for culture. How did we evolve? It was the first time in history where you are connecting three parts of the world — Asia, America and Europe by way of the galleon trade. What happened to the people? Someone must have made it to shore. It’s important for everyone to know and understand this process.”

Last summer, researchers spotted what Williams calls an “underwater target.” Researchers are now waiting for the right weather and ocean conditions to investigate that further.

Williams remains hopeful it may be the galleon.

“We'd like to find the wreck location and see if there is evidence, such as cannons or anchors that can confirm the identity of the ship,” he said. “Our long-term plan would be to leave it where it is, undisturbed, unless and until the time that a nonprofit group could scientifically excavate it and make the results public.”

-- Lori Tobias

Special to The Oregonian/OregonLive