4 Second Half of the 17th Century

It appears that Spanish sailors once again reached the coast of Oregon, but sadly, this time that knowledge is not based on stories of exploration. Rather, remains of a fatal shipwreck that occurred sometime around the end of the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th were discovered close to the mouth of the Nehalem River. Expert Robert F. Marx wrote in his work Shipwrecks in the Americas that there were fragments of wood recovered along the beach, chunks of fine china, and large quantities of beeswax. One of these pieces of wax had the date “1697” engraved on it and the others had markings that indicated their Spanish origin. The remaining pieces then must have belonged to one of the galleons of Manila who went missing during the trip back to Acapulco. Two potential ships that may have been shipwrecked are the galleons named Santo Cristo de Burgos, which was lost in 1693, and San Francisco Xavier, which disappeared in 1705. The first had sailed from the Philippians to New Spain toward the end of 1692, but when it reached the Mariana Islands on the 7th of November, the main mast, foremast, and mizzenmast were dismasted. Because it remained without a yardarm, topmasts, masts, and rigging, it had to return to the Philippians for repair before leaving for New Spain the next year. It sailed once more from Port Naga at the beginning of July under the command of general Íñiguez del Bayo. They were bound for Acapulco, but never reached the novohispano port. The Spanish authorities of the Philippines announced the fatal loss in 1695. They said that:

(…) despite having departed with favorable times, it experienced the fatal event of not having arrived at the port of Acapulco or another of the kingdoms of New Spain or other of Your Majesty’s domains, from which we could have news of his whereabouts, the most certain being that it has been lost because otherwise it would already be known about this ship, since it has been two years since it left these islands and the regular time of its navigation being from six to eight months at most.

The origin story of Manazanita

Archaeologist Scott S. Williams noted during his investigations that the galleon sank near Manzanita, a small coastal town in Oregon which still retains its Spanish name, located in Tillamook County. It appears that 231 people were traveling on the ship, of whom perhaps many survived, and that, according to passenger records carried out in the Philippines, approximately 170 of the men on board were Spanish, including nobles, soldiers and clergy, as well as common sailors, and about 64 crew members were Filipino-Hispanic, Chinese, Malaysians, and possibly Japanese and Africans.

The second candidate, the galleon San Francisco Xavier, disappeared in 1705 after leaving Cavite for Acapulco. Sailor and historian Cesáreo Fernández Duró, in volume VI of his work Armada Española desde la unión de los Reinos de Castilla y Aragón, states that after its departure nothing was heard of it,

(…) not a board, or object of any kind, big or small, has served as an indication to conjecture that it crashed on an unknown rock or an unknown obstacle, that it was sucked into the waves with everything he had on board, including general D. Santiago Zabalburu, brother of the Captain General of the islands, Don Domingo, the team members, and the passengers, whose number included whole families of means. The Ocean kept the secret of the horrific tragedy.

More recent studies, such as those presented by the Oregon Historical Society, and those of the General Archive of the Indies, made interesting observations of the remains found on the Oregon coast. They have considered a great diversity of factors such as geo-radar analysis and the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami called Cascadia, which occurred in 1700 in the land of the Nehalem. The Nehalem were the ones who spoke of the sinking of the ship to the first Europeans who arrived in the area many years after the shipwreck. Although these studies have not been able to determine with clarity the identity of the ship wrecked on those beaches, there are certain indications that lead us to think that the ship involved in the shipwreck must have been the Santo Cristo de Burgos, and that some of its crew survived and remained in those territories. As the anthropologist and researcher David G. Lewis has shown, some legends about the lost ship and its survivors have been passed over time by the tribes of the region. In one of those stories, collected in the work “Coyote Was Going” in Indian Literature of the Old Oregon Country, it is told how an old woman, after having mourned for a year the loss of her son, went for a walk to the beach near a small village, and she saw something that caught her attention. At first, she thought that it was a whale, but when she got closer she saw two fir trees on her and discovered that it was a monster that could not be identified; she approached it and saw that its side was covered with copper, that the fir trees were tied with ropes and that there was a large amount of iron; then a bear came out and stood on what was there. The old woman observed what looked like a bear but the face was of a human being. As she returned to her village, she kept thinking about her dead son and that the monster that she had heard so many times about in the stories of her people was on the shore. In this manner she made it known to the people of the town, who approached the beach and collected the copper, iron, and brass from the supposed monster, in reality a wrecked ship which they would later set on fire. What looked like bears were really two men who went out to the beach asking for water. They took these two survivors before two Clatsop chiefs and traded the metals obtained from the shipwreck with people from other nearby towns who had come there, and who later used them to make jewelry and ornaments or to make knives and other tools.

There are no records of the natives of Oregon and Washington practicing mining or forging metals of any kind, which leads to the conclusion that it was the castaways who taught them how to work metal. Thus, the survivors would have earned the respect of the tribes and not only would have interacted with them in aspects related to the exchange of knowledge but also in terms of descent, since the surname of one of them was transmitted to a son and also to a tribe or a town called Soto. Several are the references that exist on the tribe or the town of Shoto. The first of them appears in the documentation originated after the trip of Lewis and Clark of 1805, according to which it was a tribe that resided on the north side of Columbia, near a pond and almost in front of the mouth of the Multnomah River (present day Willamette River) (in present-day Vancouver), in a village of eight houses and 460 inhabitants.

According to David G. Lewis, by 1805 the son of the survivor of the shipwreck named Soto may have become a chief on his own and settled in a village upstream from the site of the galleon wreck. This tribe would have been politically aligned, like other autonomous villages, with one of the main tribes of Chinookans, and the likely alliance would be with the Multnomah. Soto would be the head of his village and by then he would be of advanced age, at least 50 years or more. As for the second reference, this is the one that appears in the accounts of the explorer Gabriele Franchère, who in 1812 visited the town of Soto, located upriver in front of the island that Lewis and Clarke had called Strawberry. There, Franchére recounts, they met an old blind man, who gave them a cordial reception, and the guide who accompanied them said that he was a white man and that his name was Soto. Through the knowledge of an old man they learned that he was the son of a Spaniard who had been shipwrecked at the mouth of the river, and that part of the crew managed to reach land safely, but all were massacred by the Clatsop, except for four, who were saved and married native women. The old man also told them that the four Spaniards tried to reach a settlement of their own town to the south, but were never heard from again, and that when their father and his companions left the place, he himself was quite young.

The third reference that we know about the town of Soto is the one made in 1813 by Alexander Henry. It seems that this town was then a safe haven for trappers, not like others nearby that used to be very hostile and defensive towards fur traders. The location of the town in this account would also be higher than that determined by Lewis and Clark. Although we have to bear in mind, as David G. Lewis explains, that it was not uncommon for villages to move periodically for various resource gathering activities (fishing camps, root gathering camps, hunting camps) and for seasonal life (winter village, summer village). In fact, the Cascades tribe, just above the village of Soto mentioned by Henry and Franchére, would move annually to a village on an island off Fort Vancouver, probably the island of Hayden, as its winter village. Knowing the legends of the natives and the accounts of European explorers regarding the survivors of the shipwreck, it is believed that the ship that was lost off the Oregon Coast was the Santo Cristo de Burgos. This hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that on the list of the crew and passengers traveling in it, a sailor appears on board called Francisco de Soto. We can find him both in the first visit that was made to the galleon in the port of Cavite in June 1692 (Francisco de Zotto, the penultimate on the list of sailors that appears in image 126), as in the second, and final visit that was made to the galleon in the bay of San Miguel, in the cove of Naga, in July 1693, before leaving back towards Acapulco (Francisco de Soto, number 13 on the list in image 864).