A Honey of a Beeswax Story ...

 The following post comes courtesy of Finn J.D. John.

 

Coming to a beach near you: Ghostly beeswax from the 1600s

Chunks of beeswax that still occasionally wash up on Oregon beaches have been carbon-dated to the early 1600s, and are believed to be from a wrecked Spanish galleon.

 

By Finn J.D. John — March 18, 2009

 

By now, the wreck of the New Carissa — or, rather, the half of it that ended up on a beach near Coos Bay — is just about gone. And just in time, too – sorted, cleaned steel is once again barely worth the cost to salvage, but not long ago it was selling for more than a dime a pound on the scrap-metal market. And there was a lot of it on that beach — plenty enough to qualify, for a properly equipped salvage outfit, as treasure from a shipwreck.

But it certainly isn’t the first trove of shipwreck treasure to be found off the shores of Oregon, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, one of the most famous sunken treasure ships off the coast is also quite possibly the oldest — but we remember it well, because bits of it float up onto the shore to remind us even now, more than 400 years later, that it’s out there somewhere.

No one knows for sure what this wreck’s name is, or even what country it’s from. Most scientists and historians agree it’s most likely a Spanish ship. Specifically, they think it’s the galleon “San Francisco Xavier,” which left Manila in 1603. There was an outbreak of civil war there, and several high-ranking Spanish families used the galleon as a refuge from the violence, hoping to start a new life in California.
They never made it. They and their ship vanished without a trace.

Frank J. Kumm, custodian of Pioneer Museum of Tillamook, holds a piece of beeswax found on the nearby beach in 1952. In 1961, radiocarbon dating showed the wax was formed in the 1600s. Historians think it was part of the cargo of a Spanish ship wrecked nearby between 1650 and 1675. (Salem Public Library/Ben Maxwell)

Was it, along with its cargo of prized Asian beeswax and all those wealthy families’ personal treasure, lost near the mouth of the Nehalem River in Oregon? Quite possibly. Or it could have come from another ship. The Spanish greatly preferred beeswax from the east — it had a higher melting point and slower burn rate than the stuff European bees produced, and that was important for the many candles used in the Catholic Mass, which in turn was important to the missions of California. So they loaded and shipped the stuff by the ton, on ship after ship, from India to the missions of California throughout the 1600s and 1700s.

Might one or more of those ships have been blown off course and foundered near Tillamook? Accounts by natives — including one who, interviewed in 1895 at the age of 100 years, said his father had witnessed the wreck of a galleon near the Nehalem — support this theory.

What we do know is, for the last 400 years, chunks of beeswax have been washing up on the Oregon coast. The further north, the more is found, although one big chunk was found recently as far south as Gold Beach. Radiocarbon dating shows these pieces of wax, and the bits of wood embedded in them, are about as old as the San Francisco Xavier.

And somewhere, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean not far from the place where Tillamook Cheese is made, there is a 400-year-old wreck that is probably Spanish — and quite possibly full of gold and jewelry.

Sources: The Beeswax Wreck Project Website (Naga Research Group, Hawaii); NW Limited Magazine; Gulick, Bill. A Roadside History of Oregon. Missoula: Mountain Press, 1991.