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Golden galleons are off Valley's coast
by
C. M. Robinson III
Remember the movie Underwater, where Richard Egan, Jane Russell and Gilbert Roland were bringing up tons of gold from a treasure galleon? How about old Lloyd Bridges' occasional treasure finds on the TV program Sea Hunt? Then there was The Deep, where Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bissett and Nick Nolte found an unrecorded Spanish treasure shipment in Bermuda.
Just about all of us have dreamed of finding some treasure galleon, particularly after former chicken farmer Mel Fisher become one of the richest men in the world when he discovered the wreck of the Nuestra Señor de Atocha, off the Florida Keys.
Jeff Burke of Rio Hondo has lived that dream. Not only that, his treasure galleons were not off the coast of Florida or along the Spanish Main, but right here along our own Padre Island. The ships were wrecked just north of the Port Mansfield Cut in April 1554, and remained lost for more than four centuries.
"I was instrumental and lucky enough to be one of the guys who found them," Burke commented. He described the adventure at a meeting of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association in La Feria.
For many years, people had known that a Spanish fleet was wrecked on the island. After storms, coins from the mid-1550s would wash up on the beach along a five-mile strip running north from the Port Mansfield Cut. A Spanish priest, one of two survivors, left an account which was first published in English in the 1930s. Several local books had mentioned it by the time Burke and several associates started looking for it.
"We had a rough idea from research by my friend Jack Haskins, in the archives in Spain, and theorized we were looking for the right wreck," Burke said. "There were coins on the beach from the 1550s. The only flota (treasure fleet) at that time was this 1554 little flota."
Four ships sailed from Veracruz on April 9, 1554. Three were wrecked on Padre Island. Although most accounts say the ships were lost in a hurricane, Burke contends it was the wrong time of year.
"It had to be a norther, because it happened in April. You know how wild the Gulf can be in a norther," he said. "The only ship that survived—heavily damaged—and reached Tampico for repairs, was commanded by the only one of those ships with a captain who had made the trip before."
Burke believes the ships were caravels—the small, ocean-going transport/warships which evolved into the later galleons of stories and movies. Because of the design of the ships, the area where they went ashore, and the condition of the wrecks, he said they were literally beated to pieces in the surf.
"The caravels were high-sided, flat-bottomed, and very unwieldy," he explained. "In 18 feet of water, they got caught in those swells that slammed them down on the bottom."
Three hundred survivors made it ashore. But only two, the priest, Fray Marcos de Mena, and an ordinary seaman named Vasquez survied. Vasquez opted to stay with the wreck, and was later picked up by a rescue ship. The other began the long march south along Padre Island, in the direction of Tampico.
"The Indians came down to the shore and gave them fish," Burke said. "They seemed friendly." Then, however, they retreated into the dunes and, "for some unknown reason," began shooting arrows at the Spaniards. During the first part of the trek, the Spaniards were able to hold off the Indians with three crossbows, which Burke call "very effective weapons at that time." But on crossing one of the waterway—either Brazos Santiago Pass between Padre Island and Boca Chica or the Rio Grande—the makeshift raft carrying the crossbows overturned and the weapons were lost.
Indian attack, hunger and privation slowly reduced the 300 survivors to 25, including Fray Marcos, the priest, who had an arrow wound in his neck. Being too weak to carry him, the others buried him in the sand, leaving his face exposed so he could breathe. Eventually he recovered enough to walk and continued south, where he found the bodies of the others on the beach. Just a few miles outside of Tampico he was recued and returned to civilization.
Burke and his associates began looking for the fleet in the spring of 1965, using magnetometers and a converted name LSM—a twin-screw, 40-foot landing craft—owned by Billy Kennon of Port Isabel. Finding nothing, that year, they did not look in 1966.
In 1967, the search resumed and on September 11 they found one of the wrecks at what they called the 2.8 site because it was 2.8 miles north of the cut. "Hurricane Buelah fouled up our salvage efforts for about six weeks," Burke said, after which they found more wreckage at what the call the 5¼ site because of its location in relation to the cut.
"These are the oldest Spanish wrecks ever found on the U.S. coast," Burke said. "They were found on the 413th year after their sinking." The wrecks lie from about a quarter of a mile north of the cut, up to 5¼ miles, Burke said. "They are about a quarter of a mile out in 18 to 22 feet of water. Part of the hull was actually under the second bar." There was no visible wreckage. "All you see is bottom, because they tended to sink into the sand," Burke explained. "In Florida, the wrecks rest on a reef, so you can locate them by cannons or piles of ballast rock. Here the top of the ballast pile is approximately six feet under the natural bottom." There is almost nothing left of the ships themselves, except what appears to be part of the bottoms buried in the sand. "It's hard to delineate since they used 30-inch timbers and the toredo worms have done a pretty good job of eating it," Burke said.
The water itself was murky because the waves so close to the beach keep the bottom stirred up. We used the `hunt and peck' system of diving—feeling and bringing things up to your face to see them," Burke said. "Sometimes we could see over three to seven feet on really good days."
The wrecks were excavated using propeller deflectors which forced the wash from the LSM's props straight down to blast the sand away. But the most efficient means was to vacuum the bottom with airlifts. The problem with prop deflectors is they require much shallower water than 22 feet although it does clear away some of the overburden and makes it easier to do airlifting.
"We salvaged gold, silver, artifacts and a breech loading cannon," he continued, but at that point the Texas Legislature passed an antiquities act giving the state sole possession of offshore wrecks. The state then blocked Burke and his associates from working on the wreck and seized everything they recovered. "The state shouldn't have gotten anything. Mel Fisher proved that," Burke said. He noted Fisher won his fights with Florida through every appeal, and ended up the sole owner of the treasure from the Atocha.
With the Padre Island wrecks, however, it was a different story. Commenting on his fight with the state of Texas, Burke said, "They have lawyers running out of their (behinds), getting paid not telling what kind of salaries. We just couldn't keep up the fight."
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