The Galleon's Final Journey: Accounts of Ship, Crew, and Passengers in the Colonial Archives

Through archival research, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur document the history of the Santo Cristo de Burgos — the ship thought to be the Beeswax Wreck of Oregon — and its crew and passengers. The Santo Cristo “drew together a multiethnic crew of Spanish, Spanish Basque, Philippine, Mexican, and possibly African men in the most sprawling global trade network of their day.” Research conducted in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila and the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico in Mexico City shows that the galleon left the Philippines in the summer of 1693 without some necessary crew and supplies. The lack of skilled men and critical supplies, along with winter storms, likely contributed to the ship's fate. Based on Native oral tradition, there were survivors of the shipwreck. According to La Follette and Deur, those survivors “were key participants in arguably the first Native-European contact on what is now the northern coast of Oregon, before disappearing into the state's cultural lore with few traces.”