Original subtitles

Since I was a kid,

I've heard about a lost shipwreck off the coast.

There are stories about the pirates,

or a battle that went on.

There's definitely something out there.

People have been finding beeswax and porcelain

for hundreds of years.

These blocks of beeswax

had these strange symbols carved into them.

And there was so much being found

that it's called the beeswax wreck.

As soon as they started describing the beeswax,

I said, "Wait, this is The Goonies shipwreck."

That movie was huge.

Oh, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at that.

Almost looks like a bow and stern.

Maybe, it does.

Our objective here is to find a beeswax shipwreck.

This is finding a needle in a haystack of haystacks.

There's more to the story here.

Some people thought it was a Japanese junk.

Other people thought it was a Spanish galleon.

What was the ship?

When did it sink?

And where did it come from?

Just looking at all the wood out here.

That piece caught my eye from over there,

just because it's off color,

but sometimes upon further examination

it's just plain driftwood,

which the majority of it is.

When I go down and walk on the beach in the mornings,

it's the get away moment, you know?

I find stuff every time, whether I'm looking or not.

I can't help but find stuff,

or it finds me, it feels like, sometimes.

I've found a piece of beeswax,

a few pieces of porcelain.

Piece after piece, after piece.

Looks like part of a bowl.

Generations and generations of stuff

has been washing up on the beach.

And that's where I got introduced to the treasure

in the beeswax wreck.

This is just some of my stuff I've collected

for a lot of years.

Pieces of porcelain that I found on a beach from the shipwreck.

Those ones have writing on them.

There were strange, weird stories from the local natives

about men from other nations being washed ashore.

There's a couple of, like, pirate theories, you know,

that just pirates showed up to bury a treasure and left.

I think that it's very possible

there could still be some stuff hidden.

I believe that the pirates would misdirect where they hide stuff

and not necessarily, you know, leave it easy

for somebody else to find stuff.

It just had me dreaming.

I mean, like, literally, like, dreaming to find it

and I almost kind of set up a goal to.

I was like, I want to answer that question.

The northern Oregon coast was where

little enclaves of Tillamook and Clatsop people

gravitated towards.

There are stories that were handed down

through the generations of the origins of the beeswax.

There's a story at one time that there were two ships

that appeared offshore,

and that they had a cannon battle back and forth...

...and that one of the ships sank.

Some of those stories say that a big ship came ashore,

and foreign people dug a big hole

and threw the chest in there.

Pirate booty is basically what it was.

Some of it was speculation, some of it was very folklorized.

They'd instilled in all of us

the story of the beeswax shipwreck.

The story of the treasure, the story of our people

going out to the beaches

and befriending any European survivors,

and making use of whatever floated in.

I, with my cousin, would go down to Neahkahnie Mountain.

We heard about the pirates that buried a trunk down in there.

We would look at low tide in the rocks

to see if we could see a trunk or a chest.

I get chills thinking about

going down to the edge of that cliff.

You do strange things when you're 19.

Being as interested in all this as I was,

I one day noticed at the grocery store,

a paper with an article about a group of archaeologists

who were gonna come out here and start doing a little research

on the beeswax wreck.

Craig is so interested and so excited

and so determined by this wreck.

He'd been looking for the wreck

since he was, I think, a teenager,

maybe since he was a small kid.

Here is a board that I found on the beach.

And so there's been a couple of times where, you know,

I just kind of roll my eyes, and like,

"Craig, you know, that couldn't have happened."

Yeah, that was something

I was wanting to show Scott here.

Or "That's crazy talk, Craig."

You never know what it could end up telling you

in the long run, so... yeah.

So, this ship has been called the beeswax wreck

for about 200 years, and the reason for that

is the first settlers in Oregon, the local Native Americans,

brought them beeswax to trade.

And they brought them beeswax in big blocks.

And those first settlers knew

there was no honeybees in Oregon,

so they asked the Indians,

"Well, where are you getting this stuff?"

And they said, "A big ship wrecked many years ago

on this beach."

And then one day I found something trapped and pinched

in the rocks down underneath the sand.

Oh, man.

This is totally a huge beam from the ship,

and it goes way back into that tide pool.

I put my hand on it, and I was like, that's interesting.

I knew what it was.

It was from a shipwreck.

And then I had this feeling,

it had to do with the beeswax wreck.

I took a video, I danced up and down,

'cause I was that sure I found it,

what I'd been looking for, or at least something,

maybe that smoking gun piece.

I went home just tickled pink.

So I called up Scott and I said,

"Hey, what's going on? This is, like, exciting.

Like, this is what I was hoping sooner or later would happen."

Craig is one of those people who gets very excited,

so when he found these timbers,

he was like, "Hey, I think these are from the wreck."

And my initial response was,

"Craig, you think everything's from the wreck."

And when Craig told me he had found them in a cave

exposed at low tide, I told him that, you know, Craig,

there's no way wood would preserve for hundreds of years.

So, at that point I told him honestly that he was crazy.

I kind of just almost hassled him over it, you know?

I call him up, you know, I found this.

I call him up, I'd vent about this.

I don't know if he was texting me every week,

but it was certainly every month,

saying, "Scott, you really got to come down here,

I really think these are from the beeswax wreck."

I knew what it was, and it was just like,

I'm gonna convince him.

We made it out to the cave with the ship beam today.

Found five other pieces of wood.

And so finally, and honestly just to almost

get him to leave me alone, I said, "Okay, Craig.

Grab a couple of little pieces and send them to me,

and I will get them identified as to the kind of wood species."

So I went out and I cut a slab big enough off of a beam

that was out there, and I sent it to him.

I sent them off to a laboratory to get identified.

They were tropical hardwood.

This is not the type of wood you find growing

anywhere in North America,

so the chances are it did come from some sort of shipwreck.

I was kind of like, oh, you know, this is interesting.

I think the next conversation I had with Craig was,

"Oh, my gosh, Craig, I'm sorry.

You can now tell me 'I told you so'

for the rest of your life."

So, we started making plans

for getting a crew to go out with Craig.

Could it be that there was more of the shipwreck offshore?

They gave me a call and said, "Art, we'd like to get you

involved searching for the beeswax shipwreck."

It immediately clicked for me,

and I said, "Wait, this is The Goonies shipwreck."

And they said, "Yeah, yeah. It kind of is."

So, that, you know, just immediately set a spark for me.

The movie The Goonies was a story about

kind of a misfit group of nerds, you know, like geeks

searching for a mystery shipwreck

off this very coast near Astoria in Oregon.

And I guess I sort of saw myself in those characters;

I think many of us did.

The ocean does not reveal its secrets easily,

and you really do have to bring a team of diverse experts

with different skills together,

like archaeologists and beachcombers.

And I thought, if we could get a break in the weather,

if we could get some luck in the condition of the seabed,

that we can find and discover what may likely have happened

with the beeswax wreck.

Let's go play with some robots in the ocean, shall we?

Nothing gets an archaeologist excited

like a potential shipwreck.

Our mission is stewardship

when we have these kinds of far-flung discoveries,

which, by the way, doesn't happen very often.

We've known that there is something out there

for a long time, and certainly our tribal community members

have been telling those stories for hundreds of years as well.

Beeswax blocks and porcelain have continued

to wash up along a seven-mile stretch of Manzanita Beach

between Neahkahnie Mountain

and the Nehalem River.

So, our plan was simple:

to look for targets just off the coast

using our multi-beam sonar,

and then use the latest underwater technology

to inspect anything that looked promising.

On our first day, we got a 5:00 AM start on the boat.

We know that there's a very typical pattern

this time of year.

Calm conditions on the morning, then the land heats up,

it draws in the sea breeze,

and the waves and everything kick up.

And so we need to start scanning as soon as we can.

It's a really, really tricky environment

on our coast here.

We have storms randomly, anytime.

We immediately put all our equipment together

and we start doing our wide-area surveys.

So, we're gonna try to completely map this whole area

so we can reveal the underwater terrain.

Every nook and cranny.

Like right there. Oh, okay.

Let's start from as far inside as we can get,

and then we'll work our way offshore.

I could see vast areas that clearly indicated

smooth sand areas, and that was really helpful.

That allowed us to eliminate big, big portions of areas.

Sure looks like five meters.

Yeah, I know.

I think it's a depression with the sand.

Sadly, there was nothing I could put my finger on

as we were doing that initial scan that really set off,

you know, flags for me to say there's an obvious wreck there.

As well as the timbers Craig found,

one of the most intriguing clues

were the strange blocks of beeswax

that have been washing up along this coastline

for over a century.

So, here are examples of beeswax blocks

that have been found over the years by beachcombers

and turned in to the museum.

Smells like beeswax.

At times, so much beeswax was washing up on shore

that it made it into the local newspapers.

So, right now I'm looking at the 1891 edition

of the Daily Morning Astorian,

and there's an article here of over a ton of wax

lately dug from the ground near Nehalem.

This is 1909.

This little article is a great one,

because it says that the substance found is not beeswax,

but ozocerite, is generally admitted,

which to me is interesting,

because this is an Astorian newspaper

where there were blocks of beeswax on display,

and yet they're still saying no, it just, it couldn't be beeswax.

There's just no way a ship would have wrecked

carrying that much stuff.

So, the most scientific explanation is it's mineral wax.

These so-called experts are really totally ignoring

what the locals were telling them,

that they found it in molded blocks,

they found it in candles,

and totally ignoring the Indian oral histories.

In 2010, a lab analysis of a beeswax sample

using a mass spectrometer revealed this molecular makeup.

It confirmed the sample was beeswax.

And not just that.

Bees leave local pollen in their wax,

making every region's beeswax distinctive.

Remarkably, our test found pollen from Southeast Asia,

so did the ship that brought the wax come from Asia as well?

Our multi-beam scanning drew a blank.

We're pretty sure the ship wrecked in this bay,

so what has happened to it?

Could it have moved or been broken up

on the rocky coastline over the years?

In order to gather clues on how the area's weather and currents

impact shipwrecks,

we headed for a known wreck nearby,

a 110-foot-long steel barge that sank in 1983.

Time to get the robots in the water.

Woo.

Our autonomous underwater vehicle has sonar that allows us

to progressively explore further and in greater detail.

It's the difference between sort of seeing the Grand Canyon

from a plane, versus actually walking down on the trails.

14.8 meters, altitude 3.23,

that's, that's exactly what we want it to be doing.

Then finally, the last little piece

is to go in with a remotely operated vehicle.

Splash, we're on.

Basically an underwater drone gives us a live feed

of what's going on.

It's not just sand, we're seeing rocks, we're seeing boulders.

The underwater scene is complex.

It's very non-homogeneous.

It's like we're in a sandstorm here.

It's bringing with it little bits of kelp

and algae and plankton.

Whoa, there goes a big chunk of algae across.

Well, you can tell how strong it is against it.

Yeah, I'm trying my best to give you,

like, a smooth picture here, I'm sorry.

The environment here is more turbulent

than we had realized.

It's just too turbulent.

Let's bring her up to the surface.

Okay, we're coming up.

We couldn't see much optically under those conditions,

and so we decide to head back in

and start looking at the data.

So, I'm looking at all of our data that we've collected here.

This is this barge.

This steel barge has been exposed to forces

for nearly four decades.

It used to have a large crane attached,

but today only the crane's cabin section is visible.

We knew the barge was scanned 12 years ago,

and so now we have two sets of data,

so we can see how it's changing over time.

Here it is in 2010, and that's exactly what

a typical shipwreck looks like on the seabed.

It's sitting proud.

The deck looks pretty well intact,

but how does that compare to our data from today?

In the past decade,

the steel ship's location has moved imperceptibly.

It's basically stayed in the exact same spot.

This has just been torn apart.

All this deck is gone, we're now seeing the ribs.

Even in the last 12 years, it's gone through incredible changes.

It's just getting torn apart now.

That really tells us about the processes here.

This is what's happening to steel ships in 40 years.

I mean, what would be left of a wooden ship after 300 years?

The steel barge gave us valuable clues.

Any wreck around here gets broken up quickly,

so we had to shift our focus

from looking for a fully intact beeswax wreck

to the search for components and pieces.

Just a few miles south,

there's a spot where fishermen claim

their nets are getting snagged.

So we're headed there to see

if at least part of the wreck might be there.

First, we'll scan with the multi-beam sonar

to get a wide-area overview,

then we'll drop in with our ROV to get a closer inspection.

Certainly an area consistent with a lot of the history.

It doesn't look super... much like geology.

The slope and characteristics of it are quite strange.

I found a piece of beeswax

in our crab pots there before.

We're following one-eyed Willy's little breadcrumb trail,

I guess, a little bit, but we're going in reverse.

It's a pretty good trail.

Well, this is great.

We have a marked spot that could be the beeswax wreck.

Let's go survey this.

Investigation into the beeswax blocks had shown

that they originated in Southeast Asia.

We wanted to study them closely for more clues.

So, this is one of the pieces of beeswax from the wreck.

You can see there's this carved mark.

They're not letters, they're almost mystical symbols.

What could these symbols mean?

We began to look up ships that were missing at sea

for at least the last 200 years,

and that led us to a totally unexpected clue

from the Spanish empire.

In the archives, there are cargo manifests that are preserved,

so you would have a list of, like, this merchant shipped

X many crates of porcelain, or X many tons of beeswax.

And it would show his mark for that merchant,

and those marks match what's been found on the beeswax.

That symbol...

is this one.

Those were shipping symbols.

And they made one thing very clear:

the beeswax wreck was a Spanish ship.

So, it wasn't a pirate ship or a Chinese or Japanese junk,

but a cargo ship.

Spain was the main colonial power in the Americas

for two centuries after Christopher Columbus

reached the New World from Europe in 1492.

But this wreck wasn't in the Atlantic, it was in the Pacific.

To help understand what it was doing there,

focus shifted from the beeswax to the porcelain

that had also been washing onshore.

I grew up here in Portland.

As a child, we all love Indiana Jones,

but it was actually really in high school

when I was able to take an anthropology class,

and it really piqued my interest.

And then in community college

I started taking archaeology classes.

The coast is not forgiving

to the artifacts that we're finding.

They're often broken up, small chunks of what we would find.

Even though I got only fragments,

they can really tell us where they were made,

when, and even who for.

The first thing you notice about these blue colored designs

is that they are Chinese.

So, why were Chinese porcelains being brought to Oregon?

We found the sherds were from large plates and cups

matching the European desire for large meals

and mugs of hot chocolate.

This is likely a cup.

We don't really know what the groove foot rim was meant to be

or what the purpose of it is,

but apparently it was a very big thing

with the European market at the time.

Using all this data together

we have come to a mean date of 1690.

And what's intriguing is that it's 120 years before

any Europeans arrived in Oregon.

That beach on that side, there's a lot of porcelain

that seems to be right...

So basically what you're seeing is material,

like, directly on the opposite side of where we currently are.

Yeah.

And you've recovered some porcelain just north of here?

Yeah, lots of it. Yeah.

So, you know, you go here to there, to there.

It kind of lines up, you know?

Just a trail.

This is an underwater environment

known by local fishermen as a place where they've hung nets.

And that's always a great indication of a place

that could be parts of a shipwreck.

Are we clear?

That's perfect, okay.

We're looking at the data as it's being collected,

and nothing was obviously sticking out.

I should have had more coffee.

And suddenly we saw this one area

where there was this linear feature.

It looked almost like the spines of the back of a stegosaurus.

There's definitely something out here.

We're starting to pick up already some linear features

in an otherwise sandy environment,

you know, that doesn't really look like rock.

Oh, here, already, yeah.

Here we're starting to pick up a few more of those.

Yeah, it is. Four or five meters long, something like that.

And another.

That's the same one, I think.

Maybe that's the broken mast.

Is it?

Yeah, now look, it's got a hollow shadow in the middle.

Yeah, there's a whole notch out in this.

This is real--yeah, you can probably see it in the...

Oh, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at that.

Look at it up here in the point cloud.

Oh, look at the bow. You can see the stern.

It looks almost like a bow and a stern.

Maybe. Sometimes X marks the spot.

Could that be the beeswax?

It could be.

Now we know that the ship was Spanish,

and we know it was wrecked around 1680 to 1700.

But why was the ship here?

The nearest Spanish settlements were over 1,000 miles away.

A vital clue came from even further away: the Philippines.

In April 1991, a dive team was exploring the waters

outside Manila Bay.

After weeks, they made an unprecedented discovery:

a 17th century Spanish galleon.

Over 160 feet down

were the wooden remains of the ship's hull.

The ship was 115 feet long and 28 feet wide.

The wreck site was surrounded by cannons

and hundreds of intact ceramic jars

containing the packaged goods ready for sale.

More than 34,000 archaeological objects

were recovered from the wreck site.

No one had ever found anything like this in the Pacific before.

It was a Manila galleon built only in the Philippines.

This ship was called the San Diego.

It was part of a massive new trade bringing Asian goods

to the Spanish colonies in Mexico and beyond.

These galleons carried large crews,

and they were Spanish-run ships.

They founded a colony in the Philippines,

and they would use that colony to trade with the Chinese.

The San Diego carried a similar cargo to the beeswax wreck.

Its 6,000-mile trip to Mexico passed just south of Oregon.

The San Diego's cargo was from Asia,

bound for Europe on a Spanish ship.

It all fits the picture.

If our hunch was right,

the beeswax wreck was a Manila galleon, but which one?

We looked for more clues, then noticed something strange.

Some of the porcelain was found inland,

well above the high tide marks.

How did that happen?

Once our geologists came out and looked at our sketch maps

of where material had been reported,

he said the only way you could get shipwreck pieces there

would be a big tsunami.

They're caused by underwater earthquakes

that send surges of water up to 25 feet high.

A tsunami did hit the Oregon coast in 1700.

So, we looked for galleons that sank before that date,

and the records reveal a Manila galleon that was lost in 1693.

All that evidence put together, the porcelain dates,

the beeswax that was found,

the geo-archaeology information about the tsunami,

where artifacts had been found,

high above the reach of storm waves or high tides.

So, now we know.

The beeswax wreck is the Santo Cristo de Burgos.

But how big was the ship? And what did it look like?

The scans from Manzanita Beach produced good data.

From this area where fishermen had reported

getting their nets snagged,

there's what we thought might be a piece of the beeswax wreck.

It fits so many of the historical accounts

for the location.

Ah, and here's our AUV photos.

The scans here show the entire area.

The gray section in the middle shows the site in greater detail

using a composite of our underwater photos.

It looked like a pointed boat...

in the previous lower-resolution data,

but here, it really looks more like a rock pile.

I thought it might be part of the wreck,

but it's devastating to find out it's just a bunch of rocks.

Well, this saved us a dive.

But there's something else on the scan that's intriguing.

We can see this beautiful ramp split between the rocks.

It's as if somebody has dug a little channel.

It slopes right up, right up to the mouth of the cave.

Anything coming into this bay that gets up over these rocks,

it's just naturally gonna get funneled up to this sand chute

right towards that cave, and it's like a loading ramp.

This is where Craig found his timbers,

which is exactly where the geology and the current

suggests pieces of the wreck could end up.

So, it looks like Craig was right all along.

Those timbers he found are the smoking gun.

If we can recover them and analyze them,

we might be able to learn more about the ship itself.

The complications of recovering the timbers

are that the caves are at the base of a cliff.

The only way to get out there

is to hike along the base of that cliff at low tide.

So, you have to time the tides

to where you're walking out at the right time.

You only have about 60 to 90 minutes to work on the site,

and then you have to hike back.

And at that point we realized

that we needed more help to do this.

And so we started talking to an archaeology company

called Search, and Jim Delgado is probably, you know,

one of the most noted maritime archaeologists in the US,

and probably the world.

I'm a West Coast-raised kid.

I saw my first shipwreck here

years ago, sticking out of the sands,

and one might say that was the beginning

of a lifelong obsession.

If this wreck is a scattered jigsaw puzzle

and I don't have all the pieces,

a nice diagnostic piece of the puzzle

will go a long way towards working out whether

any identifiable parts of the ship still exist.

And any piece could tell us how big the ship was,

or even what it looked like.

We are getting ready.

The overland crew is we're basically gonna hike

along this exposed cliff base here,

so, over all these boulders.

Alright. Good luck. Be safe.

You're scrambling over boulders and slick rock faces.

If you fall into one of those holes,

you could either twist an ankle or break a leg.

That's why we had the surf rescue team

and the high angle rescue team standing by to help us.

Any swell that comes in out of nowhere is one concern,

and they're called sneaker waves.

And this very cove has been the site

of sneaker waves and accidents.

Biggest worry is being able to get everything out on time,

and most importantly actually is doing that safely

so that nobody gets hurt.

Yeah, we're trying to move right now.

Got it? Yeah.

Yeah, it's wedged.

What we're looking at here is a large wooden beam.

It's been eroded and rounded on this end,

but we can tell it was squared off.

And this crack gets really narrow and tight.

And I think this is what's held this beam here

for the last maybe 300 years.

That's why it hasn't washed away.

Radio report just came in.

They're gonna start pulling out the first of the timbers,

and that begins with the biggest one

that's wedged inside the sea cave.

Steve got out his pry bar

and a couple of short lengths of 2x4

that he could put between the beam and the pry bar.

Oh, Steve, that's perfect.

We got it.

Go slow, guys.

We had brought out with us a bunch of life jackets.

We wrapped those life jackets around the beam

and then took those straps that we had used to lift the beam

to secure the life jackets to the beam.

Then came scrambling around

trying to find the other pieces of wood.

The next feeling I had was kind of a sense of urgency,

because the tides were starting to come in.

There's a couple of pinch points on the trail back,

that if you don't get over them before the tide comes up,

you can't get past them.

Does somebody have a flagging tape?

We can start doing some of these smaller ones,

because we're gonna have the time against us.

This is three? This is three, yup.

So, we've been on scene now for just under three hours.

Hey, guys! We need to start going!

Losing our window.

I'm running out of time here.

Well, that's not light.

No, it's not.

So, definitely not driftwood.

No.

But you can see the pattern right here, here.

There's more of the pattern there.

It could be up, more upper structure.

We finally had what we believed

were pieces of the Santo Cristo, a ship lost over 300 years ago.

Let's see what we got.

It may not look like much,

but with the help of experts like Jim Delgado,

we're optimistic that we might be able to use these pieces

to figure out more about the ship.

I think there's 13, maybe 14 total pieces.

Not all of them may be cultural from the wreck,

but we wanted to basically grab what we could

and then sort it out here.

Galleon wood, especially for Manila galleons, is rare.

So, every bit of wood that we can get tells us something

about how these galleons were constructed.

Could it be these pieces of wood

tell us which part of the ship was washed ashore here?

So, we're gonna be examining all those pieces of wood

to try to figure out where in the ship they might have fit.

See the patterns there?

Some of these you can almost get the sense

of this being a bolt that was clenched.

Here's a piece that I can say comes right off of that ship,

and here's where it fit in the ship.

What else can it tell us about the galleon?

There's something harder in here

that we'll probably want to shine a light in.

Appears to be a rock.

Sorry, guy.

We got any water for him?

This is a square hole.

Yeah.

It's eroded a bit around here, but yeah.

Possibly what we're looking at here

is where a bolt fastener came in.

This one piece alone is sheer, you know, magic.

Yeah.

The holes and the weight of the piece tell us

that it likely came from low in the hull.

The more we look at it, the more you learn, you know?

If we could figure out where this piece belonged

in the hull of Santo Cristo de Burgos,

then we could work out how big the hull was.

Let's make a digital copy

we can share with the masses.

I love it.

So, our first step was to make a 3D virtual copy

in forensic detail.

This gives us a chance to take this piece

and virtually send it to experts everywhere,

and say, "What do you think? Where do you think it fits?"

Our investigation into the beam is telling us a lot

about the full structure of the Santo Cristo.

X-rays revealed iron residue inside the beam

which must have come from bolts that have rusted away.

Okay, this is gonna be great. I can't wait to see this.

Comparing the timbers from the San Diego galleon

in the Philippines with the ones we found in the cave

revealed they are both tropical hardwood,

the sort of wood that only grows in the Philippines.

3D scans allow us to pinpoint

exactly where on the hull our timber fits.

Comparing it to a similar timber on the San Diego

tells us that the Santo Cristo de Burgos

must have been a bigger ship.

We can use that information to scale up the ship's structure.

That gives a ship that was 130 feet long and 41 feet wide.

Fully loaded, it weighed over 1,500 tons,

carrying over twice the cargo of the San Diego.

This was the container freight ship of its day,

and it was part of a nearly forgotten global trade route.

That is great. Look at that.

They were doing something truly epic.

They were taking cargo from Asia and shipping it to Mexico,

and then overland by mule train,

and on across the Atlantic to Europe.

This extraordinary trade route continued for over 250 years.

So now we know the full story of the Santo Cristo de Burgos.

It set off from Manila and must have been blown off course,

sinking off the Oregon coast in 1693.

Seven years later, a tsunami hit the Oregon coast,

smashing the wreck apart

and scattering hundreds of tons of cargo along the coastline

to elevations over 25 feet above sea level.

Everybody has always talked about,

in terms of our wreck here on the north Pacific coast,

has either been an Asian wreck,

a Japanese junk or a Chinese vessel,

or it was a Spanish galleon.

And so, Hollywood notwithstanding,

no pirates, no time, no how.

No way.

Craig Andes is a good example of somebody

who knows that coast really, really well,

who has spent his life researching

this particular wreck.

The Coasties are out.

But what's most important is

that he raised his hand and said, "Hey, I found something,"

and he brought it to the museum.

And here we are with the biggest piece of this puzzle

in 330 years because he did that.

Out here, a lot of the locals have known about

the beeswax shipwreck suspected to be in this cove.

Um, Joe, on the Sigi.

This is the gentleman.

Craig, could you put your hand up?

So, Craig is what is known as,

like, the beachcomber that found this thing.

Everybody thought you were crazy.

Oh, I know.

I've been called Crazy Craig a lot of times.

I hope there isn't any hard feelings, that I like,

disturbed, you know,

a grave site or something like that.

I'd like to think I did a service

to potentially answer the questions

that the Natives that were local here seem to have.

Wow.

And this is 300 pounds approximately? Wow.

And over 300 years old.

Amazing.

You know, it's direct proof of our oral history

as being accurate, but also it is some of the earliest history

of our contact with non-Native folks here.

But it definitely has spots for some big bolts to go through.

Incredible.

Wow.

Wow.

This just really makes me think of the people

and the things that were in there

when you talk about the beeswax boxes

that we all found, the tribes found.

And the people that must have come ashore,

the people that might have survived and lived

with everybody during that time.

With our families. Yeah.

We're certain that we have confirmed pieces

of Santo Cristo here,

but it was a huge ship, so more of it is still out there.

You never know what's buried beneath the sands offshore.

This coast, those caves, these sands, these dunes,

all have held history,

and some portions of them still hold history.