Satori
Full Member
By MATT WINTERS
For The Daily Astorian
Professional treasure-hunter is one of those dream jobs most of us bury on a deserted, palm-shaded beach at the back of imagination sometime in our early teens.
But who doesn't occasionally fantasize about stumbling upon an ancient, iron-bound chest poking up through the sand, drooling gold doubloons from a broken corner? The enduring popularity of Indiana Jones and the corny National Treasure movies testifies to our potent interest in the adventurous discovery of ancient riches.
Like winning the lottery, it happens often enough to dangle a thin thread of reality even to those of us whose most dangerous exploit is paying winter utility bills. Who didn't snap to attention last year when Odyssey Marine Exploration brought up 17 tons of silver coins and gold artifacts from a mysterious 18th century shipwreck 200 miles west of Gibraltar?
Treasure also generates a wealth of blarney (or another "b" word the boss won't let me use in a family newspaper). One participant in an online discussion board for wanna-be tomb raiders claims "over 600 ships lost centered at mouth of Columbia River, estimated $600 million total in area, many near Sand Island."
Golly, where are my chest-waders? I'm going to walk over at low tide and start digging.
The same person says, without source, that the Vazlav Vorovsky, a Russian freighter that wrecked in 15 fathoms on Peacock Spit just below Cape Disappointment in 1941, carried $1.5 million in gold and silver coins.
Shipwrecked Japanese, Chinese and Spanish sailors are a nother sort of treasure.
This was a favorite ship for the Long Beach Peninsula's "seagulls," as its beachcombers are known, but not because shiny Stalinist rubles were washing ashore. Far more prosaically, the Vazlav ruptured and released thousands of pounds of boxed lard - used to fry countless clams in the ration years of World War II.
Counting fishing boats, there have been something like 2,000 shipwrecks in the vicinity of the Columbia's mouth in the past three centuries. Hundreds more were lost along the rest of the Oregon and Washington coast, particularly around Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Among these were a number rumored to carry significant amounts of unrecovered gold. But look case by case, and ships reputed to contain safes full of coins had manifests only listing dull cargoes of newsprint and lumber.
And yet some of the rumors are pretty intriguing. A man who recently moved away from the Nehalem-Manzanita area writes on the treasure.net forum: "My brother and I came across an old gentleman a few years ago that had a first-hand story of a Spanish ship buried in the sand in that area. The ship was uncovered during a storm in approximately 1908. The only thing is, the coastline has changed a lot and the ship is now nowhere near the water, but about 1⁄3 mile (or more) inland. ... The guy that found the ship and his son tried to dig into the ship. As the son descended down into it, the sand caved in and he was killed. The old man never went back, but did mark the spot, using the witness tree and measurements."
So far, the only really tangible signs of one or more nearby Spanish wrecks are hunks of beeswax with markings that may or may not be from the early 17th century. Still, perhaps I'll put a metal detector on my Christmas gift list.
Another type of treasure altogether - a poignant historical mystery - is represented by a different kind of North Pacific shipwreck. There are numerous riveting stories of shipwrecked Japanese, Chinese and Spanish sailors living out their days among the Indians of this region.
The former have been called "Japan's accidental ambassadors." They were fishermen caught up in the same trans-Pacific current that still brings Japanese shampoo bottles and net floats to local shores. There were enough of them to warrant their own descriptive word, hyôryûsha, or sea drifters.
A Chinook legend told to Smithsonian ethnographer Franz Boas tells of a beached ship from which emerged a man who "looked just like a bear, but his face was that of a human being." The Chinook kept the two survivors as pets, and traded the ship's metal parts to other tribes for slaves.
In a Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, Gabriele Franchere says that in 1811 he met an old man of about 80 who said that his father was one of four Spaniards wrecked on Clatsop Beach many years before.
Unlike the tall tales of lost treasure, these stories are more easily verified. The genes of shipwrecked sailors may someday be dredged up from the DNA of the living descendants of the Chinook. Such knowledge really would be a treasure.
For The Daily Astorian
Professional treasure-hunter is one of those dream jobs most of us bury on a deserted, palm-shaded beach at the back of imagination sometime in our early teens.
But who doesn't occasionally fantasize about stumbling upon an ancient, iron-bound chest poking up through the sand, drooling gold doubloons from a broken corner? The enduring popularity of Indiana Jones and the corny National Treasure movies testifies to our potent interest in the adventurous discovery of ancient riches.
Like winning the lottery, it happens often enough to dangle a thin thread of reality even to those of us whose most dangerous exploit is paying winter utility bills. Who didn't snap to attention last year when Odyssey Marine Exploration brought up 17 tons of silver coins and gold artifacts from a mysterious 18th century shipwreck 200 miles west of Gibraltar?
Treasure also generates a wealth of blarney (or another "b" word the boss won't let me use in a family newspaper). One participant in an online discussion board for wanna-be tomb raiders claims "over 600 ships lost centered at mouth of Columbia River, estimated $600 million total in area, many near Sand Island."
Golly, where are my chest-waders? I'm going to walk over at low tide and start digging.
The same person says, without source, that the Vazlav Vorovsky, a Russian freighter that wrecked in 15 fathoms on Peacock Spit just below Cape Disappointment in 1941, carried $1.5 million in gold and silver coins.
Shipwrecked Japanese, Chinese and Spanish sailors are a nother sort of treasure.
This was a favorite ship for the Long Beach Peninsula's "seagulls," as its beachcombers are known, but not because shiny Stalinist rubles were washing ashore. Far more prosaically, the Vazlav ruptured and released thousands of pounds of boxed lard - used to fry countless clams in the ration years of World War II.
Counting fishing boats, there have been something like 2,000 shipwrecks in the vicinity of the Columbia's mouth in the past three centuries. Hundreds more were lost along the rest of the Oregon and Washington coast, particularly around Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Among these were a number rumored to carry significant amounts of unrecovered gold. But look case by case, and ships reputed to contain safes full of coins had manifests only listing dull cargoes of newsprint and lumber.
And yet some of the rumors are pretty intriguing. A man who recently moved away from the Nehalem-Manzanita area writes on the treasure.net forum: "My brother and I came across an old gentleman a few years ago that had a first-hand story of a Spanish ship buried in the sand in that area. The ship was uncovered during a storm in approximately 1908. The only thing is, the coastline has changed a lot and the ship is now nowhere near the water, but about 1⁄3 mile (or more) inland. ... The guy that found the ship and his son tried to dig into the ship. As the son descended down into it, the sand caved in and he was killed. The old man never went back, but did mark the spot, using the witness tree and measurements."
So far, the only really tangible signs of one or more nearby Spanish wrecks are hunks of beeswax with markings that may or may not be from the early 17th century. Still, perhaps I'll put a metal detector on my Christmas gift list.
Another type of treasure altogether - a poignant historical mystery - is represented by a different kind of North Pacific shipwreck. There are numerous riveting stories of shipwrecked Japanese, Chinese and Spanish sailors living out their days among the Indians of this region.
The former have been called "Japan's accidental ambassadors." They were fishermen caught up in the same trans-Pacific current that still brings Japanese shampoo bottles and net floats to local shores. There were enough of them to warrant their own descriptive word, hyôryûsha, or sea drifters.
A Chinook legend told to Smithsonian ethnographer Franz Boas tells of a beached ship from which emerged a man who "looked just like a bear, but his face was that of a human being." The Chinook kept the two survivors as pets, and traded the ship's metal parts to other tribes for slaves.
In a Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, Gabriele Franchere says that in 1811 he met an old man of about 80 who said that his father was one of four Spaniards wrecked on Clatsop Beach many years before.
Unlike the tall tales of lost treasure, these stories are more easily verified. The genes of shipwrecked sailors may someday be dredged up from the DNA of the living descendants of the Chinook. Such knowledge really would be a treasure.
