Todos Santos Wreck

[allen_idaho]

Hey all, I am curious if any of you have any further information about a Spanish Galleon named the "Todos Santos". She was sunk around the 1680's off the coast of Ecuador.

Here is what I do know:
- She was travelling within sight of the coast at the time of loss.
- She was being captained by a former English pirate by the name of Thomas Gage.
- She was being pursued by a French pirate by the name of Raveneau de Lussan at the time of loss.
- The ship was lost in a relatively deep channel between the mainland and a small sandy island.
- The ship carried approximately 200 tons of silver bars and an unknown amount of gold ingots.

What I'm looking for is:
- A relatively exact date of sinking
- A relative location of sinking
- Any idea of what route the ship was taking
- Any word on whether the ship was ever found and salvaged

Anybody got anything?

 

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[Galleon Hunter]

1799. Spanish galleon Todos Santos, Captain Thomas Gage, laden with 3,520,000 pesos in treasure, wrecked about eighteen miles due west of Paita, Peru on June 3. No known attempt to locate or salvage the wreck has ever been made. (Note: Another account of the loss states the Todos Santos was sunk by the French buccaneer Sieur Raveneau de Lussan.) (13,559,575,632,633,639)

I list the above wreck in the "Ghost Wreck" section of my book. Don't think it ever existed, or if it did the date is seriously messed up.

#1, The wreck is found in several popular books including... Fell's Guide to Sunken Treasure Ships in the World, Rieseberg and Mikalow; 1001 Lost, Buried or Sunken Treasure by Coffman; Fell's Complete Guide to buried Treasure Land and Sea, Reiseberg; They Found Gold, Verrel.; and I Dive for Treaasure, Reiseberg. Those sources while entertaining to read, are more fiction than reality, especially anything by Reiseberg. Curiously the Todas Santos made it onto a map published in National Geographic, volume 200, number 1, July 2001.

#2 The date is clearly wrong, if the wreck had anything to do with the French buccaneer Raveneau de Lussan. He was born in Paris in 1663. So the 1799 date found in the books is wrong, or if the date is correct, there is no link to to famous buccaneer. For additional reading see "Raveneau de Lussan: Buccanner of the Spanish Main andEarly French Filibuster of the Pacific. A translation of his journal into English of his voyage to the South Seas (Pacific coast of South America) in 1684, was translated and edited by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur in 1930.

 

[allen_idaho]

Thanks for the reply. I just can't find enough information on this thing to validate her. So I'm just going to leave the vessel off my list.

 

[Mackaydon]

I'll venture a guess that the first notation of the wreck 'Todos Santos' was written by Verrill, but before the entry in his 1936 book you referenced. On January 1, 1933, an article appeared in 'The Baltimore Sun' entitled 'Fishing for Gold on the Ocean's Floor', in which Verrill does a colorful rendition of the wreck story. Unfortunately, in neither the book nor the newspaper did he mention the year of this event--but he does mention the name of "a renegade Englishman, one Thomas Gage, an ex-pirate" . My research disclosed that there was a Thomas Gage involved in the galleon trade from between 1637 and 1687. His comments were made in Panama. Sieur Raveneau de Lussan was in the same general area somewhere between 1684 and 1689--so the connection between 'that' Thomas Gage (not the more popular one in the 18th century) and Lussan was possible.
If you would like to read Verrill's 1933 account, it can be found here (scroll down a ways):
http://stillwoods.blogspot.com/2011/08/fishing-for-gold.html

Don....