Qualla: Beeswax Wreck

Beeswax Wreck: Introduction

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For two hundred years, the Pacific kept delivering evidence of a crime it would not confess to. Chunks of yellowish wax -- some stamped with the marks of Spanish merchants, some as large as a man's torso -- washed up on Oregon's north coast beaches with the regularity of driftwood. The Clatsop people had the wax long before any European wrote it down. Fur trader Alexander Henry noted in 1813 that the Clatsop near Astoria had "great quantities of beeswax" to trade, and they told him it came from a shipwreck near Nehalem Bay. The ship, the ocean, and three centuries of storms had scattered the cargo across miles of shoreline. Identifying the vessel would take another two hundred years.

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Beeswax Wreck: A Galleon Off Course

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The leading candidate is the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish Manila galleon that vanished in 1693. These were the treasure ships of the Pacific -- massive vessels that sailed from Manila to Acapulco carrying Chinese porcelain, silk, spices, and beeswax, the last essential for m...

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Beeswax Wreck: Clues Along the Shore

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The wax was only the beginning. Over the decades, teak timbers -- a wood native to Southeast Asia but commonly used in galleon construction -- surfaced along the coast. Shards of Chinese porcelain turned up in the sand, their painted designs later dated by researchers to the late...

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Beeswax Wreck: The Fisherman's Persistence

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The wreck itself eluded every search for more than a century. Then came Craig Andes, a Tillamook County fisherman who spent over thirty years looking. In 2013, Andes discovered wreckage buried under large rocks at the base of Cape Falcon, just north of Manzanita. Professionals we...

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Beeswax Wreck: A Pacific Ghost Story

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Henry's 1813 journal contains one more detail, harder to verify and darker in tone. He reported that the crew of the wrecked ship had been "all murdered by the natives" -- a claim he attributed to Clatsop informants, though whether he was faithfully translating or projecting is i...

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