3316) Nuestra Señora de la Concepción (Spanish: "Our Lady of the (Immaculate) Conception" or Santa Maria de la Consolación 1641) (Part Three): The shipwreck and treasure of the Consolacion:
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Finding the treasure of the Santa Maria de la Consolacion:
In 1998, two brothers were walking on the beach of Santa Clara Island. One of them slipped two unusual black flat stones into his pocket that he had just discovered on the sand. Soon after, they realize that they are indeed “coins of eight” from a sea treasure.
Where did these silver coins come from? How did they get there?
The discovery of the men was of particular interest to the Ecuadorian Roberto Aguire, who was the rich owner of a tuna fishery and a numismatist-to-be. He created the Robcar company to carry out the investigation of the treasure.
Two years went by before he got the authorisation from the Ecuadorian government to start rescue and expeditions.
While the divers brought up thousands of pieces, Roberto Aguire hired Joel Ruth to identify the galleon.
Was it genuinely from the Santa Maria de la Consolacion shipwreck?
Joël Ruth is a marine archaeologist, historian and specialist of Spanish coins.
At first, he identified the wreck as the Santa Cruz’s which sank in 1680 in the same area.
Then, new clues put him on the track: maps with annotations and a carbon-14 analysis of burned wood found in the water. Ruth went to the wreck of the Consolacion.
After 20 days of efforts, several objects confirmed the dating of the ship between 1649 and 1680. There was no further doubt that the ship aground on Santa Clara Island was none but the Santa Maria de la Consolacion.
This was a precious find, because the ship’s manifest, kept in the General Archives of the Indies in Seville, listed all the cargo it was carrying before it sank. We now know that the cargo consisted of 146,000 pesos in silver and gold and silver bars.
In 1687, William Phips discovered the wreck and salvaged 68,511 pounds of silver and some gold, which was believed to be about a quarter of the ship's cargo. In 1978, Burt Webber was able to locate the wreck again and recover more treasure, which appraisers valued at around $13 million.
In 1638, the Nuestra Señora de la Concepcion, a Spanish galleon enroute from Manila to Acapulco, wrecked off the southern coast of Saipan.
Her rich cargo of Chinese porcelain, silks, furniture, ivory, and spices bound for the New World and Europe was lost along with most of her crew and passengers when the ship crashed against the reef off Agingan Beach during a violet storm.
The wreck was partially salvaged by the Spanish nearly 50 years later with the help of Chamorro divers when most of the ships cannon were recovered but was then lost to history for another 300 years.
In the mid-1980s, the CNMI government authorised a maritime salvage firm to complete archaeological excavations to recover surviving artifacts from the wreck.
They included large ceramic storage vessels, ballast stones, shards of Ming porcelain, cannon balls, nails, musket shot, coins, and a sizable collection of golden jewelry items that were the personal property of wealthy Spanish passengers.
Revenues generated by this archaeological recovery project were used by the CNMI government in the 1990s to renovate the Old Japanese hospital to serve as today’s museum.
On September 20, 1641, the Spanish treasure fleet set sail for Seville, Spain, from Havana, Cuba loaded with silver from New World mines.
Minted into the rough-shaped, famous, Spanish 8 Reale (“Piece of Eight”), the treasure was destined to swell the coffers of the merchants who owned most of the treasure, and the powerful Spanish Empire.
Just seven days before, the fleet had made their first attempt at the voyage. Meeting the full-force of hurricane-season storms, the ships were forced to turn back – returning to Cuba for essential repairs to the battered vessels. Among the damaged ships was the fated Nuestra Señora de La Pura y Limpia Concepcion, flying the flag of Vice Admiral Juan Luis de Villavicencio.
The 600 ton galleon Concepcion, already leaking before the first attempt at the voyage, and with an undersized rudder for her tonnage, was, like her sister ships, loaded to the gunwales with both New World silver, and treasures from the distant, exotic Orient.
Tons of silver from the rich mines of Mexico and Potosi were stored in the hold next to indigo, silks, spices, porcelain, and jade – the treasures of the Orient, that had been sent on Manila galleons to Acapulco on the Pacific side of New Spain (present day Mexico), then transshipped overland and loaded aboard the ships of the treasure fleet waiting in the harbor at Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico.
Hurricane season was well under way, and on the second voyage the fleet was hit by a full fledged hurricane. The ships were scattered in a matter of hours. As day broke on September 29th, the damage to Concepcion was apparent. She was left to fight for herself, and drifted under make-shift sails for days, with the hand-powered pumps in operation 24 hours a day.
Weeks later, on October 31, 1641, the hulk of the once-proud Concepcion ran aground amidst the reefs north of Hispañola, the present day Dominican Republic.
Rumors of a vast Spanish treasure lost on a remote reef circulated throughout the Caribbean and made its way to the English colonies in the Americas.
In 1687, Captain William Phipps, who would later become the governor of Massachusetts, discovered and salvaged part of Concepcion’s treasure.
And, as decades passed into centuries, many historians, treasure hunters and adventurers attempted to relocate the glistening remains of Concepcion. With time, the legends grew.
Whispered tales by firelight told of the now famous “Silver Shoals” where even to this day, a glittering piece of eight just might be found in the tropical waters under clear blue seas.
But the reality of the hunt was a different story. Eighty miles off shore, in an area riddled with ship-sinking shoals, and still in the path of violent hurricanes, more than luck was needed to rediscover Concepcion.
From the famous, including Jacques Cousteau, to the infamous, hunter after hunter came up empty handed. What was needed were clues – clues from the historical record of the Spanish and Phipps, and his original salvage efforts centuries ago.
Famed historian and shipwreck researcher Jack Haskins. Haskins, in his quiet study in the Florida Keys, set out to discover Concepcion.
Armed with the sketchy histories found in his documents, Haskins and treasure hunter Burt Webber organized an expedition to Silver Shoals. Using early magnetometers and a team of divers, they scoured the shoals for five months… and came up empty.
Webber arrived home broke and discouraged. Then, according to British author and researcher Peter Earle, Webber “was to have his only real stroke of luck.” Unaware of Webber’s and Haskins’ search, Earle was writing a book on Concepcion and some of his archival information came from a document that had survived from a salvage made hundreds of years earlier.
Earle directed them to the Kent Archives at Maidstone, and there, buried in the stacks of centuries past, were the logs of Henry, Phipps’ salvage ship. Hidden in her time-worn pages were entries that narrowed the search field dramatically.
Updated charts in hand, $2,500,000 from 30 hopeful backers, and the deck under their feet, Jack Haskins, Burt Webber and the salvage crew followed in Phipps’ wake, and, at last, on November 28, 1978, rediscovered the remains of Concepcion.
Thousands of eight reales were reclaimed from the sea in one of the greatest treasure discoveries of all time. To this day, one-of-a-kind Concepcion artifacts and treasures remain on permanent display in the Dominican Republic National Museums Casas Reales and Faro Colon in Santo Domingo.
But still, more treasure remained undiscovered… and Jack Haskins, and his dear friend Captain Carl Fismer knew it. With the aid of new metal detector technology, and the assistance of enthusiastic backers, Captain “Fizz” led a new expedition to Silver Shoals in 1986. Within days, the sand grudgingly gave up more hidden treasures, and, for the third time, Silver Shoals reef lived up to her legends.
Searching for the Concepción:
Of the more than 500 passengers and crew on the Concepción, fewer than 200 survived. The pilot Guillen made it to land, but knowing the likely fate of long imprisonment or execution that awaited him, he disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Spanish officials first learned about the wreck when Villavicencio and the survivors from the longboat straggled into Santo Domingo famished and in rags.
They had walked 170 miles (272 km) over mountainous terrain guided by locals. More survivors would follow. Spanish officials questioned them about the location of the wreck to mount a search and recover the silver. But no one could pinpoint the location.
Word got out quickly among pirates and opportunists, and for years they scoured the reef for signs of the wreck and the chance to become rich beyond dreams. But none of them found it either.
In 1687, 46 years later, William Phipps from New England came across an old survivor of the Concepción.
With funding from a London syndicate of investors and the backing of King James II, as well as incredible luck, he managed to find the wreck. As in the first extraction of the gold and silver decades before, Phipps used Africans and Native Americans to do the hard and dangerous work to recover treasure. These men may have numbered as many as 60 skilled free divers who brought up several tons of precious metal up from the sea floor.
Without these divers from Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, and the Dominican Republic, Phipps would not have retrieved much, if anything.
Europeans at the time had none of the aquatic capabilities, such as five minutes of underwater breath holding, required for such an operation. The haul made Phipps a vast fortune and got him knighted by the King, who also appointed him Governor of Massachusetts Colony. Interestingly, during his tenure as Governor, he created a special court in 1692 to handle the infamous Salem witch trials.
Almost 300 years would pass before the Concepción was rediscovered in 1978 by American treasure hunter Burt Webber.
Using magnetometers and scuba gear to find what Phipps missed, Webber managed to bring up gold and silver valued at US$13 million.
This time, the recovery was made under the watchful eye of the Dominican Republic Government, that also received a substantial share of the treasure.
UK/TCI also has a long standing claim to the reefs that include the Silver Bank where the wreck is located. The claim of jurisdiction remains unresolved to this day.
Governments still permit recoveries of treasure off their shores, but under strict guidelines and direct observation. Reflective of modern times, the reefs of the Silver Bank where the Concepción met a grim and grisly end is now a UN Underwater Cultural Heritage, World Heritage Site and protected from further exploitation.
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