MEXICO CITY – A bronze sculpture more than 430 years old was found on the Pacific coast in the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California, the
National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.
The discovery was made by INAH members and researchers from the United States two weeks ago and is a unique piece within the collection of goods
recovered over a 12-year period by the Manila Galleon Project in Baja California.
The sculpture, 12 centimeters (4 3/4 inches) tall and of an equal width, represents a Chinese “Dog of Fo,” and the first analyses have determined that
it is either the lid of a censer or a candlestick.
The find comes from one of the first galleons of the 16th century to set sail from Manila in the Philippines en route to Acapulco in the Viceroyalty
of New Spain, INAH marine archaeology unit member Roberto Junco said.
The route “was the longest on the high seas...in this case the ship could have been carried off by the various currents along the coast of the
Californias, with no survivors to continue the crossing,” Junco said.
The remains of the goods found probably belonged to the San Felipe galleon, which sailed carrying a large cargo of Chinese porcelain from the Ming
Dynasty and which disappeared without a trace in 1576, maritime historian Edward Von der Porten said.
The Asian sculpture, located underwater by means of signals from a metal detector, coincides with descriptions noted in the 18th century by Jesuit
missionaries such as Fr. Fernando Consag at an earlier moment and later by Fr. Miguel del Barco, Junco said.
“The goods we are studying coincide with the notes of Fr. Miguel del Barco, who in his chronicles says that some Indians brought to one of the
missions a bronze candlestick in the shape of a dog,” the archaeologist said.
“The object we found is probably similar to the one described by the priest, or it could be the lid of a censer,” Junco said.
The so-called “Dogs of Fo” – the Chinese word for Buddha is Fo – actually represent lions and were considered protectors of sacred sanctuaries,
usually Buddhist temples.
The Manila Galleon Project is led by U.S. researchers Jack Hunter and Edward Von der Porten with archaeologists from the INAH’s marine archaeology
unit.
The project is also receiving support from other institutions.
The team carries out archaeological prospecting in an area stretching approximately 11 kilometers (7 miles) along the coast where the greatest variety
of cargo has been found.
Originally posted by redhilltown
Fascinating! I realize they aint gonna give the gps cords of where this was found but does anybody know the general location?
pacific coast, a beach with dunes, you will have to sleuth yourself to find it.
The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum had an exhibit of some of the relics found from this galleon. I think it was 2005. One of the leaders of the
expedition, Van der Poten or something like that, gave a talk about the galleon and the searches up to that time. His name is not mentioned in the
article above, so I don't know if this is a new team or an extension of the earlier one.
In any case, it's a fascinating discovery. There have been more. I'm sure, if you're interested, that a search using Galleon San Felipe or something
similar you can find more.
A team of U.S. researchers and marine archaeologists from Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH) found a Chinese bronze sculpture
from the 16th century on the Pacific coast of Baja California, a peninsula south of the US state of California. At just under five inches square, the
statue is either a censer or a candlestick. It is decorated with a Chinese “Dog of Fo,” a lion figure that protected Buddhist temples.
It was discovered under water using a metal detector two weeks ago as part of the ongoing 12-year Manila Galleon Project which surveys 7 miles along
the Baja coast for the remains of Spanish ships known as the Manila Galleons, ships that carried trade cargo from the Philippines to Acapulco. The
trade began in 1565 when Andrés de Urdaneta, explorer, Augustinian friar and the second man to circumnavigate the globe, discovered that if ships
departing from Cebu City went north first, the Pacific trade winds would carry them east to the coast of California.
It was a punishingly long trip. Urdaneta lost most of his crew the first time, and even once the trade got going in earnest, the galleons took four
months to sail from Manila to Acapulco. From there the cargo of spices, porcelain, ivory, silk and bronze devotional statues, etc., was transported
overland to the Gulf of Mexico where it was added to the Spanish treasure ships heading back to the motherland. Tedious, long and dangerous as it was,
this trip allowed Spanish ships to avoid using unfriendly foreign ports and the Portuguese routes in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good
Hope.
The Manila Galleon Project began when some of that Ming porcelain was discovered on a Baja beach in 1999. The surveys have found thousands of pieces
of porcelain, chunks of beeswax, lead sheathing from the ship and other artifacts, but this is the first bronze “Dog of Fo” sculpture they’ve
discovered. Jesuit missionary chronicles from the 18th century note on more than one occasion Indians having bronze candlesticks shaped like dogs.
Perhaps they were describing something like this object traded from China off a Manila galleon.
It was an enormous market, starting with American silver which the Spanish shipped to the Far East. Historians estimate that as much as a third of all
the silver mined in the Spanish colonies of America ended up in Asia. With that silver the traders bought goods to fill up their huge ships — the
Manila galleons were built particularly large for cargo and so the crew could actually survive once in a while — and headed back to Mexico. On its way
from Baja to the Gulf, some of the cargo would be sold and traded locally. You can see the influence of Asian porcelain and ivory in Mexican ceramics.
The Manila galleons finally stopped sailing in 1815 when the Mexican War of Independence against Spain broke the cycle.
Inductive reasoning. It's what detectives use to work backwards from evidence at a crime scene to develop a chronology of events that, with luck and
diligence, will lead to a suspect.
It's also the modus operandi for Portola Valley resident and geophysicist Sheldon Breiner and a team of archaeologists and a historian who meet
periodically along the Mexican coast of Baja California. They're investigating the disappearance of a Spanish galleon believed to be the San Felipe.
The San Felipe left China in 1576 headed for Acapulco by way of Manila with a cargo that included silk, beeswax and tons of Ming Dynasty porcelain.
Records show the details of the cargo but not the San Felipe's arrival at its destination, and the Spanish were meticulous with their records, Mr.
Breiner says in an interview.
Mr. Breiner spoke about this exploratory adventure at Portola Valley's Historic Schoolhouse on Nov. 16. The town's Nature & Science Committee
sponsored the free event and about 20 people showed up.
Shipments of porcelain left China for Spain twice a year for some 250 years starting in 1565, Mr. Breiner says. There is debris indicating that the
100-foot, 400-ton San Felipe may have run aground off the desert coast of Baja.
Lying on and under the shifting sands of this corner of Mexico's Sonoran Desert are about 1,000 artifacts. While the researchers haven't yet found any
silk, which would have been encased in wax, they have found beeswax, some lead sheeting used on the hulls of 16th century ships to discourage
underwater pests, and a great many pieces of porcelain scattered along a two-mile-long line in the sand, Mr. Breiner says.
Why might the ship have grounded? Strong prevailing winds, scurvy among the crew of 200, a need for food or water, or a new mast or spar -- the
reasons are not known. Had the ship reached Acapulco, its cargo would have been offloaded and hauled overland to the Gulf of Mexico and then shipped
to Spain, a two-year to three-year trip altogether, Mr. Breiner says.
With hundreds of thousands of years of predictable winds, waves and depositions of sand as reference points, the line of debris is readable. The team
has worked backward from the locations of these artifacts to place the likely remains of the sunken hull. After scanning the area with an ultra
sensitive magnetometer, the team now has tracking data showing magnetic anomalies consistent with a buried hull. In short, they have a strong
suspicion as to where it is.
If this anomaly is a sunken galleon, it may never be known for certain whether it is the San Felipe. Ship owners back then did not paint names on
hulls, Mr. Breiner says. The porcelain can be dated by experts skilled at matching a design with the year in which that design was current.
Mr. Breiner says he plans to return to the site in February to survey the wreckage in detail and create a grid-based map of the debris field. The
magnetometer can detect ballast stones, cannon barrels, and iron spikes used to hold the ship's ribs to its keel. Other items with a smaller footprint
but still detectable include weapons, tools, boxes, furniture parts and personal effects of the crew. The lack of oxygen under the sediment inhibits
corrosion.
Team members, when they do speak about this project, hold back its exact location. Search and recovery work is undertaken only with the explicit
permission of the Mexican government and in the presence of archaeologists from the INAH, the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mr.
Breiner says.
Once Mexican specialists isolate and recover the hull and debris, the pieces will be restored to the extent possible -- perhaps a five-year enterprise
-- and displayed in a museum in Ensenada, the capital of Baja California, Mr. Breiner says.
The joy of a journey like this one, Mr. Breiner says, is that it takes on a breadth of field of its own. Geology, oceanography and map-making are as
critical as magnetism in solving this puzzle.
The questions Mr. Breiner poses in a paper on the subject are many. Why is the line of debris so straight? Why are there more objects at the southern
end? How do the answers to these questions help reconstruct the events of the shipwreck? Where are the ship's anchors and why are they where they are?
What has happened to the hull over four centuries? How did the porcelain stay in relatively good condition for hundreds of years in such a sandy and
abrasive environment?
"There's a lot of information that can come from a well understood search and study of an ancient ship," Mr. Breiner says.
Finding buried objects
One piece of equipment Mr. Breiner has not used and that wouldn't do much good in this exploration is a metal detector. That device transmits an
electrical signal; if something metal is within range, the transmitted signal creates within the metal an electrical current detectable by the device.
The magnetometer, by contrast, is passive. It senses the Earth's magnetic field, which is present everywhere all the time. The device notes anomalies
in that field caused by materials that have or do not have magnetic properties.
Airport and courtroom devices that screen for metal objects on a person are magnetometers that can sense a belt buckle's disturbance to the planet's
magnetic field. The device in use by Mr. Breiner in Baja is thousands of times more sensitive.
At the shipwreck, grains of magnetic minerals in the sand will provide a uniform background noise, Mr. Breiner says. Any interruption in that noise,
such as would be made by a buried nonmagnetic pile of wood and ceramics, will indicate its presence by the absence of that background noise.
Originally posted by redhilltown
Fascinating! I realize they aint gonna give the gps cords of where this was found but does anybody know the general location?
pacific coast, a beach with dunes, you will have to sleuth yourself to find it.
The Borja brothers and the fifth wife are fighting over ownership.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
Artifacts on beach help reveal story of 1576 shipwreck
By Carl Nolte
August 23, 2011
Edward Von der Porten, a San Francisco nautical historian and archaeologist, has a sea story to tell - of disease and death and the shipwreck of a
Spanish galleon full of the treasures of Asia.
He holds up a piece of delicate blue and white porcelain, part of a broken bowl. It shows a bird standing in a pond, a boat, a Chinese pagoda.
It is a piece more than 435 years old, salvaged from a bleak and remote beach in Baja California. It is part of the cargo of the galleon San Felipe,
which sailed from Manila in the Philippines for the nearly unknown coast of California and the port of Acapulco, Mexico, in the summer of 1576.
The San Felipe was never seen again until the wreck was found not long ago, allowing its story to be told for the first time.
It is a centuries-old tragedy - a horrible last voyage that ended with the crew starving and racked with scurvy or some other dietary disease, so weak
they could not sail the ship any longer. The San Felipe ran aground, everyone aboard dead or dying, "like a ghost ship," Von der Porten said.
The beach where the San Felipe ended up had no water, no food, no people. Even now, it is remote - "the middle of nowhere," Von der Porten said.
Everything lost
The mariners aboard the San Felipe had risked everything on that voyage. Had it succeeded, they would have become rich. "Instead," Von der Porten
said, "they lost everything."
Von der Porten and his associates - who include American beachcombers; Mexican archaeologists; the late Clarence Shangraw, curator of the Asian Art
Museum in San Francisco; George Kuwayama of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and dozens of volunteers - have acted like maritime detectives to
discover the story of the shipwreck.
The story began in 1576 when Spanish authorities in their new Philippine colony sent the San Felipe, a three-masted ship about 115 feet long, on a
voyage eastward to Acapulco.
The officers were Spanish, probably from Mexico, and the crew was mixed, some Spanish but mostly Filipinos, who were known for their seafaring skills.
The cargo was silk and spices, beeswax in big blocks, porcelain and some bronze figures. It came from China; the Spanish and Chinese had just
developed a trade relationship - silver from Mexico for Chinese silk and trade goods.
The San Felipe sailed north from the Philippines, to pick up the Japan Current, then eastward to make a landfall on the rocky and inhospitable
California coast, possibly near Cape Mendocino.
There was a ship every year along the route. The Manila galleon trade - westbound from Mexico, eastbound from the Philippines - lasted until 1815, 250
years. However, it was one of the most difficult voyages in the world - four months long, if the mariners were lucky, six months if the weather was
bad. Some years the ships would arrive in Mexico with the sailors so sick they could barely stand. On some voyages sickness killed them all, and the
ship was found adrift.
One galleon, the San Agustin, was wrecked in what is now Marin County in 1595, but the skipper, Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno, sailed with the survivors
in an open boat 2,500 miles to Acapulco; the only casualty was the ship's dog.
Buried for centuries
The San Felipe had no such luck. Its hulk remained offshore for perhaps a year after the ship ran aground and then was scattered by a storm and the
cargo spread on the beach over an area seven miles long.
There it sat, half buried in sand, for centuries. About 1997, Americans on a summer vacation trip found pieces of curious blue pottery.
Some of it turned up in San Francisco; Von der Porten in the meantime had been exploring the remains of the San Agustin - he knew Ming Dynasty china
when he saw it.
He got hold of some of the shards of porcelain; Kuwayama and other experts in Asian art helped identify it.
"These people had been picking up souvenirs, but they discovered - whoops - these things were not just souvenirs. They were important," Von der Porten
said.
The rest of the tale was like a detective story - the jagged pieces of porcelain were clues. Some were imprinted with the names of Chinese emperors
and the years of their reign. Some of the figures on the shards of pottery told allegorical stories from Chinese legend.
Dusty archives
Von der Porten enlisted Mexican authorities in the search for the secret of the lost ship. Ancient records in dusty archives were checked. Finally,
they came up with a name and a date: The ship was the San Felipe and it sailed from Manila in July 1576. It was one of the oldest known shipwrecks on
the Pacific Coast of North America.
Von der Porten, who has organized several expeditions to the wreck site, won't say where it is. "I can tell you only that it is south of Tijuana and
north of Cabo San Lucas," he said.
Some of the artifacts have been displayed at the San Diego Maritime Museum, and some of the story has appeared in scholarly journals. Von der Porten
has written a 5o-page monograph. There's a book in it, he thinks.
This summer, on the latest expedition to the site, a volunteer found something green-colored in the sand. He dug it out and brushed the sand away. It
was a bronze incense burner, about 4 1/2 inches tall, capped by the tiny figure of a lion.
The lion had been guarding the shipwreck for 435 years.
--
Photo below: At the home of Ed Von der Porten, on Friday August 19, 2011 in San Francsico, Ca., displayed are a few of the hundreds of pieces of Ming
porcelain discovered along the beach in Baja California in Mexico. Against a painting of the vessel, "San Felipe" by artist Gordon Miller. Von der
Porten, is the cheif organizer of an expedition that researched the Spanish galleon, "San Felipe" which sank more than 400 years ago in Baja
California, Mexico. Photo by: Michael Macor
Originally posted by bufeo
The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum had an exhibit of some of the relics found from this galleon. I think it was 2005. One of the leaders of the
expedition, Van der Poten or something like that, gave a talk about the galleon and the searches up to that time. His name is
not mentioned in the article above, so I don't know if this is a new team or an extension of the earlier one.
Allen R
The Manila Galleon Project is led by U.S. researchers Jack Hunter and Edward Von der Porten with archaeologists from the INAH’s
marine archaeology unit.
In short, they have a strong suspicion as to where it is.
Once Mexican specialists isolate and recover the hull and debris, the pieces will be restored to the extent possible -- perhaps a five-year enterprise
-- and displayed in a museum in Ensenada, the capital of Baja California, Mr. Breiner says.
displayed in a museum in Ensenada, the capital of Baja California
"If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull, but it is fierce and hostile and sullen.
The stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back
if we live, and we don't know why." - Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez
"People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care." - Theodore Roosevelt
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"Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others
cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you." - Jim Rohn
"The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." - Cunningham's Law
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