Everyone knows about the pirates who roamed the Caribbean picking off the Spanish treasure galleons, and everyone knows that there are probably millions of dollars worth of gold and silver just waiting to be found beneath the surface of the balmy tropical waters. But there is another chapter in the history of the Spanish Maritime Empire that few have read. In addition to plying the Atlantic with gold from the New World, the Spanish amassed enormous wealth trading in the Far East. Their Black Galleons would leave Manila and follow the currents north, along the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Russian Coast, and cycle around toward North America to their holdings in California and Mexico. Early explorers like Juan Cabrillo were the first Europeans to set foot on the Pacific Coast of the Americas. Famed privateer Sir Francis Drake likewise roamed along the coast, doubtless looking for Spanish treasure ships to raid. Because of competing interest between warring nations, records of these voyages were kept secret. Nevertheless, the Spanish merchants kept track of their ships and when one failed to appear on schedule, its loss was duly noted.

One such missing ship was the San Francisco Xavier, a galleon loaded with beeswax that failed to make port in the year 1707. Its fate remained unknown until US President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery, under the command of Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark, to find a riverine highway across America. When Lewis and Clark reached what is now the State of Oregon, they found the first clues to suggest an early Spanish presence in the area: a native man with red hair and freckles. The man’s name, Shoto, was taken to be a derivation of the Spanish surname Soto, a supposition that supported his claim of being the descendant of shipwreck survivors. When Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific, they found the natives of the Tillamook and Chinook peoples using beeswax mined from the sand of the nearby Nehalem Spit—beeswax in blocks marked with strange symbols and recognizable numbers and letters. While the marking provided no definitive identification, it seemed reasonable to conclude that it originated in the Far East and had been brought to the Oregon Coast by one of the Black Galleons, likely the San Francisco Xavier, which was one of the few that had disappeared completely from history. But according to the natives, the wax was not the only treasure buried in the sand.

At this point, legend and history blur together. The Northwest Indians told tales of as many as three different encounters with Europeans. They told of a wreck that yielded up blocks of beeswax and a handful of survivors, of which only four were allowed to live. But there was also mention of a ship that anchored offshore, and of fierce men that came ashore with a large chest which they carried onto the rocky slope of Neahkanie Mountain and buried. To frighten the superstitious natives, they sacrificed an African slave and buried his body with the cache, then returned to sea, never to be seen again. When American settlers at the Astoria outpost heard this tale, they could draw only one conclusion: there was pirate treasure somewhere on Neahkanie Mountain. For more than a hundred years, eager treasure hunters have combed every square inch of the 1600 foot high peak, looking for lost loot, but have found only frustration. Were there really multiple encounters? Or was the pirate tale a distortion of the events from the shipwreck incident?

On July 17, I climbed to the top of Neahkanie Mountain and had a chance to gaze down on the beach where these events took place. From the white sand beach, it is a trek of only about two miles, along a known Indian trail that switches back and forth across the slope. The ground is alternately covered by stands of Sitka spruce, and dense thickets of ground cover—thimbleberry, blackberry and sal al, along with the noxious stinging nettle. To make matters worse, a series of destructive forest fires have erased any clues that might have helped guide a treasure hunter to the mythic buried gold. But beneath that thin layer of soil, there is only solid rock.

While tales of buried pirate treasure abound in fiction, they rarely hold up in the light of simple logic. Really, why would a barely literate pirate captain stash his ill-gotten gains in a remote location and employ an elaborate system of maps and clues to record the site of the cache for future generations? In the uncertain world of a maritime criminal, it makes more sense for the brigand to convert his booty into liquid assets at the earliest possible opportunity. A far better explanation for the legend is that it was either a fabrication on the part of native storytellers, perhaps designed to elicit exchanges of goods for dubious hints or simply to taunt the gullible settlers, or an embellishment of the facts surrounding the original shipwreck.

It would be tempting for the pragmatic historian to simply close the book on the pirate legend. The San Francisco Xavier was a merchant vessel, primarily carrying beeswax and other trade goods, but not a fortune in precious metals, ergo the only treasure buried on or around the slopes of Neahkanie Mountain is one of a historic nature. But there’s a problem with that epitaph.

In 2001, United Asia Ocean Quests Inc. launched a bid to salvage the San Francisco Xavier, not off the Oregon Coast, but in the Albay Gulf on the southern coast of the Phillipines—the infamous Hell’s Gate, where at least nine Spanish Galleons are known to have been lost. If the San Francisco Xavier lies thousands of miles to the west, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, then what vessel lies buried beneath the shifting sands of Nehalem Beach?

Archaeologists now believe that the ship may have been a Dutch vessel, damaged in a battle with the Spaniards during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, decades before the San Francisco Xavier went missing. If true, then it is quite possible that there IS a treasure of some value hidden along the Oregon Coast—the spoils of earlier privateer encounters that never reached port. It is unlikely that an answer will emerge from the records of the day, just as it is doubtful that an excavation of the area will yield up buried loot. A final chapter of this mystery may never be written to anyone’s satisfaction. But as any treasure hunter knows, sometimes the journey is its own reward.

(watch for future updates on this story)