Shipwreck Credited With Inspiring ‘The Goonies’ Found Off Oregon Coast

Part of the wreck of a three hundred year old Spanish galleon believed in part to have inspired “The Goonies” was found in sea caves off the coast of Oregon. 

Timbers from the 17th-century ship’s hull were discovered in sea caves along Oregon’s coast. They were removed in a coordinated effort that gave archaeologists only an hour and a half to remove the ship’s remains due to tide conditions. 

“The extraordinarily rare hull remains were removed from sea caves near Manzanita earlier this week in a risky emergency recovery mission involving archaeologists, law enforcement personnel, and search-and-rescue teams from multiple state and local agencies,” National Geographic reported.

The Maritime Archeology Society (MAS), which has been working on the project for 15 years, discovered parts of the ships and were able to move the ship’s remains to a local museum. Members of Nehalem Fire and Rescue, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, and SEARCH Inc, also helped out with the mission.

The National Geographic Society also gave money to help fund the expedition. 

Archeologists say that the Spanish ship, which was carrying Chinese silk, porcelain, and beeswax for candles, likely went down sometime around 1693 off of Oregon’s coast.

Researchers say the ship was likely the Santo Cristo de Burgos, and was a type of ship used by the Spanish constructed in Asia known as a Manilla ship. It was likely on a trading expedition from the Philippines to Mexico. 

Not very many wrecks of Manilla-style Spanish ships have been discovered, and Director Steven Spielberg was reportedly inspired by stories of ship hunters and hidden treasures from Native Americans along the coast of Oregon. His story idea became the hit film “The Goonies” in 1985.

The film is about a group of kids in Astoria, Oregon, who find a treasure map and look for the lost treasure of a pirate whose treasure was supposed to have been hidden somewhere in the area.

The search for the Santo Cristo has been ongoing for years, with Chinese porcelain, beeswax, and ship pieces being discovered around the Nehalem River in Oregon. This led researchers to question if the Santo Cristo was actually the ship known in the area as the Beeswax Wreck, because of all the beeswax that had washed alongside the Oregon shoreline. 

“A catalog of Spanish ships published in the 1930s—a source still widely consulted by archaeologists—claimed that, according to Spanish records, the Santo Cristo burned somewhere in the middle of the Pacific,” National Geographic explained. “But the volunteer group raised money to fund research in Spain’s exhaustive naval archives, which eventually told a different tale: Despite a multi-year search by the Spanish crown, Santo Cristo de Burgos had simply vanished.” 

Now the ship has been found and its remains will be kept at Astoria’s Columbia River Maritime Museum.