Diving Into the Past

Hollywood would be hard pressed to dream up a sexier story line:

Intrepid divers brave great white shark attack to unearth the West Coast’s oldest shipwreck. Possibility of gold. El Nino, in a stretch, plays the good guy. Sixteenth century galleon, San Agustin, plays itself. History and science triumph over adversity.

Coming soon to a theater near you. . . . Not quite. This real-life thriller actually premiered Monday off Drakes Bay--a graceful curve of sandy scenery two hours north of San Francisco.

But the intrepid diver part is all true, and so is the bit about the sharks. Over the next two weeks, protected by custom-made shark cages and an electronic anti-shark force field, scientists will try to locate the San Agustin, which is believed to have gone aground here 402 years ago during a violent storm.

“It was a monumental voyage,” said Don Neubacher, superintendent of Point Reyes National Seashore. “And we believe all the material that is found belongs to the public trust.”

Some of that material has already nudged its way to daylight. In fact, archeologists and maritime historians are relatively certain that the once-nimble galleon made its watery grave off here because shards of blue and white Ming dynasty porcelain from its cargo hold have been washing ashore in the area for decades.

Although a similar underwater expedition 15 years ago failed to locate the Spanish ship, improved technology and warmer, clearer waters--compliments of our favorite weather system--have combined this time to give the divers an assist in their search.

Flashy as the expedition sounds, it will offer researchers far more than simple entertainment value. The larger purpose is to survey and preserve all of the so-called cultural artifacts that lie beneath the sparkling 10-mile expanse of Drakes Bay--everything from the wrecks of nearly 40 ships to a downed plane and probably a refrigerator or two.

That detritus of the past offers the longest chronology of West Coast shipping history available to researchers.

“The vessels lost here represent each type of ship used in trade, and we’re looking for evidence of all of them,” Roger Kelly, regional archeologist for the National Park Service, said Monday, as the team kicked off the expedition.

Shipboard scientists began cruising the shimmering bay at midmorning, employing magnetometers and global satellite positioning equipment to locate and mark likely sites of the San Agustin’s remains.

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Next week, divers will follow, delicately probing the sediment for timber, porcelain and metallic objects such as weapons, ship fittings and anchors. The large-scale excavation process will not take place until next fall.

“There’s a lot of other wrecks in that area, but none in such good shape,” said Gary Franklin, dive master for the expedition. “Being the oldest, we think it may have been covered up with sand and preserved. We may find the bottom decks, maybe the keel. We’re looking forward to far more than splinters.”

The history of Drakes Bay--a key site in the annals of California--offers more than just a catalog of downed ships. When the San Agustin landed here in early November 1595, Capt. Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno and his men met California’s coastal Miwok Indians for the first time, a startling introduction for all involved.

“This is like the aliens coming and landing on Earth. You’re a Miwok and are hanging around, chasing animals on foot and along comes something like this,” says Michael Bell, deputy incident commander for the expedition and project manager at the San Francisco National Maritime Historic Park. “That’s like first contact, isn’t it?”

Indeed. For though many believe that the English explorer Sir Francis Drake made a brief stop here some 16 years earlier, Cermeno’s trip is the first lengthy, documented encounter between Europeans and the Miwoks.

“They are well set up and robust with long hair, and go entirely naked, only the women wearing skirts of grass and deerskins,” wrote Cermeno in wonderment. One Miwok, he wrote, rowed up to the galleon “in a small boat made of grass.”

“The Indian was seated in the middle of this, and he had in his hand an oar with two blades with which he rowed with great swiftness,” Cermeno continued. “He came alongside the ship, where he remained a good while, talking in his language without anyone understanding what he was saying.”

According to Raymond Akers, a maritime historian who has studied this Portuguese captain who sailed for the Spaniards, Cermeno’s shipwreck cost far more than the loss of cargo and several lives. It probably “changed the whole history of California,” he said.

Word from the travels of Sir Francis Drake had led Spanish authorities in 16th century Mexico to believe that there was a strait that ran deeply into or through North America.

In addition to carrying cargo from the Philippines to Acapulco--which earned the San Agustin and similar ships the nickname “Manila galleons”--Cermeno was believed to be searching for the entrance to this mystical strait.

Carrying crates of Chinese porcelain and silks--and possibly some religious artifacts of gold--Cermeno landed in Drakes Bay. But his ship was wrecked, he lost his base of operations, and he had to drag 80 crew members home in a far smaller vessel.

And he completely missed the San Francisco Bay, which was later dubbed the Golden Gate. Had he not, said Akers, the Spaniards eventually would have ended up in the gold fields of California.

“California would have become a 16th century province of Spain, like Chile,” Akers said. “The San Agustin was significant for what it did not accomplish.”

Four centuries later, the research team hopes to accomplish far more than the hapless sailor at the heart of their efforts. They hope to use the ship’s timbers to teach them about 16th century shipbuilding.

They hope to find the crew’s personal belongings to flesh out the knowledge of long ago maritime life. They eventually hope to display their findings at the national seashore here.

And they hope to ascertain once and for all that the electronic force field that works so well against sharks in Africa--where the technology originated--is just as effective against sharks in the Pacific Northwest.

That one’s sort of a priority.

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Search for San Agustin

Drakes Bay near Point Reyes is the sight of a search for the remains of the ship San Agustin, believed to have gone aground in the area 402 years ago.