On June 2, 1690, as the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora del Pilar approached Guam, the captain ordered the crew to sail close to Cocos Island, hugging the coast.
The decision led to the loss of the treasure ship, which was reportedly carrying silver coins and items for trading in Asia. At the time, Guam was a regular stopping point for galleons traveling between other Spanish colonies in Mexico and the Philippines.
Nicole Delisle Dueñas of the Guam Cultural Repository described the wreck as she displayed some of the artifacts at the repository that were recovered from the ship.
“Crewmen were telling the captain to kind of go out to the high sea. He didn't listen to them, right? And so he ended up grounding out on the fringing reef right outside of Cocos Island. And, you know, we just found this really interesting history. It was the CHamoru canoes, of course, that had come out and helped the crew of the Pilar onto the island.”
CHamorus also helped the Spanish salvage what they could from the Pilar. All the crew and the passengers – Catholic friars and about 40 convicts – survived the ordeal.
Three centuries later, in 1991, a salvage operation began, with treasure hunters speculating that up to $1 billion in silver coins could be recovered from the sunken ship. An agreement required the government of Guam to get 25% of the treasure.
About 2,000 artifacts recovered from the salvage operation have been in the care of the Micronesia Area Research Center for decades.
Last week, officials announced the items would be the first MARC historical collection turned over to the repository and eventually placed on display at the Guam Museum.
'Is there treasure?'
The museum’s curator, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, said when treasure hunters set their sights on the Pilar, they were hoping to find gold and silver.
But the wreckage of the Pilar had been exposed to 300 years of relentless ocean currents, shifting sands, earthquakes, powerful storms and a world war. Typhoon Omar battered the island in 1992, after the salvage operation began, further disrupting recovery efforts. Searchers using metal detectors to look for iron were frustrated by the amount of military debris in the waters around Guam.
The complex and dangerous salvage operation continued for years.
In researching the history of the Pilar’s discovery, Bevacqua found newspaper columns and stories in which officials speculated that the riches of the Pilar could greatly benefit the people of Guam.
“At that time, the focus was entirely on, ‘Is there gold? Is there treasure? Are we going to get it?’ In fact, Joe Murphy at that time, and you know, he was writing in his column, basically saying, you know, some of the leaders are saying that if we find gold, if we find silver, if we find the treasures of the Pilar, you could build an entire tourist economy around this. People from around the world will come to visit a collection that's worth a billion dollars,” Bevacqua said.
Treasures of the Pilar
Needless to say, GovGuam coffers are not overflowing with gold doubloons and pieces of eight, and the Guam Museum won’t be displaying a billion dollars worth of silver and gold.
Few coins were ever recovered.
But as Bevacqua explained, treasure is in the eye of the beholder.
For CHamorus at the time, the items now being kept at the repository – iron nails, door handles, cannonballs and pieces of other weapons and tools – were precious metals worth more than a treasure chest full of coins.
“If they had gotten their hands on this, they would have sought ways to reshape it, to heat it up, to rework it, to turn it into a type of tool that they could have used,” Bevacqua said. “So iron, at that time, that type of metal, incredibly valuable.”
Bevacqua said the items that were recovered help tell the history of the CHamoru people, connecting modern-day people with those who lived and worked on the island hundreds of years ago.
“This is the point of museums, right?” he said. “That which stays in the past can be brought again, so that lessons can be learned.”
Dueñas said researchers have reviewed letters and documents to find out what happened to the crew and passengers rescued by the CHamorus.
“There was still a heavy resistance against the Spanish in the northern islands. So one of the letters was, they were hoping to use some of the wreckage to build another ship to quell the resistance,” she said.
The friars stayed on Guam about six months. The convicts, who were on their way to Manila, had different ideas about their future.
“They had planned to kill the Spanish governor and all the soldiers in Guam,” Dueñas said. “One of them had eventually confessed, and this is how the Spanish government became aware of the plan. So all of just this really interesting history, and these side stories all around the Pilar.”
Although the world may never learn what happened to the silver the ship was carrying, the people of Guam will keep the other treasures of the Pilar – the iron nails prized by their ancestors, cannonballs that enforced Spanish power and insight into life on the island in the 1690s.
“If we want to tell the story, not from the perspective of treasure hunter, not from the perspective of Spanish galleon captains, or even just the Spanish missionaries, but we want to tell the CHamoru people's perspective, this here is super important,” Bevacqua said.
