Real Life 'Goonies'? A Mysterious Shipwreck Found Off the Oregon Coast

Short Wave

NPR

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🗓️ 13 July 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

For centuries, mysterious blocks of beeswax and Chinese porcelain have washed up on the Oregon coast, leading to legends of pirates, treasure, and a sunken Spanish galleon. It became known as the Beeswax Wreck, and it inspired centuries of treasure hunters—and maybe even Steven Spielberg, as he created The Goonies. Now, researchers have found nearly 330-year-old timbers from the ship in a hard-to-access cave. This is the story of how a team of volunteer archeologists are working to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the Pacific Northwest, using old-school detective skills and one well-timed natural disaster.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.4	What if I told you that in a cave on the Oregon coast, there is a long lost treasure from
0:10.6	a Spanish galleon?
0:13.1	I know, it sounds like I'm describing the plot of Gooney.
0:16.9	Hey, my friend, the mouse!
0:18.9	Hey, let me look, that says 1632.
0:20.9	Is that a year or something?
0:22.5	But what if I told you that maybe, just maybe, Stephen Spielberg was inspired by a true
0:28.4	story when he set goones in the town of a story at Oregon?
0:31.9	Look, here's some metaphor!
0:33.4	That's all that Spanish junk right there.
0:37.1	Yeeeeeee!
0:38.1	And truth has been wet!
0:39.1	You see, there's a stretch of the coast in the Pacific Northwest, that is so deadly,
0:43.3	it's known as the graveyard of the Pacific.
0:47.0	It has claimed more than 2000 shipwrecks.
0:50.2	And a few of those wrecks remain so mysterious, they've grown, in bellegents.
0:55.8	The first written record of this wreck was fur trader in Astoria.
1:01.1	And so Astoria Oregon is founded in 1811.
1:04.8	And in 1813, one of the fur traders there writes in his journal,
1:09.0	the Indians from the South bring us blocks of beeswax to trade
1:13.8	from the Spanish ship that wrecked many years ago.
	...

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