The San Agustín Wreck of 1595: What Coast Miwok Villagers Made of a Galleon's Porcelain

In the late 1500s, the hunter-gatherers of the northern California coast met Spanish and English voyagers for the first time. The Coast Miwok of the northern San Francisco Bay Area were not isolated: complex trade networks had long carried their shell and other marine resources inland in exchange for obsidian, steatite (soapstone) and goods the coast lacked. But nothing in their experience matched these visitors — and the encounter foreshadowed the Spanish and Russian colonization of northern California nearly 200 years later.

The most important of those meetings, archeologically, followed a shipwreck. In November 1595, the Manila galleon San Agustín was wrecked in tamál-húye — the Coast Miwok name for today's Drakes Bay, in Point Reyes National Seashore. The Tamál-Húye Archeological Project asks what that wreck, and the goods it scattered, did to Coast Miwok life: was it the start of long-term cultural change, or did the real change come only with the colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

Working with descendant communities at every stage is increasingly recognized in archeology as more than good relations: it widens the questions a project asks and the ways complex data can be read.

Two ships, sixteen years apart

The sixteenth-century chronicles of Alta California come from five documented European voyages before the eighteenth century — four Spanish, and one English: Sir Francis Drake in the Golden Hind. Drake landed in the summer of 1579 and spent five weeks readying his ship to cross the Pacific and return to England. Where exactly he landed is debated, but most scholars agree it was in Coast Miwok country, which takes in tamál-húye.

For archeology, though, the encounter that mattered more came 16 years later.

The Manila trade. Spain's Manila trade, begun in 1573, was a main artery of commerce between Asia and Europe for nearly 250 years. Galleons built in Mexico or the Philippines for the trade carried Chinese goods from Manila across the Pacific on a northern route that met North America on the California coast, then ran south to Acapulco.

The voyage. Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño and a crew of 80 left the Philippines on July 5, 1595, aboard the San Agustín, loaded with Chinese porcelain, silk and other luxury goods. After four months at sea they anchored in a large, sheltered bay — later named Drakes Bay — to take on supplies and assemble a small launch for exploring the coast.

First contact. Cermeño recorded the first meetings as peaceful. Soon after they anchored, he wrote, a man from the beach paddled out alone in a small boat made of grass, sitting in the middle and driving it very fast with a double-bladed paddle. He came alongside and talked for a long while in his own language, which no one on board understood. Coaxed closer with friendly words, he was given pieces of silk, blankets and other small things from the ship, and went back to shore well pleased.

The wreck. Shortly afterward, a storm drove the San Agustín ashore and wrecked it. The Spaniards adapted the launch to carry the whole crew on to Mexico and abandoned the ship and its cargo. Relations with the Coast Miwok grew tenser after the loss, and at least one fight broke out over material from the wreck, as both sides tried to salvage it.

The crew stayed more than a month. It is one of the earliest documented contacts between Europeans and Native people on the northern California coast — and the last recorded one for nearly 200 years, until Spanish colonialism arrived in the late eighteenth century.

For the Coast Miwok, the Spanish departure was probably only the start of their use of the wreck: small-scale collecting, salvage when the chance came, perhaps systematic stripping, for some time after. That long engagement — above all the salvage — left the richest archeological record of early cross-cultural encounter yet identified in California, with a considerable quantity of European and Asian goods reused in Coast Miwok villages. It lies in two places: buried in the coastal village sites and middens of Point Reyes, and underwater in the remains of the ship. The project treats both as equally necessary to the story.

Reading the sources against each other

European accounts are rich, but they carry their authors' personal biases and the bias of a European world-view, and each must be weighed critically. They show the encounter as literate, elite Western men saw it. Used carefully, they still describe aspects of California Indian life at the moment of contact, before much had changed.

Oral traditions passed down through generations record some of what Native people made of these meetings. Coast Miwok and closely related Pomo narratives, though collected after contact, give a perspective no other source does — especially on the ritual and symbolic side of an encounter.

One such story comes from the Kashaya Pomo, close neighbors of the Coast Miwok to the north, told by the elder Essie Parrish to the Berkeley linguist Robert L. Oswalt in 1958. In it, long before white people came, a boat appeared on the ocean, sailing up from the south. The people had never seen a boat, and they feared their world was ending. They took the thing for a great bird floating on the sea, likely come from on high, and decided to hold a feast and a dance. Watching where it went, they promised Our Father a feast. The ship sailed far to the north and disappeared — and because it had passed without harming them, they believed their promise had turned it aside. So they held the feast, and a great dance.

Stories like this come from a cosmology very different from a European one, and that matters for the artifacts: Native people may have thought about introduced objects in quite different ways from the Europeans who were their usual users.

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence suggests that California Indians shared a belief that objects carry many meanings at once — practical and ceremonial, secular and sacred — and signify relations between people, and between people and the spirit world. Foreign goods were therefore probably taken up in complex ways, which likely varied by class, gender and age. Not every Coast Miwok person will have seen the strangers, or their things, the same way, and the project tries to account for those differences.

What the digs found

Porcelain sherds from Point Reyes archeological sites.

The finds are mostly fragments of Chinese porcelain — plates, bowls and other vessels — and iron spikes from the ship. The wreck itself has not been found; researchers from the NPS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and UC Berkeley are searching for it.

Tools, curiosities — or charms?

The central question is how the Coast Miwok recycled goods from the San Agustín. Earlier researchers offered practical answers: the ceramics were used for preparing and storing food; the sherds were collected as curiosities; or people tried working them into beads, pendants or tools and soon gave up, finding them unsuitable (Heizer 1941; Treganza and King 1968; Von der Porten 1968).

Lightfoot and Simmons (1998) proposed something else. The Coast Miwok's meeting with Drake probably took place during an important ritual period, the Kuksu ceremony. If so, people may have gathered porcelain sherds and iron spikes because they stood for those earlier encounters and for unknown worlds — not mainly as material for tools or ornaments, but as something like charms. Other possibilities follow: the objects entered other ritual practice, helped a local group build a distinct regional identity, or were used to negotiate new relations with neighbors.

Studies elsewhere have found that ceremonial life may be more open to change than everyday practice when foreign goods arrive (Marshall and Maas 1997), which makes ritual use a promising place to look for lasting change.

How the project tests the ideas

The approach is diachronic — comparing Coast Miwok practice before and after the wreck. The project first sets a precontact baseline for:

• settlement patterns
• social relations and exchange networks
• how space was organized and used
• ceremonial and mortuary practice
• material culture

Then it asks whether the encounter, or the goods, changed any of them. Did settlement or exchange shift around the Point Reyes peninsula? Did the people of Point Reyes use the objects to create an identity of their own?

Using museum collections and the original field records of the 1940s–1970s digs, the team is plotting where each introduced artifact lay and what was found with it, to tell which activities the objects belonged to. Each model predicts a different pattern.

For the everyday model, the team has analysed the porcelain to identify vessel forms and the minimum number of vessels at each site, and is comparing the proportions of each form. For the ceremonial model, Jones's (2001) point applies: breaking objects, gathering sets of them and reassembling fragments build social relations, because breaking and sharing an object ties people together. For the raw-material model, the project is going through collections and inventories from sites beyond tamál-húye.

The categories overlap. For the Coast Miwok, an object rarely had just one meaning; it could be practical and ritual at once, or practical at one time and ritual at another. Porcelain and iron, with no earlier counterpart but clear practical value, were likely wanted for use — and still carried many meanings beyond it, perhaps including status or a connection to the outsiders.

Why it matters

Because no permanent colony was founded in California for nearly two centuries after these voyages, the question here is not the one culture-contact studies usually ask — how a Native community experienced the spread of European culture — but how the Coast Miwok fitted the strangers, and what they left behind, into their own world. Drawing on collections at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and Point Reyes National Seashore, and on the particular window a shipwreck opens, the project looks at the long-term effects of a short event: a hunter-gatherer people's early brush with the expanding world economy. For communities today, understanding how those first meetings unfolded helps put them in perspective.

References cited

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Sources

Based on "The Archeology of Sixteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters in Point Reyes National Seashore," by Matthew A. Russell, NPS Submerged Resources Center archeologist, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Cermeño's account (in Sanchez's 2001 translation), the Kashaya Pomo narrative as published by Oswalt (1966), and the quoted passages of Lightfoot and Simmons and of Jones are paraphrased; an uncredited painting of the wreck is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.