Letter From Refugio
Sleeping Booty
How on Google Earth did an out-of-work musician from California stumble across the possible site of a fabled Spanish shipwreck in Melon Lake?
Eric says: I know it has been awhile since this story appeared but I am still intrigued by it. We recently purchased a home in Aransas Pass and are very close to the location mentioned. I have read so many blogs which blast this poor guy (Smith)tearing him down for various reasons. I think his resolve and sense of adventure is inspiring. Kook or no kook I can’t condemn Smith for trying. I do concede that if I were the landowner I would likely be upset too. Maybe Smith should have tried to work with them first and we would know by now if he was right or wrong about the location. I plan on taking a little kayak ride on Melon Lake soon just because the little boy in me can’t stop thinking about this! I have noticed some historical discrepancies however in the story in Jameson’s book. Mexico had already gained it’s independance from Spain in Sept of 1821 so why would a Spanish vessel laden with gold and silver be allowed to sail away from Mexico with this loot in Sept 1822? Also, I have researched the storms that hit the Texas coast from 1800 onwards and there is nothing mentioned for 1822. Can anybody offer any advice on this? Thanks (January 26th, 2011 at 10:07am)
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They ran to the car, where they waited until daybreak. Then they “borrowed” an abandoned boat they found on the bank, rowed up the river, turned into Melon Creek, turned again into a smaller tributary, and finally reached Melon Lake. They saw no signs of life aside from snakes slithering on the banks and spiders hanging in the trees. The closest house was miles away. Trying to remember his treasure map, Nathan got out of the boat and walked through six inches of water thick with coastal grass until he reached a muddy area with no vegetation. Nathan remembered that he had read that creosote from an old ship could inhibit plant growth. “We’re here!” he cried, and he ran over to hug Kathryn.
Nathan said he attempted to find out who owned the land adjoining Melon Lake. One of the first people he called was the local sheriff, T. Michael O’Connor—yes, a member of the O’Connor family. “He kept telling me, ‘Take heed. Texans don’t take kindly to people trespassing on their property,’ ” Nathan said. “I tried to be as nice as I could, and I said, ‘You take heed. My ship is in a navigable waterway.’ ”
On a return trip, Nathan and Kathryn brought metal detectors, which Nathan claims were silent until they arrived at the site. Suddenly the instruments began beeping, and the gauges swung wildly back and forth, indicating that gold and silver were under the ground. Nathan hugged Kathryn again and then danced spontaneously on his hallowed ground. “Gold and silver!” he cried. “Gold and silver!”
Still, he had no physical proof that he had found anything at all. So Nathan filed a lawsuit, dramatically named Nathan Smith v. The Abandoned Vessel, in which he sought title to the ship he claimed to have found and asked for an order preventing anyone from trying to stop his recovery efforts. He then applied for a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to excavate the site.
There is no question that Melon Lake is located inside one of the O’Connor family’s ranches. But maritime law states that if someone in a boat can get to a lake through the rivers and creeks that feed into it, then it’s considered publicly navigable. And what about marshy wetlands adjoining a lake that sometimes fill up with water after rains and sometimes go dry in the summers? The law says those too are considered navigable, no different from the Rio Grande when it slows to a trickle during a drought.
Judge Hittner held a nonjury trial in December 2008 to gauge the merits of Nathan’s claim. The property had belonged to Marie O’Connor Sorenson, one of the family’s grande dames, who had died earlier that year, at the age of 84. The executor of the estate was Sorenson’s daughter Morgan Dunn O’Connor, a striking, elegant brunette who received her law degree from St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, and who now manages part of the family’s agricultural and oil-and-gas interests (she is also a former regent for the University of Houston). She was so unhappy she had to attend the trial that she refused to shake hands with Nathan, who showed up wearing a striped suit, a striped shirt, and a striped tie.
O’Connor testified that there was no ship anywhere near Melon Lake or Melon Creek. She said that, according to local history, a house had been built from the wood and iron from a lost ship, but it was on a ranch miles from her mother’s. When Nathan took the stand, Walker, the O’Connors’ attorney, asked him a series of slightly sarcastic questions about his inability to make money in his music and film ventures. Walker then asked Nathan to talk about the other treasure-hunting expeditions he had undertaken while waiting for the court to rule on his claim. Without the slightest hesitation, Nathan declared that he had found Jesse James’s buried treasure on Google Earth as well. He explained that he had not yet gone after the loot because he thinks there is a death trap in the form of a giant teetering rock just outside the entrance to the cave.
To some observers in the courtroom, Nathan looked like, well, a kook. But in late April, when Judge Hittner finally issued his ruling, he didn’t ridicule the young treasure hunter. And though he didn’t give Nathan title to the alleged vessel, he refused to prevent Nathan from continuing his efforts to recover the ship. Based on a videotape he’d watched of Nathan and his lawyer reaching Melon Lake in an airboat and after hearing testimony that a fisherman also periodically sailed to the spot, Hittner declared that the alleged ship, if it was located where Nathan said it was, did lie “within the navigable waters of the United States.” In other words, the O’Connors couldn’t stop Nathan—or anyone else—from returning to Melon Lake to look for evidence of the ship’s existence. (The precise location has been sealed in court papers, but treasure hunters—experienced and otherwise—will be able to make a pretty good guess.) Thrilled to have a second chance, Nathan is already talking to potential investors about funding his next adventure to Texas, in which he wants to complete an archaeological survey and attempt to get an image of the ship with an expensive MRI-like scan. He hopes to receive approval from the Corps of Engineers to bring in a small tractor on a barge and do what he describes as a “minor sample dig.” Nathan has gone so far as to hunt down the project manager responsible for the salvage operations of the Titanic to ask if he would do the same thing for him.
The O’Connors, of course, will be watching. “We’re convinced he wants to dig outside the boundaries of the lake, and we’re not going to let that happen,” Walker said. The State of Texas will also be watching. “If it turns out a historic shipwreck is under submerged public waters in Texas, a private citizen doesn’t have the right to it,” Hoyt said. “Our law makes no exceptions.”
Nathan has called Hoyt and the state’s attorneys “highway robbers.” For his part, Schwartz acknowledges that the state can claim shipwrecks found under state-owned submerged land (off the coast, for instance). But he insists that the Antiquities Code does not grant the state the right to every artifact discovered in navigable waters. But even if the state does take away his ship, Nathan says he will be vindicated. “Everyone thinks I’m out of my mind. They call me a California gold digger. Well, they’re wrong. They know something is down there. They know I’ve beaten them all to it. And it’s time we take a look and see what we’ve got.” Schwartz, a reserved, soft-spoken man who took Nathan’s case on a contingency fee, agrees that some sort of dig should take place. “When I went with Nathan in the airboat to the lake, he turned on his metal detector, and there was dead silence. Then we stepped into the area where he thinks the ship went down, and the beeping began and the gauges started swinging. It was exciting.”
Because he doesn’t want to tip off the O’Connors, Nathan is not saying exactly when he will come back to Texas. But until he returns, he insists that he and Kathryn will continue to look for more buried treasure. Unfortunately, the Treasure Car has broken down for good after so many trips to Texas, so they have been forced to focus their searches around Los Angeles. Most recently, they have been taking a city bus, their trusty metal detectors in hand, out to an area near the Hollywood Bowl to look for the location of the Cahuenga Pass treasure, which Nathan also thinks he’s found with the help of his beloved Google Earth.
“I know people on that bus are laughing at me, but that’s all right,” Nathan says. “I’ve found my calling. I’m going to spend my life looking for treasure. And to all those who tell me I’m never going to find anything, I smile politely and say, ‘Just wait and see.’ ”
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