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?
Private Detector: Nathan Smith has survived snakes, lost maps, and lawsuits in pursuit of the treasure.
Photograph by LeAnn Mueller
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)
One morning in October 2006, Nathan Smith, a 38-year-old musician from Los Angeles, jumped into his dented red 1972 Thunderbird, picked up his friend Kathryn Brown, and headed to Texas for the first time in his life. He drove nonstop, except for bathroom breaks, pushing the car as fast as he could through Arizona and New Mexico. Not long after he crossed the Texas state line, a DPS trooper pulled him over for speeding and asked him where he was going. “To find treasure,” Nathan exclaimed. “I’m on the hunt for buried treasure!” The puzzled officer let him go with just a warning, and Nathan was soon barreling down the highway again, finally arriving outside the tiny town of Refugio, north of Corpus Christi. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Nathan drove to a bridge over the Mission River and stopped, his heart pounding. He turned to Kathryn, a pretty 27-year-old graduate of Duke University, and said, “We’re here.”
Three days earlier, Kathryn and Nathan had been at a Borders bookstore not far from his West Hollywood apartment when he spotted Lost Treasures of American History on a discount shelf. The book is a compilation of legends, more than two dozen in all, about forgotten mines, shipwrecks, and hidden gold. At that very moment, Nathan, a handsome guy with a big smile and short dreadlocks, was looking for something that would change his life, “something that could capture all my passion,” he later said. Besides composing music and playing guitar in bands, he had designed Web sites for small companies, and he had made a couple films that he had released on the Internet. Most recently he and Kathryn had finished shooting a horror movie for $20,000 titled Skeletons in the Closet, about a greedy banker who is haunted by the ghost of a man from whom he has stolen some land.
As Nathan started flipping through the pages, he turned to Kathryn and said, “We can do this! We can find one of these treasures!” He paid $10 for the book, walked to a nearby Internet cafe, rented a computer, and went to Google Earth, a site that allows users to zoom in on detailed satellite images of places around the globe. On a whim, he decided to investigate a shipwreck that occurred near Refugio. In 1822, according to author W. C. Jameson, a Spanish ship laden with gold and silver had encountered a hurricane along the Gulf Coast. To avoid sinking, the captain had navigated the vessel into Copano Bay and sailed into the adjoining Mission River, only to run aground in a tributary. The crew was surrounded and slaughtered by the Karankawa, and settlers later carried away much of the lumber and iron from the doomed ship. But no one ever found the treasure. “Somewhere in or near this creek, covered only by a thin layer of prairie soil, lies one of the greatest lost treasures in the history of the United States,” wrote Jameson. “Experts suggest it may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
After staring at pictures of the area, Nathan suddenly leaped up from his computer, shouting, “I’ve found it! I swear I’ve found it!” And that was how he and Kathryn ended up 1,500 miles from home on a bridge over the Mission River in Nathan’s Thunderbird, which they had dubbed the Treasure Car.
It sounded like an absolutely ridiculous scenario, that a rank amateur with no experience whatsoever in map reading, navigating, or salvaging would believe he had discovered the site of a fabled Spanish shipwreck. Was Nathan Smith out of his mind, carried away by what he himself admitted was “gold fever”? Or had he truly stumbled across the clue to a fortune he could claim as his own—the ultimate case of beginner’s luck?
For the past several months, a parade of attorneys has been showing up at a federal courtroom in Houston to make heated arguments about just that. Nathan’s attorney, Dick Schwartz, the managing partner of a prominent civil law firm in Houston, has told U.S. district judge David Hittner that Nathan has found the location of the wreck beneath part of a small lake. According to federal maritime law, Schwartz has argued that the spot is considered publicly accessible “navigable waters,” and anyone who finds an abandoned ship in such a location has the right to dig it up and keep the spoils.
But the owners of the property that surround the lake insist that the ship—if, in fact, there is a ship—is not in navigable waters. And the owners, incidentally, are not the type of people who take kindly to someone suddenly showing up with a shovel, especially a dreadlocked outsider from California. They happen to be members of the O’Connor family, one of the most powerful clans in South Texas. Thomas O’Connor, who came to Texas from Ireland in 1834, was reputed to be the state’s richest man when he died, in 1887, having accumulated 500,000 acres and 100,000 head of cattle. In 1933 his heirs became even richer when wildcatter Hugh Cullen discovered a giant oil field on their land, resulting in millions of dollars in royalties. “Needless to say,” said Ron Walker, an O’Connor family attorney in Victoria, “we’re not going to let someone come down here and do whatever he wants, all because he bought a book in a bookstore in Los Angeles. That’s just offensive.”
As if that’s not enough, attorneys for the State of Texas have also taken an interest. “We have a very important law called the Antiquities Code of Texas,” said Steve Hoyt, the state marine archaeologist for the Texas Historical Commission. “And it says that any historic wrecks in public waters belong to us. We are here to preserve our antiquities.”
“Oh, man, talk about some complications,” said Nathan cheerfully, sitting one recent morning in his West Hollywood apartment with the windows open, sirens blaring away in the distance. “It’s just like a movie!”
Indeed, the story of Nathan’s hunt for the Spanish shipwreck plays out partly as an old-fashioned adventure tale, partly as a courtroom drama, and most definitely as a comedy; think of it as Raiders of the Lost Ark meets The Verdict meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For nearly two centuries, treasure hunters have been wandering Refugio’s Barkentine Creek (also known as Burgentine Creek), which is named for a type of Spanish ship that sailed to Texas during the nineteenth century. But when Nathan studied a picture of it online, he noticed that the creek didn’t connect to the Mission River, as the book had said. So he jumped over to the Web site for the General Land Office, which posts early maps of Texas. Looking at an 1851 map of Refugio County, he spotted Melon Creek, about twenty miles away, which did connect to the river. He returned to Google Earth, hunted down Melon Creek, and noticed that it made a sudden turn to the right and then back to the left. He zoomed in closer, to a spot where the creek flowed into Melon Lake. To his amazement, he saw a large, dark, shoe-shaped image where the water made its turn. As unbelievable as it sounds, Nathan was convinced he was looking at the outline of a ship. “And I had to get to Texas right then and there just to make sure that shoe shape existed,” he says.
As they approached the bridge that October night, Nathan asked Kathryn for the map. She rummaged around the backseat, then suddenly exclaimed, “Nathan, I left it in L.A.!” Undaunted, he persuaded her to swim across the Mission River with him and hike in the general direction of the creek. When they stepped toward the river, they saw a large shape moving through the water. “An alligator!” Nathan screamed. “Or a wild hog that can swim!”
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