The Real-Life Shipwreck That May Have Inspired ‘The Goonies’

Forty years ago, when The Goonies hit theaters, Steven Spielberg delivered one of the most original and enduring pirate legends in pop culture history: Armed with nothing but a wrinkled treasure map and their wits, a group of misfit friends must evade criminals, dodge booby traps, and stumble through the pitfalls of adolescent calamities to find the lost galleon of One-Eyed Willy and the treasure it carried, hidden beneath the quiet coastal town of Astoria, Oregon.

It was a tale that instilled a sense of adventure into a generation of kids living in suburbia, leaving them to wonder what mysteries might be buried beneath their neighbor’s herb garden or the free clinic down the street—and interestingly enough, it may have been loosely inspired by a real galleon swallowed by the Pacific long ago.

1. The Legend of the Beeswax Wreck
2. Identifying the Ship

The Legend of the Beeswax Wreck

Astoria is a real place: the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, in fact (it was founded in 1811). But long before this foggy coastal town rose where the Columbia River meets the Pacific, the area has whispered its own legend—one that didn’t emerge from the minds of authors or filmmakers, but from the treacherous depths of history.

Indigenous people had been finding unusual artifacts—including chunks of beeswax, wood timbers, and Chinese porcelain—along the coast of northern Oregon for generations. The earliest mention of the likely source came in 1813, when fur trader Alexander Henry recorded that members of the Clatsop tribe arrived in Astoria hoping to trade blocks of wax, which they claimed came from a large ship that had wrecked long ago. As the years went by, and residents continued to collect artifacts on the beach, the story of the mysterious shipwreck seeped into Astoria’s culture and became known as “the Beeswax Wreck.” Steven Spielberg reportedly read a newspaper article about it while coming up with the story for The Goonies, and although he’s never confirmed a direct link, a spokesperson for Amblin Entertainment has said he did use the local legend about the wreck as inspiration for the film.

This legend was more than just a story, though—it had a paper trail. From the mid-16th to the early 19th centuries, massive Spanish galleons made a grueling annual trek from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco, Mexico. Each ship was loaded to the gills with porcelain, spices, and large blocks of beeswax. Honeybees weren’t native to the Americas, and the Catholic Church insisted that beeswax was the only wax suitable for crafting the candles used during mass; this made life especially difficult for monks trying to see where they were going in a dark sanctuary, and turned beeswax into one of the most precious commodities in the New World.

Ships would sail from the port in Manila and travel to Acapulco, Mexico, via the northern Pacific Ocean and down Americas’ west coast. These trips took months and mostly went off without a hitch; the ships, lightened of their initial cargo, would take on silver and head back to Manila.

But two ships never arrived in Acapulco. One, the Santo Cristo de Burgos, vanished somewhere along its voyage in 1693. Another ship disappeared in 1705. Hundreds of years later, researchers began the work of connecting the dots of the found artifacts, trade records, and Indigenous oral histories to try to determine the ship’s identity.

Identifying the Ship

Researchers and locals combed through the history of the Oregon coast looking for clues that could point them to the lost galleon and what might have wrecked it. They determined that, based on the locations where the beeswax and loose pieces of cargo were found, the only thing that could have scattered the debris that far inland was a tsunami.

The massive Cascadia earthquake and tsunami that occurred in 1700 was well documented in both Japanese history and Indigenous oral traditions. What they described was an event of apocalyptic proportions. Waves up to 75 feet high claimed entire villages and completely reshaped the coastline of the Pacific Northwest, uprooting trees and flooding forests with saltwater. The date of the tsunami allowed them to determine which ship was the likely source of the artifacts: the Santo Cristo de Burgos.

A tsunami might have explained why parts of the wreck were found so far inland—but the Santo Cristo de Burgos disappeared in 1693, so the disaster didn’t cause the shipwreck itself. What actually sank the galleon remains unknown and may never be discovered. Some have posited that the ship encountered severe storms and was unable to change course after getting too close to shore. (Oral histories from Indigenous people in the area indicate that there was contact with survivors; one Clatsop historian, Silas B. Smith, wrote in 1899 that they “remained there with the natives several months” before they were killed because “the whites disregarded their—the natives’—marital relations.”) 

But where the Santo Cristo de Burgos came to rest may have been solved. In 2022, it was announced that a local fisherman named Craig Andes had discovered large pieces of wood tucked away in a sea cave during a very low tide, not far from where beeswax and broken pieces of porcelain have been washing ashore for generations. The timber was carefully removed, and expert analysis, along with carbon dating, confirmed that it matched both the type of wood and the time period of the Spanish galleons that were once crafted in the Philippines.

Researchers had been looking for the wreck for 15 years. The discovery not only aligned with the trail of breadcrumbs left along the beaches, but also with the oral histories of the Indigenous communities who have lived along the coast for centuries. Researchers with the Maritime Archaeological Society say further analysis is underway, and they hope the discovery will lead them to the rest of the wreck, possibly still buried offshore near Nehalem Bay. Let’s hope that when they find it, it’s free of booby traps.

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