Santa Margarita, sunk 1601, recovery near Rota, Mariana Islands

Santa Margarita Recoveries

My cousin Jack Harbeston has been involved with the recovery of items from the ship Santa Margarita for many years now. They have found some of the most beautiful artifacts and if you click on the link you can see some of them. Here is their goal:

 The goal of the project is to collect evidence about a ship a) deposited on a windward reef four hundred years ago and b) episodically disturbed since then by violent events such as earthquakes and typhoons.  As a result of the natural violence, practically all the evidence has been moved at least once (in many cases several times), and the extent of dispersal can only by hypothesized until the excavation is complete.

Santa Margarita Status Report

                             March 24, 2006

Government Relations:  One by one, we are gradually overcoming the obstacles preventing us from completing the Santa Margarita project.  The federal permit has now been amended (two weeks of work which took six months), and the amendment of our Water Quality Certificate is being negotiated with the CNMI Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ) by our lawyer on Saipan.  Our lawyer is also meeting with the new governor and with key members of his administration.  They appear to be cooperative and fair minded.  We may finally see some adult supervision of a few overzealous environmentalists.

Those few have been trying to make the case that IOTA must stop  work for 21 days in June and again for 21 days in July, following coral spawns.  However, documents garnered from IOTA's files prove that both the federal and CNMI government agreed to limit the work stoppage for coral spawns to no more than one stoppage of five days per year. Why then would they try to stop us two times for a total of 42 days, taking away the two best work months of the year?  It demonstrates the tactics we must deal with on a more or less continuous basis.  

WHY WAS THE SHIP THERE?

As the waves forced the un-tethered Santa Margarita onto the coral reef off the coast of Rota in 1601, one of the most significant trends in world history continued to evolve in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In just more than the century since Christopher Columbus moved maritime trading to a global scale, the great European nations developed the technology and skills to conquer the world's oceans and to transport the goods and treasures they found in Asia and the Americas between those continents, and their homes in Europe. More…

I hope you will find this article enough to pique your interest. I am including just a few of the many pictures of the artifacts that can be found on the Iota Partners web page.

Carol W. ©