Murphy Givens: Treasure fleet wrecked on the island of death

CORPUS CHRISTI - The recorded history of Padre Island began with a terrible massacre. A fleet of Spanish galleons sailed from Veracruz on April 9, 1554, for Seville loaded with gold and silver from the mines at Zacatecas. It was a treasure fleet, Plata Flota, the silver fleet.

Caught in an early storm, the Santa Maria de Yciar, San Estebán, and Espíritu Santo wrecked on the long white island, Isla Blanca. One ship made it back to Veracruz to tell of the loss of the treasure fleet.

When the ships ran aground, 300 crewmen, soldiers, priests and passengers, including women and children, struggled ashore. Some swam to the San Estebán and brought back arrows and two crossbows. They agreed to walk to a Spanish settlement, thinking they were three days from Tampico, but they were about 40 walking days instead of three.

On the seventh day, Karankawa Indians attacked. Soldiers with the crossbows killed three Indians and wounded more. When the Karankawas retreated, the ship survivors began their walk down the island. They didn’t carry much food.

After five days, they ate shellfish on the beach and licked dew from island grasses, not knowing an elementary fact that fresh water could be found by digging in the sand two or three feet where a layer of freshwater rests on the saltwater. The Indians returned to the attack and many of the Spanish were killed. Children cried, but their mothers were too weak to carry them. The blazing sun aimed daggers at them.

The Karankawas captured two stragglers, made them undress, then let them go. The Spanish thought it was their clothes the Indians wanted, so they undressed and piled their clothes on the sand. Women and children were sent ahead for safety, since the attacks came from the rear, but the Indians went around and killed them all.

At Brazos Pass, the men made rafts of driftwood to get across. One man, tired of lugging his belongings, meant to throw them away but he threw the bundle overboard that held the crossbows. Without protection, almost all the men were slain. Of the 300 who began the flight of terror, two survived. One escaped and returned to the shipwreck and another badly wounded man made it to Tampico.

A salvage fleet anchored at the site of the shipwreck and divers brought up the silver and gold bullion from the San Estebán, which was easily found with its masts above water. The Santa Maria de Yciar and Espíritu Santo were found by dragging a chain between two ships. The treasure was recovered and sent to Seville.

Centuries passed. In 1804 Padre José Nicolás Ballí received a grant for 51,000 acres, a third of the island, for about $40. Padre Ballí established Rancho Santa Cruz 27 miles from the southern tip of what was called Isla de Corpus Christi. Padre Ballí left running the ranch to his nephew, Juan José Ballí II.

The Ballís soon had a thousand head of cattle on what was called Padre Ballí’s island. After the padre died in 1829, his nephew ran the ranch until it was destroyed by a hurricane on Aug. 4, 1844.

In February 1846, when Zachary Taylor’s army was concentrated at Corpus Christi, the general sent two reconnaissance details to find the best route to the Rio Grande. One squad under Capt. W.J. Hardee explored the long white island, where they saw wild cattle left from Padre Ballí’s herd and found the skeletal remains of an Indian attack and other skeletons lashed to a ship hatch cover. Because of a scarcity of grass and a want of water, Taylor chose to send his army down the inland route.

In 1847, a schooner wrecked on the island carrying John V. Singer and family. He planned to establish a shipping business at Point Isabel when Singer, his wife and two children were caught in a storm and washed ashore on Isla del Padre Ballí. They built a house of driftwood and became a Crusoe-like family, growing vegetables, running cattle, and combing the beaches for salvage. The Singer homestead was on the site of Padre Ballí’s Rancho Santa Cruz, which they called Las Cruces Ranch.

Helen Chapman, wife of an Army major, described her visit to the Singers. “Their house had been built by joint labor of their hands and all their furniture consisted of wood thrown upon the shore. The children are beautiful and perfectly healthy. The wife is a great, strong, muscular looking, good-humored woman; she helps him with his outdoor work.”

On a trip to New York, Singer loaned his brother Merritt $500 to market his sewing machine. John later got a shipment at Brownsville, a Singer Sewing Machine, reputedly the first to arrive in Texas.

In the same neighborhood of Singer’s Las Cruces Ranch, Richard King in 1854 bought more than 13,000 acres from a niece of Padre Ballí, though King never ran cattle on the island or made it an active part of his working ranch. (As an aside, in earlier columns I wrote that both King and Mifflin Kenedy had cattle on Padre Island; I believe that was wrong. Perhaps King bought the land on Padre Island land for some purpose other than ranching.)

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate authorities invited Singer, a Yankee of uncertain allegiance, to leave the island, so he buried a clay jar filled with jewelry, gold and silver worth $60,000 to $80,000 and moved the family to Flour Bluff. Like others there, the Singers engaged in the salt trade. A salt works was located at Flour Bluff near the Laguna Madre.

Because of the blockade, salt became a valuable commodity. The South suffered for lack of salt, not only to season food but to preserve it. Salt was gathered on the shores of the Laguna Madre and Baffin Bay and transported on flat-bottom scows. Salt could be sold inland for $8 a bushel or traded for food. It was better than Confederate dollars. After federal troops captured Mustang Island, efforts to stop the salt traffic intensified, with Union forces under orders to “dissolve the cargo if you cannot capture it.”

When the war ended, Singer tried to reclaim his buried treasure, but storms had changed the topography and erased his landmarks. After his wife died and another hurricane in 1867 covered the ranch with sand, he gave up and left for Honduras. Some day, it may be that a storm will unearth an old clay jar filled with John Singer’s long lost treasure.

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This is the first of four columns on the early history of Padre Island.