Porcelain in the Wreckage | Drain the Oceans

I grew up here in Portland. As a child, we all loved Indiana Jones. But it was actually really in high school when I was able to take an anthropology class, and it really piqued my interest. And then in community college, I started taking archeology classes.

The coast is not forgiving to the artifacts that we're finding. They're often broken up in small chunks of what we would find. Even though we've got only fragments, they can really tell us where they were made, when, and even who for. The first thing you notice about these blue color designs is that they are Chinese.

So why are Chinese porcelains being brought to Oregon? We found the shards were from large plates and cups, matching European desire for large meals in months of hot chocolate. This is likely a cup; we don't really know what the foot rim was meant to be or what the purpose of it is. But apparently, it was a very big thing with the European market at the time.

Using all this data together, we have come to a date of 1690, and what's intriguing is that it's 120 years before any Europeans arrived in Oregon. That beach on that side, there's a lot of porcelain that seems to be right. So basically, what you're seeing is material like directly on the opposite side of where we currently are.

Yeah, and you've recovered some porcelain. Yeah, just north of here. Lots of it. Yeah. So, you know, you go here to there to there. It kind of lines up, you know. This is an underwater environment known by local fishermen as a place where they've hung nets. And that's always a great indication of a place that could be parts of a shipwreck.

Are we clear? That's perfect. Okay. We're looking at the data as it's being collected, and nothing was obviously sticking out. I should have more coffee this morning. And suddenly, we saw this one area where there was this linear feature. It looked almost like the spines on the back of a stegosaurus.

There's definitely something out here. We're starting to pick up already some linear features in an otherwise sandy environment. Yeah, that doesn't really look like rock. Well, here already. Yeah. Here we’re starting to pick up and see more of this.

Yeah, it is four or five meters long, something like that. Maybe that's the broken mast. Yeah, look, it's got a hollow shadow in the middle. There’s a whole notch out in this. This is really where we see it in.

Oh, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at that. Look at it up here in the... Wow, look at the bow, you can see the stern. Look, it’s almost like a bow and a stern. Sometimes X marks the spot. Could that be the Beeswax? It could be.