Nao San Diego

A merchant ship converted to defend the colonies of the Indies

With the conquest and organization of the Philippine Islands by Miguel López de Legazpi, the history of Spain's colonial empire in the East Indies and its transoceanic trade began. The port of Manila became the commercial transit station between China and Mexico since, in 1573, the first two galleons crossed the Pacific loaded with exotic products from the East.

The nao San Diego was a merchant ship probably in charge of carrying out commercial missions in the area when, two days before the death of King Philip II, the Dutchman Oliver Van Noort left Rotterdam, specifically on the 12th. August 1598, with a squadron of four ships. After a journey full of difficulties, he arrived in the Philippines on October 16, 1600. Meanwhile, hostilities between Spain and England continued, supported by the Netherlands.

The Battle of Fortune Island

The ship San Diego and the patache San Bartolomé, both under the command of Antonio de Morga, president of the Manila audience and lieutenant general of the governor, hastily armed and equipped in the port of Cavite (island of Luzon) (they were equipped with ten cannons the first and with four hundred Spanish, Filipino and Japanese men) went to sea on December 12 to head towards the enemy whom they found two days later near Fortuna Island. Noort also had two ships, the Mauritius, a 270-ton captain, and the fifty-ton Eendracht.

The San Diego boarded the Dutch flagship in a desperate maneuver, despite having suffered a cannon shot on the waterline. The crew managed to jump onto the bridge of the enemy ship and, when the Spanish had seized the Dutch flag, the enemy ship began to catch fire. Antonio de Morga ordered the moorings to be broken to separate the ships, believing that the Dutch ship would go up in flames, but, inevitably, the San Diego, seriously damaged, sank and with it one hundred and fifty men. The Mauritius managed to put out the fire on board and, still afloat, fled.
The Eendracht was captured by the San Bartolomé, which had gone out in pursuit and was unable to help the San Diego and, later, its captain was captured and executed in Manila.

The technical data of the San Diego ship

It is not known exactly the origin of this ship, but it can be stated that it was a cargo ship and of large size, judging by the only reliable data that could be obtained from the remains of the hull: the 23.73 meters length of the keel in its lower part, that is, 41.26 bank cubits. If we apply the "ace, two, three" rule of Spanish construction to this dimension, corrected according to the criteria of García de Palacio (1587), the result is a boat 35.3 meters long, 11 meters wide and 5.6 meters long. of depth, which gives a tonnage of 645 tons or its current equivalent of 893 tons.

The search for the wreck

For more than three years, information was searched in the Indian archives of Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam and the Vatican, until finding the clues that led to the remains of the San Diego.

Finally in 1991, thanks to submarining and after an intense search in the seabed near Fortuna Island, a team led by French underwater researcher and archaeologist Franck Goddio discovered its remains lying 52 meters deep. Starting in January 1992, the scientific excavation of the wreck began, being co-financed by the French ELF Foundation and Goddio himself, while the extraction of pieces was rigorously documented, in exhaustive records, by archaeologists from the National Museum of the Philippines, controlled by its director, Father Gabriel Casal. The work continued until April 15, 1993.

Archaeological excavation work

The underwater excavation work began by marking the exact place under which the San Diego was located with a large red float. The excavation support device included an archaeological research catamaran equipped with nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers. The boats that worked on the recovery were the Kaimiloa, a tug boat with a large rear work platform, the Osam Service, a small fifty-foot tug, the cargo Lift, and a small two-seater mini-submarine, the Small.

The team for the dive was made up of staff from the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology, as well as two leaders and fourteen professional divers. The team also included other specialties such as archaeologists, doctors, photographers, cooks and the crews of the different boats.

Diving in the San Diego

The first dives were, logically, of reconnaissance, finding at first glance a mound 25 meters long by eight meters wide and with a height of 3 meters. The San Diego rested scattered on a hill facing west, because in that place two large anchors lay pointing to the front of the ship. During the first days, the diving equipment was prepared and a bell was installed to serve as an elevator for the divers.

This system could transport two divers linked to the surface by two tubes that supplied them with oxygen to control decompression levels. Two compressors supplied a large reserve of oxygen from which the tubes were connected, and a decompression chamber was always ready in case of emergency.

The divers were divided into two groups, one that used the bubble while the other dived with autonomous equipment. Numerous oxygen lines were installed for autonomous divers to carry out decompression stops. The total number of divers available was eighteen, so it was decided that they would work in pairs so that the work on the bottom would not be interrupted, the time of which did not exceed forty minutes.

After the bottom work, the divers made, on average, about an hour of stops at the different decompression levels before rising to the surface. As Frank Goddio, the director of the excavation, comments: "the teams followed each other like a well-paced ballet and, on the surface, the two chief submariners carefully monitored each one's dive time and were responsible for ensuring good air supply as well. as well as communications with the fund."

At the bottom of the sea each diver worked with water extractors, vacuum cleaners and containers of different sizes weighted with lead to store the recovered objects. Each container had a different color that corresponded to a work area of one meter by one, that is, the maximum surface that a diver could excavate in forty minutes. During the entire excavation there were practically no incidents, except for two divers who were stung by scorpion fish and bothered by the moray eels, who had made the old stoneware and porcelain vessels their lair and refused to leave them.

The archaeological pieces found and the discoveries of the expedition

The importance of the discovery of the San Diego ship has been fundamental from many points of view: naval, weapons, instruments logically, of reconnaissance, finding at first glance a mound 25 meters long by eight meters wide and with a height of 3 meters. The San Diego rested scattered on a hill facing west, because in that place two large anchors lay pointing to the front of the ship. During the first days, the diving equipment was prepared and a bell was installed to serve as an elevator for the divers.