Flor de la Mar & Cinco Chagas – Some Dusty Legends Still Deserve a Second Look

[Selwyn]

Hello all,
I’ve recently gone down the rabbit hole researching the Flor de la Mar and Cinco Chagas. Not chasing treasure, just checking if anything’s been missed in the usual narratives. Good housekeeping and all that.
Turns out, both wrecks may not have ended up quite where most believe they did.
I posted earlier, mostly to tease out fresh info or overlooked clues, but the silence has been rather telling. 60+ views, one comment, and tumbleweeds.
So here's the thing: if anyone out there still cares about either of these wrecks, beyond rolling their eyes at the old legends, I'm open to compare notes or trade thoughts. I’m not a professional or licensed anything. Just someone who connected a few overlooked dots and found the outcome… worth a raised eyebrow or two.
Not looking for treasure, glory, or to waste anyone's time. I am just wondering if there's anyone still out there who hasn’t given up on these wrecks completely.

 

[CoD71]

Right, here’s what falls out of actually reading the Portuguese sources rather than recycling the secondary literature.
The “treasure ship of all time” framing is a 20th century projection. The period chroniclers describe a different ship and a different loss.
The iconic lions: Bras de Albuquerque (Commentarios, 1557) gives you six lions, bronze. Damião de Goes (Cronica, 1566) gives you two cast iron lions from the door of the King’s palace at Malacca, of four originally taken. Two non-primary chroniclers, same iconic item, different specifics. The myth has them golden. Neither chronicler does.
The bone bracelet of the cabal is multi-source attested in Bras, Goes and Castanheda. It really was on the ship, really was lost, and mattered to the man who lost it.
The most interesting cargo detail is on the junk, not the nau. Goes records sixty Iao families. Javanese carpenters, blacksmiths and caulkers with their wives and children, slaves of the King of Malacca, being shipped to India to teach other slaves. Albuquerque was moving the Malaccan shipyards out, slave by slave. The cargo of the fleet was the human infrastructure of an empire.
And then there is the actual greatest loss, in Albuquerque’s own hand to King Manuel in Carta IX, dated 1 April 1512 from Cochim: “A carta principall se perdeo em frol de la mar”. The master chart of the Indies went down with her. He reconstructed it from memory at Cochim with the surviving pilot and Pero d’Alpoem of the Trindade, then sent the reconstruction back to Lisbon with the letter. The Livro de Francisco Rodrigues, MS 1248 in the Bibliotheque de l’Assemblee nationale in Paris, is almost certainly its working descendant.
That was the treasure that survived the wreck. Everyone has been looking for the wrong cargo for five hundred years.
Cinco Chagas I’ll save for later…