Thank you Vox Veritas. As a matter of fact you are somehow related to this query of mine as I remember reading some years ago when you wrote in one of your articles, years before your new book came out, in reference to the 1605 Cordoba fleet that you believed one might have wrecked in this same Bay of Ascension, you wrote:
“In 1994 when investigating Francisco Nuñez Melian, character that in 1625 it recovered half million of pesos of the remains of the galleon Santa Margarita, shipwrecked in 1622 with the today it celebrates Nuestra Señora de Atocha in the keys of Florida, I located a document of the 1628 in that which the king authorizes him go to look for to a galleon lost in the bay of the Ascension, Mexico. Nuñez had known about this ship for a called pilot Juan Contreras, neighbor from Merida of Yucatan. In 1995 at the 97 I carried out several trips to Mexico and Central America. In an occasion I came closer to the mentioned bay and I could know for a called local fisherman Pedro that in the external part of the reef that is to the entrance, he had seen several times cannons and an it anchors like to some five fathoms of depth. With the accustomed ability that they have the fishermen to find a place in the means of the sea, it took me exactly above, and it was not very difficult to check with a tube, one chewed and some fins that exactly there about four cannons were, and a little more to the east an it anchors. When asking to the fisherman if he knew of another place with remains of old ships, he told me that in the whole reef that has some two miles long, there was not anything but that could be old”.
I have always believed Veritas that what you perhaps found in your trips to this Bay are the remains of the Santiago not the San Roque as you had stated. What makes me wonder though is that I have a document from 1660 that states that they had recovered the cannons of the Santiago, I have an exact map of where they were found so if they indeed recovered the cannons, whose cannons were the ones you saw in the Bay of Ascension?
You know that I don’t believe anything Zacarias said or did, I spent five years researching the Isla Misteriosa ordeal and I concluded that he was only trying to get out of jail claiming all kinds of lies and contradictions that were based on a catastrophe that must have shocked the whole of Europe and America for the great loss of life and gold. In the 1615-1620 periods everybody knew of the Cordoba fleet disappearance, everybody that spoke Spanish or English and this Flemish scoundrel was no exception. Similar to the effect of the sinking of the Titanic in the few years after the accident, everyone knew about it.
By the way I have always believed that Bob Marx in dealing with very “valuable” archival documentation that he came across after hours of looking, that people pay much dinero to get their hands on, simply had an “artistic license” to “modify” critical facts that the normal reader need not know. That is only my personal feeling and I have no reason to say this other than most of his information is very accurate and I understood some of his “errors” to be somehow understandable.
