Espiritu Santo, Baja, Mexico

Treasure Hunters on Espiritu Santa, an Island off Baja California

By Mateo Garcia Elizondo

The red cliffs of Espiritu Santos, Baja, California. Mateo Garcia Elizondo photos.
The red cliffs of Espiritu Santos, Baja, California. Mateo Garcia Elizondo photos.

The sea seems calm, but it is actually teeming with life, underwater clouds of needlefish, schools of three feet wide manta rays, and even the occasional family of transiting dolphins.

I am riding a motorboat commanded by Miguel, the skipper on the boat ride out of Tecolote beach, on our way to the island of Espiritu Santo, south of the Mexican Baja California Peninsula.

I cannot take my eyes off the various layers of stone rise from the sea, sometimes white, others pale brick, others a deep emerald green. Above them, clouds of hundreds of tijerilla birds hover in diverse directions, without touching one another.

Motorcycling Down Baja California

The cliffs of the Espiritu Santo island, are straight and massive, a deep, reddish ochre. In some parts, they look like they have been cleanly sliced with a knife, while at other places the tide and the wind have slowly burrowed into the stone, forming uncanny silhouettes and faces into the cliff walls through millions of years of continuous erosion.

There is a prehistoric stillness about this imposing desert island on the Sea of Cortez, as Miguel explains that these silhouettes were once considered the guardians of the Island, and feared even by the pirates who came from Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Playa del Amor beach, on the Espiritu Santo island.
Playa del Amor beach, on the Espiritu Santo island.

“Coming here from La Paz,” he tells me, you must have passed the port of Pichilingue, which is the old name that people used to give to the sailors who landed in that port.

The Pichilingues were superstitious men, who spoke a mix of Spanish, French, English and Dutch, as well as some of the local indigenous language, and were dubbed the Pinchi Lingues, the ‘men with an awful language’.

Many of them were pirates, who came to the Sea of Cortez mainly to hide out from the authorities, which were busy patrolling the Caribbean at the time.”

Tales of Piracy

Tales of witchcraft abound in these waters, as do tales of piracy, and this is not the first pirate story of the sort I hear around Baja California. On the first day after my girlfriend and I camped out on Tecolote beach, a woman asked us if we hadn’t heard any chains at night.

It turned out that a hill just behind the beach, which the local tribe, The Pericu, called ‘the Parrot’ on account of a stone formation at the top of the mound that resembles the head of a parrot, was said to be haunted by the spirits of slaves who had been brought here and subsequently murdered by pirates, and that their chains, and even their wails of agony, could still be heard at night.

Espiritu Santo Island

Three miles across the sea from Tecolote beach, there is the Espiritu Santo Island, a thin reddish streak on the horizon. Although there are some half-dozen families of fishermen who live on the island, Espiritu Santo is a protected reserve, known mainly for being the permanent home of more than five hundred sea-lions.

The waters around the island are also a protected biosphere reserve, the birthplace of every single humpback whale in the world, which travel to this peninsula once a year to give birth and raise their young.

Traffic to and from Espiritu Santo is carefully regulated, and a permit -usually procured through an official guided tour- must be obtained to enter into the reserve. The distance to the island out of Tecolote looks narrow enough to cross it on a kayak, but under this searing desert sun, who knows how far we’d make it before we passed out from the heatstroke. So we find Miguel, and ask for his help crossing over.

A map of Baja in rock.
A map of Baja in the rock formations.

Miguel grew up in the port of Mazatlan, Sinaloa, across the Gulf. He grew up working as a fisherman, diving instructor and tour guide, and recently moved out to the more peaceful beaches of Baja. He’s been living in Tecolote beach for a few months with his girlfriend, at a beachside restaurant called La Ostra, and working the tour to Espiritu Santo. His boss, Ernesto, was born on the island and is one of the six or seven fishermen who can call themselves natives of the island of Espiritu Santo.

Netherworld in the Depths

The tour to Espiritu Santo includes snorkeling, which is always a bit like a panoramic trip, hovering above a netherworld in the depths. We swim by the rocks where the sea lions basked in the sun. One of them even came up closer, swimming in circles around us and making clear eye contact.

The fear is impossible to control when you’re facing a 300-pound wild animal, but it seemed playful, devoid of fear, and we were told that the females are cuddly, and often interact with human beings when they are done nursing their young, and feel less inclined to protect them.

The azure water around Playa del Amor beach.
The azure water around Playa del Amor beach.

We visit a small bay of white sand and turquoise waters, Playa del Amor, like a gigantic salt-water swimming pool the size of several football fields, teeming with small, translucent fish.

You could see clear through to the soft sand under the water, the explosive blast of your steps as you walk weightless, like an astronaut in the clear, warm bay. Someone played a Creedence record in the background.

From the beach, the entire island seemed like an arid desert, which had fallen from the sky into the middle of the sea. There were, Miguel told us, deer and goats and much of the usual desert wildlife on this island; cacti, as well as many species of scorpions and poisonous snakes.

There was also a species of small trees growing from the cliff-sides, locally referred to as “wild fig trees”, and a concoction from the leaves and bark were said to be your best chance of ever getting to a hospital if you got bitten by a rattlesnake.

As we sail along the island, Miguel explains to me that these are some of the most bio-diverse waters in the world. Every year, humpback whales migrate to this peninsula to give birth to their young, which is why it is said that, being born in Mexican territorial waters, “every whale in the world is Mexican.”

The Navy keeps a careful watch over these waters, which receives visitors from the entire world: oceanographers and marine biologists, extreme water sportsmen, fishermen, freedivers, even researchers shooting documentaries for National Geographic.

They are also some of the richest, he says, and he doesn’t mean it is only one sense of the word. I cannot help but notice a multitude of luxurious yachts of all nationalities. These boats are fully equipped with kayaks and diving equipment and probably made a quick stop in one of the local Marinas on a trans-Pacific voyage to take a look around the Gulf.

A seal on the rocks.
A sea lion on the rocks.

“Treasure Hunters”

Miguel tells me that some of these yachts are said to belong to ‘treasure-hunters’, people who in his own words, are “exactly the same as archeologists, but without museum permits.”

“These waters have a lot of treasures buried in them.” Miguel tells me, “In the old days, a lot of pirates used to come and hide their treasures in islands like these. Many of their ships were sunk, and the remains are still there.”

I cannot help but be enthralled by these tales of ancient piracy and modern treasure-hunters. I imagine an unknown seaman who would have witnessed the sinking of a ship charged with gold bullion and then recorded the exact co-ordinates in an old diary sold at Sotheby’s.

Then, foreign millionaires, or perhaps people funded by millionaires with yachts and sonar and diving equipment, who then head out to what used to be some remote pirate outpost in the Sea of Cortez, doing a tour of the local sea wreckage to see what they can fish out. They could probably melt all the gold in the end and put it straight into a bank.

“When night falls and the security slackens a bit, they put on their wet suits and go treasure hunting,” Miguel tells me, “Word through the grapevine, is that they do pull out some pretty handsome chests out of the water from time to time.”

Finding a Skeleton

On the beach
High noon on the beach.

Some of them are more licensed than others. He tells me how a few years ago, French anthropologists made it to the island, and they found a skeleton, completely painted in black.

It was unclear if this skeleton was found in the context of a Pericu burial site, or, as some said, that it was part of an elaborate ritual of witchcraft intended to bring harm to someone.

What turned out to be more important was that the anthropologists stumbled upon a pearl that that was uncommonly large. This uncommonly large pearl was quickly taken to France for “research”, and placed in a museum.

Gargoyle rock
Gargoyle rock, one of the island’s guardians.

This began a long tradition of international “researchers” who came to find hidden treasure and quickly expatriated them to distant lands. Treasure hunting in Baja is a serious business.

People come from all over the world to unearth these hidden stashes from another time. It’s an age of ship-raiders all over again, or perhaps the age of treasure hunters never ended. They exist, and they’re doing it down here, in the coasts of the Gulf of Baja California.

“Of course our government probably just looks the other way, you know how it is. As long as they get their share, I suppose there’s a way around everything.”

I’m hoping to learn more about this, but on that occasion, the boat ride to Tecolote beach goes by in contemplative silence, broken only to mention the passing of marlins and manta rays through the crystalline water below us. The boat-ride is always in the end, the best part of the experience, the chance to be at sea.

As we draw near the beach and Miguel mentions a tip would be nice, I can’t but think that maybe the treasure hunters he describes are bit like himself, young men from Mazatlan port, who grew up sailing, and know their way around diving equipment, who’ve maybe heard rumors or gotten a good tip from a friend, who’re out there looking, waiting for their luck to improve, for their chance to unearth a big sunken pot of gold that some crook forgot somewhere before dying, sometime long ago.

We get off the boat at Tecolote, but the vessel leaves port again. Miguel, the skipper, is off to La Paz. Just another day at sea.

Mateo Garcia Elizondo.

 

Mateo Garcia Elizondo is a Mexican freelance writer and journalist, currently residing in Paris. You can read his blog at: trippyfiction.blogspot.com

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