"The Shipwreck of the La Galga"

The famed ponies of Asseateague and Chincoteague barrier islands on the coast of Maryland and Virginia are drawn from descriptions 

of the legend of Spanish horses swimming ashore from the sinking Spanish frigate "La Galga" after it hit a sand bar 

during a hurricane in September 1750.

by Ellen Rice

The original pen & ink 11" x 14" above was drawn by Ellen (minus the border) for her

​Treasure Beaches of the Mid-Atlantic map. For the lithographic print above,

she recreated the map's border, a design she found on a piece of shipwreck pottery on the Delmarva coastline.

Prints are available.

The Lore, the Mystery and the Facts

about the ponies of Assateague and Chincoteague Islands 

by Ellen Rice

One of the reasons I loved my earlier divided career as a journalist and feature writer, fine artist and newspaper illustrator was discovering the stories behind the stories and bringing facts into focus.

Lately my thoughts have been turning to two ships, the Victory Chimes and the Spanish ship that legend says brought the first horses to the Maryland and Virginia sister barrier islands of Assateague and Chincoteague.

I wondered how the legend started. What was it's origin. There had to be one. Once I started digging, I couldn't stop. One new discovery after another uncovered another.

Following is what I discovered.

The story of the Chincoteague ponies originated with oral storytelling between early settlers and the indigenous tribes of the area. Spanish records and DNA tie bring the stories told full circle.

Records show that in August of 1750, the 54-gun, 631-ton, two-bridge frigate, three masted Nuestra Señora del Carmen, otherwise known as Galga Andaluza, was leading a convey of merchant ships on it's way from Havana to Spain and perished on the shores of Assateague Island. 

ndigenous oral history from surrounding Algonquian-speaking groups describe  "great canoes with wings" running aground and breaking apart in heavy surf and large, majestic, powerful "spirit dogs" or "holy dogs" kicking through the waves to struggle ashore. on the shifting sandbars of Assateague. The native people had never seen a horse before. 

Settlers in the late 1700s also recorded that the "Assateeg" people used hand signs and gestures to explain that a Spanish ship filled with "Mustang horses" had wrecked off the coast. They described moving people to the mainland by swimming and by canoe while the horses were left to swim ashore.

A core element of the tale centers on the indigenous people's relationship with the ocean. Long before Europeans arrived, the barrier islands were used for seasonal hunting, fishing, and harvesting. The ocean was deeply respected, and the tribal tradition emphasized a duty to the sea.

When La Galga struck the shoals, the oral accounts highlight the bravery of the native men who launched their heavy dugouts into the violent, churning hurricane surf. The indigenous rescuers focused their efforts entirely on pulling the drowning Spanish sailors and passengers from the water. The horses, being powerful swimmers, were left to their own instincts to reach the beaches of Assateague safely.

After the shipwrecked horses claimed the marshlands, the native people chose not to domesticate or capture them for heavy labor.

Legend says the indigenous peoples viewed the surviving horses as creatures that now "belonged to the island" and the spirits of the wind and sea. They observed the horses adapting to the harsh environment—eating the coarse salt-marsh cordgrass and digging into the sand for fresh water. The native population chose to coexist with the feral herds, viewing them as a permanent fixture of the wild barrier landscape rather than livestock to be conquered.

The scientific validation linking Assateague horses to Spain was discovered by accident at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Zooarchaeologist Nicolas Delsol was analyzing ancient livestock remains from Puerto Real, a 16th-century Spanish colonial settlement in modern-day Haiti. While sequencing mitochondrial DNA from what was originally misidentified as a cow's tooth, Delsol discovered the sample was actually a 16th-century horse molar fragment.

When the research team sequenced this ancient genome—the oldest domesticated horse DNA ever recovered in the Americas—they cross-referenced it with a global genetic database of modern equine populations. 

Instead of finding a direct match with modern horses on the Iberian Peninsula as expected, the computer models revealed that the the closest living genetic relatives to that 500-year-old Spanish horse are the Chincoteague and Assateague ponies.

• Haplogroup A Link: The ancient tooth sample belonged to equine haplogroup A, a maternal genetic lineage that originated in southern Europe and Central Asia. This specific lineage has been tracked to horses living in Spain since the Bronze Age, establishing the foundational Iberian ancestry of the Assateague herds. 
• The Lineage Split: The high degree of genetic similarity suggests that the Assateague ponies share a highly specific, localized lineage with the horses Spanish conquistadors and ranchers brought to the early Caribbean colonies.

What This Means for the "La Galga" Myth:

While a DNA sequence from a single tooth cannot act as a GPS tracker to pinpoint an exact shipwreck event (like the 1750 grounding of "La Galga," it lends heavy credibility to the Spanish origin folklore. 

Prior to this study, the prevailing scientific consensus supported the theory that the horses descended from common English livestock left by mainland colonists in the late 17th century. The genetic link firmly proves that the herd's foundational ancestry relies on early Spanish colonial imports rather than standard British farm horses. 

Early colonists claimed they could actually see the wooden skeleton of the wrecked Spanish vessel trapped in the sandbars. The community custom of "Pony Penning" was first described in writing in 1835. It was already referred to as an "ancient" custom where islanders rounded up the wild herds. 

It is thought that the exact location of the remains of LaGalga is known and that what remains of the wreck is buried in sand and salt marshland adjoining a cove, in a spot delineated in official records written by the surviving Spanish captain of LaGalga. There is a stalled legal battle between Maryland and a treasure hunting company  for permission to dig for the wreck.

And that is the end of my explorations into the legends, lore, mystery and known facts about the wreck of the Spanish ship "La Galga" and a genetic link to the famed ponies of the islands of Assateague and Chincoteague, Maryland and Virginia.

For now,. If the company is ever allowed to search for "La Galga" in its target location, I'll add the information here.

Ellen