The Lost Ship of the Desert is the subject of legends about various historical maritime vessels having supposedly become stranded and subsequently lost in the deserts of the American Southwest, most commonly in California's Colorado Desert. Since the period following the American Civil War, stories about Spanish treasure galleons buried beneath the desert sands north of the Gulf of California have emerged as popular legends in American folklore.
Video Lost Ship of the Desert
Stories
The "Lost Galleon"
The earliest tales of a lost Spanish galleon appeared shortly after the Colorado River flood of 1862. Colonel Albert S. Evans reported seeing such a ship in 1863. In the Los Angeles Daily News of August 1870, the ship was described as a half-buried hulk in a drying alkali marsh or saline lake, west of Dos Palmas, California, and 40 miles north of Yuma, Arizona. It could easily be viewed at a distance of several miles from a mesa that lay between Dos Palmas and Palma Seca, California. The stories have given Palma Seca other names: Soda Springs, Indian Springs, and Bitter Springs, as the area was not well mapped in 1870. Expeditions were sent out in search of her, but the ship had apparently vanished into the sand and mud once again. The Galleon, according to old timers, is now under the waters of the modern Salton Sea.
There are those who claim the ship is Thomas Cavendish's Content, filled with pirate plunder; others claim that she is the Iqueue, a ship of Spanish mutineers.
Pearl ship of Juan de Iturbide
This may refer to the same ship as the Legendary Lost Galleon, however the Pearl Ship on it's own has always been placed in a distinct location, North East of El Centro, California. In 1907 a man named Nels Jacobsen, a farmer in El Centro, discovered antique ship wreckage on his farm. After a severe windstorm it was uncovered from a large sand dune near the back of his lot. He went to town and hired a field hand at the saloon, so he could go into the city. After this trip to Los Angeles, Mr. Jacobsen returns Mysteriously richer. Mr. Jacobsen later purchases a large farm lot in Imperial, and builds the first two story brick commercial building in town. This would become home to the US Post Office, the barber, saloon, general store, gun shop, and a hotel upstairs. This property today is located at the corner of modern day 8th St and Imperial Avenue. The block still houses the new US Post office building and an old farmhouse. A Circle K Union 76 gas station is on the brick building's former site on the corner.
According to his field hand, the "Jacobsen El Centro Ship" contained Black Pearls, Yuma Black Gold (Arsneic impurity), mexican silver, and small amounts of blue Sapphires. All of these are common trade items of Spanish interest in the Pacific Americas at that time.
A pearl ship is rumored to have been seen as recently as the 1970s near Superstition Mountain, on a military base. Another report puts it in the desert farther North Near Ocotillo Wells. There have been numerous anecdotal reports, however it is unknown which of the three ships these could be..
The real story is quite complex, as there were actually three different pearl ships. In 1609, the King of Spain commissioned three Caravels to be built at Acupolco, New Spain for the sole pupose of charting, navigation, and merchant exchange. The fleet of ships were completed in 1612 and entrusted to a retired Spanish Conquistador Captain Alvarez de Cordone. His two Assistant Captains for the smaller Caravels were Juan Iturbide and Pedro de Rosales.
The three Caravels were built based on the drafts of Christopher Columbus' small caravel, with one larger, one shorter and wider with shallower drafting. The three ships were Ordered to explore and chart the newly discovered "Inland Waterways" of the Cahuilla Sink and Coachella sink, surrounding modern day Salton Sea and Colorado River Delta.
At that time the Ocean Sea level was five feet higher than today, and the Salton sink was flooded to roughly that level. Today the surface of the Salton Sea is roughly 180 ft below sea level, with a brackish stream flowing downhill from Launa Salida in Mexico. This would give the Northern Sea of Cortez a reach roughly to Whitewater in the North of Coachella Valley.
Early on in the trip the crews began trading with Natives for pearls. Cordone was a smuggler as well, and was looking primarily for Gold. He traded unfairly with Native Tribes and soon ran into trouble. Cordone's ship was attacked his ship seized after he delivered torn rags to the Natives en lieu of quality garments. Nearly captured, he was severely injured and escaped as Iturbide rescued his skiff. He was transported back to Acapulco on Iturbide's ship, where command was passed down to Juan.
It is Rumored amoung Native Americans of Yuma that the Captured Caravel made it's way to Glamis where they ran aground in a marsh. Unable to free the stuck craft, the Natives burned it to the waterline and left it.
The humble merchant ship Captain Juan de Iturbide re-embarked on his Royal Commission, now the Commander of the Cartography Expedition. His crew sailed the shallow-drafted caravel up the Gulf of California to locate his other two ships. Ultimately he uncovered the fact that the inland sea did not connect North to San Francisco, rather terminated at mountains near modern day Palm Springs. Rosales' ship made it North into the Lake Cahuilla marshes as well.
Cahuilla Lake is an extinct ancient seabed, which alternately becomes freshwater or a brackish saltwater basin, as it fills with runoff from the Colorado River. The River has changed it's course over time due to flooding and earthquakes. As such the Delta from the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers has slowly filled in the Sea of Cortez. This sandy wash separates Imperial Basin from the rest of the Gulf of Baja. Thus, periodically connected to the gulf this basin was already in the process of drying up somewhat permanently.
After exploring the lake for several days, Iturbe found Rosales, who was stuck on a marshy reef near the Western Shore. Pearl hunting while charting inlets often leads to this ultimate conclusion. After loading most of the cargo of Gold and black pearls into the smallest Caravel, they headed South. Soon Iturbide and Rosales found themselves unable to keep the ship in deep water, yet again.
After sticking the final ship in a mud bog on the Eastern shore near modern day El Centro, they abandoned ship.
Iturbide and Rosales were forced to lead the crew by foot to the Spanish settlement at San Louis del Rey (near Yuma) on foot. They did manage to bring away what a small army of conquistadors could carry, however leaving behind a fortune in Gold and black pearls which were never fully recovered from any of the three ships. At that time Yuma was still Oceanfront property, and they were able to be recovered by a Galleon in 1615.
Sixteenth-century records from New Spain indicate that the De La Cadena family had a pearl-diving monopoly in Baja California, after purchasing the lease rights from the crown thereafter. They operated dozen of small Caravels in and around the Salton Sink as Lake Cahuilla dried up between 1620 and 1860. Undoubtedly numerous other ships have sunk in the area, further complicating the possibility of positively identifying any specific wreck. [1]
Newspaper reports have indicated one such ship, Possibly that of Rosales has been seen in the desert. Invariably found and lost several times, there are several stories about it having been looted. A mule driver traveling with the de Anza expeditions through Alta California was said to have removed pearls in 1774. Around 1908, an El Centro farmer named Nels Jacobsen was said to have found a very small chest of jewels, which he quietly sold in Los Angeles. He used timber from pearl ship to build his pig pens.
The Viking ship, or the "Serpent-Necked Canoe"
The Viking stories originated around 1900 from the Mexicans and Indians who live in the Colorado River delta region near the Laguna Salada basin. The ship is consistently described as an open boat with round metal shields on its sides in the badlands west of Mexicali, Mexico.
Around 1933, Myrtle Botts, a librarian from Julian, California, had an encounter with an old prospector who showed her photos of what she called a Viking ship. He gave her and her husband directions to the location but an earthquake prevented the Botts from following the prospector's trail to the ship. Julian's Pioneer Museum, which inherited Myrtle Botts' papers, also inherited those directions.
The Julian Pioneer Museum is not in possession of any records regarding the Viking ship mentioned in this story.
The ferry boat or river schooner
This story really grew out of an effort to explain or debunk the Lost Galleon story. It is thought that an abandoned ferry or steamboat that had broken away during a Colorado River flood and had been left dry in the vast sands of the river delta is the origin of the rumors. Others claim that it was a schooner that gold-seekers wishing to search the more inaccessible portions of the Colorado River had built in Los Angeles and hauled through the desert by a mule or oxen team until the animals perished, leaving the boat mired in soft sand.
The ferry boat story changed over time more often than the Lost Galleon story. One incarnation said that a small ferry (a two-man sweep) was built away from the river in a place a hundred feet or so above sea level, where a source of wood was found, and that a team of six (or more) oxen perished hauling it through the sand near Los Algodones.
Maps Lost Ship of the Desert
Evaluation of the legends
From a smattering of first-, second- and third-hand accounts, a variety of fictional (especially graphic and cinematic) variations of the Lost Ship stories have been created. Not surprisingly, the first-hand accounts are extremely rare. Many of the above references fit the Lost Mines and Urban Legends molds, where the story passes from ear to ear with all evidence disappearing along the way.
Searching for and finding the remains of a Lost Ship is now rather problematic. The greater part of the Salton Sink has been submerged under the Salton Sea since 1905, and much of the adjacent land is under military control and has even been used for bombing ranges, rendering on-the-ground searches highly hazardous and/or illegal.
Lands adjacent to Laguna Salada in Baja California, and between the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea, regularly receive wind-blown sand from the desiccated delta of the much-diverted Colorado River, generating vast sand dune systems. Aerial searches using ground-penetrating radar might reveal ships' remains, but there has not yet been an agency that undertook this project and revealed its findings. Whether or not any such ships actually existed, the legends persist and remain entertaining to many.
From a scientific and geographical basis, what is the probability of a ship sailing into the area? Around AD 1500, the lake was 26 times the present size of the Salton Sea. It has flooded and dried eight times between 1824 and 1905. In 1540 Spanish explorer Diaz was in the area, and by 1700 to 1750 the lake had infilled. Presently there is a "high ground" in Northern Mexico, of 23 feet, or 6+m. Thus a ship of 8 foot draft would need to have an additional 30 feet of water, above "sea level". While "king tides" of summer and winter are the highest, and conceivably a storm surge could add further water building up, wind-blown up the Sea of Cortez, 30 feet of additional depth seems highly unlikely.
Media renditions of Lost Ship stories
This is a media timeline list of material related to the "lost ship" in the California desert; it shows how the story has changed in each generation's telling.
Note: Although most written items are a paragraph or more long, and sometimes lengthy articles, some are only a brief sentence or two in passing of what the author had heard and thought about a ship in the desert story.
1800s
1900s
2000s
See also
- Mahogany Ship, a similar legend concerning an alleged shipwreck in Victoria, Australia
- Desert Rat Scrap Book
- Calico Print magazine
- Desert Magazine
- Francisco de Ulloa
- Harry Oliver
- San Diego Reader; "Stay Away From Pinto Canyon" by Robert Marcos, June 2009. http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jun/03/cover
- Sahara (2005 film)
References
External links
- More Lost Ships from the Harry Oliver Fan Center site - tales of submarines, an aircraft carrier, and wagonloads of booze, in the Southern California deserts
- "Lost Ship of the Desert" website
- http://www.maritimehistory.org/content/search-second-three-pearl-ships
Source of article : Wikipedia
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