He put two fingers to his lip, He whispere'd wild, he stood a-tip, And lean'd the while with lifted hand, And said, "a ship lies yonder dead," And said, "Doubloons lie sown in sand along yon desert dead and brown," The earliest tales of a lost Spanish galleon appeared shortly after the Colorado River flood of 1862.
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.
This legend may refer to the same ship as the Lost Galleon, but its own story has always placed it in a distinct location, closer to the sand hills west of El Centro, California.
The story goes that in 1615, Spanish explorer Juan de Iturbe embarked on a pearl-harvesting expedition, during which his crew sailed a shallow-drafted caravel up the Gulf of California.
A high tidal bore carried him across a strait into Lake Cahuilla, a postulated contemporaneous saltwater basin periodically connected to the gulf which was already in the process of drying up permanently.
After exploring the lake for several days, Iturbe found himself unable to sail out again, whereupon he beached his craft and made his way back to the nearest Spanish settlement on foot, leaving behind a fortune in black pearls.
In 1907, a farmhand named Elmer Carver noticed odd-shaped fence posts while working on Niles Jacobsen's farm in Imperial, California.
Around 1933, Myrtle Botts, a librarian from Julian, California, had an encounter with an old prospector who reported seeing a ship lodged in the rock of Canebrake Canyon.
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.
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.
[2] 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.
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.
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.
+Bill Boyd: "Lost Ships of the Desert" (book, p. 461) by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration of Northern California, 1967 (book) by Choral Pepper & Brad Williams, 1967 (book, p. 71) by Lake Erie Schaefer, 1968 chapter: "Desert Pearls" Ray Weiss: "Letter to the editor" chapter by Al Masters: "California's Fabulous Dune-Locked Pearl Galleon" Jeff Ferguson: "Pearl Galleon of the California Desert" Harvey Grey: "Phantom Ship of the Gran Desierto" Harold O.
It was destroyed by an arsonist in Dec. 6 2006 Bob Difley: "The Lost Ship of the Mojave" Cecilia Rasmussen: "Were there Spanish Pearls Before Brine in Salton Sea?"
By Florine Lawlor The article is about a hiking trip to view petroglyphs which are located in Pinto Canyon, west of the Yuma Desert.