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Jun 29 15 2:55 PM
Momma don't allow no trollin round here.Administrator
LOST SHIPS OF THE DESERT
Is there an ancient sailing craft lying half-concealed in the sands of the Colorado Desert? Such a ship has been reported by emigrants, prospectors and other travelers who claim that she lies with her bow buried deep and her richly carved stem raised high above the sands. The usual theory is that it is a mirage-like most of the exciting tales that come out of the desert-always a few miles away, but when a mirage really gets down to business, the results can be startling!
Tales of a Spanish galleon lost in the sands of the Colorado Desert keep recurring, from an amazing variety of sources. One of the most persistent made the pages of the Los Angeles Star in 1870. It seems that hundreds of years ago, when the waters of the Gulf of California came up into the desert, a pirate ship sailed up the Gulf. It was caught in some cross currents and went aground on a sand bar. The crew died, and the ship was left stranded there with almost a million doubloons and pieces of eight in her hulk. It's only when the wind blows and the sand clears that you can get a good look at her, and then the same wind comes along and covers her up again. The Star locates the wreck about ten miles from Dos Palmas. The newspaper gives a graphic description of the time when the Gulf occupied the entire valley, and, in fact, connected up with the Pacific Ocean through San Gorgonio Pass and Los Angeles. The Star did a series of articles speculating that the ship might have been one of the units of King Solomon's navy, or the craft that carried the ten lost tribes of Israel to America; and for the latter offered proof that the tribes never reached America but died of diptheria in the Sandwich Islands! Another idea advanced was that a war-like people from the Indian Sea took a tempestuous voyage to the Gulf of California. Here their ship, Bully Boy, sank in treacherous quicksands. Her hull was made of teakwood and did not rot. The Digger Indians of California are descendants of this Shoo-fly tribe.
The Los Angeles Star continued to keep its readers buying papers by reporting a search for the ship in its edition of November 12, 1870. It wrote, "Charley Clusker and a party started out again this morning to find the mythical ship upon the desert this side of Dos Palmas . Charley made the trip three or four weeks ago, but made the wrong chute and mired his wagon fifteen miles from Dos Palmas. He is satisfied from information he has received from the Indians that the ship is no myth. He is prepared with a good wagon, pack saddles, and planks to cross the sandy ground." On December 1 the Star printed this story from the San Bernardino Guardian, "Charley Clusker and party returned from the desert yesterday, just as we were going to press. They had a hard time of it, but they have succeeded in their effort. The ship has been found! Charley returns to the desert today, to reap the fruition of his labors. He was without food or water, under a hot broiling sun for over twenty-four hours, and came near perishing." Charley had found a great Spanish galleon, with ornate carvings, crosses and broken masts, sunk in the desert sands several miles from any water. The Star readers waited in vain for further news of the galleon. Historical novelist, Antonio de Fierro Blanco, in his book The Journey of the Flame, tells of a party that left Mazatlan in 1615 on a pearl-hunting and trading expedition into the northern end of the Vermilion Sea - the Gulf of California. After they passed Point San Felipe, homeward bound, they began to look for the Straits of Anian that would carry them from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Instead they found a narrow entrance leading to an inland sea (presumably the area now occupied by the Salton Sea). While they were exploring the shores of this body of water, a great cloud burst occurred in the adjacent mountains, sending quantities of debris into the sea. This landslide choked the narrow inlet through which they had come. They spent weeks trying to find another outlet, until the water began to recede as if by enchantment, and their ship was finally grounded. They were obliged to leave it in the desert with its vast treasure of pearls aboard.
Subsequently, a boy named Manquerna, from Sinaloa, said dig in 1774 he was taken by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza as a mule-driver on the exploring trip from Sonora to the California coast. When they started crossing the desert westward from the Colorado River, he was sent out to the right of the course traveled by the main body of explorers, to seek a different route. While he was traveling at night to avoid the heat, he stumbled upon an ancient ship, and in its hold were so many pearls that they were beyond imagination. He took what he could carry, deserted de Anza, and finally reached the Mission of San Luis Rey. Later, he spent many years trying to find the ship again.
The desert actually has had several ships sailing its sands. Before the present Salton Sea was formed, the Liverpool Salt Works, operating in the bottom of the dry sink, built a three wheeled sand yacht similar to an ice boat, and used it on the packed bottom of the old salt bed. In the late 1890s an inventor came to the desert with a wagonload of lumber and the necessary ironwork for building a ship. He pitched his tent in the vicinity of Kane Springs and proceeded to build a contraption in the general shape of a boat, with mast and sail and four broad-tired wheels. But the wheels were not big enough and the craft made only about a hundred feet before it wobbled into an eroded cut, shook the one-man crew overboard, and staggered unguided across the sand. it finally bumped into a weed hill and toppled over, breaking the mast off about four feet above the one-piece cross-board deck.
In 1862, according to the Desert Magazine of El Centro, California, when the gold rush to La Paz, Arizona was in full swing, a boat twenty-one feet long was built by the Los Angeles firm of Perry and Woodworth for a band of gold-seekers. They expected to use it crossing the Colorado River. The boat had a mast and sail and four wheels. They loaded the amphibian with provisions, hitched two teams to it, and started out on the two hundred fifty mile journey. Somewhere between Whitewater and Dos Palmas the teams gave out and the craft was abandoned.
But back to those legendary ships. The very real navigational hazard of the Colorado River's immense tidal bore might well have caught an unsuspecting sailing ship, carried it inland and dumped it there. Persistence of such legends in both Indian and frontiersmen lore make it hard to completely discount them. The sands tell no tale.