The Ship Lost in the Desert

I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and look down at that pale desert floor stretching away below you, and that far silver gleam of the Salton Sea — and let me tell you one of the great lost-treasure legends of the whole American West, because folks have sworn for a hundred and fifty years that somewhere out there in that sand lies a ship. A real ship. Buried in the desert.

Now here's the thing that makes it just possible enough to keep men digging: that desert down there hasn't always been dry. Long ago the whole basin was filled by an enormous freshwater lake — they call it ancient Lake Cahuilla — a body of water bigger than any lake in California is today, lapping right up against these mountains. It came and went over the ages as the Colorado River wandered and flooded. So there really was, once, an inland sea down there where now there's only sand and that shrinking, salty remnant.

And the story goes like this. Back in the sixteen-hundreds, a Spanish captain named Juan de Iturbe was sailing up the Gulf of California, his ship heavy with a fortune in pearls — black pearls, the old tellers always say, a whole hold full of them. And he came to a wide opening of water leading north, and he thought, why, this must be a passage through to the Pacific. So he sailed his galleon up into it — and sailed, and sailed, right up into that great inland lake, deep into the desert, chasing a way out that wasn't there. And then the water began to drop. The lake was drying, or draining back, faster than he could find his way out — and his ship ran aground, stuck fast in the mud and the sand, miles and miles from any ocean. They say he and his men walked out and left her there, pearls and all.

And there, the legend says, she sits to this day — a Spanish treasure galleon, half-swallowed by the dunes, somewhere out in that desert you're looking at. Over the years, plenty of folks have claimed they saw her: a prospector who stumbled on a wooden hull sticking up out of a sandbank, an old pioneer woman who spoke of the wreck she'd seen as a girl, wind uncovering a ship's ribs after a storm and then burying them again before anyone could bring back proof. Nobody's ever laid a hand on those black pearls. But nobody's ever quite proved there's nothing there, either.

So as you climb up away from the desert, take one more look down at that old lakebed. Somewhere down there, maybe, under a dune, a pearl ship's been waiting four hundred years for the sand to give her back. That's the kind of country this is — where you can lose a whole ship in the desert, and still be looking for it. Roll on up the mountain.