Lost Ships of The Southwest
By Ed Keenan, author and cowboy poet

"A ship is never finished until she's sunk!" So said the late Gerald ("Jerry") MacMullen, historian of maritime history and co-founder of the San Diego Maritime Museum.

Sunk or stranded—maybe here in the southwest “a ship is never finished until her treasure is found.” Lost ships and lost gold mines of the old southwest have at least one thing in common. They are buried in the changing sands of time and shrouded in the mystery of being seen and then unseen, like mirages of sand and sea. Over time lost ships develop in to legends of the shifting sands—sands of desert dunes and murky seas. These tales of lost bonanzas waiting to be found— of being found and lost after being lost and found—treasure ships and gold mines, they each conjure up the same spirit!

For instance there is this legend of the “lost ship of Imperial Valley”, somewhere near El Centro, California. Blowing winds uncovered it on a ranch sometime before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1907 when yet a teen-age boy, an Elmer Carver was working for this rancher named Jacobson. He claimed to have seen the remains of the actual ship on Jacobson’s ranch. Recounting the story in his later years, Elmer Carver said, that Jacobson’s wife told him in confidence the location of the ship’s remains. She told him that, from within this mysterious boat her husband recovered an iron chest containing a horde of jewels.

History has it that Elmer Carver and his wife came to Imperial Valley poor as church mice but left as wealthy folks. While their tale is generally known and even plausibly accepted by some of the old-timers, no one else claims to have seen the remains of the ship. They just knew that the Carver’s came to El Centro as poor folks and that by some means they left very well off.

But one of the more believable ship finds took place about one hundred miles to the west, as the crow flies. In 1956 Melvin Scott, a diver off the coast of Solana Beach, in northern San Diego County, was diving with his Aqualung about fifty feet deep. He was about a half a mile off shore and came upon this ghostly outline of a ship partially buried in the sand. Inspecting it, he identified four broken masts and gun ports on each side and a muzzle-loading cannon still in place. Accordingly, he reported: “the wooden hull and timbers were in fairly good shape, apparently because of being buried in the sand.”

Adding credibility to his tale is a single historical record by a marine archeologist of Scripps Institute of Oceanography. It says, “many years ago a small sailing vessel was in tow bound for San Diego. A storm came up, the towline broke and the vessel went down near Solana Beach. The vessel had a small cannon aboard suitable for firing mooring lines. It’s possible this might be the “galleon.”

When Melvin Scott reported finding a shipwreck, it started a flurry of interest countywide. He wrote the State authorities that deal with maritime salvage and told them that what he saw was no underwater mirage. He was curtly informed that the property would belong to the State of California and that he would not get single a dime of any treasure retrieved from her.

Disgusted, he thereafter became reluctant to pinpoint where he had found the old sunken ship. However, the law regarding maritime salvage has since been relaxed a bit, making it possible for an individual to benefit from a salvage operation.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography made at least one serious attempt to locate the wreck but the weather had the bottom so stirred up that visibility was very poor. Several other underwater searches were attempted with no success, so presumably the wreck is still down there waiting for another diver.

In 1958, part of a wreck washed ashore at Cardiff, very near Solana Beach. It re-ignited the buzz and many people thought the unique piece must be part of the legendary galleon. Definite identification was never made. So, perhaps the well-known lost galleon of Solana Beach, maybe loaded with gold bars, jewels and silver coins, still awaits some fortunate diver who gets lost in the swirling sands of the ocean floor.  Who knows when it will be rediscovered since, "a ship is never finished until she's sunk" or its fortune is found.

In addition to these intriguing tales, sightings of other ships from the Salton Sea to the Anza-Borrego desert, including a Spanish Galleon, have persisted for over a 150 years. I was a personal witness to one of these reports during my childhood.

All my life my Dad was a rock hound and a darn good prospector. I recall him coming home once from one of his prospecting expeditions, probably in the Anza-Borrego area. He described a ship’s mast that he had seen sticking up out of the desert sand. He was more excited about that find than any ledges of rose quartz outcroppings or searching for tarnished nuggets on three buttes. The oddity of it all made his story believable beyond question. Who goes out in the desert looking for gold and comes back with a lost ship story?  He re-told that experience for years, and it weren’t no desert mirage. To this day I have no doubt that he saw what he saw.

Perhaps the most plausible tale of a ship lost in the desert involves the pearling expedition of Senor Juan de Iturbe in the year 1615. It is said that after a very successful pearling trip along the coastal waters of Baja California, he sailed up the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of Mexico) to explore its northern end. There, the gulf became a rather narrow channel but Iturbe determined to navigate the waterway for quite some distance, until lo and behold, the waters opened up into another vast sea that extended far and wide!

He had apparently sailed inland and drifted northwest over, what is today, Imperial Valley toward Borrego Springs and then around the mountains, to the present Coachella Valley toward Palm Springs. Eventually, he realized that his inland sea was landlocked, so he determined to return south to the open gulf. But now, to his surprise, he noticed that the tidal waters were receding fast. He found himself the victim of time and unforeseen occurrence—the wrong place at the right time. Like a fish caught in a tidal pool, in consternation he frantically sailed around looking for the outlet back to the Sea of Cortez, but to no avail. He and his ship were trapped—up a creek without a paddle! He finally became stranded on a sandbar.

Maybe if he had found the entrance to the outlet channel he could have calmly allowed the tides to return. But, for what ever reason, Iturbe felt forced to abandon ship with all its precious cargo of pearls and leave it high and dry.

Apparently, early Mexican history records that he found his way back to Mexico where he built another ship, never again to wander into shallow waters like a salamander!

Since the geographic record shows that the Sea of Cortez once extended up in to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, who knows, maybe my Dad saw evidence of the fabled lost Mexican ship with a large cache of pearls that got land locked back in the early 1600’s, in the ancient Gulf of California. 

Off and on since the time of Juan Iturbe, history records that settlers, travelers and crusty old prospectors have seen ships exposed in the wind-blown desert sand. It is believed that a valuable cargo of black pearls on the lost Mexican ship still awaits discovery by some lost treasure hunter seeking lost treasure.  Think of it—the lost finding the lost—not gold but desert pearls! And thereby hangs a tale waiting for the final chapter.

Now every desert cowpoke or chuck wagon cook will laugh and tell you that any such pearls had to come from “desert oysters” collected by castration during spring roundup—and them is rare as hens teeth!

So, sunk or not, maybe in the southwest the quote should be: “A lost ship is never finished until her treasure is found.”

Ed Keenan © 2007