After filling his 50 ton ship with a sufficiently large fortune in pearls, Iturbe sailed on past San Felipe in search of the Colorado River mouth. Assuming he had found the long sought Straits of Anian, the fabled passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, he sailed on and eventually went aground on a sandbar in a vain attempt to locate a continuation of the Straits. From the highest mountain he saw a vast body of water winding toward the northeast the Colorado River , but he could not find the entrance.
On his return voyage to the south he could not find the narrow opening to the Vermilion Sea and again went aground. Manquerna then told of working as a mule driver for Juan Baptista de Anza who was searching for a land route from Sonora to Alta California. Fevered by this wealth, I abandoned my comrades, and, riding toward the ocean as far as my mule could carry me, I climbed the precipitous western mountains on foot. Are there lost ships in the desert? The great tidal bore of the upper Sea of Cortez and the Colorado River is a dangerous navigational hazard and an unsuspecting sailing ship, without aid of charts or navigational aids, may have been carried through a narrow opening into an inland sea and deposited on the shallow bars.
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Explorers, traders, pirates, and even pearling ships that do not return can tell no tales. The persistence of such legends in both Native American and frontier lore makes it hard to completely discount. When the right conditions of wind and shifting sands combine, will a mast or ornately carved hull emerge from the grave?
And will it just as quickly disappear again? Only the one who is in the right place at the right time—and sees it— will know for sure. And they may not tell. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Today, the Salton Sea is the largest body of water in California. Sometime in the mid 19th century, a Cahuilla chief named Cabazon told a white visitor the story — already several hundred years old — of a great white bird sailing there from afar.
This could be a reference to a Spanish ship. Grasson pointed to the striated rock that rose all around us.
Mojave Desert Lost Ship
A map showing California as an island, an common misconception even into the early 18th Century. The legend includes a history of California from Cortez to Born in Cleveland in , Grasson enlisted in the U. Army after high school and worked as a cook. After his discharge, he went to Los Angeles in , hoping to become a comedian.
He once met Jay Leno, but asked me not to repeat the story of that encounter because he thought it was salacious. I fear, also, that Grasson was too nice and too Midwestern for the likes of the Comedy Store. Audiences appeared to agree. To make a living, Grasson sold carpet. In , Grasson moved out to Orange County, because it was cheaper to live there. Then, that became too expensive. Like many others who lived in or near Los Angeles, Grasson found real-estate prices pushing him East, into Riverside County and beyond, ever deeper into the desert, until he ended up in Banning, where he has lived for the last 11 years.
About 10 years ago, one of his co-workers told Grasson he was too intense and needed a hobby. Here, in the creosote wilderness, he found a tranquility he had never known before: Hundreds of thousands of people visit the deserts of California each year—Death Valley National Park alone attracts more than a million tourists. Most of these do not return to search for ancient treasure ships.
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Two factors drove Grasson into the realm of obsession. He became an avid visitor to TreasureNet. He also read Philip A. That tribe, he says, is concerned only with self-enrichment, willing to abuse property rights and historical artifacts in the pursuit of some long-lost trove. It is enough for Grasson to live inside the legend, the way a believer lives inside a religion, never questioning its outer bounds.
He is also driven by a slight sense of grievance, a conviction that academics are errant in their near-unanimous assertion that there is no desert ship. He knows they look down on him, but he also thinks he knows more than they do.
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At the same time, he spends more time pouring over documents than trekking through the desert. In the parking lot of a small Indian casino where we stopped for lunch, Grasson pulled from the back of his Jeep a copy of The Last of the Seris , a book by Dane Coolidge about the indigenous people of Tiburon Island, in the Gulf of California.
Grasson also had Golden Mirages , the book that first inspired him a decade ago.
Bailey might not have many more facts than Grasson, but he has does have the force of conviction, annealed by the passage of time. We cannot subsist on faith alone, but can we subsist without any faith? Are we ready to become mere aggregations of lifehacks, corporate efficiency our only goal?
But even so, there has always been just enough to keep going. Like Bailey many years before, he refuses to consign the desert ship entirely to the realm of fiction. Promising leads have vanished like a cactus mouse in the undergrowth. The desert ship is buoyed by legend, but scuttled by facts. And if there was a ship on the desert floor, where did it go? Myrtle Botts, the librarian who said she saw it, claimed it was buried by an earthquake. Even Grasson concedes that a part of it should have remained above ground.
The Lost Treasure Ship of the Mojave
The desert is a changeable place, but not so changeable that an entire ship can disappear from view overnight. Brian Dunning, who hosts the popular Skeptoid podcast, investigated claims about the lost desert ship in He concluded that no Norsemen sailed up the Gulf of California: A 16th-century Spanish ship seemed the most plausible to Dunning, but he discounted this as well, largely on the grounds of paleo-hydrology: Given the course and depth of the Colorado River, it could not have deposited a ship in some of its more popular mythological locations in the Colorado Desert.
Others have reached more or less the same conclusion as Dunning. In , the Los Angeles Times concluded there were plenty of craft lost to the saline depths of the Salton Sea, but these belonged to the U. Navy, which had a test site nearby. Confronted with facts that pummel his theories—or the lack of facts to back up his beliefs—Grasson retreats into an uncertainty he thinks benefits his cause. Death Valley Jim, who has written a dozen books about desert lore, agrees.
And whatever he made was hard-won.
The Lost Treasure Ship of the Mojave by Robert Gustaveson
In other words, Grasson has plenty in common with the WWCs—i. Many expeditions were sent out in the search for the ship, But the ship soon vanished under the sand again. Many of the expeditions reached failure because of the huge amounts of land to cover in the Mojave desert. Also the short of supplies held many groups to a halt.
One man known for his expedition was Charley Clusker. Charley had set out on an expedition to find the lost ship.
Mojave Desert Lost Ship
Charley came back to his town with the news that he had found the lost ship of Mojave. When charley went back to the site of the ship he could not find it and searched for another 6 weeks to only come up short.
Many have set out for the Lost ship of the Mojave. Many have said they have seen it and know where it is.