Ships of the Desert

Imperial Valley 1905

Introduction

A few centuries past, the Colorado River was much more mighty than it is today. Almost every year when the spring runoff poured down from the distant Rocky Mountains the Colorado River alternated its course like a long wet pendulum. It knew no boundaries when it poured into the desert floor over which it must travel in its race to the Gulf of California. To a passenger on a high flying jet the desert today resembles a huge piece of wormwood, testimony to the thousands of scars left in the land by the erratic and often vicious Colorado River.

There is geological evidence that, at certain times in the past, the river furrowed such a deep channel into the gulf during spring rampages that salt water from the sea poured back into the channel after the flood subsided.

The Salton Sink

The Salton Sink

On the California side of the desert is the Salton Sink, the lowest area of land within the United States, some two hundred feet below sea level. Each time the sink was visited by the Colorado, it became a lake. Each time it was deprived of water, it dried up. Fossil evidence indicates that on at least two occasions in the past, the gulf broke through the deltaplain and joined it with the sea. No one knows with certainty how many times it has been filled and emptied, but the most recent inundation occurred in 1906 when the Colorado created the present Salton Sea.

These countless transitions from sand pit to sea have left many paradoxes. Grotesque concretions, like giant mushrooms, skeletons, serpents, and mythical monsters litter vast regions of the desert floor. One such area is in the AnzaBorrego State Park where there are acres upon acres of round concretions.

Made up of sandstone cemented into shape with calcium carbonate, there is no dispute about their connection with bodies of water that have filled the Salton Sea. Another curious spectacle in the Salton Sink is a vast oystershell bed formed during one of the sink’s unions with the Gulf of California.

Averaging eight inches across, these petrified shells of the Ostrea vespertina, or ruffled oyster species, lived here about ten million years ago. In nearby areas are many thousands of tiny freshwater shells deposited during a later epoch. Many, many years past, the sink was the bottom of a vast freshwater body known as Lake Cahuilla, and primitive fish traps of the Indians still may be seen on the old water line of this lake a few miles south of Palm Desert. It was fed by the Colorado River and drained into the gulf, and there is a legend that the earth shook and that this huge body of water, covering hundreds of square miles, disappeared within a day and a night. All of this lends credence to the legend of an ancient ship, partially buried in sand in a desolate canyon of the California desert badlands.

Santiago Soeia

One of the more intriguing versions is the story told by the Sehora Petra Tucker who, before she married her prospecting husband, was the widow of one Santiago Soeia. It was Santiago who first found the ancient ship of the desert. A wealthy Mexican of quick temper, he had fled Los Angeles to escape a hangman’s noose. He took up residence in the border city of Tecate where he awaited the arrival of Petra. While he waited, he heard from an Indian peon that several ollas of gold were buried in the desert mountains of the United States about forty kilometers northeast of Tecate. The peon just happened to have a map of the gold’s location, just happened to need some quick cash, and thus was willing to sell Santiago the chart. A transaction was quickly consummated. Santiago waited for Petra to arrive, then waited in Tecate for another couple of months before chancing the trip across the border to pick up his treasure. He returned a month later with no ollas of gold, but he told Petra a strange story.

While searching for the treasure, he had entered several canyons near the floor of the desert and in the bottom of one with high sheer walls was an ancient ship with round discs on its side. Only a portion of the ship projected from the sand.

On the wall above the ship was some strange writing carved into the rock, not Indian, not English nor Spanish, not any other language with recognizable letters. The bow of the ship was curved and carved like the long neck of a bird. Santiago had brought back a souvenir of his find, a shield made of metal in the shape of a tortilla, only larger, which was one of a series attached to the side of the ship. What happened to it? It was heavy and worthless and was thrown away. What happened to Santiago? He was a man of quick temper, and he died within a year of bullet wounds received in Sonora. The location of the strange vessel was forgotten, other than that it lies in a narrow canyon some forty kilometers northeast of Tecate.

Very recently some records were discovered concerning an official inquiry that was held by the Spanish Court in 1574 in Guadalajara. A strange fleet of vessels had been sighted sailing north in the Gulf of California. The vessels resembled Galician caravels with pelican figureheads. The fleet consisted of three large and five small vessels. Because they obviously were not of Spanish origin, the Grown had ordered an investigation. The witnesses in the investigation included Spanish soldiers and Indians who lived in pueblos along the western coast of Mexico. All described the vessels in a similar manner. One of the witnesses was a Franecscan friar who was brought up in a European seaport and familiar with the sailing vessels of many nations. Never had he seen vessels such as these.

No conclusion was reached in the investigation, nor is there any mention of a vessel of this description being seen again until 1933, a year remembered in southern California because of the great earthquake which leveled Long Beach, California, and caused damage for many miles around.

Myrtle & Louis Botts

Myrtle and Louis Botts of Julian, California, often came down from their mountain village near San Diego to camp in the desert. Their favorite spot was near an area of natural mineral springs, some hot and some cold, which today are maintained as a resort by the United States Park Service. In the thirties, however, hardly anyone knew about Agua Caliente Springs, and it was then that the Bottses arrived with their tent and enough supplies to remain for a week.

Myrtle Botts was, and still is, the librarian in charge of the Public Library of Julian. She is also a serious amateur botanist and was one of the founders of the famous wildflower show held annually in Julian. Desert wildflowers depend entirely upon the rain that falls during early winter months. If the desert receives heavy rains in January or February, its floor will be wild with color in March. If the rains fail to materialize, the seeds are unable to germinate and must wait another year or more until the seasonal rains do fall. It was to survey the rain situation and to search for possible new specimens that the Bottses came to the remote desert area near Agua Caliente Springs in the spring of 1933.

On their second or third night out, they camped near the entrance to a deep canyon where there was a cold water spring. While preparing their supper, a dusty and semi-illiterate prospector arrived to replenish his water supply. Some days earlier, he told the Bottses, he had been well into the canyon where he had seen an old ship sticking out of some dirt right in the side of the mountain. The Bottses were interested, but the prospector could tell them nothing more, other than that the ship was “yonder up the canyon.” When he told them that he also knew where the lost Peg Leg Mine was located, the Bottses dismissed him as a garrulous old man and rejected his tale of the lost ship.

The following morning the Bottses hiked into the canyon in their quest for wildflower specimens for the upcoming show. They followed the floor of the defile, eyes fastened to the ground; then, as the grade became steeper, they paused for a brief rest. Mrs. Botts noticed it first.

Jutting out of the canyon wall, almost immediately overhead, was the forward portion of a large and very ancient vessel. A curved stem head swept up from its prow. Along both sides of the vessel were clearly discernible circular marks in the wood, quite possibly left by shields which at one time had been attached to the vessel. Near the bow, on one side of the ship, were four deep furrows in the wood. The craft was high enough to hide its interior from the Bottses’ view and the side of the canyon was so steep that it could be scaled only by an expert mountain climber. Indeed, he might have trouble because the wall was composed of shale and clay, too unstable to support his weight.

For a long time, the Bottses studied the curious sight, then slowly retraced their steps to their camp, taking careful note of landmarks in order to experience no difficulty in returning to the ship. The earthquake struck at almost the moment they emerged from the canyon. Both were thrown to the ground, and as they clutched the moving earth in terror, they could see their camp shaking itself to pieces in front of them. Mrs. Botts remembers their empty car bouncing across the desert floor as if it were being driven slowly over railroad ties. When the rumble had subsided and the earth once again had become calm, the Bottses retrieved their wandering automobile and gathered up their scattered camp supplies. The spring that had been cold the night before, Mrs. Botts discovered, had now become hot.

The earthquake had been a severe one, causing extensive damage in Long Beach and many other sections of southern California, but as is the case in most natural disasters, it was soon forgotten. Not forgotten by the Bottses was the strange ship in the desert canyon. Preliminary research in her library told Mrs. Botts that the vessel most nearly resembled an old Viking ship, yet she could not believe that the craft could be one of those ancient piratical vessels. Before she reported her discovery, she decided to have another look at the craft and to support her announcement with some photographs. Thus, the following weekend, the Bottses once again set out for the desert area near Agua Caliente Springs.

Once again, the couple hiked up the steep canyon, but this time when they came to the spot where they had paused to rest, their passage was blocked. Half the mountainside had fallen into the canyon, the unstable earth shaken loose by the heavy temblor. There was no sign of the ancient ship. If the earthquake had occurred a short time earlier, the Bottses realized uncomfortably, they also would have been buried under the tons of earth shaken from the mountain.

Today, Mrs. Botts is not sure what kind of an ancient ship she and her husband, and an old prospector, saw in the desert canyon. It could have been Phoenician, or it could have been Roman, but she feels that it was Viking. Eventually there will be another earthquake around Agua Caliente Springs and possibly the earth will open to display this ancient vessel.

The Seri Indians

There are other legends and tales of lost ships in the vast California desert. The Seri Indians, who live on Tiburon Island in the Gulf of Mexico, sing of one. One song recounts the arrival of the “Came From Afar Man.” Many, many years in the past there appeared at Tiburon Island a huge boat that contained many, many men with yellow hair and a woman with red hair. They remained at the island for many, many days while the men went hunting with their arrows and spears. One man, who was their chief, remained behind and lay with the red-haired woman on the boat. When the hunters returned with their game, the boat departed from the land of the Seris.

No mention is made in the song of how the visitors escaped with their lives. It was a Viking custom for captains to have their wives along. Another story in the lost ship syndrome involves a modern Viking, one Nels Jacobsen, a rancher in California’s Imperial Valley. Jacobsen reportedly found the skeleton of an ancient boat near his house some six miles east of Imperial City in 1907 and thriftily salvaged the lumber from it to build a pigpen.

There are records, however, that support the most persistent legend of a lost ship in the desert and that may have given birth to the old Indian legend of the great bird with the white wings. Thanks to the predilection of the Spaniards for forever saving anything that ever has been put on paper, the archives in Guadalajara, Mexico, tell of the experiences of a hapless young captain named Juan de Iturbe who did indeed lose his ship somewhere in the Salton Sink.

Juan de Iturbe

Until the end of the First World War, the tidelands of southern Baja, California, were one of the largest pearl centers of the world. Pearl-bearing oyster beds extended for miles along the Gulf Coast of Baja and it did not take long for the avaricious Spanish to learn of this treasure beneath the sea. (The pearling industry was destroyed in 1919 when an unknown disease killed all of the oysters.) Harvesting the pearls was closely supervised by the Spaniards. Some independent operators were licensed to work the pearl beds, but generally the harvest was reaped by salaried divers. Records were kept of the amount of the harvest, of the trials of those caught pearling illegally, of the ships of the Spanish fleet that patrolled the coast to enforce the pearling regulations, and of the occasional raids by pirates. It is among these records that the story of the young Captain Juan de Iturbe comes to light.

In 1615 de Iturbe departed San Bias in command of three ships assigned to a pearling mission off La Paz. Six months later, after a half year of exceptionally good pearling, he prepared to return to San Bias. Within an hour after his departure, his small fleet was sighted by the Dutch corsair Joris van Spielbergen who promptly captured one of the ships and removed its precious cargo. De Iturbe dispatched the other ship to warn the Manila galleon, which was due, of the corsair’s presence; then, in his own ship, he fled to the north.

The corsair elected to chase de Iturbe, knowing perhaps that eventually he would trap him at the head of the gulf. However, when de Iturbe reached the end of the gulf, he found that it narrowed into a wide channel. He sailed into it on the tide and, when through, to his amazement found himself on another large sea. Charts in his possession showed clearly that Baja was a peninsula, not an island, but there wasn’t a naval officer alive who didn’t secretly cherish the idea that cartographers were mistaken and the legendary Straits of Anian, purported to provide a passage from the gulf to the Pacific Ocean, would turn up after all. De Iturbe convinced himself that he had found it.

He sailed north, looking for passage around the mountains on the west. At approximately 34 degrees latitude, which is the present site of the Salton Sea, he found his passage blocked.

Other than for a river entering the sea, there was nothing but desert sand, a few foothills, and distant mountains. Disappointed, he turned south, but he was unable to find the wide channel to the gulf through which he had entered. In its place was a small stream, barely large enough to provide passage for a longboat. He turned back toward the north. The river that had fed this inland sea had vanished. He was landlocked. Very shortly thereafter, he ran aground. De Iturbe abandoned his ship and its valuable cargo of pearls, hiked back to the gulf, and he and his crew eventually made their way back to Mexico.

Was de Iturbe’s ship the great white bird of the Indian legend? Some historians say no. When the explorer Melchior Diaz traveled to the mouth of the Colorado in 1540, he reported no lake nor sea. More than two centuries later, when de Anza struggled through the desert seeking a land route to Upper California, the sink was still dry. Thus, say the skeptics, de Iturbe’s testimony is false. His ship is not the great white bird.

It is, however, easy to answer the skeptics. Water from the Salton Sea of today evaporates in the dry desert heat at the rate of six feet per year. A lake twice the size of the present Salton Sea could have come and gone between the visits of Diaz and de Anza.

J.P Widney

Shortly before the turn of the century, a Dr. J.P Widney advanced a plan under which the Colorado River would be diverted intentionally into the Salton Sink. In western Arizona,” he said, “there are traces of an ancient population much more dense, much more highly civilized than those now inhabiting this section of the country. There are ruins of cities, once large and populous, canals for extensive systems of irrigation, fragments of pottery so numerous that the ground seems paved with them.” The evidence of a previous civilization, he argued, was proof that such an inland sea once had existed and that it could exist again.

Never again will the Salton Sink be filled by a rampaging Colorado River. The stream is now well harnessed by a series of dams and pours docilely into the gulf below the Mexican-United States border. Most of the silt it used to carry sifts to the bottom of Lake Mead behind Boulder Dam. This does not mean, however, that when the Salton Sea evaporates it never again will be filled.

Conclusion

Below the sink is a comparatively small natural dike, an insignificant range of foothills, which holds the Gulf of California from the below sea-level sink. Steadily it is eroding. Twice a day, the tides of the Pacific are compressed into the 700-mile long funnel that is the gulf. At its opening, the gulf is 150 miles wide. At its top, the gulf is a mere 32 miles across. Huge tidal bores, more than ten feet high, batter this natural dike month in and month out, and every time they recede between assaults, they carry a little more of the range with them.

Before the Colorado was dammed, it carried tons of silt daily into the gulf and the silt acted as a cushion to the attack by the tidal bores. However, the Colorado River now has been tamed. Its silt drops into the lakes behind the dams, and the dike takes the full brunt of the tidal bores.

The Salton Sink will fill again. The cities of Mexicali, Calexico, El Centro, Brawley, and Indio will be inundated. The gulf will extend northward to the cities of Palm Springs and Palm Desert. Fortune hunters in the area will be forced to seek sunken, rather than buried, treasure.