Somewhere in the sand of the Colorado Desert, between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border, there is said to be a ship. Not a wreck on a shore. A ship buried in dry land, a hundred miles from the ocean.
The story has deep roots. In 1615 a Spanish captain named Juan de Iturbe sailed up the Gulf of California hunting pearls. The legend says he pushed into a vast inland sea that no longer exists, found the water falling behind him, and had to abandon his ship with its cargo of pearls when he could not sail back out. Geologists confirm the land there has flooded and dried many times. Lake Cahuilla once covered much of the Imperial and Coachella valleys.
In 1870 the Los Angeles Star reported that a man named Charley Clusker had found the ship in the desert, and he led several expeditions to try to find it again. He never brought anything back. Over the years prospectors and a few Native witnesses described a hull with a high prow sticking out of a dune, sometimes a Spanish galleon, sometimes a Viking longship with carved dragon heads. Each time the shifting sand covered it again before anyone could return.
As a treasure hunter, I know the desert is the best vault there is. Sand hides and sand reveals, on its own schedule.
What if a ship full of pearls has been lying out there all along, waiting for the right wind.
Desert mirage passed down for four hundred years, or a galleon still under the dunes?
