Lost Ship of the Desert

The Lost Ship of the Desert is the subject of legends about various historical maritime vessels having supposedly become stranded and subsequently lost in the deserts of the American Southwest, most commonly in California's Colorado Desert. Since the period following the American Civil War, stories about Spanish treasure galleons buried beneath the desert sands north of the Gulf of California have emerged as popular legends in American folklore.

A mountaineer, storm-stained and brown
from farthest desert touched the town
And, striding through the town held, up
Above his head a jewell'd cup.
He put two fingers to his lip,
He whispere'd wild, he stood a-tip,
And lean'd the while with lifted hand,
And said, "a ship lies yonder dead,"
And said, "Doubloons lie sown in sand
along yon desert dead and brown,"
Joaquin Miller 1875, The Ship in the Desert,
Roberts Brothers' version.

The earliest tales of a lost Spanish galleon appeared shortly after the Colorado River flood of 1862. Colonel Albert S. Evans reported seeing such a ship in 1863. In the Los Angeles Daily News of August 1870, the ship was described as a half-buried hulk in a drying alkali marsh or saline lake, west of Dos Palmas, California, and 40 miles north of Yuma, Arizona. It could easily be viewed at a distance of several miles from a mesa that lay between Dos Palmas and Palma Seca, California. The stories have given Palma Seca other names: , , and Bitter Springs, as the area was not well mapped in 1870. Expeditions were sent out in search of her, but the ship had apparently vanished into the sand and mud once again. The Galleon, according to old timers, is now under the waters of the modern Salton Sea.

There are those who claim the ship is Thomas Cavendish's Content, filled with pirate plunder; others claim that she is the Iqueue, a ship of Spanish mutineers.

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Wikipedia