On the morning of November 12, 1870, Charley Clusker set out from San Bernardino, California, in search of a 255-year-old Spanish galleon loaded with pearls and other treasures. A veteran of the Mexican American War, Clusker, then 60, was a lifelong explorer who had come to California years earlier in search of gold. According to newspaper reports, he had discovered a Spanish galleon in the Colorado Desert, in the southeastern corner of the state, but was forced to turn back to civilization after running out of water and nearly dying of dehydration.
The Daily Alta California, a newspaper published from 1849 to 1891, noted, "Mr. Clusker is esteemed by this community for his honesty and sense of duty. He certainly believes he has found THE SHIP, and everyone here believes him. He starts again tomorrow, taking with him several barrels of water." Alas, when Clusker returned to what he believed to be the ship’s location, he couldn’t find it, and he never did.
Over the next century and a half, other sightings were reported, all of them unsubstantiated, like grainy black-and-white photos of UFOs or the Loch Ness Monster. No one could say for sure that there was a centuries-old ship lying abandoned somewhere in California’s millions of acres of desert. Yet the search for it became a mystery to be solved, evoking powerful memories and fantasies of the American Southwest.
According to legend, King Philip III of Spain commissioned the galleon in 1610. It was built in what is now the city of Acapulco, Mexico, and took two years to complete. Captain Juan de Iturbe is said to have sailed the ship up the Gulf of California on a pearl-hunting expedition. There are differing accounts of what happened next. Iturbe may have stopped briefly near present-day Mulegé, on the east coast of Baja California, to help a sinking ship and retrieve its cargo. He may also have tricked some Native Americans into giving him their pearls.
In any case, the galleon eventually reached the top of the bay, continued northwest up the Colorado River, and followed the river into one of its much shallower straits deep into what is now California. Iturbe is believed to have hoped to find the long-imagined sea passage connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Instead, the galleon was swept away by a fast-moving tidal current a wave formed by water flowing through a narrow passage and drifting across the shallow desert and all the way to Lake Cahuilla, just northwest of the Salton Sea. At this point, somewhere around the 34th parallel, the galleon appears to have washed ashore on a sandbar. Stranded in the California lowlands, Iturbe abandoned his ship and its loot and disappeared into the desert forever.
In 1933, librarian Myrtle Botts, like Clusker some 60 years earlier, found the galleon once. Botts was hiking with her husband in the Anza-Borrego Desert, near Mexico. After hearing from a prospector about a ship protruding from the side of a nearby canyon called Canebrake, she managed to catch a glimpse from a distance, which she later claimed. Like Clusker, Botts and her husband were ill-equipped for the hike and decided to return later to see the ship up close. However, they were unable to find it when they returned.
Other notable efforts to find the galleon include a 1949 expedition led by three UCLA students and an ongoing effort led by John Grasson, a former editor of Dezert Magazine. It is worth noting that Botts, like the UCLA students, believes the ship was Viking, not Spanish. It is also worth noting that there is no evidence for this proposition any more than there is for a Spanish galleon magically carried across the California desert by a wave.
But that is not important. The mystery of the galleon persists not because there is evidence but because there is no evidence because Clusker, Botts, Grasson, and all the others who have gone searching want to believe that the desert is a magical and unknowable place. They want to believe that the ship is there and cannot be found, and whether they realize it or not, that is what their faith demands. Every once in a while, one of them sees or stumbles upon something or someone concrete or believable enough to feed the legend. That’s why Clusker and his imitators excite us they give us enough detail, enough truth, to make us wonder if maybe, just maybe, they’re not as wild as we think. Maybe they’re onto something.