Legends of the Lost

LEGENDS OF THE LOST The Ghost Ship in the Desert Has Enthralled Fortune Seekers for Years

Few legends are as preposterous as that of the Ghost Ship, a magnificent sailing vessel that inhabits the desert north of Yuma and shows herself only when the wind is strong enough to blow the sand from her bow. Then she appears, seeming to rise from the Earth's bosom. But soon the wind shifts and tosses the sand back over the ship like a veil, hiding her again from the eyes of the fools who, at the risk of their gullible necks, swear she exists and even set out into the brutal desert to prove it.

Over time have come accounts of men so enamored of the legend that they have loaded their very lives onto the backs of burros and ridden out from Yuma looking for the Ghost Ship.

Their efforts have produced some marvelous visions, and some equally marvelous prose, published in newspapers and magazines from San Francisco to New York.

In September, 1891, the Arizona Enterprise of Florence published these fine words, inspired by a man who put his reputation behind the sight he swore his eyes beheld: "I saw before me the outline of a sailing vessel. Every portion of her was clearly defined, yet a haze or a peculiar, indescribable light was cast upon the scene. It was too late an hour for a mirage; besides this, the view was not stationary, the "The vessel... was about 80 feet in length, 18 feet breadth of beam, and of about 40 tons burden. The hull sat well out of the water which was plainly visible while the bow arose straight above the deck. The stern also sat high out of the water, after the style of Chinese junks, and two masts, fore and aft rigged, gave the vessel a very odd appearance, unlike any I had ever seen.

"As strange and startling as was the weird scene, I was more than astonished at the sounds I heard. The creaking, straining noise of a sailing vessel running before a stiff breeze was plainly heard while the distant notes of a sailor's song fell upon my ear."

Surely, such a spectacular vision could occupy only the mind of a man influenced by too little water, or too much whiskey.

The Enterprise tells us the expedition in question occurred early in 1882, four years after two German prospectors showed up in Yuma, suffering great distress and telling of losing a companion in the desert. But their comrade did not merely disappear. Oh, no. His fellow Yuma adventurers swore that he'd been "shanghaied and taken off on the ghost ship," which seemed to float before them "as a cloud."

It's hard to know in whose imagination this ship first sailed. Many claim to have seen it in locations as varied as the Colorado Desert east of the San Bernardino Mountains and on the Palomas Plain of southwestern Arizona.

I circled the plain by car, setting out from Gila Bend, not so much to see the unseeable ship but to examine the terrain where she lives. It was flat, unwelcoming, even vaguely hostile, a place suitable to the machinations of ghosts, who, after all, always prefer their own company.

Writers tackling the phenomenon of the desert ship have sent interpretations and explanations gusting across the continent with gale force.

The Los Angeles News, back in 1870, said the ship was discovered by Indians when a saline lake, glistening on the desert, dried up, and the receding waters brought forth the ship.

I found a musty magazine full of quotes from a windy old chin-stroker who declared the ship was British and named the Content. She set sail in 1587, suffered a mutiny, and ran aground at the north end of the Sea of Cortes. The waters receded in time, and the vessel stayed put.

Our informant recounted the fable, told by an elder of the Tohono O'odham tribe, of an Indian waiting for the wind to reveal the vessel, then crawling aboard to haul valuable artifacts from her bow.

"The old ghost appears in the form of a three-masted barkentine," said our storyteller.

"It's only been seen a few times by Indians over the centuries, and the last time was over 100 years ago."

Tom Brown, leader of the 1882 Yuma expedition, concluded that the bear's head growling from the ship's bow proved she was English, and her rigging left no doubt she belonged to the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

"She may be, and probably was, one of the lost vessels of that patriotic pirate, Sir Francis Drake," said Brown, "who made his first expedition up this [California] coast in 1578."

Interest in this oddest of sights got extensive airing in The Cosmopolitan, a New York magazine, published in September, 1886.

The story tells of another prospector, not named, who, failing in his effort to find mineral wealth in the nearby mountains, started for home and became lost. When he rode his horse to the crest of a ridge to find his direction, he spied a great ashy-white valley with not a protuberance of any kind to break its flat monotony. Except for the object a mile out, "rising like an islet on a glassy lake," the battered hulk of a vessel lying partially tipped to one side, as if it had drifted broadside upon a sandbank, its broken masts projecting 10 or 15 feet above the deck.

Imagining all manner of wealth in the ship's belly, the prospector trembled with excitement at the discovery as he pressed toward it. But the ground refused passage.

It broke beneath the weight of his horse, and together they sank into a deep mire, unable to proceed. When he tried turn-ing for home, the prospector discovered that the flesh on his horse's legs had been eaten nearly to the bone from contact with powerful alkali deposits. He had no choice but to destroy the animal and walk.

Only through grace and good fortune was he able to make his way, parched and near death, to a stagecoach stop, where he was slowly nursed back to health.

But delirium had erased all memory of the ship's location. In his efforts to find it again, the prospector consulted an old priest who told of discovering, in certain ancient historical volumes, an explanation that might give some logic to the tale of the ghost ship.

The priest said that many vessels, laden with gold and all manner of valuable commodities in transit from the East Indies, had been dispatched north from Acapulco during the 16th century in the expectation that a route would be found by which the cargo might be taken directly to Spain, instead of being transported across Mexico and reshipped on the Atlantic Coast.

These ships had never been heard from again, disappearing as mysteriously from sight as the mirage of the desert.

"It requires no violent stretch of the imagination," said The Cosmopolitan, "to identify the wreck with one of the lost vessels and to load it with an imperishable store of gold and silver."

But the great ship's cargo, if such exists, lies there still today, waiting. And the frustrated Cosmopolitan prospector, like so many others, died without ever finding it a second time, giving sustenance to the legend and proving that what the eyes cannot see twice, the imagination can see a thousand times.