The Pearl Ship

[Oroblanco]

Dang Mike, I never heard of the 1907 incident, and in Coyote Canyon! Heck I tramped around there a couple of decades ago and may have been walking over the danged ship. Now I owe you another cold one, for a great lead in where to start looking, if I can ever get over there to do a hunt.

I would also like to say I LOVE your map! I like all old maps, especially those with major geographic errors as it really shows the thinking of the day when the map was made. Explains a lot!

I too think that the fellow who was digging up old spanish coins had not found the pearl ship, but the English privateer. Somewhere in my old notes I had the name of the ship and the captain, date etc but working only from memory just can't pull it up. I can't even do a Google search without either the name of the captain or the ship or even the year, but I do remember it was after the pearl ship.

Thanks again, cooool map buddy!
your friend,
Roy - Oroblanco

 

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[gollum]

Hey Oro,

Then you will love this! The Library of Congress has tons of old maps digitized, and online for freeeeeeee!

Go to this website (it is Library of Congresses map site):

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html

You will have to download a special viewer to see the maps (but that's free too)! Go to the "Discovery and Exploration Section.

Best,

Mike

 

[Shadowed_Blue]

Kool stuff....love that free map site!!

Most of the details outlined in this post including the tale of DeAnza'a muleteer can be found in Eugene Conrotto's book Lost Gold and Silver Mines of the Southwest. Additionally it contains excerpts from a January, 1939 Desert magazine article by Charles Niehuis in which one Perta Socia Tucker was interviewed concerning the ship. Evidently her first husband knew of the ships location (why he was still poor is somewhat of a paradox) and described it to her as "...a narrow box canyon with high sheer walls, and a sandy bottom; and partially buried there, a boat of ancient appearance - an open boat but big, with round metal disks on its sides." She went on to say... "one time my husband, Santiago, was riding in the mountains in the Estados, and I was with him. We were up high, and could see more mountains, 15, maybe 20 miles away, and he say: 'Perta, I am a poor man now, and maybe some time I die before you and leave nothing. You get a good man, and come back here. You go to those mountains, the ship, it is there'."

Sounds like she could have been up in the Jacumba Wilderness looking north to the Fish Mountains. Definitely north of the border at any rate.

Shadowed_Blue

 

[grizzly bare]

Blue,
wasn't that story supposedly about a Viking longship that he had found? He told her that he could have brought her a metal pan for working cornmeal if he had had a chisel to pry it off the ship.
When I google "Viking longship in desert" the story comes up.
grizzly bare

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

HIO, K guys fill me in. Too lazy this morning to do the research.

How many oysters need to be harvested on an average for a Pearl in the Mar de Cortez?

For a ship to be loaded with them would require a fantastic amount of Oysters, no?

Where did he manage to recruit or take with him that many divers?

How long must it have taken to accumulate them?

A trunk full of pearls of any quality would represent a huge fortune, a ship load?.

I do know that Pearl shell had a great value then, is it conceivable that much of the cargo was Oyster Pearl shell?

Curious, since I have never really researched this project, but what little information that I have, places it below Mexicali in the sand dune area. Perhaps in the Pinacate area?.

This is an excellent project since initially, it would not require much operating capital.

Tropical Tramp

 

[gollum]

HIO, K guys fill me in. Too lazy this morning to do the research.

How many oysters need to be harvested on an average for a Pearl in the Mar de Cortez?

For a ship to be loaded with them would require a fantastic amount of Oysters, no?

Where did he manage to recruit or take with him that many divers?

How long must it have taken to accumulate them?

A trunk full of pearls of any quality would represent a huge fortune, a ship load?.

I do know that Pearl shell had a great value then, is it conceivable that much of the cargo was Oyster Pearl shell?

Curious, since I have never really researched this project, but what little information that I have, places it below Mexicali in the sand dune area. Perhaps in the Pinacate area?.

This is an excellent project since initially, it would not require much operating capital.

Tropical Tramp

Hey Jose,

They didn't get all the pearls in the Sea of Cortez. The stoies I have read say they travelled all up and down the West Coast. They traded crap with the Indians for the pearls they had.

Nobody knows for sure where the ship wound up, but it's location could not be too close to the current boundaries of the Sea of Cortez, because an integral part of the story is most of the crew died walking back to the Sea to the last galleon. If they only had to walk 30 or 40 miles, there was probably plenty of water and food on the ship for that short a hike. And also the story goes that it took them about two weeks to get back.

Best,

Mike

 

[Oroblanco]

Mike what you have read is very much in agreement with what I read - that they had their own divers (according to one source Africans, according to another, Japanese) but had much better success in trading with Indios for pearls. They seem to have bragged of trading rotten biscuits for pearls, which probably did not do much for future relations!

As to exactly how much of a load of pearls we are talking about here, we can only speculate. However some folks seem to get a mistaken idea of a huge Spanish galleon, with a hold capacity of hundreds of tons, when this was not the case. The ship was (if memory serves) purpose-built on the coast of Mexico just before the voyage, with a shallow draught so as to be able to put ashore if needed; now I am no expert on ships of the day but if I remember right the ship was what we would call a "sloop" or brigantine, (two different types of relatively small ships) and would not have a particularly huge carrying capacity in the holds. So we may be talking about a treasure of a mass of pearls, but in bushels not in metric tons. We also know that many Amerindian tribes obtained pearls by putting the oysters in a fire, which cracked them open easily but pretty much ruined the pearls for europeans. Could the load have been oyster-shell instead of pearls? Of course it could, but the report of Iturbide was pretty clear in claiming it was pearls, plus the one surviving vessel of the voyage had a nice haul of pearls so the evidence suggests Iturbide was telling the truth.

Is the ship north or south of the border? Boy that is one good question! They supposedly sailed north to 34 degrees latitude, which is well north of the border, but if I remember right they also sailed round the perimeter of the lake looking for any kind of channel to escape so could be literally anywhere along the edge of it. It seems logical they would have traveled as far south as possible before deliberately beaching it, so as to shorten their hike out to the sea - but Iturbide was also concerned about a hiding place for the ship to prevent someone else spotting it and taking the treasure which was why he chose a canyon to beach it. That means the canyon could be pretty much anywhere around the shore of the fast-vanishing lake, though I would doubt it would be so far as 34 degrees north, we also know that it took them more than one day or two days of hiking to get out to the gulf so...just theorizing here but I don't think it is safe to say the old boat is absolutely north OR south of the border based on what we have.

The modern day sightings place it in a narrow box canyon and quite close to the border. This seems odd because there are roads, homes etc in that area but who knows? I sure have never seen it so can't say where it is. Actually I am curious as to whether pearls will decay or not? I realize pearls in a jewelry box won't decay, but what about pearls buried in the ground? If the ground is only slightly acidic, over time the pearls may well just dissolve into the soil - after all we know that a pearl will disappear in a glass of vinegar. So the possibility exists that unless someone can locate and recover this treasure, it may end up being nothing but a white calcification on some old rotted timbers and rust stains in the sands. I sure hope someone does find it, before it is truly gone forever though.

Oroblanco

 

[Isayhello2u]

This is my favorite legend oroblanco is essentially correct in his facts If the ship was one of Iturbes
and not a Rus (Russian Vikings), Chinese or Arabian Vessel

On lost lakes, one of The problem is there are two. when ever the colorado formed the ancient Cahilla lake
the outflow of that lake would spill over into Lake Maquata (aka Laguna salada area).
Lake Maquata has had inflows from both the ocean and the colorado since the 1860s
so it could have been either an branch of the ocean or a freshwater lake in 1615.

for sailing ships trying to determine Longitude in 1615, it was a guess work, closest estimate kind of thing

Iturbe who worked for the Cardona's cartel which had the pearl fishing rights to the Americas in 1615
had his ships purpose built in Acapulco. if his ships were similar (and may have been the same ships)
to those used in the 1615 expedition up the California gulf. then we can get an estimate of their size from
the Journal of dutch admiral (or pirate) Joris Von Spielbergen who captured the largest ship of the 1615
voyage. he described it as more of a fishing boat than a ship of war and he used the small ship as a tender
in the Philippines. he also left a drawing of the small captured ship floating next to his Fleet of large galleons
Iturbe had Negro slaves purchased from the pearling areas of the nearly depleted Caribbean pearl beds and brought overland. There are also indications that in 1615 the cardona cartel was using some form of a diving bell. we know for sure Iturbe had a two man bell in 1632. The pearl beds of California were at the time of his arrival pretty much untouched. they also were at the time the only known source of Black pearls.

as a side thing I have been searching on-line listings of European royal jewels for mentions of black pearls before
the discovery of Tahiti. I think some of those Iturbe brought back wound up with Catherine the great.
(The recent Disney movie has cluttered the search keyword criteria horribly)

there is also a painting of a unknown girl wearing a black pearl pendant, painted circa 1615 in one of the balboa park museums in San Diego. I saw it, when I was busy with something else and only realized it later.
I haven't been able to get back to ask about it.

Walter Nordhoff (aka Antonio DE Fierro Blanco) in his book Journey of the flame writes of an De Anza Muleteer who claimed the pearls
I think it was Choral Pepper who wrote of Johansen? a farmer who used wood from the nearby ship to build a fence for his pigs and maybe took a chest of jewels to be sold in L.A.

Several Very recent versions of ship stories mention people taking or having wood from what was left of the ship

 

[Oroblanco]

Greetings Isayhello2u and welcome to Treasurenet! I had read your post in another thread but did not notice that you had only recently joined.

This tale of the Pearl ship is one of the most fascinating tales of the American southwest in my opinion, with good reasons to believe it is true. I have never gone out searching for it personally, but have seriously considered it and may yet get a chance to some day.

One thing about this treasure has been bothering me for some time - would the pearls survive in the ground? I know that pearls will dissolve in vinegar a mild acid, and we know that most western soils are either slightly acidic or slightly alkali, either of which may be corrosive to pearls which are basically calcium carbonate. As long as the ship remained relatively intact the pearls would be protected to a certain degree, but as the wood rots/deteriorates/gets eaten by termites, the pearls would be exposed to the elements more and more over time. True it is desert which gets little rain but it DOES get rains, and the soil holds the moisture for considerably longer than the surface so...I fear that if the pearl ship is not found sooner rather than later, the pearls may be dissolving away into nothing but a white stain in the soils!

Isayhello2u, if you were going to go look for the Pearl ship, where would your first choice spot be? (If you would rather not say I will understand.) Thank you in advance and again welcome to T-net!
Roy ~ Oroblanco

"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" --Groucho Marx

 

[gollum]

Hey,

I just noticed a mistake I made in a previous post about this. Coyote canyon is North WEST of Borrego Springs (not NorthEast).

Mike

 

[Oroblanco]

Good catch Mike - I find mistakes in my posts too when I look them over later; seems I get carried away writing sometimes and miss silly mistakes.
Roy

 

[Isayhello2u]

Oroblanco we have talked before on other forums
I had joined this forum before its format changed a year or two back but only posted two messages
so my membership quickly lapsed. athough I often surfed the messages here. I had to rejoin to post.
My dad is the one who wrote the little booklet on the lost ship for the benefit of the coachella museum in Indio.
His updated version of that for their gift shop is now finished but he is having problems with his color printer.
but once that problem is solved he will get it to their shelves. (i am also trying to make a cd pdf version for him) anyway Because Dad wants to raise money for the museum
I have promised I would limit what I post online about the ship but im quite willing to answer private emails.

As a side Hobby I have been keeping track of Ship of the desert stories the fictional as well as non fictional.
and been writing a sort of background history to the legend (posted in the harry oliver yahoo group.)

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

" I never make mysteakes"

Tropical Tramp[

 

[Oroblanco]

Hello friends - Isayhello2u would you believe I had a similar problem? I had joined this forum years ago but had a problem with my old reliable PC and lost my passwords etc along with numerous emails, addresses etc so had to rejoin recently. Fortunately the same ID was available - if anyone cares to search through the old archives you will find me there too.

From your statements I get the impression you DO have an idea where it is! (Pearl ship) Do you know if anyone has ever located the photos of the "viking" ship? I never had any luck tracking them down.

Tropical Tramp wrote
" I never make mysteakes"

Well heck I never do make mistakes - I once thought I had made a mistake but I was mistaken......

Roy ~ Oroblanco

 

[Isayhello2u]

I am not aware of any of the desert ship photos that have shown up except for a couple of photoshoped creations.

on the question of the pearls survival the desert heat is just as much a problem for pearls as acidic conditions and age.
to quote from a text on caring for pear jewelry.
"pearls contain calcareous crystals that are sensitive to chemicals and acids. They also contain water and protein and need to be properly taken care of. Pearls should never be wrapped in cotton or wool because the heat generated would add to the risk of drying out, causing the the pearls to crack and turn brown." It is also recommended that pearls be dampened from time to time in lightly salted water.

"I am not perfect to be too perfect can be seen as a fault and I have no faults."

 

[gollum]

Hey ISH2U,

What Oro is talking about is not the Pearl Galleon. It's the Viking Ship. There was a Viking looking ship found somewhere either closer to/or below the Mexican Border. A boy showed it to a couple, and they took some pics of it. This was supposed to have happened in the fifties or sixties. Story goes that shields were still fastened to the side of the ship exposed.

Mike

 

[Isayhello2u]

I understood Oro perfectly Gollum. thats why I replied in the plural
"any of the desert ships"
You hear rumors of photos that someone describes as being a viking like ship
or of other photos of the remnants of some other antique wooden ship
but the only photos I am aware of are that might be traceable are of the lost/abandoned steamships and of the sunken warplanes

 

[Oroblanco]

Hello friends,
The photos have been quite a problem to track down. I have heard of several - one that an "old prospector" showed to a vacationing couple, another of the "viking ship" (this was supposedly published in a newspaper, which I have failed to locate) and another pair of shots taken by a small plane flying over, which are supposed to show an old Spanish ship in the sand dunes. I wish I could find any of these photos, but so far no such luck.
Oroblanco

 

[gollum]

Shoot Isay,

All you have to do is get a survey of the Salton Sea, and you will get fighters, a B25, a B17, some fighter bombers, and a bunch of other warplanes.

I've never heard of their being pics of the Pearl Galleon. I would love to find them.

Best,

Mike

 

[cptbil]

Ships in the CA. Desert ?
Yep!
No! Problem with that!
Has Everyone missed the MAIN POINT ?
Look at the Early Spanish Maps of CA. ...
There are several in earlier "Posts/replies" on this every Topic !
You can't miss "IT" !