Normally when you hear of a shipwreck you’d expect it to be at the bottom of the ocean or clinging to some exposed rocks somewhere out to sea, but the story of the Mojave pearl ship features a wreck that’s supposed to be in the middle of the Mojave desert, 100 miles in-land.
The story goes that during a very high tide one day, a vessel floated up California’s Salton sea basin when it was flooded and became stranded when the tide went back out, but as for who the ship belonged to or exactly what it was carrying seems to be any ones guess. There are a few stories about the origins of the ship and how it got there, the oldest of which dates back to the early 1600’s.
In 1615 a Spanish explorer named Juan de Iturbe went on a long pearl harvesting voyage, during which he gathered a huge amount of them. Surviving records from the archives of New Spain, which was a Spanish overseas territory, talk about how the De la Cadena family had a pearl diving business in Baja California and Juan de Iturbe is mentioned as being connected to them, though it doesn’t specify how.
Most likely he either worked for them or married into the family, but whatever the story is there’s records he existed and reasonable evidence to suggest his occupation was a captain. The story goes that after returning from his gathering expedition he was washed into the Basin by a storm that caused numerous high waves, and after it had settled he found himself and his ship stranded in a rapidly shrinking in-land lake.
He then abandoned his ship and walked with the crew to a nearby Spanish settlement to get help, but for whatever reason he seemed to disappear along the way. Other stories about how the pearl ship ended up in the Mojave desert are along the same lines, with a series of waves or bad navigation leading a ship into the lake which became stranded and was abandoned.
There is a good chance that a ship could accidentally end up in the middle of a tidal lake and become stranded, but as for it sitting there with a ton of pearls on board for so long without being found is close to impossible. There’s a few claims about what happened to it over the years, with someone on the de Anza expeditions claiming to have found it in the year 1774, and then in 1914 a local farmer apparently came into town with a small chest of treasure he quietly tried to sell, but these are just stories.
If there ever was a ship there the pearls would have been taken and the woodwork long since rotted, but if the story is true and it very well could be, there’s the chance that many of the pearls fell off the ship in the area it finally touched down and keeled over. The problem with this would be that the Mojave desert is huge and pearls don’t give a signal on a metal detector, so good luck if you’re going to have a go at finding them.
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