The Wreckage Of A Legendary Ship Lies Somewhere Off The Mexican Coast.
By Kevin Franklin
And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under
by wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away
into the southwest, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.
-- Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
TRAVEL OF LEGENDARY proportions has at its core the potential
for discovery--and mishap.
I have little interest in leisure travel where everything is
planned, catered and anticipated. Club Med was made for someone
else. So when I stumbled across a footnote in a book mentioning
that the wreck of the Sophia Sutherland, the ship that
inspired Jack London's classic The Sea Wolf, was somewhere
on the remote west coast of Baja, I vowed to go search for it.
The fact that maps of the region are vague, the roads terrible
and no one seemed to know exactly where this wreck might be--or
even if it was still there--made it all the better. Fuel might
or might not be available, and auto parts most certainly were
not. The hot, dry and dusty roads would be punishing to man and
machine alike. In short, a dream vacation.
In The Sea Wolf, the brutish captain Wolf Larsen commands
his ship The Ghost with an iron hand, tyrannizing his crew
and two marooned survivors of a shipwreck. The exact events in
The Sea Wolf never took place, but London absorbed the
experience of a sealer and heard similar stories during his seven-month
voyage as an able-bodied seaman aboard the three-masted schooner
Sophia Sutherland. In 1893, London sailed with the
ship's Scandinavian crew to the Bonin Islands south of Japan,
and on to the sealing-grounds of the Northwest Pacific, writes
Lewis Gannett in the 1960 introduction to the book. In its later
years, the Sophia Sutherland hauled lumber down the Baja
coast. In a storm in 1912, it broke free and wrecked somewhere
on this coast.
Our two-truck convoy is rattling down the washboard road toward
Santa Rosalillita. We ask some locals about the ship, but get
only vague replies of various wrecks. We drive north, stopping
every so often to climb dunes near the road and scan the beach
to see if we can spot anything.
On one of these stops I hear the distant bark of a seal. We clamber
over a rocky point, looking for the source, but are unable to
spot the animal. Just when we think we should be giving up, one
of us hears a faint bark in the distance. We pile back in the
vehicles and follow the faint track of a road.
Soon we're overwhelmed with what smells like a long-dead beached
whale. We follow the smell over the dunes and emerge onto a white,
curving beach stretching for empty miles around to Punta Rocosa.
Just off the beach sits an island that is quite likely the source
of the smell: It's covered with seals.
We watch them milling in the water. Even from a quarter-mile
away, it's apparent they're keeping an eye on us. A few seals
sunning themselves on rocks several hundred yards away are now
making their way toward the island. We're content to watch them
through binoculars.
Little wonder they're a bit skittish. These seal populations
had been wiped out by American sealers in London's time. That's
why the Sophia Sutherland risked the hazard of an oceanic
crossing in order to work the remote waters of the western north
Pacific.
As for the wreckage, our pursuit thus far reveals nothing of
the Sophia Sutherland. We continue north and make camp
on beautiful beach, deserted except for some dolphins and a couple
seals hunting in the bay waters. Finding the ship matters little
to me. It's the notion of exploration with a purpose that brings
me delight.
We'll continue searching tomorrow. (To be continued next week.)
|