Sunday, November 26, 2017

Sunday Drive: Shipwreck, 1927 - Descanso Point, Baja California

The caption to these two undated photos from the Currey family album, written in barely legible white ink on black paper, turned out to be somewhat accurate, although the name of the freighter was misspelled: "Cincunius on the rocks 50 miles from home* in Mexico[.]"


[From the Currey family album in my personal collection]


Since a search for the ship by name wasn't successful, the next thing was to establish the date of the photos. Fortunately the snapshots weren't glued on the page and when carefully extracted I found this on the back:

[From my personal collection]



Examining the photos it was clear that the freighter's grounding was recent as all the rigging was still in place--in fact, close inspection showed that there was a barge alongside it.

So next I turned to the newspapers and found this in the Albuquerque Journal for September 26, 1927:

[Newspapers.com]


[Baja California. Secretaria de Agricultura y Fomento : Direccion de Estadios Geograficos y Climatologicos ... Mexico. 2a. Edicion, 1922
Source: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection]


The San Diego Union had more about the Circinus.

[Thursday, September 29, 1927   Paper: San Diego Union (San Diego, California)   Page: 5  
© This entire service and/or content portions thereof are copyrighted by NewsBank and/or its content providers
Source: GenealogyBank.com]


The Circinus eventually was towed to San Francisco, after a stop in San Pedro where the damage was assessed and bids taken for repairs, which turned out to be more expensive than first thought. Her captain had his license suspended for a while.


[Monday, October 24, 1927   Paper: Evening Tribune (San Diego, California)   Page: 7  
© This entire service and/or content portions thereof are copyrighted by NewsBank and/or its content providers
Source: GenealogyBank.com]

When her repairs were completed, the Circinus resumed service and, after a sale and name change (SS Vermar) several years later, ended up as the Russian steam ship Karaganda. Built in 1919, she was scrapped in 1967.

You can read her history here.



*Since San Diego wasn't her home port I assume the reference was made to the Currey home in Encanto.



© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting! One assumes that the curreys were in Mexico if they took the photos personally. Maybe it was taken by some other family member. I can't remember if this was before or after they were married, or how old they would have been.

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  2. Both of them were born in 1902, Mother in June and Dad on the last day of the year...they got married in 1922 and their son was born the following year. They camped in Mexico a number of times over the years and these photos were taken by them, probably Dad, personally. I didn't include it but the caption also noted that this was the location where they had picked up some cactus in a tire.

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