Shipwrecks of the California Coast

More than two thousand ships have been lost along California's 840 miles of coastline--Spanish galleons, passenger liners, freighters, schooners. Some tragedies are marking points in U.S. maritime history. The "City of Rio de Janeiro," bound from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1901, sliced the fog only to strike a rock and sink in twenty minutes, sending 128 passengers to watery graves. Seven U.S. Navy destroyers, bound on a fateful 1923 night from San Francisco to San Diego, crashed into the roc