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There's something tragic about a beached ship; not only is it "dead", but it's died on land rather than in the ocean and been denied a sailor's burial. You can imagine the surprise then, when our intrepid heroes run into a ship in the middle of the desert.
Somehow this ship has been wrecked on land and far from water. If it isn't just there to look ominous and creepy like a Ribcage Ridge, then it will very likely hold important supplies, clues or shelter from the desert environment for the heroes.
The fact that the ship has run aground can mean a lot of things about the desert or setting. Mundane explanations include receding shorelines due to climate change or a typhoon/tropical storm/tornado. Weirder possibilities include but aren't limited to: a Teleporter Accident, The End of the World as We Know It having come and gone, the captain being that bad of a navigator, the place where all the stuff the Negative Space Wedgie sucks up gets dumped, or any of a hundred other possibilities.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 8 comics, Willow manages to teleport a ship on the Himalayan mountains. Granted, it's not as dry as the Sahara, but it's probably the farthest you can go from the sea.
- Scrooge McDuck and his nephews took shelter in a Spanish Galleon lost in a South American desert after being left for dead by the Beagle boys, while both were trying to find the Seven Cities of Cibola.
- Just A Pilgrim: after the sun grows in size and dries up all the world's oceans, one battle takes place in the now dry wreckage of the Titanic.
- In one Groo The Wanderer comic, Captain Ajax manages to keep Groo (the walking disaster area) from sinking his ship multiple times...at least until Groo accidentally releases the flood gates of the artificial lake the ship was on, sinking the lake instead!
Ajax: I don't know how he did it, but I know HE did it!"
Film
- There's a brief shot in the Special Edition of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind which shows a ship in the middle of the Gobi desert. It's supposed to be one of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances.
- In Holes, a plot-important wrecked rowboat sits in the middle of the dried-up lake.
- Near the beginning of Tank Girl, a ship is seen on a dried harbor bottom. Watch it here, starting at 2:35
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- WALL*E: EVE blows up a couple of these when she gets angry. (WALL*E is set on an Earth humanity abandoned because it got too polluted).
- Used symbolically in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End where Jack Sparrow's version of Ironic Hell has him pulling one of these, as a pirate the worst place for him to be would be in the middle of a desert. Not that this minor setback stopped him.
- Lawrence Of Arabia is dumbfounded to see a ship sailing through the Sinai desert. It actually means he's reached the Suez Canal and safety.
- The funny thing about this is that ancient versions of the Suez Canal have been constructed and reclaimed by the desert before, in ancient human history. If the Suez Canal of today were to be abandoned, it would eventually sand in.
- An interesting inversion is seen in Waterworld during the expedition in the diving bell - a submarine is seen having crashed into the side of a skyscraper in the flooded city.
- The plot of Sahara involves a literal shipwreck in the Sahara which is supposed to be loaded with confederation gold coins of The American Civil War.
- An upside-down riverboat is found in Cowboys and Aliens 500 miles from any river that can hold it. Apparently, this is the work of the aliens, but the movie then completely forgets about this, and no explanation is provided.
- In one of the most surreal scenes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, an abandoned ship is found atop a tree in the middle of the jungle. The original script expanded this into an actual subplot*
The Amazon sometimes has drastic changes of water flow so it's actually not that far-fetched for a ship to end trapped in a tree but the final cut leaves it ambiguous and it might as well be a figment of the men's imagination who have gone mad at that point. Since Aguirre is the ultimate River Of Madness story, this is actually very fitting.
- Invoked in the movie Fitzcarraldo (also from Werner Herzog, the director of Aguirre) where the titular mad rubber baron moves a steamship through mountains and jungles in order to put it on an unreachable river. The movie's prop ship was later abandoned in the Peruvian jungle after filming was completed, making it also a Real Life version of the trope.
- The 1995 live-action Fist Of The North Star film has a submarine sitting in a middle of a wasteland.
Literature
- In One Hundred Years Of Solitude the discovery of a wrecked ship is the exploration party's sign that they are nearing the sea, causing them to give up hope of reaching civilisation.
- Wolf in Shadow by David Gemmell has the Big Bad headquartered in the Titanic, exposed when the Earth shifted on its axis, moving all of the oceans.
- The plot of Sahara by Clive Cussler involves a literal shipwreck in the Saharah- a Confederate Ironclad. Really.
- Its cargo is the most surprising thing. It's the corpse of Abraham Lincoln. The one shot at Ford's theater was an unwitting double
- Played with in Andre Norton's Quag Keep. Whilst traversing the Sea of Dust, the heroes discover a slightly-buried ship. However, it had been specially designed to travel through the dust.
- Norton's No Night Without Stars features the nearly-intact remains of a submarine in a dried-out ocean basin, hundreds of years After the End.
- Appears in Louis Sachar's classic novel Holes. No, it's not in the Sahara, and it's not a ship. It's a small two-person rowboat several miles from Camp Green Lake. It provides shade from the brutal sun, as well as some jars containing moldy peaches, which are later used to carry water. It also contains Zero, who has run away from Camp Green Lake.
- In John Christopher's Cosy Catastrophe A Wrinkle in the Skin; massive earthquakes redistribute the balance of ocean and land, and the protagonist comes across a large tanker sitting in the desert which used to be the seabed.
- Star Trek: Destiny begins with Earth's second starship, the NX-02 Columbia, being found on the surface of a remote desert planet.◊
- Chris van Allsburg's The Wreck of the Zephyr revolves around a wrecked sailboat found on a cliff top and the legend of how it got there.
- In Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, Elric is given the use of the Ship That Sails Over Land And Sea by the friendly King of the Water Elementals. Unfortunately, while sailing it over land, the King of the Earth Elementals gets tetchy over an artefact rightly belonging on water intruding on his domain, and arbitrarily removes its power to sail over land, leaving ship and crew stranded.
Live Action TV
- Just A Pilgrim did this with the Titanic (It's a post-apocalyptic world where the oceans have dried up).
- A Viking ship in Land of the Lost.
- The Black Rock in LOST, the wreck of a 19th century sailing ship decaying in the middle of a jungle. Bonus points for explaining how it got there in season 1, and then showing the actual event in season 6.
- Season 3 of Sea Quest DSV began with the titular submarine being found in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Aliens did it.
- One of the most memorable images to come out of Doctor Who: a red London bus in the middle of an endless desert. (It came through a dimension door.)
- The opening credits of Father Ted show a stranded ship, some way inland, ostensibly somewhere on Craggy Island, with no clue as to how it got there. Apparently a real ship was washed ashore on the West of Ireland after a bit of what locals call "soft weather"...
Music
Tabletop Games
- The 3E Ravenloft products introduced "Mistways" to the setting, as semi-reliable paths between realms. One of them leads from the Core's Nocturnal Sea directly to the deserts of Har'Akir, invoking this trope on any ship that traverses it.
Video Games
- Spaceship example: In The Dig, one of the first things Brink and company find on Cocytus is the deserted ruins of a space ship, which also houses the first "ghost" in the game.
- Another spacecraft burried beneath the sands of a desert is what kick-starts the plot of the first Homeworld game.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games involves a pirate crew that somehow shipwrecked into a desert. Apparently, they beached themselves so hard that the front end of the ship punched through the ground and now sticks out in Subrosia.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword gives us the Sandship, which used to be a seafaring vessel until the seas dried out and filled with sand. At least, until you activate the Timeshift Stone onboard...
- Happens in the original Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga with the pirate ship in the middle of Teehee Valley.
- This is one area in Pokemon XD. In this case, you actually see how it got there in the beginning of the game. It was dropped there by Shadow Lugia.
- There's an infamous wreckage of a ship in the salty, dried-up lakebed known as Shimmering Flats in World of Warcraft. After much Wild Mass Guessing to its origins, the location is one of several obvious choices to be reflooded in the new expansion.
- The party actually uses one of these as their main transportation in Dragon Quest VIII, after using magic to get it back to sea. Strangely for a fantastic setting, its pretty clearly stated to be a receding coastline issue- they get it back to sea by using magic to "get the area to remember when there was ocean there".
- In Crysis, a frozen ship is found on a mountain. Aliens put it there. Sort of.
- Highway 17 is peppered with these, as well as other places (like canals rendered so shallow only an airboat can get through) which feature beached craft quite prominently.
- The mission "Sangre del Toro" in Battlefield: Bad Company 2's story mode revolves around B-Company's search for one of these (the eponymous Sangre del Toro) in the middle of Chile's Atacama Desert.
- One is featured during a mission in Just Cause 2. It's a very large tanker in a desert that is very high above sea-level. No explanation is given at all, although the name of the place means "formerly a sea" in Indonesian.
- There are a number of rusted, wrecked barges in Stalker: Call of Pripyat in previously low-waters that have now turned into swamps and marshes. One is used as a 'town' of sorts, and others are hiding places for other Stalker gangs, or Stalkers trying to find somewhere to rest, away from the weather, wildlife, or random blowouts/emissions.
- A beached ship acts as one end of the arena in one of the settings for the post-apocalyptic Fighting Game Primal Rage.
- Donkey Kong Country Returns features a shipwreck at the top of a cliff.
- An argument could be made for the ship mast seen in the Lost Woods of Donkey Kong Country 2, althought it may just be there as a "spiritual resting place" for the ghost version of the boss you fought earlier.
- Also in 2, a wrecked ship is located in Crocodile Cauldron, the second world and a volcano. The ship itself is in a small lake of superheated water. The third world with the swamp theme has also a semi sunken ship in it. Given that the overall theme of this game is Pirates, there could have been even more Saharan Shipwrecks in the other worlds...
- Digital Devil Saga has a cruise ship in a desert, there's no bodies of water in the Junkyard period, and only it started to rain during the game's events. Many characters had expressed confusion about it, including the fact they even knew what a ship was - more evidence that the Junkyard wasn't what it seemed.
- Various small ships in Fallout 3 show that the water level was gone down significantly in the last 200 years.
- The original Syberia featured a few rusty ships in the middle of the desert that is strongly implied to have been Aral Sea once (the town of Aralbad is fictional but its location is obvious).
- The Aperture Science Labs research vessel Borealis is slated to appear in Half-Life 2: Episode 3 whenever THAT finally comes out. It disappeared from its dry dock one night, as did large parts of its dry dock; teaser art shows it lodged in an ice canyon who-knows-where.
- Also, in the original Half-Life 2, there was a segment in which the player had to drive along a coastline to get to Nova Prospekt. Thanks to a Combine portal in the ocean acting as a "drain" - to move the water to other Combine-occupied worlds - the water line has greatly retreated from its former level, leaving the rusted remains of boats exposed and resting on the now dry seabed.
- The Crystal Desert of Guild Wars: Prophecies contains several derelict Margonite ships from a time when the area was still known as the Crystal Sea.
- Early on in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Drake and Sully stumble upon an abandoned Nazi U-Boat stuck miles upriver in the middle of the jungle. Sully's explanation that it floated up there then got stuck isn't entirely implausible but still quite unlikely.
- The level "The Storm" in Halo 3 is set at an abandoned harbor on a lake drained by the Covenant during their excavation of the Ark portal.
- From the same developer, one of the chapter screens◊ in Marathon 2 shows the spaceship Boomer crashed on one of the moons of Lh'owon.
Western Animation
- Part 2 of the Five-Episode Pilot of DuckTales involved searching for a Spanish galleon in the middle of a desert. It had gotten there in the first place because of a torrential rainstorm that floods said desert every hundred years.
Real Life
- Truth in Television: The Aral Sea and Lake Chad were once much larger than they are now. When the Aral dried up, it grounded a number of large steel-hulled ships on what is now both sand and grassland with no water visible in any direction.
- Aral used to be even smaller, until Kazakhstan dammed away the Lesser Aral and limited its water consumption (for irrigating the cotton fields), so it started slowly filling again. So maybe those hulks on the shores of Lesser Aral may finally return to their element someday.
- The Mediterranean Sea has dried up numerous times in its ancient history. Since it's already pretty deep, it would have necessarily exposed the lowest dry land on earth.
- Salton Sea, after it was abandoned in the 60's, suffered some flooding but mostly receding shorelines, leaving many abandoned boats (probably already sunk on the bottom by the time they were dried out) marooned high and dry on cracked, parched earth far from water. The fact that the Salton Sea is artificial to begin with, having been created by an irrigation accident in the 1920s, helps explain this.
- According to legend this has happened in real life, if you believe the lost civilization types. There are supposed to be lost ships from Atlantis in the North African desert and in the Atlas Mountains, as well as a famous Viking longship(!) in the deserts of the American southwest with skeletons still at the oars.
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