Cecil B. Demille and the Tiburon Island Adventure‪.‬

Cecil B. DeMille needed a vacation. He had been working hard preparing for a new motion picture to be titled The Ten Commandments (the 1923 silent black-and-white version), and he needed a break before the exhausting job of filming began. What better way to rest up, he thought, than to get together with some friends on his beloved yacht Seaward for a few weeks of sailing and casual hunting and fishing. And what better place to get away from the Hollywood pressure cooker than Mexico? He and his friends could sail south to the tip of Baja California and then head northward into the Gulf of California. To add a little extra adventure, they could chart a course for fabled Tiburon Island and take a first-hand look at the notorious Seri Indians. But the idyllic voyage he had in mind proved to be anything but smooth sailing. Things began to go awry right from the start, and through a combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, perhaps a bit of hubris, and plain bad luck, it turned out to be a trip that would dog him for the rest of his life. The idea of sailing into the Gulf of California and visiting the Seri Indians was a familiar one to southern Californians, for intrepid sailors had occasionally been doing just that for more than two decades. Unfortunately, some of the earlier trips had come to tragic ends. Two parties of Americans who went ashore on Tiburon Island in the mid-1890s disappeared and were presumed killed by Seris. The fate of the missing Americans had made lurid copy for the Los Angeles newspapers. For a while, imaginative journalism ran wild, and the Seris were accused in print of cannibalism and a litany of other sins against God and Nature. These fanciful reports induced a number of prominent and self-righteous southern Californians to concoct schemes to buy Tiburon Island, conquer or exterminate the loathsome Seris, and turn the island into a cattle ranch or a vacation resort with luxury hotels. Nothing ever came of these quixotic schemes, of course, and gradually the wild and sensational tales of mysterious Tiburon and its ferocious Serfs faded from the newspapers.