Gold Rush Disaster

Just off the coast of Northern California, our Deep Sea Detectives dive into a cove near Mendocino--a rocky inlet called "the Washing Machine" for its turbulent currents. There they find the wreckage of The Frolic, a clipper that smuggled opium into China during the 1840s. Who built and owned it? How did remnants of its cargo--Chinese ceramics--turn up in 1984 in a Native-American village in the Redwood Forest? How could there be no historical record of a shipwreck just off the California coastline?

• documentary