Namibia’s Skeleton Coast offers an epic view of an elemental struggle: raw, churning ocean in an endless tug-of-war against the indomitable march of desert sand. It’s a place ruled by jackals, seals and seabirds. This shoreline, partly preserved in a 6,300-square-mile national park and the rest controlled by a government mining concession indeed contains skeletons — whale bones, mainly from the old hunting days, strewn like plane wreckage, as well as the bludgeoned hulks of cargo ships and fishing boats, possibly more than a thousand of them in the region, slain by a lethal combination of dense coastal fog and shallow rocky outcrops.  

I traveled up and down the remote Skeleton Coast looking for the remains of wrecks for the New York Times Magazine’s Voyages issue in Fall 2019.