Mary Celeste (/səˈlɛst/; often mistakenly called Marie Celeste) was an American-registered commercial brigantine built in Canada that was found abandoned and floating in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Azorean islands on December 4, 1872. Her lifeboat was gone when the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia discovered her partially sailed and in a disheveled but seaworthy state. Her journal said that the last entry was made eleven days prior. She had departed from New York City for Genoa on November 7 and was discovered to be well-fed. The captain and crew’s personal items were unharmed, and her cargo of alcohol was undamaged. Nobody who had been on board was ever heard from or seen again.
Built on Spencer’s Island in Nova Scotia, Mary Celeste was launched in 1861 under the British register name Amazon. When she got her new name in 1868, her ownership and registration were changed to American. She thereafter continued to sail without incident until her trip in 1872. Following her rescue, the court’s officers in Gibraltar held salvage hearings where they deliberated over a number of potential foul play scenarios, such as mutiny by Mary Celeste’s crew, piracy by the Dei Gratia crew or others, and conspiracy to commit salvage or insurance fraud. These hypotheses were not substantiated by any solid evidence, but residual doubts resulted in a salvage payout that was comparatively low.
The proceedings’ lack of conclusion encouraged ongoing conjecture about the fate of the ship’s inhabitants, and the narrative has been frequently convoluted by fabrication and imagination. The impact of alcohol vapors rising from the cargo, subsurface earthquakes, waterspouts, an attack by a huge squid, and psychic involvement on the crew are some of the theories that have been put out.
Mary Celeste was taken over by new owners and continued to operate following the Gibraltar hearings. In 1885, the captain intentionally sank the ship off the coast of Haiti in an effort to deceive insurance companies. Her 1872 abandonment has been the subject of several dramatizations and recountions in plays, documentaries, films, and books. The ship’s name has come to symbolize inexplicable desertion. Though the vessel’s name was spelled Marie Celeste, Arthur Conan Doyle used the mystery as the basis for his short fiction “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” published in 1884. Due to the popularity of the narrative, the spelling has been more often used than the original.
Earlier Times
At Joshua Dewis’ shipyard on Spencer’s Island, a town on the coast of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, the keel of the future Mary Celeste was laid in late 1860. The ship was carvel-made, with the hull planking flat rather than overlapping, and was rigged as a brigantine. It was built of locally fallen timber and had two masts. Launched May 18, 1861, she was christened Amazon and registered June 10, 1861, at neighboring Parrsboro. According to her registration papers, she was 99.3 feet (30.3 meters) long, 25.5 feet (7.8 meters) wide, 11.7 feet (3.6 meters) deep, and had a gross tonnage of 198.42.
Under Dewis’s leadership, a group of nine locals owned her; among the co-owners was Robert McLellan, the ship’s original captain.
In June 1861, Amazon set off on her first trip, sailing to Five Islands, Nova Scotia, to pick up a load of lumber that would be transported across the Atlantic to London. Following his oversight of the ship’s cargo, Captain McLellan became unwell, and his condition grew worse. On June 19, the Amazon went back to Spencer’s Island, where McLellan passed away. After taking over as captain, John Nutting Parker continued the journey to London, during which time Amazon had more mishaps. She crashed with and sunk a brig in the English Channel after leaving London and clashed with fishing gear in the narrows near Eastport, Maine.
For two years, Parker held the position of commander, mostly overseeing Amazon’s operations in the West Indies trade. After traveling over the Atlantic to France in November 1861, she may have been painted in Marseille by renowned Marseilles School nautical artist Honoré de Pellegrin. William Thompson took over as commander in 1863 and held the position until 1867.
“We went to the West Indies, England, and the Mediterranean—what we call the foreign trade,” Amazon’s buddy subsequently recounted of these peaceful years. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred. When a storm forced Amazon ashore at Cape Breton Island in October 1867, her owners abandoned her as a wreck due to her severe damage.
On October 15, Alexander McBean, of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, purchased her as a derelict.
Renaming and reassigning ownership
In less than a month, McBean sold the wreck to a nearby merchant, who then sold it to New York-based American mariner Richard W. Haines in November 1868. After purchasing the wreck for US$1,750, Haines invested $8,825 in its restoration. He took on the role of captain and registered her as an American vessel in December 1868 with the Port of New York Collector, renaming her Mary Celeste.
The ship was taken by Haines’s creditors in October 1869, and James H. Winchester led a syndicate in New York that purchased it. The consortium’s makeup shifted many times during the course of the following three years, although Winchester always had at least a half-share. Mary Celeste’s trading activity at this time is not documented. The ship had a significant overhaul early in 1872, at a cost of $10,000, greatly expanding her. She was enlarged to 103 feet (31 meters) in length, 25.7 feet (7.8 meters) in width, and 16.2 feet (4.9 meters) in depth. A second deck was constructed as one of the structural modifications; the inspector’s report mentions new transoms, poop deck extensions, and numerous timber replacements.
The ship’s tonnage rose to 282.28 as a result of the renovation. The consortium was composed on October 29, 1872, of Winchester, holding six shares, and two lesser investors, each holding one share. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, the ship’s new captain, held the remaining four of the twelve shares.
Briggs, Captain, and crew
Born on April 24, 1835, in Wareham, Massachusetts, Benjamin Briggs was one of sea captain Nathan Briggs’s five sons. All of the boys save one went to sea, and two of them ending up as captains. Benjamin was a devout Christian who frequently shared his religion at prayer sessions and consistently studied the Bible. Following his marriage to his cousin Sarah Elizabeth Cobb in 1862, he cruised the Mediterranean on his schooner Forest King for their honeymoon. In September 1865, Arthur was born, and in October 1870, Sophia Matilda.
Briggs had risen to prominence in his field by the time Sophia was born. He thought of leaving the sea and starting a company with his brother Oliver, a sailor who had also become weary of his nomadic lifestyle. Instead of pursuing this initiative, Oliver and Benjamin each put their funds in a portion of a ship: Oliver bought a part in Julia A.
Hallock, while Benjamin bought a stake in Mary Celeste. After a thorough refurbishment in New York, Benjamin assumed command of Mary Celeste in October 1872 for her maiden journey to Genoa, Italy. He made arrangements for his wife and little daughter to travel with him, leaving his school-age son in the care of his grandma at home.
Briggs took a great effort in selecting this voyage’s crew. Albert G. Richardson, the first mate, had previously sailed under Briggs and was married to a Winchester niece. Danish-born New Yorker Andrew Gilling, the second mate, was around twenty-five years old. Edward William Head, the recentlywed steward, signed on with Winchester’s personal recommendation. Gottlieb Goudschaal, Arian Martens, and the brothers Volkert and Boz Lorenzen were the four general seamen, all Germans from the Frisian Islands. They were referred to as “peaceful and first-class sailors” in a subsequent testimony. Shortly before the journey, Briggs sent a letter to his mother expressing his extreme satisfaction with the ship and personnel.
According to Sarah Briggs’s mother, “if they continue as they have begun,” the staff seems quietly capable.
Abandonment
New York
Briggs landed in New York City on October 20, 1872, at Pier 50 on the East River to oversee the loading of 1,701 barrels of alcohol that were part of the ship’s cargo. A week later, his wife and baby daughter joined him. In a letter to his mother dated Sunday, November 3, Briggs stated that he planned to depart on Tuesday and that “our vessel is in beautiful trim and I hope we shall have a fine passage.”
Mary Celeste went into New York Harbor early on Tuesday, November 5, leaving Pier 50 with Briggs, his wife and kid, and seven other crew members. As a result of the unpredictable weather, Briggs chose to hold off until the weather improved. After he anchored the ship close to Staten Island, Sarah took advantage of the extra time to write her mother-in-law one more letter.
“Tell Arthur,” she said, “I make great dependence on the letters I shall get from him, and will try to remember anything that happens on the voyage which he would be pleased to hear.” Two days later, the weather cleared, and Mary Celeste sailed out of the harbor and into the Atlantic.
The Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia was waiting at Hoboken, New Jersey, for a load of petroleum that was going to Genoa through Gibraltar, while Mary Celeste was getting ready to set sail. Both first mate Oliver Deveau and captain David Morehouse were well-respected and experienced mariners from Nova Scotia. Given their comparable interests, several authors believe it plausible that Captains Briggs and Morehouse were acquainted, even if only briefly.
According to some sources, they were close friends who had dinner together the night before Mary Celeste left, although the only proof of this comes from Morehouse’s widow, who remembered the event fifty years later. Eight days after Mary Celeste, on November 15, Dei Gratia sailed for Gibraltar along the same general path.
Derelict
At around 1 p.m. on Wednesday, December 4, 1872, land time (Thursday, December 5, sea time), Dei Gratia had arrived at a location of 38°20′N 17°15′W, halfway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. When Captain Morehouse stepped on deck, the helmsman reported seeing a ship moving around six miles (9.7 km) in an unsteady direction towards Dei Gratia. Morehouse thought something was amiss because of the ship’s unusual movements and the peculiar way her sails were rigged. He despatched Deveau and second mate John Wright in a ship’s boat to investigate as the vessel got closer since he could not see anyone on deck and he was not receiving any response to his signals.
Based on the name on her stern, the two were able to identify that this was the Mary Celeste. After climbing aboard, they discovered the ship was empty. A large portion of the rigging was destroyed, with ropes hanging carelessly over the sides. The sails were only partially set and in terrible shape, with some missing entirely. The lazarette and forward hatch coverings were on the deck, open, but the main hatch cover was fastened securely. The one lifeboat on board, a small yawl that had seemingly been placed across the main hatch, was nowhere to be seen, and the glass cover on the binnacle that held the ship’s compass had cracked and moved.
For a ship of her size, the amount of water in the hold was substantial but not concerning—roughly three and a half feet (1.1 m). On the deck, a homemade sounding rod—a tool for gauging the volume of water in the hold—was discovered.
The ship’s daily log, which they discovered in the mate’s cabin, included a last entry dated November 25, nine days earlier, at 8 a.m. Mary Celeste was located around 400 nautical miles (740 km) from the place where Dei Gratia encountered her, at 37°1′N 25°1′W off Santa Maria Island in the Azores. Although the cabin’s inside were messy and damp due to water seeping in via entrances and skylights, Deveau saw that everything else was in normal order. Personal belongings, including a sheathed sword beneath the bed, were strewn all around Briggs’s cabin, but the captain’s navigational instruments and the majority of the ship’s paperwork were gone.
The galley equipment was tidied up and there was plenty of food in the storage, but nothing cooked or in the process of being made. The evidence suggested a peaceful exit from the ship via the missing lifeboat; there were no overt indications of fire or fighting.
After Deveau went back to Morehouse with his findings, Morehouse made the decision to bring the wreck 600 nautical miles (1,100 km) into Gibraltar. A salvor may be entitled, under maritime law, to a sizeable portion of the total worth of the saved vessel and its cargo; the precise amount will depend on the level of risk involved in the salvaging. The eight-man crew of Dei Gratia was split between the two ships by Morehouse, who sent Deveau and two seasoned sailors aboard Mary Celeste while he and the other four crew members stayed on Dei Gratia.
For the most of the journey to Gibraltar, the weather remained calm, but because each ship was woefully undermanned, the pace of advance was sluggish. On December 12, Dei Gratia landed at Gibraltar; Mary Celeste arrived the next morning, having encountered fog.
The vice-admiralty court detained her right away so she could get ready for the salvage trials. “I can hardly tell what I am made of, but I do not care so long as I got in safe,” Deveau wrote to his wife after the arduous experience of bringing the ship in. I’ll get paid handsomely for the Mary Celeste.
Hearings on Gibraltar’s salvage
On December 17, 1872, the salvage court proceedings got underway in Gibraltar, presided over by Chief Justice Sir James Cochrane. Frederick Solly-Flood, the Attorney General of Gibraltar and Advocate-General and Proctor for the Queen in Her Office of Admiralty, presided over the case. A historian of the Mary Celeste case characterized Flood as “the sort of man who, once he had made up his mind about something, couldn’t be shifted” and as someone “whose arrogance and pomposity were inversely proportional to his IQ.”
As the New York Shipping and Commercial List reported on December 21, Flood was irrevocably persuaded by the testimony of Deveau and Wright that a crime had been committed: “The inference is that there has been foul play somewhere and that alcohol is at the bottom of it.”
On December 23, Flood gave the order for an inspection of Mary Celeste, which was done by Surveyor of Shipping John Austin with the help of diver Ricardo Portunato. Austin saw what he believed to be slashes on both sides of the bow from a sharp object, and he also noticed what could have been blood on the captain’s sword.
The investigation highlighted that there was no sign of severe weather on board the ship, based on the discovery of an upright sewing machine oil bottle in its location. The possibility that the vial has been replaced since the abandonment was not brought up by the court or Austin. According to Portunato’s hull report, there had been no accident or grounding of the ship.
A second examination by many commanders of the Royal Navy confirmed Austin’s assessment that the incisions on the bow were intentional. They also found what seemed to be bloodstains on one of the ship’s rails and what appeared to be a deep axe mark. These results confirmed Flood’s beliefs that the mystery was more likely to be the result of human misbehavior than a natural calamity.
He forwarded the records to the Board of Trade in London on January 22, 1873, along with his own assessment that the crew had consumed alcohol and killed the Briggs family and the ship’s commanders in a drunken rage. They’d chopped the bows to make it look like a crash, then run away in the yawl to meet an unidentified end.
Flood believed that Morehouse and his crew were concealing something, namely that the log had been manipulated and Mary Celeste had been abandoned at a more easterly place. It was inconceivable to him that Mary Celeste could have gone so far without a crew.
On January 15, James Winchester came in Gibraltar to find out when Mary Celeste would be allowed to discharge her load. Winchester lacked the $15,000 that Flood requested as a guarantee. Winchester learned that Flood believed there was a possibility Winchester had knowingly recruited a crew to assassinate Briggs and his officers as part of a plot. During a series of acerbic discussions with Flood on January 29, Winchester attested to Briggs’s impeccable reputation and emphasized that Briggs would not have deserted the ship unless absolutely necessary.
When scientific examination of the stains discovered on the sword and other parts of the ship revealed that they were not bloodstains, Flood’s allegations of mutiny and murder suffered serious blows.
A report from US Navy Captain Shufeldt that was ordered by Horatio Sprague, the US consul in Gibraltar, dealt Flood a second blow. Shufeldt believed that the sea’s natural movement on the ship’s timbers was what caused the scars on the bow, rather than human activity.
On February 25, Flood reluctantly removed Mary Celeste from the court’s jurisdiction since he had no hard evidence to back up his concerns. She sailed from Gibraltar to Genoa two weeks later, escorted by Captain George Blatchford of Massachusetts, who had been reared locally. On April 8, Cochrane made the salvage payment announcement.
The amount awarded was £1,700, or roughly one-fifth of the ship and cargo’s entire value. This was far less than anticipated; according to one source, considering the degree of risk involved in getting the derelict into port, the reward ought to have been doubled or perhaps tripled.
In his parting remarks, Cochrane sharply criticized Morehouse for his choice earlier in the trial to dispatch Dei Gratia under Deveau to deliver her petroleum cargo, even though Morehouse had stayed in Gibraltar at the court’s disposal. According to Hicks, Cochrane’s tone implied misconduct, guaranteeing that Morehouse and his team “…would be under suspicion in the court of public opinion forever.”
Suggestions for explanations
Foul play
Though suspicions of foul play persisted, Flood’s claims of murder and conspiracy were not supported by the evidence in Gibraltar. Due to Mary Celeste’s significant overinsurance, Winchester was temporarily accused of insurance fraud by Flood and some press stories. The insurance companies that had provided the policies did not launch an investigation, and Winchester was free to dispute these claims.
According to a 1931 Quarterly Review article, Morehouse could have waited for Mary Celeste, enticed Briggs and his group to board Dei Gratia, and then murdered them there. Paul Begg contends that this explanation fails to take into account the fact that Dei Gratia was the slower ship; she sailed from New York eight days after Mary Celeste and would not have caught up to her before she arrived in Gibraltar.
Although there is no proof that Briggs and Morehouse were pals, another idea holds that they were conspirators who planned to split the salvage earnings. Hicks says that “if Morehouse and Briggs had been planning such a scam, they would not have devised such an attention-drawing mystery.” In addition, he queries Briggs’ decision to leave his son Arthur behind if his goal was to vanish forever.
Although there were Riffian pirates operating off the coast of Morocco in the 1870s, Charles Edey Fay notes that while the pirates would have robbed the ship, the captain and crew’s personal belongings—some of which were quite valuable—were left untouched. Historian John Gilbert Lockhart speculated in 1925 that Briggs killed every passenger before taking his own life in a religious frenzy. After speaking with Briggs’s heirs, Lockhart expressed regret and removed this hypothesis from a later version of his book.
Lifeboat
Oliver Cobb, Briggs’s cousin, subsequently hypothesized that the personnel move to the yawl could have been planned as a stopgap safety precaution. He surmised that the main halliard of the ship may have been used to secure the yawl to the ship, allowing the party to return to Mary Celeste once the danger had passed, based on Deveau’s testimony of the condition of the rigging and ropes. But if the line had broken, casting the yawl and her people adrift, Mary Celeste would have sailed away empty. Begg points out that it wouldn’t make sense to affix the yawl to a ship that the crew believed was about to capsize or sink.
Macdonald Hastings writes: “If the Mary Celeste had blown her timbers, she would still have been a better bet for survival than the ship’s boat,” arguing that Briggs was a seasoned skipper who would not have led a frightened desertion. Had Briggs depended on the ship’s boat for his life instead of Mary Celeste, Hastings claimed he would have “behaved like a fool; worse, a frightened one.”
A prominent marine mystery investigator in the early 20th century, Arthur N. Putman, a New York insurance assessor, developed a similar lifeboat theory emphasizing that just one lifeboat was missing from the vessel. He saw that the rope of the boat was cut rather than untied, suggesting that Mary Celeste was abandoned without much delay. Although the ship’s log frequently reported hearing tiny explosions and menacing rumbling from the hold, it should be noted that alcohol cargoes naturally release explosive gas.
He surmises that there was a stronger explosion and that a sailor went below deck with a lighted cigar or an open flame, which set off the vapors and caused an explosion strong enough to knock off the top of the hatch, which was discovered in an odd place. Putman further conjectured that the crew, including the captain and his family, abandoned Mary Celeste by cutting the rope and jumping into the lone lifeboat in a state of fear and horror.
Natural phenomena
Most observers concur that a very unusual and concerning situation had to have occurred for the whole crew to desert a safe and seaworthy vessel that was well-stocked. Deveau dared to explain using the sounding rod that was discovered on deck. He proposed that Briggs abandoned the ship following a false alarm due to a failure, maybe related to the pumps, which gave the erroneous impression that the ship was fast filling with water. The quantity of water in the ship and the tattered condition of her sails and rigging might be explained by a serious waterspout strike that occurred before to the abandonment.
The crew may have overestimated the quantity of water on Mary Celeste and thought she was in danger of sinking due to the low barometric pressure created by the spout, which might have forced water from the bilges up into the pumps.
Other theories include the prospect of an unexpected underwater earthquake, the emergence of a relocated iceberg, and the worry of going aground while stranded. According to hydrographical information, it seemed unlikely that an iceberg would travel thus far south; other ships would have likely seen it. Begg expands on a belief that, after being becalmed, Mary Celeste started to drift toward the Dollabarat reef off Santa Maria Island.
According to the hypothesis, Briggs launched the yawl in the hopes of making landfall because he was afraid his ship would run aground. Then, when the waters rose and sunk the yawl, the wind may have lifted Mary Celeste and flown her away from the reef.
This explanation is flawed since several of the ship’s sails were furled when it was discovered, yet if it had been becalmed, all of the sails would have been set to catch any breeze that came along.
A submerged earthquake may have created enough surface turbulence to break apart some of Mary Celeste’s cargo and release harmful gases. Briggs may have ordered the ship to be abandoned due to growing concerns about an impending explosion; the shifted hatches indicate that there may have been an inspection or an effort at airing. On January 24, 1886, the New York World published an article on an alcohol-carrying vessel that had exploded. A seepage of alcohol through a few porous barrels was mentioned in the same journal’s February 9, 1913 issue as the source of fumes that may have produced or threatened an explosion in Mary Celeste’s hold.
Oliver Cobb, Briggs’s cousin, was a fervent supporter of this hypothesis, according to which Briggs might have ordered the ship to be evacuated if there had been enough worrying circumstances, such as rumblings from the hold, the smell of fumes escaping, and perhaps an explosion. Briggs might not have properly secured the yawl to the tow line in his haste to escape the ship before it detonated. A gust of wind may have carried the ship away from the yawl’s occupants, leaving them to perish in the open air. This argument is weakened by the fact that there was no explosion damage and the cargo was found in a substantially intact form.
The explosion idea was given new life in 2006 when chemist Andrea Sella of University College, London conducted an experiment for Channel Five television. Using paper boxes for the barrels, Sella constructed a replica of the hold. He set off an explosion using butane gas, producing a tremendous boom and ball of flame, but surprisingly, the replica hold did not sustain any fire damage. He declared: “We produced an explosion akin to a pressure wave. A magnificent wave of flame was present, but the air behind it was comparatively cold. There was no burning or scorching, and no soot was left behind.”
False histories and myths
In the decades that followed, fantasy and fact merged. In June 1883, the Los Angeles Times embellished the Mary Celeste account with fictional details. “Every sail was deployed, the tiller was securely fastened, and not a single rope was misplaced. The galley fire was blazing fiercely. The meal was still unfinished and hardly cold, and the journal was only completed to the hour of her discovery.” Mary Celeste was supposed to have drifted off the Cape Verde Islands in November 1906 by Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. This was approximately 1,400 nautical miles (2,600 km) south of the true location. There were live chickens on board, and the first mate was “a man named Briggs,” among other falsehoods.
Many observers have concluded that the most significant recounting of the Mary Celeste event was included in an article published in the January 1884 issue of Cornhill Magazine, which made sure the scandal would go on forever. Arthur Conan Doyle, a 25-year-old ship’s physician at the time, created this early piece. The narrative “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” by Doyle did not follow the truth. He renamed the vessel Marie Celeste; the skipper was named J. W. Tibbs; the trip, which proved deadly, went from Boston to Lisbon in 1873. The ship was carrying people, including the named Jephson.
In the narrative, a zealot called Septimius Goring, who despises white people, has persuaded crew members to kill Tibbs and steer the ship to the coast of Western Africa. Except for Jephson, who is spared because he has a mystical charm that Goring and his allies revere, the remainder of the ship’s company is slain.[i] Although Doyle hadn’t anticipated his tale to be taken seriously, Sprague—who was still the American consul in Gibraltar—was fascinated enough to ask if any of the details in the narrative might actually be genuine.
A claimed survivor’s tale from one Abel Fosdyk, purportedly Mary Celeste’s steward, was published in 1913 by The Strand Magazine. In this version, the team was watching a swimming competition on a makeshift platform when it abruptly collapsed. All but Fosdyk perished from drowning or shark eating.
The magazine, in contrast to Doyle’s story, presented this as a serious solution to the mystery, but it was riddled with elementary errors: Briggs was referred to as “Griggs” and Morehouse as “Boyce”; Briggs’s daughter was described as a seven-year-old instead of a two-year-old; the crew numbered thirteen; and inadequate knowledge of nautical terminology. A credible literary fraud from the 1920s, conducted by Irish writer Laurence J., deceived a lot more people.
Keating was once again recounted as a survivor of a man named John Pemberton. This one conveyed a convoluted story of insane behavior, murder, and cooperation with the Dei Gratia. Basic mistakes like misnaming important staff members and using Doyle’s name (“Marie Celeste”) were among them. Still, the narrative was presented in such a compelling way that the July 26, 1926, New York Herald Tribune accepted it as fact. Keating’s prank is characterized by Hastings as “an impudent trick by a man not without imaginative ability.”
The former boatswain of Mary Celeste was the purported source of a narrative written by Captain R. Lucy that appeared in the Daily Express in 1924, despite the fact that this individual is not included among the registered crew. Briggs and his crew are thrown into the position of predators in this story; they spot a derelict vessel, which they board to discover abandoned and holding £3,500 worth of gold and silver in its safe.
Using the lifeboats aboard the liner, they reach Spain where they decide to divide the money, leave Mary Celeste, and start again. For a while, Hastings finds it astounding that people accepted such an implausible narrative; he claims that readers “were fooled by the magic of print.”
A gigantic octopus or squid is said to have taken the whole complement of Mary Celeste, one by one, according to Chambers’s Journal from September 17, 1904. The Natural History Museum claims that gigantic squid, or Architeuthis dux, may grow up to be 15 meters (49 feet) long and have even been known to assault ships.
Begg notes that although the monster could have been able to kill a crew member, it was unlikely to have grabbed the captain’s navigation equipment and the yawl. An undated issue of the British Journal of Astrology interprets the Mary Celeste narrative as “a mystical experience” and links it “with the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, the lost continent of Atlantis, and the British Israel Movement.” Other theories have pointed to paranormal intervention.
Despite the fact that Mary Celeste was abandoned in a distant section of the Atlantic, the Bermuda Triangle has been referenced. Aliens in flying saucers have been the subject of similar imaginations.
Later profession and last journey
On June 26, 1873, Mary Celeste departed Genoa and landed in New York on September 19. She had become an unpopular ship due to the Gibraltar hearings and press reports of murder and mayhem; Hastings notes that she “… rotted on wharves where nobody wanted her.” The syndicate sold the ship to a group of New York merchants in February 1874, albeit at a significant loss.
Mary Celeste frequently lost money while sailing the West Indian and Indian Ocean itineraries under this new management. Periodically, the shipping press would publish information about her whereabouts. In February 1879, for example, she was reportedly in St. Helena, where she had called to get medical attention for her captain, Edgar Tuthill, who had become unwell. As the ship’s third prematurely deceased captain, Tuthill’s death on the island contributed to the growing belief that the vessel was cursed. The owners sold Mary Celeste to a group of Bostonians led by Wesley Gove in February 1880. Thomas L. Fleming, the new captain, held the position until August 1884, when Gilman C. Parker took over.
The ship’s port of registry was Boston at first, but it moved a few times over the years. No documentation exists of her travels during this period, but Brian Hicks, in his analysis of the affair, claims that Gove made a concerted effort to turn her into a success.
Parker plotted with a group of Boston shippers in November 1884, loading Mary Celeste with a cargo that was essentially worthless but was falsely listed on the manifest as valuable items and insured for US$30,000 ($1,020,000 today). Parker left for Port-au-Prince, the capital and main port of Haiti, on December 16. The Rochelois Bank, a sizable and well-explored coral reef, was situated in the canal that separated Gonâve Island from the mainland on January 3, 1885, as Mary Celeste neared the harbor.
Parker purposefully rammed the ship into this coral, destroying the ship’s bottom and causing irreparable damage. After rowing ashore with the crew, Parker sold the salvageable cargo to the American consul for $500 and filed insurance claims for the purported value.
The ship’s insurers launched a comprehensive inquiry when the consul claimed that the items he had purchased were almost worthless, which quickly exposed the truth about the over-insured cargo. Parker and the shippers were put on trial in Boston in July 1885 for conspiring to conduct insurance fraud. Parker was also accused of “wilfully cast away the ship,” a barratry offense for which the death penalty was in effect at the time. The conspiracy case was tried first, but the jury declared on August 15 that they were unable to reach a unanimous decision. A few jurors declined to find Parker guilty of the conspiracy charge in order to avoid jeopardizing his next death trial.
The court worked out a deal where the defendants refunded all of the money they had received and dropped their insurance claims, saving the expense of a costly retrial. Parker’s accusation of barratry was postponed, allowing him to go free. Still, his career was destroyed, and three months later he passed away penniless. Two of his co-defendants committed themselves and one went insane. Begg points out that “if the court of man could not punish these men … the curse that had devilled the ship since her first skipper Robert McLellan had died on her maiden voyage could reach beyond the vessel’s watery grave and exact its own terrible retribution.”
The marine archaeologist and novelist Clive Cussler led an expedition in August 2001 that said they had discovered ship remnants lodged in the Rochelois reef. The debris was lost behind the coral, leaving just a few pieces of wood and a few metal objects to be recovered. According to preliminary examinations, the wood was of the kind often employed in New York shipyards during the refit of Mary Celeste in 1872, and it appeared like the ship’s remnants had been discovered.
Nevertheless, dendrochronological analyses conducted by Scott St George of the Geological Survey of Canada revealed that the wood originated from trees that would still have been growing in 1894, around 10 years after Mary Celeste’s passing, most likely from the US state of Georgia.
Remaining legacy and celebrations
It has been documented that curiously abandoned ships on the high seas have been discovered before, including Mary Celeste. Naval commander and marine mystic Rupert Gould enumerates other similar incidents from 1840 to 1855. Regardless of the veracity of these tales, what people remember is the Mary Celeste; the ship’s name, or the misspelled Marie Celeste, has cemented itself in their minds as a symbol of mysterious abandonment.
With 25 persons on board, the 70-ton motor yacht MV Joyita vanished in the South Pacific in October 1955 while en route from Samoa to Tokelau. A month later, the abandoned ship was discovered floating 600 miles (970 km) north of Vanua Levu. No one on board was ever seen again, and an investigation panel was unable to provide a reason. The primary historian of the event, David Wright, has called the case “… a classic marine mystery of Mary Celeste proportions.”
Two popular radio plays by L. Du Garde Peach and Tim Healey in the 1930s, as well as a theatrical production of Peach’s play in 1949, were inspired by the Mary Celeste narrative. Numerous novels have been released, most of them providing realistic rather than fantastical explanations.[m]
The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (known as Phantom Ship to American viewers) was released in 1935 by Hammer Film Productions, a British film studio, and starred Bela Lugosi as a crazy sailor. Begg says it’s “a period piece well worth watching,” but it wasn’t a commercial hit. A 1938 short film called The Ship That Died dramatizes a number of hypotheses, including mutiny, fear of an explosion from alcohol fumes, and paranormal activity, to explain the desertion.
The Mary Celeste made an appearance in the 1965 Doctor Who episode The Chase, where the sudden appearance of a group of Daleks looking for the Doctor and his companions, who had momentarily landed the TARDIS on the ship moments earlier, was said to have caused a mass panic and caused the crew to disappear.
The True Story of the Mary Celeste, a program that aired on the Smithsonian Channel in November 2007, looked at a number of facets of the case but failed to provide a conclusive resolution. A theory put forth the idea of instrument malfunction and pump congestion. Before being filled with booze, the Mary Celeste was used to transport coal, which is notorious for its dust. Since the pump was discovered dismantled on deck, it’s possible that the crew was trying to fix it. The skipper would not be able to determine how much water had been taken in when navigating choppy seas because the hull was jam-packed full.
According to the filmmakers, there was a possibility that Briggs ordered abandonment because he believed they were near Santa Maria, even though they were really 120 miles (190 km) farther west due to a malfunction in the chronometer.
The disappearance of the Mary Celeste and her crew is the central theme of the 2020 ghostly horror film Haunting of the Mary Celeste. In this film, the disappearance is attributed to paranormal “rifts” created by tectonic plates that have the ability to trap both people and animals.
A memorial outdoor theater shaped after the hull of the ship and a monument marking the location of the brigantine’s construction honor Mary Celeste and her lost crew on Spencer’s Island. Gibraltar and the Maldives have each released postage stamps honoring the occurrence twice, with the ship’s name misspelled as Marie Celeste on one of them.
