MYSTERIES UNCOVERED-TRUE STORIES OF THE PARANORMAL AND UNEXPLAINED-The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

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The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

In the winter of 1872, the American merchant ship Mary Celeste was discovered drifting, abandoned, yet still seaworthy—a "ghost ship," inviting comparisons with the mythical tale of the Flying Dutchman. The fate of the Mary Celeste's ten-man crew, somehow lost in the vast Atlantic Ocean, remains one of the greatest of all maritime mysteries. Were they murdered? Kidnapped by pirates? Spirited away by some supernatural force? Or were they simply the tragic victims of bad luck and human error?

"She brought disaster on every man
that put his trust in her."
James Franklin Briggs, the nephew of
Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste

May 18, 1861, was a good day for the shipyards of Spencer's Island, situated some 78 miles (125km) northwest of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada: It saw the launch of the Amazon, a 100-foot (30.5m), two-masted brigantine. Unfortunately, the omens for the Amazon's future were not good—her captain, Robert McClellan took sick and died of pneumonia on her maiden voyage, within just 48 hours of taking command. Shortly afterward, the ship collided with a fishing boat off the coast of Maine and received a deep gash in her side. The Amazon was subsequently damaged on several subsequent occasions, finally running aground during a storm in Cow Bay, Cape Breton Island, in 1867.

Badly damaged, the Amazon was bought by a dealer named Alexander McBean, from Glace Bay, Cape Breton Island. He sold the brig to an American merchant named Richard W. Haines, who undertook repairs. Maritime lore decrees that it's bad luck to change the name of a ship, but after spending the sizable sum of $8,000 on repairs—not much less than the ship was worth—Haines did just that, renaming her the Mary Celeste. Haines' choice of name was allegedly inspired by Maria Celeste, the illegitimate daughter of Galileo, and Galileo's mistress, Marina Gamba.

Haines' motives for restoring the wrecked ship remain obscure. A December 1872 article in the Boston Globe cited that Haines "knowingly and fraudulently obtained a certificate of register for said brig," so he may well have seen some (possibly shady) moneymaking possibilities in his investment.

In 1869 the craft was seized by Haines' creditors and taken on by a reputable New York shipping firm, James H. Winchester & Co., which hired her out to small firms. The Mary Celeste also underwent a major refit that added a deck and increased her gross tonnage by 50 percent. Cabins were moved between decks, and several other alterations were made to her structure.

On November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste set sail from New York City, under the command of Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, an experienced seaman who owned one third of her. She was bound for Genoa, Italy, with a cargo of 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol, a poisonous type of ethanol used for fortifying wine. Captain Briggs was accompanied on the voyage by his wife, Sarah, and their two-year-old daughter, Sophia, as well as a seasoned crew of seven men: Albert G. Richardson, first mate; Andrew Gilling, second mate; Edward William Head, steward and cook; Volkert Lorenzen, seaman; Boz Lorenzen, seaman; Adrian Martens, seaman; and Gottlieb Goodschadd, seaman.11

"Our vessel is in beautiful trim and I hope we shall have a fine passage but I have never been in her before and I can't say how she'll sail. We seem to have a very good mate and steward and I hope I shall have a pleasant voyage," wrote Captain Briggs in a letter to his mother before departure. Sarah echoed this sentiment in a letter to her mother-in-law: "Benji thinks we have got a pretty peaceable set this time all around if they continue as they have begun. Can't tell you how smart they are."22

All appeared well until December 4, when the British brig Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste adrift around 400 nautical miles (740km) off the Azores. Shortly before setting sail, Captain Briggs had met Captain David Morehouse of the Dei Gratia and they had chatted about their upcoming voyages. The Dei Gratia was also bound for the Mediterranean, leaving just a few days ahead of the Mary Celeste. When Captain Morehouse spotted the Mary Celeste near the Azores, he knew the ship immediately. He also noticed that something was amiss. She appeared to be floundering aimlessly with the wind. He noted that the Mary Celeste "was under very short canvas steering very wild and evidently in distress."33 It was clear to the captain that no one was at the wheel. Two of her sails had been blown away and another was flapping in the wind; however, there was no distress signal.

Captain Morehouse drew his ship level with the Mary Celeste and hailed her. Receiving no response, he saw that the small yawl that served as the ship's lifeboat was missing from the stern davits. The deck was eerily empty and there was nobody at the helm. Crewmen from the Dei Gratia boarded the drifting ship and found that everything was neat and in order. The only sound was the eerie creaking of the ship's timbers. They wondered if some sort of plague had overcome the Mary Celeste's crew and they would be discovered below decks. However, they soon realized that the ship was completely deserted. There was no sign of the crew or of Captain Briggs and his family. There was no evidence of any kind of struggle and nothing seemed amiss.

The Mary Celeste had just sailed into maritime history.

A search of the ship failed to uncover any clues as to the crew's whereabouts. The cargo was still on board, as well as the crew's personal belongings and six months' worth of food rations. In the captain's cabin, Briggs' watch was hanging from a lamp bracket above the table. A half-drunk cup of coffee sat by the captain's writing station, where he meticulously recorded the ship's daily activities and observations. The last entry had been made at 6 a.m. on November 25. It recorded the weather conditions and noted that the ship was 6 nautical miles (11km) off the Azores. Beside the logbook was the beginning of a letter that read:

"Fanny, my dear wife,"

The words appeared to be the beginning of a letter written by the first mate, Albert G. Richardson, to his wife, which had been abruptly interrupted. Also found in the captain's cabin was a piece of cloth on Sarah Briggs' sewing machine, indicating that she had been sewing when she was disturbed. "There seemed to be everything left behind in the cabin as if left in a hurry, but everything in its place. [We] noticed the impression on the Captain's bed as of a child having lain there," read the crew of the Dei Gratia 's report. The hull, mast, and yard goods were in good condition, as was the deckhouse, and the captain's cabin. The only things that were missing—other than the lifeboat—was the captain's chronometer, sextant, and navigation book, along with the ship's register and various other documents.44

There appeared to be no reason for abandoning the ship, and there was no evidence that the Mary Celeste had encountered unusually bad weather or been involved in an accident. The Dei Gratia's crew did discover that there was around three and a half feet (1m) of water in the ship's hold; however, this posed no significant danger and the ship was still seaworthy. The search party concluded that—for whatever reason—the Mary Celeste 's crew must have abandoned ship in a great hurry, for they had left behind their pipes and tobacco—something they felt no sailor would purposely do.

A skeleton crew from the Dei Gratia sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, some 1,200 miles (1,930km) away. The new crew managed to pump out the water in the hold in a few hours and the ship was declared fit enough to sail "around the world with a good crew and good sails."

Once the Mary Celeste reached Gibraltar, the crewmen applied for a salvage payment. British officials examined the ship and convened a salvage hearing, which was usually limited to determining whether the salvagers were entitled to payment from the ship's insurers. Captain Morehouse estimated that he would be able to claim about $17,400 on the ship and about $18,000 for the cargo.

The man in charge of the inquiry was the Attorney General of Gibraltar, Frederick Solly-Flood, QC. He suspected that foul play was involved and launched an inquiry, ordering a survey of the ship on December 23, 1872. He obstinately stuck to his belief that some sort of conspiracy was being perpetrated, even insisting that the missing Captain Briggs had plotted with Captain Morehouse to share the salvage rights of the Mary Celeste. However, the court found no evidence that anything was untoward. No bodies had been discovered and nothing had been stolen from the ship.

"I am of the opinion that she was abandoned by the master and crew in a moment of panic and for no sufficient reason," stated Captain R. W. Shufeldt of the US Navy, after inspecting the ship. "I reject the idea of a mutiny from the fact there is no evidence of violence about the decks or cabins."55 In a letter to the US State Department, Horatio Sprague, the American Consul to Gibraltar, wrote: "This case of the Mary Celeste is startling, since it appears to be one of those mysteries which no human ingenuity can recreate sufficiently to account for the abandonment of this vessel, and the disappearance of her master, family, and crew, about whom, nothing has ever transpired."44

Eventually, the salvagers—the crew from the Dei Gratia—received a payment of roughly one-sixth of the $46,000 for which the Mary Celeste and its cargo had been insured. This was poor compensation for the trouble that the salvagers had gone to, and indicative of a cloud of suspicion that lingered over the ship's disappearance and the involvement of the Dei Gratia's crew.66

For a while, friends and family of the Mary Celeste 's crew clung to hopes that they would be found. The Secretary of the US Navy requested that all vessels passing in the vicinity of the Mary Celeste 's location should heave to for 24 hours, to search for survivors; however, attempts to find clues as to the fate of the crew proved fruitless.

Following the Gibraltar hearing, the Mary Celeste was released to her part-owner, James H. Winchester, and returned to service. On February 25, a fresh crew arrived on board to deliver the ship's cargo of alcohol to its scheduled destination, Genoa.

The Mary Celeste once more sailed the seas—presumably uneventfully—for a further 12 years, before meeting a sad end in 1885. Her captain, Gilman Parker, had loaded her with a cargo of cheap rubber boots and cat food, before deliberately running her aground on Rochelais reef, Haiti. He then filed an extortionate insurance claim for an expensive cargo that didn't exist.77 Three months after his trial, Gilman Parker died in obscure circumstances. His first mate died three months later. One of the plotters of the insurance scam committed suicide, and all of the firms involved in the fraud went bankrupt.88

Sailors are famously superstitious, and often attribute accidents at sea to unknown evils lurking below the surface. Many believed that the Mary Celeste was jinxed. According to James Franklin Briggs, a nephew of Captain Briggs, the Mary Celeste should have been named "Mary Diablesse," or "Mary the She-Devil," because "she brought disaster on every man that put his trust in her."99

The Briggs family as a whole seems to have been dogged by appalling bad luck. Several of Captain Briggs' siblings had tragic ends. His oldest brother, Nathan Henry, died at sea years before the Mary Celeste made her mark on history. His youngest brother, Zenas Marston, succumbed to yellow fever while in port at Beaufort, North Carolina, shortly before Captain Briggs' own disappearance. Another brother, Oliver Briggs, was lost at sea when his brig, the Julia Hallock, foundered in the Bay of Biscay. Captain Briggs' sister, Maria, drowned at sea with her husband, Captain Joseph Gibbs. His father, Nathan Briggs, also a sea captain, died after being hit by lightning outside his home, Rose Cottage, in Sippican Village, Massachusetts.

Another theory, popular in the latter part of the 19th century, was that the crew had drank the industrial-strength alcohol onboard and committed mutiny. It was also posited that alcohol vapors from the cargo had expanded in the Azores heat and blown off the main hatch, prompting the crew to fear an imminent explosion. The chief mate of the Dei Gratia, Olivier Deveau, claimed that the head of one of the alcohol barrels had been blown off. However, the rest of the Dei Gratia crew reported that the main hatch to the cargo hold was secure and they did not smell any alcohol. Furthermore, if alcohol fumes had caused an explosion, the ship would have gone up in flames, yet there was no evidence of fire.

Around the time of the original inquiry into the Mary Celeste case presided over by Gibraltar's suspicious Attorney General Solly- Flood, whispers of foul play made their way into newspapers. According to a February 1873 article in the Indianapolis News, Captain Briggs was "murdered off the Bay of Biscay by his crew, who mutinied, and also killed his wife and child."1010

This hypothesis was vigorously asserted by Fanny Richardson, the first mate's wife: "I always believed and always will believe that my husband, Captain Briggs, Mrs. Briggs, her baby, and the cook were murdered by the crew . . . I think it is far more likely that the crew broke [the cargo] open, drank it, lost their heads, then murdered the four Americans on board and got away in the after boat and were lost."1111

Nine of the 1,701 barrels of alcohol in the hold were indeed empty; however, these empty ones were recorded as being made of red oak, not white oak, like the rest. Red oak is known to be more porous than white, and therefore more likely to leak. Furthermore, if the crew had drunk poisonous raw alcohol from the cargo, it would have blinded or soon killed them.

This theory that the crew had lost their heads and mutinied was based on simple prejudice—the majority of the crew were foreign. Among the doomed members, German brothers Volkert and Boye Lorenzen became suspects owing to the fact that none of their personal belongings could be found on the abandoned ship. According to a descendant, however, the brothers had lost their personal items in a shipwreck earlier in the year.

One of the more unusual items found on board was a sword with reddish stains on it; reddish stains were also noted on the deck. Attorney General Solly-Flood deduced that these stains were blood. According to Captain Briggs' family, the sword had been picked up by the Captain while touring a battlefield at Fiume, Austria. However, this was contradicted by Fanny Richardson, who said that the sword was a trick sword that belonged to her husband. Later, a British naval physician, Dr. J. Patron, proved that the so-called bloodstains on the sword and deck were nothing more than rust spots and fragments of a vegetable substance.1212 "From the preceding negative experiments I feel myself authorized to conclude that according to our present scientifical knowledge there is no blood in the stains observed on the deck of the Mary Celeste or on those found on the blade of the sword I have examined," he reported.

The mystery of the Mary Celeste might well have drifted into obscurity if a young Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the future creator of Sherlock Holmes, had not published a short story inspired by the incident titled "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" in the January 1884 edition of Cornhill Magazine.

In Doyle's tale, the ship, fictionalized as the Marie Celeste, is in perfect order—with no water in the hold—when discovered by the Dei Gratia. Doyle's Marie Celeste also has all of her boats present and intact—whereas one boat was missing from the real Mary Celeste. Other dramatic touches, such as the Dei Gratia 's crew finding breakfast served but uneaten, helped fire the imaginations of readers, who took his story to be true.

Doyle's eponymous narrator is an American doctor and well-known Abolitionist who served with the Union army during the Civil War. The doctor takes a sea voyage for his health aboard the Marie Celeste—described as a "snug little ship"—but the peaceful trip goes awry when the captain's wife and child disappear, presumably swept overboard, and the grief-stricken captain shoots himself in the head. The boat is later boarded by a group of spear-carrying warriors, party to the murderous vengeance of one of the passengers, a former slave bent on revenge. The ship's crew are thrown overboard, but the narrator is spared and cast adrift in a canoe, because he carries a black stone—a powerful good-luck token—previously given to him by an elderly freed slave for championing the liberation of African Americans.

Doyle's sensationalistic tale gave rise to numerous theories about the real fate of the Mary Celeste's crew, ranging from the comparatively mundane—insurance fraud—to a freak natural disaster, piracy, murder, and even attack by a giant sea monster. The Mary Celeste mystery also helped establish the legend of the Bermuda Triangle—the notorious area famed for the unaccountable disappearances of ships and, later, aircraft—despite the fact she hadn't sailed near those waters.

Speculation concerning an attack by a monster of the deep is easy to dismiss because the ship had sustained no serious damage. Piracy is also unlikely because the ship was still full of cargo and the crew's personal items, including money, were untouched. "Acts of God" explanations have included a seaquake or a waterspout.

Perhaps the most plausible scenario stems from the discovery of a sounding rod—a tool used to test the depth of water—on the Mary Celeste's deck, along with the disassembled components of a pump used to empty water from the hold. On its preceding voyage, the Mary Celeste had carried a cargo of coal, and the ship had just recently been refitted. Coal dust and construction debris might have fouled the pump, which could explain why it had been taken apart. With the pump inoperative, Captain Briggs would not have known how much water was actually in the hold. Perhaps Captain Briggs grew so concerned about the water in the hold that he convinced himself that the Mary Celeste could sink at any moment and ordered the ship to be abandoned. However, Captain Briggs was an experienced sailor and widely respected for his seamanship. He wasn't prone to panic or hysteria. "There was never a question that he would do something irrational," commented Ann MacGregor, writer of the 2007 television documentary The True Story of the Mary Celeste. In all likelihood, if Captain Briggs did order the ship to be abandoned, he must have been within sight of land. According to his last record, they were only 6 miles (9.6km) off the Azores. He might have decided that they were close enough to land to deploy their lifeboat—with, as it turned out, disastrous consequences.

The mystery of the Mary Celeste is by no means unique in maritime history. Over the decades, numerous ships have been found aimlessly drifting in the ocean with not a crewman in sight. However, in those cases, the crew eventually reached safety or their fate was easily established by evidence left on board. On that fateful December day in 1872, the Mary Celeste sailed forever into international maritime legend, a silent witness to tragedy. Her story captured the world's imagination, perhaps because it provided the New World with one of its earliest and most absorbing nautical legends. The mystery of the Mary Celeste—a fruitful source for writers, maritime sleuths, and TV documentarists—continues to resonate into the 21st century.

Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea, Paul Begg

Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea, Paul Begg

Lost at Sea: The Truth Behind Eight of History's Most Mysterious Ship Disasters, A. Hoehling

Quad-City Times, December 20, 1965: "What Happened to the Ship Mary Celeste?"

Pembroke Daily Observer, July 30, 2015: "No Human Ingenuity Can Account for the Abandonment"

Smithsonian, November 1, 2007: "Abandoned Ship—What Really Happened Aboard the Mary Celeste ?"

The Daily Herald-Tribune, October 12, 2001: "Maritime Mystery Solved"

The Toronto Star, July 23, 1989: "Why Was the Mary Celeste Abandoned?"

Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew, Brian Hicks

The Indianapolis News, February 28, 1873: "Bad News"

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 9, 1902: "Mystery of Lost Crew of the Mary Celeste"

Arizona Republic, February 7, 1943: "Son's Greatest Mystery Has Never Been Solved"