Mysterious incidents at sea have it all: a crew that for a time is it’s own closed society, the vagaries of seas and tides and weather, and spice of exotic locations, sometimes unknown and unknowable locations, even sightings of exotic creatures, or lost islands. In lore, and in fact maritime mysteries live on, and not just in seafaring towns. The great North American classic, The Mary Celeste, will be discussed forever, we predict.
Below is a review of the basic facts. In a way, what happened is simple, but there’s a lot to discuss. A range of possibilities, lots to deduce.
On November 7, 1872, the 282-ton brigantine Mary Celeste set sail from New York Harbor on its way to Genoa, Italy. On board were the ship’s captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia, along with eight crew members. Less than a month later, on December 5, a passing British ship called Dei Gratia spotted Mary Celeste at full sail and adrift about 400 miles east of the Azores, with no sign of the captain, his family or any of the crew. Aside from several feet of water in the hold and a missing lifeboat, the ship was undamaged and loaded with six months’ worth of food and water.Mary Celeste had a shadowy past. Originally christened Amazon, it was given a new name after a series of mishaps (including the sudden illness and death of its first captain and a collision with another ship in the English Channel). An investigation into whether to grant payment by its insurers to the Dei Gratia’s crew for salvaging the “ghost ship” found no evidence of foul play. Mary Celeste would sail under different owners for 12 years before its last captain deliberately ran it aground in Haiti as part of an attempted insurance fraud. In 2001, best-selling novelist and adventurer Clive Cussler claimed to have found the wreck of Mary Celeste, but later analysis of the timbers retrieved from the ship he found showed the wood was still living at least a decade after Mary Celeste sank.
Meanwhile, one of the most famous maritime mysteries in history endures:
Why would an experienced captain such as Briggs, or his sailors, abandon a perfectly sound ship?
Theories over the years have ranged from mutiny and pirate attack to assault by giant octopus or sea monster, while the more scientifically minded proposed an explosion caused by fumes from the 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol in the ship’s hold.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even weighed in with a short story published in 1884, in which the inhabitants of the ghost ship fell victim to an ex-slave seeking vengeance.
On the less-sensationalized end, an investigation chronicled in the 2007 documentary “The True Story of the Mary Celeste” was able to offer no definite conclusion, but did suggest a scenario in which a faulty chronometer, rough seas and a clogged on board pump could have led Briggs to order the ship abandoned shortly after sighting land on November 25, 1872.
According to the last entry in the ship’s log book, made that morning, Mary Celeste was within sight of the Azores island of Santa Maria, some 500 miles from where the Dei Gratia would find it nine days later.
History.com, Sara Pruitt, July 21, 2015
Theories of what happened to the ship run an astounding gamut.
Pirates slaughtered everyone on board, then took off (without the valuables!) in a rowboat. A mutiny occurred, with the sailors taking off in the rowboat, and leaving their own survival gear behind…
Freak storm conditions frightened the wits out of captain and crew, who decided a small rowboat was safer than a ship which now had water in the hold. So they took off, without even taking their basic gear with them…
There are even theories about rare monsters from the deep, or, believe it or not, alien abductions of the whole cast of crew and passengers. You name it, someone has proposed it.
But regarding the theories that might actually make sense, the number grows much smaller. One careful theorist has posed the idea that at one point, around November 25 when the ship was in sight of islands, the captain perceived unusually high levels of water in the hold, with no easy way to pump it all out nor perceive with precision how much water was there or how fast it was rising.
It’s conceivable the captain gave up on the ship, felt that he couldn’t risk the lives of crew and family (remember his two-year old was aboard!) on a sinking vessel, and ordered all to the safety of the sighted land. For some reason in this scenario, they never made the short journey, but were lost in a resurgence of storm, or dashed on the rocks. By why was no trace ever found or seen?
And again, why were so many items, easily grabbed and very handy, found abandoned on the ship?
There are some holes in this theory, we think, but at least it makes careful use of actual ship’s logs, actual facts. It’s not just constructed out of fancy.
Stay tuned, in the next sections, for some other carefully constructed theories.