THE KNOWN FACTS surrounding the abandonment of the Mary Celeste on the high seas call for a lot less speculation and eye-rolling than the embellishments of the event heaped upon that same vessel under her more mysterious but erroneous name of Marie Celeste.
Built at Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, and first named Amazon, the ship later renamed Mary Celeste was launched on 18 May 1861 against the backdrop of the American Civil War and, to be fair, she does seem to have been a ship of ill omen. Her first captain and part-owner, Robert McLellan, fell ill and died while supervising her loading for the maiden voyage to London, which was undertaken instead by one Captain John Nutting Parker. On the outward-bound leg of that journey, Amazon crashed into a fishing dam in the straits off the state of Maine and, on the return leg, she crashed into and sank a brig in the Strait of Dover. After successive owners had failed to make her pay, Amazon was – in rather suspicious circumstances – driven against the rocky coast of Cape Breton Island during some admittedly stormy weather in October 1867; the owners abandoned her as a wreck and walked away with the insurance money. Next, the remains were bought by Richard Haines of New York who, having spent $9,000 returning her to a seaworthy condition and with a greater carrying capacity, re-registered her as the Mary Celeste, a name inspired by Maria Celeste, the illegitimate daughter of Galileo and his mistress, Marina Gamba.
In late October 1872 the Mary Celeste was at berth in New York’s East River and being loaded with 1,701 barrels of raw commercial alcohol for transit to Genoa. With her cargo, valued at $35,000 and fully insured, she set sail on 7 November with her new captain and part-owner, Benjamin Briggs, at the helm; also on board were Briggs’s wife and daughter and a crew of seven. On 4 December, the British-registered Dei Gratia, captained by David Morehouse, which had left New York a week later and was also bound for Genoa, came upon the Mary Celeste about halfway between the Azores and Gibraltar. Still under reduced sail but making very unsteady passage through the water, the Mary Celeste appeared to Morehouse to be abandoned so he sent a small party across to see what was going on.
His first mate, Oliver Deveau, reported back that while there were no signs of violence or upheaval, no one was aboard, yet all personal possessions were in place; it appeared as though everyone had simply disappeared into thin air. As far as Deveau could ascertain, all the cargo was intact, yet all the covers to the hatches granting access to the hold had been removed as if someone had been trying to ventilate it. The ship’s side rails next to the midship storage point of the longboat had been removed to facilitate the launch of that craft and the ship’s sextant and marine chronometer were missing; also, one of the strong sail-ropes, the peak halyard, had been taken down and tied to the stern as if to tow the longboat behind for some reason. At a loss for anything better to do, Morehouse, who just happened to be a friend of Briggs, put a skeleton crew aboard the Mary Celeste and both ships made for Gibraltar, where they arrived on 12 and 13 December.
A court of inquiry was immediately convened with examination of the Mary Celeste revealing nothing out of the ordinary – apart from the fact that all ten aboard had disappeared. There was no internal or external damage to suggest what might have instigated such abandonment, which had obviously been undertaken in a hurried yet orderly manner. Nevertheless, the Attorney General of Gibraltar, Frederick Solly-Flood, a pompous and arrogant man disliked by all, was determined to establish foul play; in fact, his wild imaginings were the very bedrock on which subsequent outlandish theories were founded. He first postulated that the crew must have got at the cargo and, in a drunken frenzy, murdered the captain and his family before taking off in the longboat. When it was pointed out that none of the barrels had been breached and their contents were quite undrinkable, Solly-Flood moved on to the stance that Captain Briggs must have murdered the crew and then waited for his friend, Morehouse, to catch up and complete their plot to claim the salvage money. He also suggested that Morehouse’s decision to remain in Gibraltar to make himself available to the proceedings, while allowing his ship to continue to Genoa under Deveau, was simply a ruse to spirit away Briggs and his family, allegedly hidden aboard.
Having been unable to prove anything of the sort, Solly-Flood moved on to the ship having been attacked by a giant squid or octopus, or the entire crew having been sucked from the decks by a waterspout of outlandish proportion. Despite none of Solly-Flood’s theories allowing for the hurried but professional evacuation of everyone into the ship’s longboat, Gibraltar – not to mention Europe and America – was soon buzzing with tales of the ship having been attacked by a sea monster or by the Flying Dutchman ghost ship, rising up from the sea to spirit away all aboard.
THE BRIGGS FAMILY CURSE
The year before he set out on his ill-fated voyage on the Mary Celeste, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs had decided to give up the sea and almost bought a hardware store in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In hindsight, this would have been a wise move.
As a treat, Briggs decided to take his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Sophia, along for the ride on the Mary Celeste, so they disappeared with him. Their son, Arthur, was left ashore with relatives as he was of school age. But tragedy was also to befall him in later life when he was struck and killed by a falling tree in a storm.
The rest of Briggs’s family were no less unfortunate. His father was killed by lightning and his brother, Oliver, who had decided on a life in hardware after hearing of Benjamin’s fate, went to sea just two months later. On 8 January 1873 Oliver’s ship, the Julia A. Hallock, was struck by a sudden storm in the Bay of Biscay and sank in minutes, taking Oliver with it.
After no conclusions whatsoever were made as to the fate that had befallen the crew of the Mary Celeste, the ship was released to continue to Genoa under a Captain Blatchford, brought out from Boston by the ship’s co-owners. Unfortunately for Morehouse, his reputation was forever stained by Solly-Flood’s ravings, which also gave the insurers of the Mary Celeste the leeway to offer a derisory 20 per cent of the combined value of the ship and cargo as salvage money when the going rate was 50 per cent.
In all likelihood, the world would have forgotten about the Mary Celeste had it not been for a young Arthur Conan Doyle, then publishing anonymously. The January 1884 edition of the Cornhill Magazine published his short and darkly gothic version of the fate of those aboard the ship he renamed the Marie Celeste. Under the title of ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, it is from this narrative that we inherit all the ghost-ship embellishments such as the half-eaten meals on the table with mugs of steaming tea and still-burning pipes laid carefully to one side. Presented as if dictated by the titular character, sole survivor of the demonic and homicidal insanity that overcame all others on board, many took the story to be factual. The Boston Herald certainly swallowed the yarn hook, line and sinker, reproducing it as a factual account to leave its readers under the impression that this had been the terrible fate of those aboard the Mary Celeste.
Modern science seems to have come up with the most logical explanation as to the fate of the ship and crew. When the ship was unloaded at Genoa, nine of the 1,701 wooden barrels of alcohol in the hold were found to be unbreached but empty. The other 1,692 barrels were made of white oak, but the empty ones were made of red oak, which, not having the occluded pores that make white oak watertight, is best suited to the storage of dry goods. The shippers of the cargo, Meissner, Ackermann & Co., had accidentally used nine barrels which, quite unsuitable for the storage of a volatile fluid, had allowed their contents to seep through their walls and fill the cargo hold with fumes. This would explain why the crew had removed the hatch covers granting access to the hold but, with alcohol fumes being much heavier than air, this would have done little to lessen the danger level of their situation. The dangerous nature of the cargo as the root cause of the evacuation had been explored before but always discounted as it was known that, when the ship had been examined on arrival at Gibraltar, there had been no signs anywhere on the ship of fire or explosion.
However, in 2006 Dr Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London and a man of international acclaim in his field, created a replica of the Mary Celeste cargo hold into which he packed paper cubes before flooding the compartment with butane and igniting it. One would expect this to result in crushed and charred cubes and scorched walls but nothing of the sort happened. As Sella explained, what he had created was a pressure-wave flash explosion which, although dramatic and frightening, occurred against a background of relatively cool air and was of such short duration as to leave neither structural damage nor signs of scorching or charring. And, Sella stressed, the alcohol fumes in the hold of the Mary Celeste would have flash-burned a lot faster and a lot colder than his butane. If this was indeed the cause of the evacuation, one can appreciate the panic produced among a crew who, acutely aware of the dangerous nature of their cargo, saw the hatches blown off by a violent rush of vivid flame from the cargo hold. Understandably reluctant to hang around for a repeat performance of such an event, Briggs and his crew took to the longboat, lashed in tow to the Mary Celeste, hoping for the best. Somehow the halyard had become detached from the cleats on the longboat to leave the party drifting to their doom. When Deveau went on board a few days later, all the alcohol fumes had flashed off, leaving no tell-tale odour.
Bad luck continued to dog the Mary Celeste. The 1880s saw her working West Indian waters, yet still with no one managing to run her at a profit; when three of her owner-captains died prematurely, she was branded a cursed ship. This allowed the shifty Gilman C. Parker to snap her up for a song – and he was a man who knew exactly how to make money out of the Mary Celeste. In November 1884 and in collusion with others, including his first mate, Parker crammed her to the gunwales with worthless junk – barrels supposedly filled with fine wine, which in fact contained water, and so forth – before driving her at full speed onto the Rochelais coral reef off the coast of Haiti. When he tried to claim the $30,000 insurance money – close to $1 million at today’s values – he was instead told to expect prosecution for fraud, but both Parker and his first mate died before warrants could be issued: Parker choked to death in a drunken stupor and the first mate, Fillmore Tyson, came a very poor second in a knife fight. Parker’s three other co-defendants fared no better: one died, another was declared insane and the third shot himself, prompting the belief that the Mary Celeste had reached out from the bottom of the sea to bring down those who had destroyed her.