Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (13 page)

One calm, quiet afternoon in December 1872, seaman John Johnson peered through his telescope from the deck of the
Dei Gratia
(“by the grace of God” in English). Alarmed by what he had seen, he shouted down for the second mate, John Wright, to join him, and the two men stared at the ship sailing erratically on the horizon. They then summoned the captain, David Reed Morehouse, and the first mate, Oliver Deveau. More house at once recognized the
Mary Celeste
, which had put to sea from New York only seven days before the
Dei Gratia.
Despite the absence of distress signals, Morehouse knew something had to be wrong—no one appeared to be guiding the vessel—so he steered his ship closer. After two hours, Morehouse concluded the
Mary Celestewas
drifting, so he dispatched Deveau and some deckhands in a small boat to investigate, and one of the most puzzling sea mysteries of all time began to unfold, for the brigantine was completely deserted.

It was later recorded—although not by Deveau himself, who kept his information for the later inquest he knew he would have to attend—that the boarding party came upon mugs of tea and a half-eaten meal left out on the table, and a fat ship's cat fast asleep on a locker. Mysterious cuts had been made in part of the railing, some strange slits had been cut into the deck, and a bloodstained sword was discovered under the captain's bed. Two small hatches to the cargo hold were open, although the main one was secure, and nine of the 1,701 barrels of American alcohol were empty. A spool of thread was balanced on a sewing machine and, given the slightest movement, would clearly have rolled off if the sea hadn't been so calm. A clock was turning backward and the compass had been broken, but there were no signs of a violent struggle and, even more mysteriously, no sign of Captain Briggs, his wife, daughter, the single passenger, or any of the seven-man crew. Curiously, the vessel's sextant, navigation book, chronometer, ship's register, and other papers were all missing, while the captain's log lay open and ready for use upon his desk. It appeared that the people on board the
Mary Celeste
had simply vanished in the middle of eating their breakfast, never to be seen again. This is the story that became the accepted version of events, but as we delve into the truth of the tale we will try to find out what really happened and how the legend has grown to become one of the greatest sea mysteries of all time.

Following the discovery of the ghost ship, people's imaginations were working overtime.
The Boston Post
reported on February 24, 1873, that “it is now believed that the brigantine
Mary Celeste
was seized by pirates in the latter part of November, and that the captain and his wife have been murdered.” Two days later,
The New York Times
concluded that “the brig's officers are believed to have been murdered at sea.” Ever since then, speculation about the crew's sudden disappearance has been the subject of many a seafaring yarn, with stories of mutiny, giant whales, sea monsters, alien abduction, and much more, while the truth of what happened to the people on board the doomed ship, discovered halfway between the Azores and the Portuguese coast on that calm December afternoon, has remained a mystery.

Frederick Solly Flood was the attorney general for Gibraltar, where the
Mary Celeste
had been taken by Morehouse and his crew, and the advocate general for the British Admiralty Court. An arrogant, excitable character, infamous for his snap decisions, he had lost his son's entire inheritance on a horse called the Colonel in the 1848 Epsom Derby. At the inquest into the
Mary Celeste
, Flood decided that the crew must have broken into the cargo hold and drunk the nine barrels of liquor before murdering the captain and his wife and abandoning ship. He had to rethink his ideas after it was pointed out that the
Mary Celeste's
cargo was of denatured alcohol, a mixture of ethanol and methanol similar to methylated spirits, and more likely to kill than to intoxicate.

Unabashed, Flood revised his conclusion to suggest a conspiracy between the two captains, who knew each other, to defraud the
Mary Celeste
‘s owners. According to this theory, Briggs had killed his crew just before Morehouse was due to intercept the
Mary Celeste
and then stowed away with his family on the
Dei Gratia
while Morehouse claimed the salvage rights to the
Mary Celeste
and the two scurrilous captains split the money. It was then pointed out to the hapless attorney general that Briggs part-owned the ship himself and that the entire salvage money would have been less than his original investment. Solly Flood went back to the drawing board and decided that if Briggs hadn't been involved, then Morehouse must have killed the entire crew to gain salvage rights to the ship himself. Eventually, after many months of slander, the Admiralty stepped in and exonerated Morehouse of all responsibility, compensating him and his crew. Oliver Deveau must have read in despair what had been attributed to him by the newspapers, to which a spiteful Flood had been quick to leak details of the case.

Other theories were also dismissed, since giant sea monsters, despite a penchant for sailors, were not known for taking a ship's papers and navigational instruments, nor were the aliens who had apparently abducted every living being on board except the cat. Neither were they picked off the deck one by one by a giant sea squid, nor blown into the sea by a passing whale that sneezed, and most clear-thinking people have ruled out any connection with the Bermuda Triangle (see “Try to See It from My Angle: The Bermuda Triangle,” page 12), as the
Mary Celeste
‘s path didn't cross it. Piracy was also ruled out, as nothing of value had been stolen, and mutiny was considered unlikely, as the small crew of professional and disciplined sailors were on the short voyage voluntarily and Captain Briggs himself was known to be well liked by his men. In March 1873, the court finally had to admit they were unable to determine the reason why Captain Briggs had abandoned the
Mary Celeste
, a conclusion that caused a sensation as it was the first time in history a nautical inquest had failed to find a satisfactory explanation.

It was Solly Flood's rantings in court that alerted the English media to the mystery of the
Mary Celeste.
When news reached London, a certain young doctor took a keen interest in the reports, using them in a short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement.” The yarn, published in January 1884 by the prestigious
Cornhill Magazine
, featured a mystery boat called
Marie Celeste
, not
Mary Celeste
, captained by a man called Tibbs, not Briggs. Many features of the fictional account are close to the true story of the
Mary Celeste.
Equally, many details—such as the half-eaten breakfast, and the abandoned boat in perfect condition floating serenely on still waters—were a figment of the writer's imagination. And as the imagination belonged to the young Arthur Conan Doyle (who also crops up in “Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden,” page 101, and “The Spine-chilling Tale of the Chase Vault,” page 39), the creator of Sherlock Holmes, it was extremely convincing. With his appealing mixture of fact and fiction, Conan Doyle had inadvertently created a mystery that would occupy thousands of minds over the next century and provoke endless hours of debate.

Just when the conspiracy theories surrounding the
Mary
(not
Marie) Celeste
were beginning to die down, an interesting new lead emerged. In 1913, Howard Linford came across some old papers of Abel Fosdyk, a friend of his who had recently died. Among them was what claimed to be an eyewitness account of what had happened to the captain and crew of the
Mary Celeste.
According to this account, Abel Fosdyk, due to unfortunate circumstances, had had to leave America in a hurry and had persuaded his good friend Captain Briggs to stow him away on the
Mary Celeste.
He also describes how Briggs had asked a carpenter to install a new deck-level on board so that his wife and daughter would have a viewing platform away from the dangers of a working ship's deck. Fosdyk then tells how Briggs, while at sea, became involved in a good-natured argument with two of the crew about how well a man could swim while fully clothed and to conclude the matter all three jumped into the calm water for a race. Unfortunately, they were then attacked by passing sharks. When the rest of the crew raced up onto the new temporary deck to see what the commotion was, it promptly collapsed, throwing everybody to the sharks. Everyone apart from Fosdyk himself, that is, who clung to the platform, which drifted to the coast of Africa where he was saved. According to Fosdyk, he had been unable to tell the story during his lifetime for fear of being recognized and hauled back to America.

However, Fosdyk had gotten many of his facts about the ship and crew wrong. He claimed the crew were entirely English when in fact the crew list confirms four were German. Also, he described the
Mary Celestes
a vessel of six hundred tons when in reality it was less than half that size. Finally, it is highly unlikely that Briggs, a responsible sea captain, would jump fully clothed into the sea with two of his crew, leaving the rest of his men, his wife, and his two-year-old daughter on board to fend for themselves should the three swimmers run into trouble. Especially as, given the set of the rigging when the boat was discovered deserted by the
Dei Gratia
, it must have been sailing at a speed of several knots at the time, leaving the swimmers far behind. Whether Fosdyk invented the story and left it to be discovered among his papers upon his death, or whether his friend Howard Linford created the myth, is unknown.

Nevertheless, when
The Strand Magazine
published the papers in 1913, they raised more questions about the mystery than they answered. Then, in the late 1920s, in
Chambers's Journal
, a young reporter by the name of Lee Kaye interviewed John Pemberton, another alleged sole survivor of the
Mary Celeste
claiming to be able to reveal the shocking truth of what had really happened to the captain and crew. The public demanded to know more and the press eventually tracked Pemberton down and published the story alongside a photograph of the old sailor. Lawrence Keating turned the story into a book,
The Great Mary Celeste Hoax
(1929). The book was a worldwide bestseller until it was revealed that the journalist Lee Kaye, the sailor John Pemberton, and the author Lawrence Keating were all one and the same. The photograph of Pemberton that Keating had given the press was of his own father.

But setting all the hoaxes and theories aside, what really did happen to the
Mary Celeste?
Let's consider the evidence in a bit more detail.

In 1861, the first ship to emerge from the yard of Joshua Dewis shipbuilders on Spencer Island, Nova Scotia, was christened the
Amazon.
Launched as the American Civil War was gathering pace, she proved to be trouble right from the start. Her first captain, Robert McLellan, died before the ship went anywhere. Her second captain, John Nutting Parker, sailed her into a weir in Maine and during the subsequent repairs she caught fire. The ship passed through many hands with equal bad luck before being bought by J. H. Winchester & Co. of New York for $2,500 during 1871. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs bought a one-third share in the boat, intended to be his retirement fund. Briggs was born on April 24, 1835, in the town of Wareham, Massachusetts, and was a man of strict religious beliefs and a dedicated teetotaler; he was described as “of the highest character as a Christian and an intelligent and active shipmaster.” After a $14,500 refit, the ship reemerged in New York's East River proudly bearing a new, hopefully luckier name. The rechristened
Mary Celeste was
ready for her maiden voyage.

In 1872, Briggs prepared to take his new ship to Genoa with a cargo of denatured alcohol (intended for use by the Italians to fortify their wines). He enlisted his first crew, engaging Albert Richardson, a Civil War veteran who had served twice before with Briggs, as first mate. Second mate Andrew Gilling and steward Edward William Head were also of solid and reliable reputation. The four ordinary seamen were all German, two being brothers who had recently survived a shipwreck that had destroyed all of their possessions.

On Saturday, November 2, 1872, after the barrels of alcohol had been loaded and made secure, Captain Briggs is known to have dined with his old friend Captain David Morehouse, skipper of the
Dei Gratia
, who had a cargo of petroleum to transport to Gibraltar a little over a week later. The two ships would be taking an almost identical route across the Atlantic, although the two men did not expect to see each other again before they returned to New York. As the weather was particularly stormy in the Atlantic, Captain Briggs was forced to wait before he risked venturing out on the open sea, and he finally set sail on the afternoon of November 7.