The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (59 page)

Lincoln writes: “According to both contemporary and later writers, the child’s true father was Cardinal Richelieu, or perhaps a ‘stud’ employed by Richelieu . . .”

And who could such a “stud” have been? The obvious candidate is Richelieu’s handsome young captain of musketeers, François Dauger de Cavoye. There are many stories about the conception of Louis XIV – how, for example, Richelieu plotted to bring the king and his queen together, and how Louis took refuge with Anne of Austria during a thunderstorm, as a result of which the child was conceived. It is of course possible that Louis XIV was conceived as a result of one single encounter between the king and queen, but far more likely that Richelieu arranged the encounter so that Louis would have reason to believe the child was his own . . .

Several writers mention the resemblance between Louis Dauger de Cavoye, Eustache’s younger brother, and Louis XIV. This would be understandable if the two were, in fact, half-brothers.

And so at last we have a theory that seems to explain the mystery of the man in the mask. François de Cavoye was the “stud” who made sure that an heir to the throne was born, thus frustrating the aspirations of the Merovingians (and the Priory of Sion). Eustache and Louis Dauger both knew that the king was really their half-brother; this is why Louis became a royal favourite after his release from the Bastille. He could be
relied upon to keep a secret. But the ne’er-do-well Eustache was a different story. After his downfall, his resignation from the guards, and the arrest and imprisonment of his brother, he began to talk too much. Perhaps he tried some form of blackmail on the king: release my brother or else . . . That would certainly explain why Louis had him whisked away to Pignerol and kept incommunicado, and why he later made sure that the “ancient prisoner” always accompanied the governor Saint-Mars when he moved to another prison. It is also conceivable that Eustache became involved with the Priory of Sion and the plot to place a Merovingian on the throne of France – after all, what better reason could there be for replacing the king than revealing that he was not the true son of Louis XIII? Fouquet probably knew the secret already, since he also seems to have had connection with the Priory. (Lincoln speculates that this is why Fouquet was arrested and tried; Louis tried hard to have Fouquet sentenced to death, but the court refused.) That is why Eustache was allowed to become Fouquet’s valet. But when another old acquaintance of Dauger’s, the Duc de Lauzun, was imprisoned in Pignerol after an escapade, he and Dauger were carefully kept apart.

This theory could explain many things. It could explain, for example, why the war minister Louvois (who undoubtedly knew the secret) told his mistress that the masked prisoner was the son of the Duke of Buckingham and Anne of Austria. It was not too far from the truth; it explained why the king should want to keep the prisoner’s existence a secret; but it made the prisoner the illegitimate child rather than the king. It would also explain why Dauger was obliged to wear a mask when other people were around: like his brother, he probably resembled the king. It is almost impossible to imagine why a man should be obliged to wear a mask unless his face itself is an important key to his secret.

It must be admitted that there is also one strong objection to this theory. When King Louis XV was finally told the secret of the man in the mask by his regent, the Duc d’Orléans, he is reported to have exclaimed, “If he were still alive I would give him his freedom”. Would the king really have thought it unimportant that his grandfather was the son of Richelieu’s captain of musketeers? Perhaps; after all, his own throne was now secure. But there is another story of Louis XV that casts rather more doubt on the theory. When the Duc de Choiseul asked him about the mysterious prisoner he refused to say anything except: “All conjectures which have been made hitherto are false”. Then he added a baffling afterthought: “If you knew all about it, you would see that it has
very little interest”. If this comment is true – and not simply an attempt to allay the duke’s curiosity – then it suggests that all the thousands of pages that have been written about the man in the iron mask are “much ado about nothing”.

33

The Mystery of the
Mary Celeste

On a calm afternoon of 5 December 1872 the English ship
Dei Gratia
sighted a two-masted brig pursuing an erratic course in the North Atlantic, midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. As they came closer they could see that she was sailing with only her jib and foretop mast staysail set; moreover, the jib was set to port, while the vessel was on a starboard tack – a sure sign to any sailor that the ship was out of control. Captain Morehouse of the
Dei Gratia
signalled the mysterious vessel, but received no answer. The sea was running high after recent squalls, and it took a full two hours before Morehouse could get close enough to read the name of the vessel. It was the
Mary Celeste
. Morehouse knew this American ship and its master, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs. Less than a month ago both vessels had been loading cargo on neighbouring piers on New York’s East River. The
Mary Celeste
had set sail for Genoa with a cargo of crude alcohol on 5 November, ten days before the
Dei Gratia
had sailed for Gibraltar; yet now, a month later, she was drifting in mid-Atlantic with no sign of life.

Morehouse sent three men to investigate, led by his first mate Oliver Deveau, a man of great physical strength and courage. As they clambered aboard they saw that the ship’s decks were deserted; a search below revealed that there was not a living soul on board. But the lifeboat was missing, indicating that Captain Briggs had decided to abandon ship.

There was a great deal of water below decks; two sails had been blown away, and the lower foretop sails were hanging by their corners. Yet the ship seemed seaworthy, and was certainly in no danger of sinking. Then why had the crew abandoned her? Further research revealed that the binnacle, the box containing the ship’s compass, had been smashed, and the compass itself was broken. Two cargo hatches had been ripped off,
and one of the casks of crude alcohol had been stoved in. Both forward and aft storage lockers contained a plentiful supply of food and water.

The seamen’s chests were still in the crew’s quarters, an indication of the haste in which the ship had been deserted. But a search of the captain’s cabin revealed that the navigation instruments and navigation log were missing. The last entry in the general log was dated 25 November; it meant that the
Mary Celeste
had sailed without crew for at least nine days, and that she was now some 700 miles north-east of her last recorded position.

Apart from Captain Briggs and a crew of seven, the
Mary Celeste
had also sailed with Brigg’s wife Sarah and his two-year old daughter Sophia Matilda. Faced with the mystery of why they had abandoned ship for no obvious reason, Morehouse experienced a certain superstitious alarm when Deveau suggested that two of the
Dei Gratia’s
crew should sail the
Mary Celeste
to Gibraltar; it was the prospect of £5,000 salvage money that finally made him agree to Deveau’s scheme.

Both ships arrived in Gibraltar harbour six days later. And instead of the welcome he expected, Deveau was greeted by an English bureaucrat who nailed an order of immediate arrest to the
Mary Celeste’s
mainmast. The date significantly was Friday the 13th.

From the beginning the
Mary Celeste
had been an unlucky ship. She was registered originally as the
Amazon
, and her first captain had died within forty-eight hours. On her maiden voyage she had hit a fishing weir off the coast of Maine, and damaged her hull. While this was being repaired a fire had broken out amidships. Later, while sailing through the Straits of Dover, she hit another brig, which sank. This had occurred under her third captain; her fourth accidentally ran the ship aground on Cape Brenton Island and wrecked her.

The
Amazon
was salvaged, and passed through the hands of three more owners before she was bought by J.H. Winchester, the founder of a successful shipping line which still operates in New York. Winchester discovered that the brig – which had now been renamed
Mary Celeste
– had dry rot in her timbers, and he had the bottom rebuilt with copper lining and the deck cabin lengthened. These repairs had ensured that the ship was in excellent condition before she had sailed for Genoa under the experienced Captain Briggs – this helped to explain why she had survived so long in the wintry Atlantic after the crew had taken to the lifeboat.

British officials at Gibraltar seemed to suspect either mutiny or some Yankee plot – the latter theory based on the fact that Captain Morehouse and Captain Briggs had been friends, and had apparently dined
together the day before the
Mary Celeste
had sailed from New York. But at the inquiry that followed, the idea of mutiny seemed to have gained favour. To back this theory the Court of Inquiry was shown an axe-mark on one of the ship’s rails, scoring on her hull that was described as a crude attempt to make the ship look as if she had hit rocks, and a stained sword that was found beneath the captain’s bunk. All this, it was claimed, pointed to the crew getting drunk, killing the master and his family, and escaping in the ship’s boat.

The Americans were insulted by what they felt was a slur on the honour of the US Merchant Navy, and indignantly denied this story. They pointed out that Briggs was not only known to be a fair man who was not likely to provoke his crew to mutiny, but also that he ran a dry ship; the only alcohol on the
Mary Celeste
was the cargo. And even a thirsty sailor would not be likely to drink more than a mouthful of crude alcohol – it would cause severe stomach pains and eventual blindness. Besides, if the crew had mutinied, why should they leave behind their sea-chests together with such items as family photographs, razors and sea-boots?

The British Admiralty remained unconvinced, but had to admit that if the alternative theory was correct, and Briggs and Morehouse had decided to make a false claim for salvage, Briggs would actually have lost by the deal – he was part-owner of the ship, and his share of any salvage would have come to a fraction of what he could have made by selling his share in the normal way.

In March 1873 the court was finally forced to admit that it was unable to decide why the
Mary Celeste
had been abandoned, the first time in its history that it had failed to come to a definite conclusion. The
Dei Gratia’s
owners were awarded one-fifth of the value of the
Mary Celeste
and her cargo. The brig herself was returned to her owner, who lost no time in selling her the moment she got back to New York.

During the next eleven years the
Mary Celeste
had many owners, but brought little profit to any of them. Sailors were convinced she was unlucky. Her last owner, Captain Gilman C. Parker, ran her aground on a reef in the West Indies and made a claim for insurance. The insurers became suspicious, and Parker and his associates were brought to trial. At that time the penalty for deliberately scuttling a ship on the high seas was death by hanging; but the judge, mindful of the
Mary Celeste’s
previous record of bad luck, allowed the men to be released on a technicality. Within eight months Captain Parker was dead, one of the associates had gone mad, and another had committed suicide. The
Mary Celeste
herself had been left to break up on the reef.

Over the next decade or so, as no new evidence came to light, interest in the story waned. During the trial, when fraud was still suspected, a careful watch had been kept on the major ports of England and America. But there was no sign of any of the missing crew.

In the year 1882 a 23-year-old newly qualified doctor named Arthur Doyle moved to Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, and screwed up his nameplate. And during the long weeks of waiting for patients he whiled away the time writing short stories. It was in the autumn of 1882 that he began a story: “In the month of December 1873, the British ship
Dei Gratia
steered into Gibraltar, having in tow a derelict brigantine
Marie Celeste
, which had been picked up in the latitude 38°40´, longitude 70°15´ west”.

For such a short sentence, this contains a remarkable number of inaccuracies. The year was actually 1872; the
Dei Gratia
did not tow the
Marie Celeste
, the latter came under its own sail; the latitude and longitude are wrong; and the ship was called plain English Mary, not Marie. All the same, when “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was published in the
Cornhill
magazine in 1884 it caused a sensation, launching Arthur Doyle’s career as a writer – he was soon using the name A. Conan Doyle. Most people took it for the truth, and from then on it was widely accepted that the
Mary Celeste
had been taken over by a kind of Black Power leader with a hatred of Whites. Mr Solly Flood, the chief investigator in the
Mary Celeste
case, was so indignant that he sent a telegram to the Central News Agency denouncing J. Habakuk Jephson as a fraud and a liar. From then on the
Cornhill
was willing to publish most of Conan Doyle’s stories at thirty guineas a time instead of the three guineas he had been paid so far.

Doyle’s story was the signal for a new interest in the mystery, and over the next few years there were a number of hoax accounts of the last days of the
Mary Celeste
. They told all kinds of stories from straightforward mutinies to mass accidents – such as everyone falling into the sea when a platform made to watch a swimming race gave way, or the finding of another derelict carrying gold bullion, which tempted Captain Briggs to leave his own ship drifting while he escaped in the other one. One author argued that all the crew had been dragged through the ship’s portholes at night by a ravenous giant squid, while Charles Fort, the eminent paranormal researcher, suggested the crew had been snatched away by the same strange force that causes rains of frogs and live fish. Fort added, “I have a collection of yarns, by highly individualized liars, or artists who scorned, in any particular, to imitate one another; who told, thirty, forty, or fifty years later, of having been
members of this crew”. Even today the
Mary Celeste
often sails unsuspectingly into TV serials and Sci-Fi movies to become involved in time warps or attacked by aliens in UFOs.