The Ghost Ship That Sailed Itself: What Happened Aboard the Mary Celeste?
The Mary Celeste left New York on November 7, 1872, bound for Genoa. She was an American brigantine of some 282 tons, and her hold carried 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol destined to fortify Italian wine. Her master was Benjamin Spooner Briggs, a Massachusetts sea captain of thirty-seven, devout, sober, and by every account careful and well regarded. He did not sail alone. With him were his wife, Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and a hand-picked crew of seven, among them the Frisian brothers Volkert and Boz Lorenzen and the German sailors Arian Martens and Gottlieb Goudschaal, men Briggs himself had described as peaceable and first-rate. The Briggs' seven-year-old son Arthur had been left at home with relatives so as not to miss school. Ten people sailed.
The last entry on the ship's log slate was dated November 25, near the Azorean island of Santa Maria. It recorded nothing unusual.
The afternoon of December 4, 1872, was gray and unsettled roughly midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal when the helmsman of the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia noticed a sail that would not behave. The other ship was yawing, falling off the wind and coming up again, her canvas set in a slack and careless way no working crew would tolerate. Captain David Morehouse studied her through his glass for two hours as the distance closed. He knew the vessel; he had dined with her master in New York only weeks before. When his first mate Oliver Deveau finally rowed across and hauled himself over the rail, he found a sound ship sailing herself, with no hand at the wheel and no soul anywhere aboard.
Deveau searched her. The hull was sound and the ship plainly seaworthy. Below decks lay a full six months of food and fresh water, untouched. The crew's oilskin boots and pipes sat undisturbed in the forecastle. Sarah's harmonium stood in the cabin with sheet music nearby. There was perhaps three and a half feet of water in the hold, enough to be noticed but nowhere near enough to sink her, and one of the two pumps had been disassembled. The forehatch and a small after hatch lay open, their covers upturned on the deck, yet the main hatch over the cargo remained sealed. The binnacle holding the compass had been knocked from its place and its glass broken. The yawl, the ship's single small boat, was gone, and the evidence suggested it had been launched deliberately from its position across the main hatch.
Gone with the boat were the ship's register, the captain's chronometer, his sextant, and the navigation book, the items a master would gather if he meant to leave in an orderly way and fix his position afterward. The dates set the hardest fact of the case. The log slate stopped on November 25; the ship was boarded on December 4. For nine or ten days an empty vessel had sailed across open ocean, holding roughly to her course.
Deveau and two men brought the Mary Celeste into Gibraltar, and the salvage hearings opened before the Vice-Admiralty Court. Frederick Solly-Flood, the Attorney General who led the inquiry, treated the case as a crime from the outset. He put forward a drunken mutiny, then piracy, then a conspiracy by Morehouse and the Dei Gratia's own men to murder the crew and claim the salvage. A surveyor named John Austin was sent aboard and reported cuts on the bow that he thought had been made by a sharp instrument; stains on the captain's sword and marks on the rail were declared to be blood.
The case dissolved under examination. The alcohol cargo was undrinkable, which ruled out a drunken riot. The supposed bloodstains, when tested, proved not to be blood. There were no signs of struggle, nothing had been stolen, and there were no bodies. After months the court could prove no wrongdoing. It awarded the Dei Gratia's men one thousand seven hundred pounds, only about a fifth of the combined value of ship and cargo, an unusually low sum for a salvage of that size.
The cargo itself yielded one detail that would matter later. When the alcohol was delivered at Genoa, nine of the 1,701 barrels were found empty. Those nine, alone among the whole consignment, had been built of porous red oak rather than the white oak used for the rest, and their contents had leaked and evaporated through the staves.
In 1884, twelve years after the event, a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle published a sensational short story about a ship he called the Marie Celeste, told by a supposed survivor and full of murder on the high seas. It was fiction and Doyle never pretended otherwise, but it lodged in the public mind, and with it lodged inventions that still circulate as fact: warm meals left steaming on the cabin table, tea still hot, a single half-eaten breakfast, and the misspelled name itself. None of that is in the record.
The ship had a difficult history before 1872 and a worse one after. She was built in 1861 in Nova Scotia under the name Amazon. Her first captain fell ill and died within days of taking command, and a run of collisions and groundings followed before she was salvaged, rebuilt, renamed and sent back to sea. After the Gibraltar hearings she passed from owner to owner with a growing reputation as an unlucky vessel, until her last captain, Gilman Parker, ran her deliberately onto a reef off Haiti in 1885 in an insurance fraud and destroyed her. Even the wreck has resisted identification: remains announced in 2001 as the Mary Celeste turned out, when the timbers were dated, to have come from trees still growing years after she sank.
Of the ten people who left New York in November 1872, not one was ever found. No body came ashore, no wreckage of the yawl was ever identified, and no confirmed trace of any of them has been recorded in the century and a half since.
Conclusions and Open Questions
The explanation most historians now favor begins with those nine porous barrels. The theory holds that alcohol leaking through red oak staves built up fumes in the hold, and that a sudden venting through the opened hatches, or a frothing spill that sounded like water coming in, convinced Briggs an explosion was imminent. He would have put everyone into the yawl and stood off at a safe distance, the boat held to the ship by a line, intending to reboard once the danger passed. Then the line parted, or a squall drove the ship away faster than oars could follow. The theory fits the open hatches, the sealed main hatch and the carefully gathered instruments. Its weakness is physical: fumes concentrated enough to terrify a veteran master should have scorched or stained the hold, and no scorching was found. Nor is it obvious that Briggs, who knew what he was carrying, would have panicked at all.
Other theories crowd around it. A waterspout, the seagoing cousin of a tornado, would explain the water in the hold and the disordered rigging; but a spout violent enough to drive ten people off a ship would likely have left far worse damage than the Mary Celeste showed. A submarine earthquake, or seaquake, might have frightened the crew, yet it should have marked the hull or shifted the cargo, and it did not. A simpler mechanical fright has also been proposed: with one pump dismantled and a sounding rod found abandoned on deck, Briggs may have taken a badly misread depth of water for a fast and fatal leak. That fits the physical evidence well, but it asks us to accept that an experienced captain abandoned ship on a figure he could have rechecked in minutes.
Solly-Flood's criminal theories have never entirely died. Some argue still that Morehouse and Deveau, who knew Briggs and knew the ship, staged the discovery for the salvage award, or that the crew mutinied and fled. Against this stands everything the court could not find: no blood, no struggle, nothing stolen, an undrinkable cargo, no bodies. At the far edge of the discussion sit giant squid, sea monsters, alien abduction and paranormal vortices. One theory holds that only something outside ordinary experience could empty a ship so cleanly; the difficulty is that every such account still has to explain the register, the chronometer and the sextant, removed by someone who was thinking clearly.
What remains unexplained is the shape of the decision itself. Whatever emptied the Mary Celeste worked in a narrow band between panic and order: fast enough to drive ten people off a seaworthy ship, calm enough that they paused to collect the tools of navigation. It may be that no single cause is required, only a sequence in which each step was reasonable at the time: rough weather, water in the hold, a dismantled pump and a bad sounding suggesting she was filling faster than she was, a reek of alcohol from the porous barrels, and a captain with his wife and infant aboard deciding to stand off in the boat and watch. One parted line would then have been enough.
The open questions are simple and unanswered. Where, in nine or ten days of unmanned sailing, did the ten actually leave the ship? Why has no trace of the yawl or its occupants ever been found, in an area crossed by shipping? And what danger presents itself as both immediate and survivable at a distance of a few hundred yards? Ten people died, among them a two-year-old child, and the record of their last hour consists of an open hatch, a broken binnacle, a missing boat and a blank log slate.