MARY CELESTE

Opening

On 4 December 1872, the crew of the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia spotted a ship sailing erratically in the Atlantic between the Azores and Portugal. She was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York nearly a month earlier for Genoa. First mate Oliver Deveau rowed over and climbed aboard.

Nobody was there. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia and seven crew had gone, along with the ship's only lifeboat. The ship was seaworthy, the cargo was nearly all there, and there was food and water for six months. None of the ten people was ever seen again.

Timeline

18 May 1861The ship is launched as the Amazon from Joshua Dewis's yard at Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia. Her first captain, Robert McLellan, falls ill and dies on her maiden voyage, the start of a reputation for bad luck.

October 1867She is driven ashore on Cape Breton Island and abandoned as a wreck.

1868After salvage and repair she is sold to American owners, registered in New York in December, and renamed Mary Celeste. A refit in 1872 enlarges her.

October 1872Benjamin Spooner Briggs takes command, bringing his wife Sarah and their daughter Sophia. Their son is left at home in school.

5 to 7 November 1872She leaves Pier 50 in New York for Genoa carrying 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol, waits off Staten Island for the weather, and puts out into the Atlantic on 7 November.

25 November, 8 a.mThe last entry on the log slate places the ship six miles from the island of Santa Maria in the Azores.

4 DecemberThe Dei Gratia, under Captain David Morehouse, finds her about 400 miles east of the Azores. Deveau finds about three and a half feet of water in the hold, one pump taken apart, a sounding rod on deck, and the captain's sextant, chronometer and ship's papers missing. Personal belongings are untouched.

12 to 13 DecemberThe Dei Gratia reaches Gibraltar, and a prize crew brings the Mary Celeste in the next morning.

17 December 1872 to April 1873The Vice-Admiralty Court hearing, under Sir James Cochrane. Attorney General Frederick Solly-Flood suspects the crew got drunk on the cargo and murdered the Briggs family, and in January writes to the Board of Trade to say so. Stains on a sword turn out not to be blood. The ship is released on 25 February, and on 8 April the salvors receive £1,700, about a fifth of the value of ship and cargo.

1873She delivers her cargo at Genoa, where nine of the 1,701 barrels are found to be empty, and sails back to New York.

January 1884Arthur Conan Doyle publishes a story about the ship in the Cornhill Magazine, inventing details that are still repeated as fact.

3 January 1885Her last captain, Gilman Parker, deliberately runs her onto the Rochelois Bank off Haiti in an insurance fraud.

Key figures

Benjamin Briggs was an experienced captain and a strict teetotaller. He had brought his wife and young daughter along, and left their son at home in school.

David Morehouse and Oliver Deveau of the Dei Gratia found her and sailed her to Gibraltar. Their salvage claim made them suspects for a while.

Frederick Solly-Flood, Gibraltar's attorney general, pushed the theory of foul play.

Arthur Conan Doyle, then a young doctor, gave the world the version it remembers.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources: the log slate, Deveau's evidence, the Gibraltar court record, the surveyor's report on the ship's condition, and Solly-Flood's correspondence with the Board of Trade. Nine of the alcohol barrels were found empty when the cargo was unloaded at Genoa.

Still missing: the lifeboat and the ten people in it.

Things you might not know

• "Marie Celeste" is Conan Doyle's mistake. His 1884 story J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement changed the name and invented the half-eaten meals and warm cups of tea. Neither was ever found.
• The captain didn't drink. Briggs was a temperance man, which helped clear his crew of the drunken-mutiny theory.
• The cargo was undrinkable. It was denatured industrial alcohol, which would have poisoned anyone who tried.
• Her first captain died too. Robert McLellan fell ill on the Amazon's maiden voyage and died.
• Her final voyage was a fraud. In 1885 she was run onto a reef off Haiti for the insurance. Her captain was charged with barratry, then a capital crime, but walked free.
• Clive Cussler thought he'd found her. In 2001 the novelist announced the wreck off Haiti. Tree-ring dating showed the wood came from trees still growing in 1894.
• An explosion leaves no scorch. In 2006 chemist Andrea Sella showed, for a television documentary, that alcohol vapour could ignite in a pressure-wave explosion frightening enough to empty a ship, without leaving burn marks.

Competing explanations

Alcohol fumes. Leaking barrels, a smell or rumble from the hold, and a captain who feared an explosion orders everyone into the boat, perhaps tied to the ship by a line that later parted. Sella's experiment supports it.

A false alarm about flooding. With the pump stripped and water sounding high, Briggs may have thought she was sinking and abandoned ship near Santa Maria. A 2007 Smithsonian Channel documentary added a faulty chronometer: if Briggs believed he was further from land than he was, or that the pumps could not cope, leaving for the nearby island would have seemed safer. The lifeboat could not catch the ship again.

Foul play. Mutiny, piracy or a plot with the Dei Gratia. The court found no evidence, and pirates would have taken the cargo. As one historian has pointed out, two captains planning a salvage scam would not have invented such an attention-grabbing mystery.

Later life of the case

Mary Celeste is the most famous ghost ship in history, and her name is used for any place abandoned in a hurry. Most of what people "know" about her comes from Conan Doyle's fiction. For a ghost ship that kept sailing for decades with no one aboard, see the SS Baychimo.

Finding

The data points to an ordinary decision with a terrible outcome: Briggs took everyone into the lifeboat because he believed the ship was in danger, and the boat was lost. Fumes and a false flooding alarm both fit. Nothing on board suggests violence.

What still will not resolve: what Briggs saw, heard or smelled on the morning of 25 November that made him leave a sound ship.