Mary Celeste

The Greatest Mystery of the Sea

Paul Begg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317865308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Mary Celeste is an iconic mystery - a perfectly seaworthy ship found wandering aimlessly at sea, her crew strangely and inexplicably missing.

Paul Begg tells the story of the discovery of Mary Celeste and the people who vanished, and investigates over a century's worth of speculation and survivors' tales, searching for the facts behind one of the world's great mysteries.

CHAPTER I

THE OCEAN WANDERER

At about 1.00 p.m. on Thursday, 5 December 1872, sea time, a sailor named John Johnson was at the wheel of the brigantine Dei Gratia when he sighted a vessel about six miles off the port bow. The state of the stranger’s sails caught his attention and suggested to him that there was something wrong. He called to the second mate, John Wright, and pointed the ship out to him. The Dei Gratia’s skipper, Captain Morehouse, who was coming on deck from below, also saw the stranger and scanned her through his glass (telescope). With the greater clarity this provided it was obvious that something was indeed wrong. The two vessels were sailing towards each other and as they closed the distance, Captain Morehouse ordered Dei Gratia’s boat be readied to take some of his men across to the ship to render whatever assistance they could.

The two ships came within hailing distance, but there seemed to be no life aboard the stranger. It was decided to lower the boat and for Dei Gratia’s mate, Oliver Deveau, to take two men, Second Mate John Wright and seaman John Johnson, over to investigate. They accordingly piled into the small boat and rowed over to the stranger.

It was now mid-afternoon. On the stranger’s boards they could see her name painted, Mary Celeste, but had no cause to imagine as they clambered over the side and dropped to her deck that they were about to enter the history books as participants in the greatest of all maritime mysteries. The only sounds that greeted them aboard Mary Celeste were those normally encountered aboard a ship, otherwise she was strangely silent.

Mary Celeste was deserted.

In the months to come Captain Morehouse, Mate Deveau and the crew of Dei Gratia would be suspected of piracy, of having boarded Mary Celeste and slaughtering everyone on board. Other thinkers speculated that they had colluded with the crew of Mary Celeste in a scam in which they first took them to land and then claimed the salvage reward with the intention of splitting it between them. The captain and crew of Mary Celeste would fare even worse, being accused of almost everything from murderous religious fanaticism through most seafaring crimes imaginable to rank stupidity.

Over the years a myth would also grow up around Mary Celeste, ensuring that she would pass into the common language to describe any strangely deserted place. This myth entailed a minor name change – Mary Celeste is more often than not called Marie Celeste – and the story of her discovery and the mysterious disappearance of all those aboard her is immeasurably enhanced. In the popular imagination by details such as all the lifeboats being found secure in place on board, half-eaten meals and cups of warm coffee left on the galley table, and the aroma of fresh tobacco smoke lingering in the Captain’s cabin, where a cat is supposed to have been found sleeping peacefully on a bed.

Disappointingly, none of this is true.

The disappearance of the crew from Mary Celeste is a real, genuine and impenetrable mystery, but even real, genuine and impenetrable mysteries attract embellishments like a magnet attracts iron filings. I have no idea why this happens, why it is that people take a good mystery and try to make it even more mysterious, but it is a sad fact that a really good mystery, enjoyably taxing to the imagination, seems far less interesting when stripped of these embellishments. Happily, that is not the case with Mary Celeste.

True, the story is far less excitingly mysterious than the half-eaten meals, warm mugs of tea and the lingering aroma of fresh tobacco smoke make it seem, but instead of such things leading to wild and supernatural theories such as the terrified crew being snatched one by one from the deck of the vessel by the tentacles of a massive octopus or of being beamed aboard a flying saucer in a Close Encounter of the Third Kind to join other abductees such as the captain and crew of the Cyclops or the pilots and navigators of Flight 19, we are confronted with the need for prosaic explanations of the ‘closed room’ kind. Aficionados of detective fiction will be familiar with this type of crime story: a person is murdered inside a room from which there is no apparent means of access or egress except through a door that is locked from the inside. How did the murderer escape the room? The death of Julia Stoner in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery ‘The Speckled Band’ is just such a closed room mystery.

In the case of Mary Celeste we are confronted with a ship that appears to have been abandoned – or which somebody wanted it to be believed had been abandoned: the only ‘lifeboat’, a small yawl lashed to the main hatch, was missing and a piece of railing nearby had been removed to facilitate launching, and some of the ship’s papers and instruments were missing. Those aboard Mary Celeste appear therefore to have launched the small boat, climbed in and, it must be assumed, drifted away from Mary Celeste until it had eventually capsized and everyone aboard been drowned. But Mary Celeste was a perfectly seaworthy ship. She was not sinking or taking on water, and she was fully provisioned. There is no apparent reason why she should have been abandoned.

Why would the highly capable, honest and experienced captain and crew desert in mid-ocean a perfectly seaworthy and well-provisioned ship?

This was a question that would exercise the mind of a man named Frederick Solly Flood, who had the very grand-sounding title of Her Majesty’s Advocate-General and Proctor for the Queen in Her Office of Admiralty, and Attorney-General for Gibraltar. Mary Celeste was brought into Gibraltar by a small skeleton crew put aboard by Dei Gratia – a feat of seamanship – and Captain Morehouse claimed the ship and her cargo as salvage, expecting that he and his men would each receive a just and reasonable reward for the danger and risks they had undergone in saving the vessel.

Under maritime law a proportion of the value of a ship and her cargo can be claimed by those through whose labour and skill the ship and cargo were saved. The amount is usually based on the danger and skill involved in bringing the ship or cargo into safe harbour, or more often from recovering goods from a sunken vessel, as was the case, for example, when nearly £5,000,000 of gold bullion was recovered from the White Star liner Laurentic, sunk off Ireland in 1917, or the recovery of five tons of gold and ten tons of silver from the P&O liner Egypt from the Bay of Biscay in 1930.

However, whilst claiming salvage is not uncommon, finding a perfectly seaworthy and well-provisioned ship at sea is, so it was not unreasonable for foul play to have occurred to suspicious minds; thus it was that the story of Mary Celeste turned from a maritime mystery into a murder mystery, complete with assorted and disputed clues, among them a supposedly bloodstained sword.

The fact is that Mary Celeste is more than a perplexing maritime mystery – more, even, than an unusual and exciting murder mystery. It veers into the occult too. Mary Celeste has been discussed as a jinxed ship, a ship marked out by fate to bring disaster and misery to everyone associated with her.

Jinxes are things of the imagination, but if ever there were a story that could persuade of their reality, it is the story of Mary Celeste. Misfortune dogged Mary Celeste from the death of her young first captain during her maiden voyage to her own end when she was deliberately run aground and destroyed in an insurance scam; those involved were caught and brought to trial but a legal technicality allowed them to walk from court free men. The jinx reached from the ship’s watery grave, however, and each of the conspirators apparently died in unpleasant circumstances and trouble befell almost everyone else associated with the case. The jinx may have continued even to this very day, as a well-publicised discovery of Mary Celeste’s remains may not have discovered the Celeste at all.

A jinx may also have doomed Captain Benjamin Briggs, the vanished skipper of Mary Celeste. All but one of his brothers and his sister died at sea and his seafaring father was struck by lightning as he stood in the doorway of his home!

Naturally over the years many people have tried to explain what happened aboard Mary Celeste. Some have written their theories and explanations as fiction in short stories and novels, some have presented their fiction as fact, and from time to time the story has been at the centre of heated controversy. Mary Celeste has also featured on postage stamps and provided material for various radio shows, including the all-time classic Goon Show. It even provided the plot for an early offering from the famous Hammer film studios, Phantom Ship, starring Bela Lugosi.

Mary Celeste was a brigantine, a two-masted vessel, square-rigged on the foremast and fore and aft rigged on the mainmast – strictly speaking a hermaphrodite brig. The difference was that the square-rigged sails were set to take the wind on the same side of the sail (in other words, the sails took the wind from behind), whereas fore-and-aft sail could take the wind either side of the sail, depending on the direction of the wind. Mary Celeste was 103 feet long, 25.7 feet broad. Moving from bow to stern, there was the windlass, the forehatch, immediately under which was a new hawser, and beyond the forehatch was the foremast. Immediately abaft the foremast was the forward deck house. It was 13 feet square and six feet above the deck, made of thin planking painted white, and consisted of three rooms divided fore and aft (lengthways), two on the port¹ (left) and one, the galley, on the starboard. The two cabins were the fore-cabin, entered through a sliding wooden door facing the bow of the ship and which was the crew’s quarters, sleeping four, measuring 9 feet 6 inches broad and 6 feet 9 inches long, and aft was the Second Mate’s room, about 6 feet 9 inches square. The Second Mate’s cabin was entered through a door on the port side. The starboard or right-hand side room was the galley, containing the steward’s bunk. There was a scuttle hatch overhead in the galley. The sills of the doors to these cabins were about a foot in height. The cabins had four windows, two on either side. On the port side the windows were covered by a thin sliding shutter, the after window on the starboard side was uncovered.

Approximate layout of Mary Celeste’s deck

Beyond the forward house was the main hatch with a small boat, a yawl, on it. Then the pumps just in front of the mainmast and abaft the mainmast was the main deck house, 14 feet wide, 18 feet long, and again made of thin, white-painted planking. It consisted of four rooms and was entered through a hatch, where a sliding door opened onto the companionway. There was a pantry on the port side of the main cabin, entered by a door with a sill about 1½ inches above the level of the lower deck or floor of the cabin. On the floor of the pantry there were various packets and boxes, among them a bag of sugar, a bag containing two or three pounds of tea, a barrel containing flour and a box containing dried herrings; also some rice, a nutmeg, some kidney beans, and several pots of preserved fruits and other provisions in tins covered with paper.

Rough guide to the state of Mary Celeste’s sails when found

The main deck house also housed the Chief Mate’s cabin. Here various articles of clothing and other things were stowed under the bed, including the vessel’s ensign and her private signal ‘W. T.’.

A fore-cabin or saloon was furnished with a table, two bench seats, a sideboard and stove. Beyond this communal room was the Captain’s cabin, lighted by petroleum lamps. Mrs Brigg’s melodeon was in the centre against a partition. Next to it were a number of mostly religious books. There was a little child’s highchair and a medicine chest containing bottles and various medical preparations in good condition. There was also a sword in a scabbard, about which much would be made when Mary Celeste was minutely examined in Gibraltar because it appeared to have been smeared with blood and afterwards wiped clean.

On the port side of the Captain’s cabin was a water-closet. Near the door, opposite a partl...