The Mary Celeste

On the fifth of December 1872, the crew of the British brigantine Dei Gratia sighted a ship behaving oddly in the mid-Atlantic, sails set but yawing without direction. Hailing her brought no answer. When a boarding party climbed aboard the American merchant brig Mary Celeste, they found her entirely deserted.

There was no sign of struggle and no sign of disaster. The cargo, more than seventeen hundred barrels of industrial alcohol, sat largely intact in the hold. There was ample food and fresh water. The crew’s personal belongings, pipes and oilskins and seamen’s chests, remained in place, the sort of things men fleeing for their lives would surely have grabbed. The one lifeboat appeared to have been launched deliberately, not torn away, and a length of rope trailed from the stern. The last entry in the log was days old. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their young daughter, and seven crew were simply gone, and were never found.

The mystery has drawn every kind of explanation, sober and lurid alike. Piracy was ruled out because nothing of value had been taken. In the salvage inquiry at Gibraltar, suspicion briefly fell on the Dei Gratia’s own crew and even on foul play, but nothing was proven and the finder’s reward was reluctantly paid.

The most credible reconstruction is quietly frightening in its ordinariness. Several barrels of alcohol were later found empty; escaping fumes may have alarmed Briggs into fearing an imminent explosion, prompting him to order everyone into the lifeboat, tethered by that trailing rope, to wait at a safe distance. If the line parted in the swell, the abandoned ship would have sailed on alone, leaving ten souls adrift with no way back.

Provenance: the mid-Atlantic, December 1872; the derelict was brought into Gibraltar for a salvage inquiry.