What Happened to the Crew of the Mary Celeste?

Nobody knows for certain, because none of the ten people aboard the Mary Celeste was ever seen again. The evidence gathered for the salvage hearing, though, points to a deliberate but mistaken abandonment: Captain Benjamin Briggs most likely ordered everyone into the ship's small boat near the Azores on or soon after 25 November 1872, convinced his vessel was in trouble, and the boat was lost. The more lurid explanations, from mutiny to sea monsters, collapse once they meet what the boarding party actually found.

What did the boarding party find on the Mary Celeste?

The Mary Celeste, a 282-ton brigantine, sailed from New York on 7 November 1872 for Genoa with about 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol. Aboard were Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia and seven crew. In early December (accounts give the 4th or the 5th) the brig Dei Gratia, under Captain David Morehouse, came across her drifting about 400 miles east of the Azores. Morehouse had left New York eight days after her; she should already have been in Genoa. Morehouse sent his first mate, Oliver Deveau, across with John Wright, his second mate. They found the ship sound, with sails partly set, roughly a metre (3.5 feet) of water in the hold and six months of food and water in her stores. The crew's belongings were still in their quarters, and the cargo was largely intact. Missing were the ship's only boat, her papers and the captain's navigational instruments. Several details would matter later. One of the two pumps had been partly taken apart, and a sounding rod, used to measure water in the hull, lay nearby. The covers of both cargo hatches, fore and aft, had been taken off and left lying on the deck. The main halyard, a heavy rope, hung broken over the side. The last log entry, made early on the morning of 25 November, placed the ship about six miles from the island of Santa Maria in the Azores, with land in sight.

Did the Gibraltar hearing find any sign of foul play?

The Dei Gratia's crew sailed the derelict to Gibraltar to claim salvage, and the case came under the scrutiny of the colony's attorney general, Frederick Solly-Flood. He suspected a crime. He suggested the crew had got drunk on the cargo and mutinied, and he pointed to stains on a sword and marks on the bow as signs of violence. Tests showed the stains were not blood.

Suspicion also fell on two German brothers in the crew, Volkert and Boye Lorenzen, because none of their possessions were found aboard. A descendant later told the documentary-maker Anne MacGregor that the two men had lost their belongings in a shipwreck earlier that year, which leaves them without a motive. The court found no evidence of foul play, but its unease showed in the award. The salvors received only about a sixth of the $46,000 for which ship and cargo were insured. The physical evidence works against every version of the crime theory. Pirates or mutineers would hardly have left a valuable cargo and the crew's possessions behind, and no one had a reason to strand themselves in a small open boat hundreds of miles from the mainland. Collusion between Briggs and Morehouse to defraud insurers has also been suggested, but no evidence for it has ever emerged.

Could alcohol fumes have driven the crew off the ship?

The most popular modern explanation begins with the cargo. When the barrels were unloaded in Genoa, nine of them were empty, and those nine were recorded as red oak, a more porous wood than the white oak used for the rest. Alcohol could have seeped out and filled the hold with vapour, and the open fore and aft hatches would fit a crew trying to air it. In 2006 Andrea Sella, a chemist at University College London, put the idea to the test for a Channel Five documentary. He built a replica of the hold, stood paper cubes in for the barrels and used butane to stand in for alcohol vapour. When the gas was lit, flame swept through the space, yet the air it left behind was cool enough that the paper came through unburned. A fumes scare, in other words, could have been terrifying without leaving a single scorch mark for the salvors to find. MacGregor is not persuaded. The boarding party reported the main hatch secured and mentioned no smell of fumes, both awkward facts for an explosion in the hold.

What does the faulty-chronometer theory explain?

MacGregor's own reconstruction, made for a 2007 Smithsonian Channel documentary with Woods Hole oceanographer Phil Richardson, starts with navigation. Using historical records of winds and sea temperatures, they showed that the empty ship could have drifted from Santa Maria to the spot where she was found in ten days without anyone at the helm. Re-plotting the logged positions suggested Briggs was about 120 miles west of where he believed, probably because his chronometer was wrong, so he sighted land some three days later than expected. The day before reaching the Azores he changed course to pass north of Santa Maria, perhaps looking for shelter, and the night before the final log entry brought rough seas and winds above 35 knots.

Then there is the pump. She had carried coal on her previous voyage and had just come out of a major refit. Coal dust and building debris could have choked the pumps, which would explain why one had been dismantled. With the pumps out of action and the hold packed too tightly to inspect, Briggs had no way to tell how much water his ship was taking on. The sounding rod on deck suggests someone was trying to find out. Put together, the picture is of an experienced, well-regarded captain, with his wife and small daughter aboard, who had come through days of bad weather, found land late and could not tell whether his ship was sinking. Leaving her within sight of Santa Maria, the last land for hundreds of miles, would have looked like the prudent choice. The broken halyard may even be the line that tied the boat to the ship until it parted, leaving ten people adrift as the brigantine sailed on without them. That last step is inference, but it fits the recorded facts.

How did fiction turn the Mary Celeste into a legend?

The case might have faded from memory but for Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1884 short story "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", published in the Cornhill Magazine, invented a lurid backstory involving a vengeful former slave and renamed the ship "Marie Celeste", a misspelling that has followed her ever since. Decades of speculation followed, along with films such as a 1935 picture starring Bela Lugosi as a murderous sailor. The case has nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle, whose legend grew from similar retellings; she was found on the far side of the Atlantic, between the Azores and Portugal. Her real end was squalid rather than spooky. In January 1885 her captain ran her onto a well-charted reef off Haiti on purpose, hoping to collect on a nearly worthless cargo insured as if it were valuable. In 2001 an expedition led by the novelist Clive Cussler announced it had found the wreck, but analysis of the timbers later showed they came from trees still growing about a decade after she went down. The Mary Celeste is less a ghost story than a puzzle whose witnesses are all missing, the kind of evidential gap that, as with the Somerton Man, attracts decades of speculation. Test each theory against the salvage-hearing facts and the dramatic ones fall away: no struggle, no theft, no fire damage, no motive. What remains is a captain who believed his ship was in danger and took his family and crew into a small boat within sight of land. The ship survived. They did not.