Brian Freemantle
The Mary Celeste
‘Wouldst thou’ — so the helmsman answered — ‘Learn the secrets of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers comprehend its mystery.’
Introduction
The Mary Celeste, an American half-brig of 282 tons, became a maritime legend a little past three o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5, 1872.
Her precise location was latitude 38.20 N., by longitude 17.15 W., due east of the Azores and 591 miles from Gibraltar.
At that point, she passed a British brigantine, the Dei Gratia. By a coincidence — later to occur to many people as just too incredible — its master, Captain David Reed Morehouse, had been the dinner guest of the master of the Mary Celeste, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, the night before the American vessel had sailed from New York with a cargo of 1,700 barrels of commercial alcohol, bound for Genoa.
Morehouse therefore knew the destination of the Mary Celeste. And recognised her to be on course, although sailing in the wrong direction. What he had first thought to be a fluttering distress signal was a ripped, tattered sail. The wheel, unmanned and unsecured, spun with every fresh thrust of wind.
Across the narrow gap separating them, Morehouse hailed his friend’s ship. There was no response.
‘What in God’s name can have happened?’ Morehouse asked first mate Oliver Deveau. The question has been posed repeatedly over the past hundred years in an attempt to solve the mystery of the world’s most famous ghost ship.
Mutiny and murder was the attempted answer of Mr Frederick Solly Flood, Attorney-General and Admiralty Proctor of Gibraltar, the port to which a salvage crew from the Dei Gratia sailed the derelict. So convinced was the Attorney-General of crime — and that a chemical analyst had bungled an examination — that he suppressed for fourteen years a forensic report that stains on deck and upon a sword blade were not blood.
It was a conviction that caused him, within six weeks of the Mary Celeste’s being found, to write in an official report to the Board of Trade in London: My own theory is that the crew got to the alcohol and in the fury of drunkenness murdered the master, whose name was Briggs, his wife and child and the chief mate; that they then damaged the bows of the vessel with the view of giving it the appearance of having struck on rocks or suffered a collision so as to induce the master of any vessel which might have picked them up, if they saw her at some distance, to think her not worth attempting to save; and that they did some time between the 25th of November (the date of the last log entry) and 5th December, escape on board some other vessel bound for some North or South American port or the West Indies.
The British government accepted his view. On March 11, 1873, Sir Edward Thornton, British Ambassador to Washington, passed on to the American administration evidence assembled in Gibraltar and asserted in his covering letter: ‘You will perceive that the enquiries which have been initiated into the matter tend to rouse grave suspicion that the master and his wife and child were murdered by the crew.’
Responding to the British government’s belief, U.S. Secretary to the Treasury William A. Richardson circularised customs officials throughout the United States on March 14, instructing them to look out for any ship carrying the alleged murderers to America.
Captain James Winchester, principal owner of the Mary Celeste, fled Gibraltar after giving evidence at an enquiry because he feared the official determination to prove a crime. To the U.S. Consul in Gibraltar, Horatio Jones Sprague, Captain Winchester wrote from the safety of New York on March 10, 1873, that he had quit the colony after being convinced by a friend there that the judge and Attorney-General intended arresting him for hiring the crew to murder their officers.
Captain Winchester wrote that although the supposition was ridiculous, ‘From what you and everybody else in Gibraltar had told me about the Attorney-General, I did not know but he might do it as they seem to do just as they like’.
In such a fertile atmosphere of fear, suspicion and preconception — where innuendo became evidence and facts that didn’t fit were blatantly concealed — the conjecture blossomed.
Four years before creating the legendary Sherlock Holmes, a Portsmouth doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle earned 30 for a short story purporting to be the account of a surviving passenger, J. Habakuk Jephson. Conan Doyle misnamed the derelict Marie Celeste and had J. Habakuk Jephson, ‘the well known Brooklyn specialist on consumption’, tell of another passenger, a half-caste from New Orleans named Septimus Goring, infiltrating the crew with henchmen, having the captain and officers killed and then sailing to Africa to establish a black empire there. Only a black stone shaped like a human ear, a talisman venerated by Negroes, saved J. Habakuk Jephson from death.
U.S. Consul Sprague sent the account — printed in the magazine Cornhill — to the State Department in Washington with the somewhat conservative verdict that it was ‘replete with romance of a very unlikely or exaggerated nature’.
Amazingly, Attorney-General Flood seized it as an eye-witness account and informed the American authorities he was in contact with officials in Germany, believing that some of the Mary Celeste’s German crew were hiding there after joining Septimus Goring in the mutiny.
Mrs Fannie Richardson, wife of the Mary Celeste’s first mate Albert Richardson, told newspaper reporters on March 9, 1902, that she believed that her husband, the captain and the captain’s wife and child had been murdered by the crew. Albert Richardson’s sister, Mrs Priscilla Richardson Shelton, thought the same, while his brother, Captain Lyman Richardson, was convinced they had been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia.
British author J. L. Hornibrook wrote in Chamber’s Journal in 1904 that the crew were plucked from the ship, one by one, by ‘a huge octopus or devil fish’, recalling evidence at the enquiry of an axe-slash upon a deck-rail and suggested it had been caused in a futile attempt to fight the monster off.
The Nautical Magazine published an account by another alleged survivor of the vessel, in which Barbary pirates had boarded and slaughtered everyone aboard, and in the British Journal of Astrology in 1926 author Adam Bushey had the crew being ‘dematerialised’ because they had sailed at a psychically vital moment over the very spot where the lost city of Atlantis had sunk beneath the waves. Professor M. K. Jessup, instructor in Astronomy at Michigan University, wrote in a book, UFO, in 1955 that the people aboard the Mary Celeste didn’t go downwards but upwards — snatched off the vessel by the crew of a hovering flying saucer.
As the theories became wilder, so did the ‘facts’ surrounding the finding of the Mary Celeste by the Dei Gratia.
Within half a century, it was unquestioningly believed that, when Captain Morehouse had come upon the vessel, there had been a half-eaten breakfast upon a cabin table, together with three cups of warm tea, a bottle of cough mixture open but unspilled upon another table, a phial of oil and a thimble beside a sewing machine upon which a child’s dress was being repaired, the captain’s watch still ticking, the stove in the galley warm to the touch, the galley fire burning, a cat peacefully asleep on a locker, sailors’ pipes half-smoked, their washing hanging out to dry, the ship’s boats still at their davits and no sign of damage or violence.
Not one of these suppositions is accurate.
There were facts established about the mystery. And upon them it is possible, I believe, for a conclusion to be suggested as to the fate of Captain Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia and the seven-man crew.
Although fictionalised for ease of narrative, The ‘Mary Celeste ’ is based upon facts presented at the Gibraltar enquiry into the salvage claim by the Dei Gratia crew, and evidence taken from the surviving documents and statements of people directly involved in the affair.