The ship was launched as the Amazon at Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, in May 1861, a 282-ton brigantine whose first captain died of pneumonia at the start of her maiden voyage. After a wreck off Cape Breton in 1867 she was sold, rebuilt, registered at New York and renamed Mary Celeste. By 1872 she had been enlarged with a second deck, and one of her new part-owners, Benjamin Spooner Briggs of Marion, Massachusetts, took command.
What happened
She left her New York pier on November 5, 1872 and put to sea on the 7th, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of commercial alcohol. Aboard were Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and a crew of seven. The log shows two weeks of heavy weather. The last entry on the slate, at five in the morning on November 25, put the ship about six miles off Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores.
On December 4, around one in the afternoon, the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia under David Morehouse sighted her some 400 miles further east, sailing erratically under shortened canvas. A boarding party found no one. The single lifeboat was gone, as were the chronometer, sextant and ship’s papers; the log and the crew’s belongings remained. There was about three and a half feet of water in the hold, one pump had been taken apart and a sounding rod lay on deck. The hatches were off the forward and lazarette holds but the main hatch was secure, and the cargo was intact apart from nine barrels later found empty. There were six months of food and water. Morehouse put his mate and two men aboard and the two ships sailed for Gibraltar, where they arrived on 12 and December 13.
The investigation
A salvage claim should have been a short hearing in the Vice Admiralty Court. The Gibraltar Attorney General, Frederick Solly-Flood, turned it into a criminal inquiry. He had the ship surveyed, treated cuts in the bow rail and stains on the deck and a sword as evidence of violence, and theorized that the crew had got at the alcohol, murdered the Briggs family and officers and fled, or alternatively that Briggs and Morehouse had conspired in a fraud. The press followed him: a Boston Post report reprinted in the New York Times on February 26, 1873 told readers that the brig’s officers were believed to have been murdered at sea. Chemical analysis showed the stains were not blood, and an American naval officer who inspected the ship judged that the crew had left in a panic. After three months the court found no evidence of foul play, released the ship, and in the spring awarded the salvors £1,700, roughly a fifth of the insured value, a sum that signaled lingering suspicion of the Dei Gratia’s men.
The explanations
Much of what people know about the Mary Celeste is fiction. In January 1884 the Cornhill Magazine printed “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” an anonymous story by a young ship’s doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle, which renamed the vessel Marie Celeste, moved the discovery by a year and had her taken by a vengeful former slave. The misspelling stuck, and so did later inventions: the half-eaten breakfast, the warm tea, the ticking clock, the cat asleep in the galley. None of these appear in the testimony of the men who boarded her.
The serious explanations begin from a single fact: an experienced captain does not abandon a sound ship in open water without a reason he believes is urgent. Alcohol fumes building up in the hold and blowing off a hatch would supply one; the boarders reported neither fumes nor a sprung main hatch, though nine empty barrels of porous red oak suggest leakage. A waterspout could have given a false sounding and a false sense of sinking. The reconstruction favored by a 2007 Smithsonian investigation, using the log positions and historical weather data, is that Briggs, having mis-fixed his position by over a hundred miles, found water in the hold he could not properly gauge with a pump dismantled, and ordered everyone into the yawl within sight of Santa Maria, tethered to the ship by a line; the line parted, the brigantine sailed on and the boat did not. The cargo arguing against mutiny, the belongings against piracy and the intact hull against a sea monster, that remains the most economical account.
Where it stands
The ship herself was wrecked deliberately on a Haitian reef in 1885 in an insurance fraud, and a wreck found there in 2001 proved too young to be her. Ten people vanished in November 1872 and their fate can be reconstructed but not proved. The verdict is a mixture: the abandonment is one of the best-documented events in maritime history, and almost everything that made it a legend was added afterward.