Said Dr Cobb:
I think that the cargo of alcohol, having been loaded in cold weather at New York, early in November and the vessel having crossed the Gulf Stream and being now in comparatively warm weather, there may have been some leakage and gas may have accumulated in the hold. The captain, having care for his wife and daughter, was probably unjustifiably alarmed and, fearing a fire or an explosion, determined to take his people in the boat away from the vessel until the immediate danger should pass … whatever happened, it is evident that the boat, with ten people in her, left the vessel and that the peak halyard was taken as a tow line and as a means of bringing the boat back to the Mary Celeste in case no explosion or fire had destroyed the vessel. Probably a fresh northerly wind sprang up, filled the square sails and the vessel gathered way quickly. The peak halyard made fast at the usual place on the gaff would be brought at an acute angle around the stanchions at the gangway. With the heavy boat standing still at the end, I do not wonder that the halyard parted. This would tally exactly with the evidence given in court – that the peak halyard was broken.
The meteorological evidence also supports this theory. Surviving records of the Serviço Meteorologico dos Açores, the Portuguese authority covering the islands, attest that ‘stormy conditions prevailed over the Azores on November 24 and 25’. However, those same records show that ‘calm or light winds prevailed on the forenoon of the 25th’. The improvement did not last, however. In the afternoon a storm broke of almost unnatural ferocity. During the twenty-four-hour period, at Ponta Delgada, only fifty miles from where the disaster occurred, there was recorded a rainfall of 11.4 inches. The ‘cold front’ passed between three and eight p.m. Then the wind veered from south-west to north-west, which would have carried any small vessel not towards Santa Maria, but out into the Atlantic, where the nearest coast would be that of Portugal, eight hundred miles away.
There is recorded evidence that the alcohol had seeped from the Mary Celeste’s barrels. After the ship’s eventual release from Admiralty custody in Gibraltar, she completed her voyage to Genoa, where it was discovered upon unloading that nine barrels were empty.
One person who never wavered in his belief that Captain Briggs and his family had been murdered was Gibraltar Attorney-General and Admiralty Proctor, Frederick Solly Flood. It was not until July 28, 1887 – fourteen years after he had had it made – that the analysis of the supposed blood upon the sword blade found in Captain Briggs’s cabin was released, and then only because of pressure from the American State Department in Washington.
In the letter supplying him with the findings of Dr Patron, court registrar Edward Baumgartner wrote to the U.S. Consul on that date:
This analysis which was made by Dr Patron MD at the instance of Mr Solly Flood speaks for itself, it being rather remarkable, however, that the analysis or report so brought in, was brought in under seal on the 14th March, 1873, and the seal remained unbroken until I opened it for the purpose of giving you a copy.
The Mary Celeste continued to sail the oceans – although always with a crew – for twelve years after her mystery voyage.
Her ending was ignominious. The last registration entry in the records of the United States government – Number 28, issued on August 4, 1884 – is endorsed ‘lost by stranding, January 3, 1885, on reefs off Rochelais, near Miragoane, Haiti. 7 on board. None lost.’
Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, discovered that a near-worthless cargo had been insured for $30,000 and that an insurance fraud had been planned between the master, Captain Gilman Parker and the U.S. Consul in Haiti. The consul fled into the jungle interior of Haiti and escaped arrest. Parker was arraigned on a charge of conspiracy and barratry, the wilful wrecking of a vessel, the penalty for which was death. There was a failure to agree at his first trial. He died before he could be brought before a second court.
It was two years after that – in July 1887 – that Consul Sprague responded to the American government’s pressure about the blood sample and wrote in his letter to Washington:
This case of the Mary Celeste is startling, since it appears to be one of those mysteries which no human ingenuity can penetrate sufficiently to account for the abandonment of this vessel and the disappearance of her master, family and crew about which nothing has ever transpired.
Consul Sprague could have been mistaken.
On May 16, 1873, the Liverpool Daily Albion reported: A sad story of the sea – a telegram from Madrid says ‘Some fishermen at Baudus, in Asturias, have found two rafts, the first with a corpse lashed to it and an Agrican [American?] flag flying and the second raft with five decomposed bodies. It is not known to what vessel they belonged.’
It was never established nor even investigated if they might have been those of the people who disappeared from the Mary Celeste.
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.
Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.
Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.
In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.
Freemantle lives and works in London, England.
A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.
Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.
Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.
Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.
Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.
A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.
Freemantle wo
rking on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.
Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.
Many of the staff secretaries are dressed as Vietnamese hostesses to commemorate the many tours Freemantle carried out in Vietnam.
The Freemantle family on the grounds of the Winchester Cathedral in 1988. Back row: wife Maureen; eldest daughter, Victoria; and mother-in-law, Alice Tipney, a widow who lived with the Freemantle family for a total of forty-eight years until her death. Second row: middle daughter, Emma; granddaughter, Harriet; Freemantle; and third daughter, Charlotte.
Freemantle in 1999, in the Outer Close outside Winchester Cathedral. For thirty years, he lived with his family in the basement library of a fourteenth-century house with a tunnel connecting it to the cathedral. Priests used this tunnel to escape persecution during the English Reformation.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1979 by Innslodge Publications Ltd.
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
The Mary Celeste
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Epilogue
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Copyright Page
The Mary Celeste Page 21
