The Mary Celeste

by Stan Mason

  “Benjamin Briggs was a fine man and as smart a shipmaster as ever trod a deck. The vessel’s Mate, Richardson, was a man of excellent character, and the Steward was a white man who was respected by all who knew him. The crew were all Germans and were the nicest set of men I ever saw on board a ship.”

  Dr. Cobb still felt strongly about the slur on the character of a member of his family and refused to allow the matter to rest. His letter to the New York Times in 1924 was expanded into an article published by the Yachting Monthly in London in August 1925. This was entitled ‘The Mystery of the Mary Celeste’ and it left nothing to be desired by the reader on the grounds of vindication by Dr. Cobb, as follows:

  “In the New York Times of Sunday October 12th, 1924, there appeared a story purporting to be the true story of the Mary Celeste as told by one Triggs to Captain Lucy, R.N.R. As Captain Benj. S. Briggs of the Mary Celeste was a cousin of mine, and the said story reflects very unjustly upon his character, I have been appealed to as one of the family to set the record right. Captain Briggs was a Christian gentleman; he belonged to a family of Ship Masters who lived up to the best traditions of the sea. To represent his as a deserter of his ship is to desecrate his memory, and any such statement is resented by the family.”

  After that, he worked hard to break down the inaccuracies of the tale, remarking on them with great relish. To begin with, the type of vessel described by Triggs could hardly have been the Mary Celeste. For example, it had no yards on the mainmast. The number of crew aboard was wrong. Once again, Boston had been mentioned as the port of destination.....a total inaccuracy.....and there were others. Cobb was not prepared to accept that distortions had occurred through bad memory, misinterpretation by oral communication, or mistakes as the information passed from one person to another. He felt very strongly that people were deliberately interfering with the true nature of the mystery to the extent of maligning those people no longer able to defend themselves.

  The vitriolic criticism of the infuriated doctor seemed to act as a tourniquet on the public, stunning it into silence for nearly a year. However, the pressure was starting to build-up behind a weakened dam which would be breached eventually. Dr. Cobb explained his own theory in detail.

  “A cargo of alcohol sometimes explodes, and usually rumbles before exploding. It may well be that after the breakfast had been cleared away in the cabin on the morning following the day of the last entry in the log-book, when the vessel would have been about one hundred miles from St. Mary’s Island, the temperature rising, the cargo began to rumble. The Captain would naturally have had the boat lowered and brought quickly alongside, and would have put his wife and child into the boat at once as a measure of safety. After getting the boat alongside, apparently the work of taking in sail was commenced. Someone lowered the topgallant yard and someone the gaff topsail. At this point I think there was an explosion of gas which flew the fore-hatch in the air, and it fell on the deck upside down. Expecting immediate destruction of the vessel, everybody jumped into the boat and shoved off as quickly as possible. They were intent upon one thing only - to reach a safe distance before the great explosion which they momentarily expected. In their haste they neglected to attach a line to the vessel by which they would have been towed, and to take provisions water and instruments of navigation. The cargo did not explode, and the vessel sailed away from them, leaving eleven persons in a small boat a hundred miles from land without compass, food or water. They perished, how we shall never know.”

  Before moving on, it is apt to mention another work..... ‘Mysteries of the Sea’ by J.G. Lockhart in 1924.....who was to make an impact three years later. He took care to unravel the manuscript by Linford and Abel Fosdyk, placing emphasis for the work firmly on the former by inference to the style of writing adopted by certain novelists towards the end, and just after, the nineteenth century. Lockhart did not hesitate to judge the story as being false, whoever the author, hunting down the discrepancies as they were set out in the text. He declared:

  “It is not very likely that any Captain, even if his nerves were in a bad state, would want to be allowed by his men to go for a swim in the middle of the Atlantic with his clothes on. The overthrow of ten people in the collapse of so small a platform as ‘Baby’s quarter-deck’ and the idea that a man could drift, without sail or oar or food or water, from the Azores to the African coast, and survive the experience is merely ridiculous.”

  He went on to suggest that no person who had served at sea would use expressions which indicated an ignorance of nautical terms such as Fosdyk had written. He also commented that the fellow who wrote the story “did not know a poop-deck from a jib down-haul.” Lockhart had very little sympathy for Triggs either, and his criticism was most scathing. He refused to accept the fact that a derelict steamer, smack in the middle of a busy ocean highway, was unidentifiable because the name was rusted on the bows and the stern. He suggested that the derelict steamer was probably a greater mystery than the Mary Celeste. Like many other authors, one must feel that Lockhart presented his views tongue in cheek to ride on the crest of a mystery he could never hope to resolve. And if he could not solve it.....or anyone else for that matter.....why not use as much poetic licence as permissible and criticise everyone else. It was all harmless fun which had become a kind of armchair sport over many years in the home, the club and at the local tavern. Therefore, rather carelessly, Lockhart decided to theorise that Captain Briggs had lost his senses and his mind, and had butchered his crew. He lived to regret this theory deeply.

  ***

  The vehicle for a new revelation which happened to be another survivor story - although one must question how many survivors spread all over the world could be tolerated by the public - was Chambers Journal. After twenty-two years of reticence it returned to make its mark with a story that became known as the great Pemberton hoax. The author, Lee Kaye, could hardly believe the success of his story which was accepted by many people to be the real solution to the mystery. In July 1926, ‘The Truth about the Mary Celeste’ was being sold in its thousands.....as though never before had any solution been offered. The post-war misery in an era of the swinging twenties may have been the reason for this attitude but, whatever the cause, the mystery of the derelict ship became popular once again. Mr. Kaye began with some basic details to give credence to his story, explaining that on the seventh of December, 1982, at ten o’clock in the morning, a vessel was sighted in the Atlantic sailing along with full spread of canvas towards the Spanish coast. As she did not respond to signals, and showed no sign of life when viewed through the glasses, the skipper of the hailing vessel despatched a boat’s crew to investigate. The stranger proved to be the brig Marie Celeste. There was no one about the deck, and a search revealed no one in the cabin. The forecastle was silent and deserted. The vessel had been abandoned precipitently for no apparent reason. The brig’s boats....two.....stood firm in their chocks on the roof of the deckhouse. It was clear they had never been moved for the paint where the keels touched the chocks was still an unbroken skin. In the forecastle were five seamen’s chests and two canvas kit-bags still containing the outfits of the crew. The galley-range, although raked out, was still hot. A cat was sleeping peacefully on the locker. A meal was laid on a table in the after-cabin. The viands were cold, but three cups of tea which stood by the plates were yet luke-warm.

  The evidence of the warm tea in the cabin and the still-hot range in the galley implied that she had been manned to within half-an-hour of her finding. Further elaborations of the facts .....in statements of the crew which boarded her.....complicate the story. One account states that the ship’s chronometer was missing which gave rise to a theory that the crew had left the vessel under stress of the weather and had taken the chronometer to navigate the boat, or boats. But it had been stated that the boats were still in their chocks, so the author self-demolished this theory very effectively. It was recorded that a glass of water which st
ood on the sideboard in the cabin was still full, showing that the vessel had not encountered heavy weather since it had been placed there. Yet there was still one living member of the crew.....possibly two! John Pemberton was hired as the ship’s cook and they departed from New York on the seventh of October, 1872, five days after the Dei Gratia sailed. The name of the vessel was Mary Sellars, named after the sweetheart of Captain Briggs. Pemberton was a survivor from the derelict, having reached the age of seventy years, a naval pensioner of the American Civil War. The other survivor, supposedly residing in England, was the Boatswain named Jack Dossell. Lee Kaye alleged that he visited Pemberton, who also lived in England, and examined discharge certificates which placed him bona fide beyond dispute in that he joined the Mary Celeste on the fourteenth of October, 1870. The complicated story refers to the accidental death of Mrs. Briggs which cause Captain Briggs to go mad and he “disappeared” one night. The crew, fearing they would be charged with mutiny and murder, took to the boat....abandoning the ship.

  Not surprisingly, this article brought forth comment from Dr. Oliver Cobb, who was joined this time by Arthur Briggs, the son of the Captain of the derelict vessel......the young boy who had been left behind to continue his studies at school in 1872. Arthur Briggs was now over sixty years of age. Together, they wrote to the Boston Sunday Post in August 1926 which printed their condemnation of Lee Kaye’s story in a united family front. This was in the wake of the New York Herald Tribune’s comment in an editorial two weeks earlier with the heading: ‘The Mary Celeste Mystery’. The Boston Sunday Post followed the letters of Dr. Cobb and Arthur Briggs with a reported interview arranged with the widow of Captain Morehouse. It was the first time that the wife of the Captain of the Dei Gratia had been asked for information. She indicated reluctantly that her husband believed that gases escaping from the alcohol casks might have caused fear of explosion.

  In September 1926, Outlook Magazine reviewed the article by Dr. Cobb entitled ‘The Mystery of the Mary Celeste’, published a year earlier in Yachting Monthly, and probed the weaknesses which were apparent in the story told by Triggs at the same time. Also in September, the Literary Digest drew down all the theories and stories to provide a brief summary, without drawing any conclusions. This was a policy contrary to the view of the editor of the British Journal of Astrology who, in the same week, published ‘The Mary Celeste Mystery Solved’ by Adam Bushey. The author had no doubts about his theory to account for the disappearance of the crew. Clearly, they dematerialised in mid-Atlantic, having cleared from Hell Gate, New York, on the seventh day of the eleventh month, with two mysterious individuals who brought the ship’s complement to thirteen. Twenty-eight days later, she was found derelict and the explanation was contained in the following riddle:

  “Six thousand years after the Fall in Eden, which happened 56 years after Adam’s formation as a White man, viz. 4,184.6 B.C., a ship left Hell Gate in the kingdom of the West with a cargo of Spirits for a city of the East. As she sailed the seas she passed over a vanished continent called Atlantis whose King had once ruled the earth; but because of its wicked ness it was sunk, and that ship emptied of all its beings, its papers and its time measurement when it had indeed passed over Atlantis so that she had none to guide her and none could tell whence she came nor the time. But there were those who watched and who knew; and so, by the grace of God, she was found by the ship of Israel, and taken unto the Rock, and that ship was given a new name, a new Captain and crew, a new set of papers, and a new time measurement, and she took her Spirits to their appointed haven. That ship sailed 17 days wit her old crew, 11 days with no crew, and she lay 70 days in the hands of strangers, or rather in the hands of Israel, before her rightful owner came out of the West and took her over again.”

  This was breathtaking stuff to many. It was declared that in this riddle existed the only clue. The answer lay deep in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh in the land of Egypt, the divine structure mentioned in the 19th Chapter of Isaiah, the inspired designer of which knew that when four thousand years had passed, the Great King would wake up his faithful servants and rule the Earth. Measurements in the Pyramid proved that would happen in the year 1872 A.D. and the Mary Celeste was only one of the mysteries of that fateful year. The Great New Captain had whipped up the eleven souls and two angels from the vessel as she passed over the cesspool of pre-diluvian Atlantis. That was the solution to the mystery of the ‘Mary of Heaven’ as her name meant, the ship found by the Grace of God and brought to the Rock, the portal to the land of Egypt. Such imagination defies comment and few people were able to understand the riddle or its explanation, let alone its logic. The theory did little to boost the circulation of the magazine and tended to press the subject of astronomy into further disrepute as a speculative art.

  The year of 192y applied to John Gilbert Lockhart His review of the mystery was the only item published.... or indeed the only one to appear in the following twelve months. His work entitled: ‘A Great Mystery of the Sea: The True Story of the Mary Celeste’ did not intend to capture the imagination of his readers only their interest. He took care to outline the facts in brief and to point out that Conan Doyle was the primer from which all legends stemmed. On analysis, Lockhart decided to favour the verdict of Captain Winchester, Dr. Cobb and the theory of a threatened explosion. He commented:

  ‘Let us try to reconstruct the tragedy. On November 25th 1872, the Mary Celeste was a few miles from the island of Santa Maria. The weather was fine, a light wind was blowing, and we may assume that for the latitude and the time of day was pretty warm. As the Mary Celeste slipped along, pitching slightly in the Atlantic swell, we may suppose a danger signal. It may be that someone noticed the small of gas lingering around the hatches: or that someone had heard queer rumbling noises, such as in a warm climate, gas escaping from alcohol, may make. The Captain ordered a hatch to be removed so that air might reach the cargo and dispel any gas that had been formed. While the men were lifting the heavy hatch there was an explosion, overturning it and perhaps injuring one of the men working on it.

  There was alarm and possibly confusion, since at any moment an explosion might blow the ship sky-high. Some of the men began to take in sail, others to lower the yawl. A moment later a second small explosion threw them into something like a panic. They did not stop to take in the sail or to lash the wheel. The Captain snatched up his chronometer and such of the ship’s papers he could quickly lay his hands on: someone burst open a drawer and took out a few tins of preserved meat: and all, without further delay, bumbled over the side into the yawl. Possibly in the hurry of launching, the small overcrowded boat capsized and all were drowned. Or perhaps they got clear of the ship. If so, their one thought would be to place as much water as possible between themselves and that perilous cargo, and they would row with desperate haste away from the Mary Celeste. But the minutes passed: nothing happened: the stopped rowing and watched. Presently, the wind freshened and the brigantine ran away from them. They might have tried to row after them and failed to reach her or, still haunted by the fear of an explosion, have turned the yawl’s head towards the distant shore. They may have drawn near to the coast and been caught in the surf, the boat smashed and ten lives lost. No trace of it or them was ever found, but the disappearance of a small boat in the Atlantic was hardly a major mystery. Meanwhile, the removal of the hatch had released the gases from the hold of the Mary Celeste, the fresh air had poured in and, all danger past, the brigantine sailed on unmanned. The solution covers most of the facts. It explains the state of suspended routine, the headlong haste with which the ship was abandoned, the overturned hatch, the barrel of alcohol which bore signs of having been tampered with and doubtless was damaged in the explosion, possibly the spots of blood on the deck. The stains on the cutlass had been proved to be rust and the cuts on the bows had probably no connection with the affair.’

  Lockhart was trying hard to assist but his inability to do so is a matter
of record exposed by his own hand. In advance of his presentation, he tentatively issued a public apology for the work submitted three years earlier, withdrawing the theory originally stated which did little to enhance his reputation. In ‘Mysteries of the Sea’ he propounded:

  ‘I put forward a solution which a number of people were kind enough to approve, and which others, perfectly reasonable regarded as too far-fetched to be permissible. My solution was suggested to me by the horrible and authentic story of Mary Russell, a brig sailing from Barbados to Cork in 1828, whose Captain suddenly went off his head and, with the assistance of two apprentices, first bound and then butchered the greater part of his crew. Only two men, both badly injured, managed to escape from him and hide in the hold. I suggested the presence of the harmonium and of religious books and music in the cabin of the Mary Celeste might possibly be the clue to a similar tragedy: that the Captain, a man of excellent character, might have developed religious mania and, with the strength and cunning of a homicidal lunatic, have attacked, overcome, and murdered his wife and child and crew, taking them one by one and unawares: and that finally the mad Captain of an empty ship, he may have recovered his senses, as homicidal maniacs generally do and, horrified by his crimes have thrown himself overboard. All this was mere conjecture, of which little more could be said than that, although there was not a job of positive evidence in its support, it roughly accounted for most of the facts as I have given them.’