by Lionel
The main hatch cover was securely in place — if it hadn’t been properly fastened, the water below decks would have been a much more serious problem. Several auxiliary hatches were open, however, and their covers were lying on the deck. Wright and Deveau inspected the galley carefully. It held less than a foot of water. There was an ample supply of fresh drinking water, and most of the Mary Celeste’s provisions were still intact and edible.
When their search took them to the cabin that Ben and Sarah had shared, they found the temporary, or slate, log. It recorded that on Monday, November 25, the Mary Celeste had been near St. Mary’s Island in the Azores, sailing on a bearing of east-southeast. By eight o’clock that same day they had been within six miles of Eastern Point and moving on a bearing of south-southwest.
It was of great significance in trying to piece together the clues to the tragedy that Sarah’s sewing machine had not been put away, and there was a partly completed child’s garment in it. A sewing machine was a very expensive and important piece of household equipment in 1872. Its owner would take great care of it — except in some dire emergency. What had made Sarah abandon it?
The evidence in the mate’s cabin also provided clues to the suddenness of whatever had disturbed the passengers and crew so dramatically. A navigational calculation remained partially finished. In the days before electronic calculators became ubiquitous, it was very important for a navigator to complete the mathematical work he was doing. Courses were checked and rechecked by hand — the hard way. You didn’t leave a half-finished calculation unless something really important had called you away from it. This cabin also contained a tracing of the Mary Celeste’s track up until November 24, when she had been about one hundred miles southwest of San Miguel Island in the Azores.
Other telltale signs of sudden departure in the crew’s quarters included razors left out unwiped. These expensive items could last a lifetime with care. No one on sailor’s pay in 1872 would carelessly leave his razor out to rust. Other treasured possessions, including pipes, tobacco pouches, and protective oilskins, had also been abandoned. There was even a bottle of medicine without its cork. Someone had felt that the disturbance — whatever it was — was so urgent that there wasn’t time to replace a cork! Sea chests had also been abandoned — a thing no nineteenth-century sailor would do except in dire emergency. Newly washed underwear was hanging out to dry on a line slung across the crew’s quarters.
One of the popular misconceptions about the mystery of the Mary Celeste can be traced back to a sentence from Conan Doyle’s short story “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” which was published in Cornhill Magazine in 1883. This fictional version of the abandoned vessel contained the sentence: “The boats were intact and slung upon the davits; and the cargo, consisting of tallow and American clocks, was untouched.”
The borders between fact and fiction are not well guarded. When the story of the Mary Celeste was repeatedly told and retold, Conan Doyle’s reference to the intact lifeboats (plural in his yarn) being in their places was deliciously mystifying. If the captain, his family, and his crew had not gone in the boats, how had they gone?
Lifeboat suspended on its davits.
The historical facts were very different: the boat (singular) was a small yawl, normally kept above the main hatch cover. It was missing; the clear implication was that the people had left the Mary Celeste in it. In fact, two sections of the ship’s rail had been removed, presumably to launch it. Further indications that at least some of the ship’s personnel had left in the boat were that they seemed to have taken the bill of lading, the navigation book, the sextant, and the chronometer with them. Taking these items suggested that whoever was in the inadequate little yawl had been hoping to navigate her either into a main shipping lane to be rescued, or to get her to the nearest land.
After their careful inspection of the abandoned Mary Celeste, Deveau, Johnson, and Wright returned to the Dei Gratia to report their findings to Captain Morehouse. A decision had to made. Salvage money was a big incentive — but trying to run both brigantines with too few men on each risked total disaster. It was finally agreed that Deveau with two good men to help him could probably get the Mary Celeste as far as Gibraltar. Oliver was, after all, an exceptionally powerful man and an exceptionally good sailor. Morehouse had complete confidence in him. Accompanied by Augustus Anderson and Charles Lund, Deveau took command of the derelict Mary Celeste.
The risks were significant: each vessel had barely more than a skeleton crew. If there was an emergency, or if the weather turned really foul, it would mean desperate trouble. They decided to travel in convoy, keeping within clear signalling distance of each other. All went well at first, but a fierce storm separated them as they entered the Straits of Gibraltar. The Dei Gratia docked in Gibraltar on the evening of December 12. The magnificent Oliver Deveau and his two fearless crewmen struggled in about twelve hours later.
Between them, Morehouse and Deveau had accomplished an almost impossible and highly dangerous task. They had saved a valuable ship and her expensive cargo. They richly deserved a hero’s welcome and generous salvage money as a reward. What actually happened was almost unbelievable.
A preposterous little bureaucrat named Frederick Solly Flood held the grandiloquent title of Attorney General for Gibraltar and Advocate General for the Queen in her Office of Admiralty. Unfortunately, Fred, a neurotic control freak, was obsessed with the notion that some form of trickery must have taken place. He simply could not get his microscopic mind around the simple fact that the Mary Celeste had been found abandoned. Her Majesty’s very inadequate Advocate General formulated the theory that the crew of the Mary Celeste had broached the alcohol cargo in the hold, become dangerously drunk, murdered Captain Briggs and his family and then one another, before the last man standing had — presumably — fallen overboard. It was explained to him in simple language that raw industrial alcohol is extremely unpalatable, and that it causes acute abdominal pain long before it causes intoxication. Reluctantly, Fred gave up his crew-got-drunk theory and sought other criminal explanations.
Undaunted, he arranged for marine surveyors to make a thorough examination of the Mary Celeste. They said she was in excellent condition, with no sign of any collision damage. However, their reports included one curious detail. There was a long groove running along each side of her bows — as though it had been deliberately cut there. One marine carpentry expert, Captain Schufeldt, said he thought the grooves were simply the result of natural weathering.
Having found nothing on the Mary Celeste’s structure to support his paranoid suspicions, Fred’s next line of enquiry was to suggest that some curious reddish-brown stains on the deck were blood. He also became intensely curious about some stains on an antique Italian sword found in Captain Briggs’s cabin. He had both sets of stains analyzed — and the forensic chemistry of the 1870s was capable of achieving quite commendable results. Having had a report from the analysts, however, Fred decided to keep it to himself. This almost certainly indicates that it wasn’t blood. Had the stains supported his theories, Fred would have trumpeted them from the housetops.
It was fortunate for Morehouse, Deveau, and their crew that the members of the Admiralty Court were sensible and experienced seamen. Despite Fred’s attempts to discredit them, Morehouse and his men were awarded £1,700 in salvage money: a tidy sum for the 1870s, but only a fraction of what they should have been awarded.
The fate of Briggs, his family, and the crew of the Mary Celeste remains an unsolved mystery of the sea. Theories abound; proof is missing. Only statistical probabilities of different strengths exist — attached to a wide variety of hypotheses. What theories have been put forward over the years?
Ergotine poisoning could have been responsible. Ergot is a parasitic fungus: scientific name claviceps purpurea. It turns up on various cereal grasses, including wheat and barley, but rye seems to be its favourite host. Individual ergots in the form of purple-black sclerotia (club-shaped bodies) g
et to the tops of the cereal grass where its seeds are produced. These sclerotia then give rise to the fungal fruiting bodies of the claviceps purpurea. Typically, these fungal fruiting parts have bulbous heads mounted on long stalks. The ergot alkaloids they produce include: beta-ergocryptine, ergocryptine, ergocristine, ergocornine, beta-ergotine, ergotomine, and ergotine itself. These different varieties all have hallucinogenic properties to a greater or lesser extent. They are also vasoconstrictive, interfering with the blood supply, and can cause gangrene in the body’s extremities.
Medieval hygiene being very limited, outbreaks of ergotine poisoning with its accompanying hallucinations were all too common. A very severe outbreak in France as recently as the 1950s led patients to report that they were being chased by hideous monsters. The relevance of ergotine to the unsolved mystery of the Mary Celeste is clear: if the food was contaminated, the passengers and crew would have hallucinated and left the ship in wild panic — some in the boat, some by leaping overboard to escape the “hideous monsters” they thought were pursuing them.
Some ergotine hallucinations are reportedly aetiological in character: they seek to “explain” the environment in unreal ways. If another human being — nurse, doctor, or caregiver — is approaching a hallucinating ergotine poisoning victim, the patient will imagine that the approaching figure is a vampire, a were-beast, a zombie, a demon, or a homicidal extraterrestrial being. The agonizing pain felt in the victim’s intestines because of the toxicity of the ergotine will be imagined to be caused by the monster’s claws, or a blast from the alien’s laser gun — depending upon the cultural expectations of the patient.
We can imagine the Briggs family and the crew of the Mary Celeste, infected with hallucinogenic ergotine toxins, “explaining” their fellow sufferers in terms of wild-eyed homicidal pirates, sea monsters, mermen, Tritons, Atlanteans, or Quinotaurs. The ergotine theory is tenable but unproven.
Piracy was not totally unknown in 1872. Although the heyday of the trade was over, a few pirates and white slavers still functioned spasmodically along the notorious Barbary Coast. Was it remotely possible that beautiful young Sarah Briggs met what nineteenth-century New England puritans would have coyly described as “a fate worse than death”? Was she sold into a North African brothel, or to swell an emir’s harem, while her husband and his crew grimly ended their days as slave labourers? The problem with that theory is that pirate slave traders would not have left anything of value on the Mary Celeste. They would certainly have taken the money that was still on board when the Dei Gratia found her, and they would have seriously considered taking the entire ship herself. A change of flag and nameplate and the Mary Celeste could have been sold quickly, quietly, and profitably in a port where difficult questions were not asked and paperwork was minimal.
The slaver theory is, however, curiously supported by the evidence of a man named Demetrius. He breathed nothing about the tragedy until 1913 — forty years after the event — because of his own alleged role in the crime. Demetrius claimed that he had actually been one of the slavers who had captured the Mary Celeste’s complement. As she approached the Azores, his ship had flown signals: “Short of provisions. Starving.” Briggs had responded humanely by signalling to them to send a boat. When it approached the Mary Celeste there seemed to be only one man aboard it, plus some provision cases covered with a tarpaulin. Too late, Briggs and his crew realized that the other heavily armed slavers were hidden below the sheeting. Briggs and his crew were all transferred to the slaver, and the Mary Celeste was abandoned. Demetrius went on to recount that fever had decimated the pirates and their prisoners until scarcely anyone was left alive on board the slaving vessel. He concluded his tale by reporting that a large steamer had subsequently collided with the slaver and sunk her — without stopping — and that he, Demetrius, was the sole survivor. His strange account was just possible, perhaps, but it sounds more like a tall tale than the truth about a tall ship!
Another dramatic theory involved sea monsters. Did some dark denizen of the deep reach up with its grim tentacles and pluck Ben, his family, and the crew of the Mary Celeste from their ship? It seems highly improbable, and yet the theory cannot be entirely dismissed as idle fantasy.
The oceans are vast, and things dwell within them that would have been more than capable of destroying the personnel of the Mary Celeste without necessarily destroying their ship as well. It is far more probable, however, that such a Krakenesque assailant would have taken the ship itself down rather than merely picked off the crew — but the theory is not an impossible one.
Yet another theory that might have sprung from the quaintly officious little mind of Fred Flood concerned a pack of dangerously intoxicated rats. It was suggested that they had broached the industrial alcohol in the hold, rather enjoyed it, and turned as a psychotic rodent horde on Briggs, his family, and the crew, who leapt overboard to escape. Presumably, the alcoholic rats had leapt after them, lemminglike, into the Atlantic — because Oliver Deveau and his companions found no trace of them when they explored the Mary Celeste and then sailed her successfully to Gibraltar.
A similar theory blames a plague of flesh-eating crabs rather than rodents. This hypothesis suggests that they popped up buoyantly out of the Atlantic, swarmed aboard the Mary Celeste, and swiftly devoured everyone before jumping back, replete, into the ocean. That story is reminiscent of the work of the brilliant horror writer Guy N. Smith, whose Night of the Crabs is one of the most effectively bloodcurdling yarns in that genre.
The next theory involves vanishing islands. They have a long tradition. Classical accounts tell of enormous whales sleeping peacefully while partially submerged. In these versions, sailors land on the supposed island and light a fire to cook their food. Not surprisingly the gigantic whale wakes up and plunges down into the depths — taking them with him. It seems highly improbable that the personnel of the Mary Celeste decided to hold a picnic and barbecue on a sleeping whale in November — but the idea was once put forward.
Natural disasters and unusual geological and meteorological phenomena may have had a hand in the tragedy. There is evidence that on November 5, 1872, the seismological recording equipment in Zurich, Switzerland, noted a very large earthquake with its epicentre in the Atlantic Ocean in the vicinity of where the Mary Celeste would have been. Could that submarine seaquake have been responsible in any way for the ship’s abandonment?
Waterspouts threatening a sailing ship.
Whirlwinds and waterspouts were also blamed by some theorists. It seems highly improbable, however, that any waterspout would have been so selective that it siphoned off all the human beings but left the ship relatively undamaged.
An exceptionally neat and consistent explanation is usually labelled “The Stowaway’s Story” and takes account of the curious groove running along each side of the Mary Celeste’s bows. According to the unnamed stowaway, who claimed to be an eyewitness, there was a great deal of friendly rivalry between Briggs and his first mate. Each claimed that he was the stronger and faster swimmer, and, with little else to do, they decided to settle the matter by having a swimming race around the ship — starting at the bows and finishing the circuit there.
Active little Sophia, the Briggs’s toddler daughter, caused her parents much anxiety by slipping away occasionally and trying to climb out along the bowsprit to watch the water racing by. The ship’s carpenter built a neat little safety platform for the child immediately under the bowsprit, which accounted for the two grooves where he had let it securely into the ship’s timbers.
Bowsprit: below here the two grooves ran along the bows.
The swimming race began. Briggs and Richardson were neck and neck all the way. Everyone stopped whatever he, or she, was doing and ran up on deck to watch. The curvature of the bows, sloping down towards the waterline, restricted their vital view of the finish. The spectators clambered onto the little platform to get a better look: it promptly collapsed on top of Briggs and Richardson as they finished th
eir race. Everyone was drowning while their ship went heedlessly on her way.
The stowaway storyteller cut two pieces of rail away to launch the yawl to try to save them. He risked punishment and imprisonment by revealing himself and trying to help them, but he did his best. Just as he got the yawl into the water, however, a squall hit the Mary Celeste. She sped away from the tragedy, while the stowaway found it almost impossible to handle the yawl on his own. He did eventually get it back to the spot where the accident had happened — but only the pathetic little play-platform floated forlornly in the water: there was no sign of a living soul.
A more salacious version of the swimming race hypothesis was that Richardson was Sarah’s lover, and that he and Benjamin had decided to settle the matter honourably — with a swimming race rather than a duel. Sarah, in love with both, had agreed to go exclusively with the winner, while the loser would quietly move out of her life once they reached port. It’s a million light years from the ethics of the nineteenth-century New England puritan culture to which they all belonged — but stranger things have happened.
The stowaway in the yawl finally made it to a lonely part of the Azores, gave a false name, told a vague and confused story about being shipwrecked — but said not a word about the Mary Celeste in case of punishment for stowing away.
It was a beautifully neat story — and perhaps that’s where its main weakness lies. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but truth tends to have loose ends and an untidy structure. It is well-crafted fiction that fits together precisely.
The mysterious bow grooves are also explained by the hypothesis of extraterrestrials in a UFO. By a curious coincidence one of our early science fiction novels, called Fiends, published in the 1950s by Badger Books of Hammersmith, involved a UFO with a gigantic gripper as part of its equipment. This was used to immobilize the Mary Celeste while the extraterrestrials abducted her people. Needless to say, it was that alien gripper that left the marks on the bows.
