The Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship Found Adrift

The Story

On 5 December 1872, the crew of the British ship Dei Gratia found a ship adrift about 400 miles east of the Azores, according to Smithsonian magazine. It was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York a month before, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of alcohol. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their 2-year-old daughter and seven crew members were on board. When the Dei Gratia's sailors climbed aboard, no one was there.

The ship was seaworthy. There was three and a half feet of water in the ship's bottom, one of its two pumps had been taken apart, and the lifeboat was gone. The last log entry was from 5 a.m. on 25 November. Most of the cargo was intact, though 9 barrels, made of red oak rather than white oak, were empty.

The cargo was almost untouched, the lifeboat was gone, and the last log entry was ten days old.

At the inquiry, the attorney general in charge, Frederick Solly-Flood, suspected mischief, but after more than three months the court found no evidence of foul play. The salvagers received only one-sixth of the $46,000 for which the ship and cargo had been insured. In 1884, Arthur Conan Doyle published a short story based on the case that posited a capture by a vengeful ex-slave. Theories since have ranged from mutiny and piracy to sea monsters and killer waterspouts.

A more ordinary explanation has gained ground. Smithsonian reports that documentarian Anne MacGregor and Phil Richardson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that Briggs was about 120 miles west of where he thought he was, probably because of an inaccurate chronometer. MacGregor suggested that coal dust and construction debris could have fouled the pumps, leaving Briggs unable to tell how much water the ship was taking on, and that he might have ordered everyone into the lifeboat within sight of the island of Santa Maria. No one aboard was ever found, and the explanation remains unconfirmed.