MARY CELESTE

 

I believe the mystery of the Mary Celeste was solved in the late spring of 1873, on the long, lonely silver beach called the Playa del Silencio - the beach of silence (above). It was a fitting place for such a tragic tale to conclude.

The sea to the north is a stormy and fog shrouded arm of the Atlantic known as the Bay of Biscay. According to a report in a Liverpool newspaper, just off this rugged limestone coast with it's endless bays and rugged inlets, Spanish fishermen stumbled upon the final chapter of a maritime tragedy.   

Two makeshift rafts loosely tied together rolled in the turbulent waters. One was flying an American flag. On it were the decomposed remains of  a single human being. Lashed to the second were five more, badly decomposed bodies.  Could this have been the end for the crew of the Marie Celeste? 

She was brig; carvel built, "the hull planking flush rather than overlapping", just under 100 feet from bow to stern, 25 feet wide, weighing 198 tons with two main masts. She had been  built for the North Atlantic shipping trade, and launched from Spencer's Island in the Bay Of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada  on 18 May, 1861. And she was always a sad ship.

Her first captain, Robert McLellen, died of pneumonia after filling the Mary Celeste with her maiden cargo of lumber.  Her second captain, John Nutting Parker, delivered the lumber to London, but struck and sank a fishing brig on the voyage home.  In 1867 a storm ran her ashore and her owners sold her for salvage. Repaired and refitted, the Mary Celeste went back to work. Then in early 1872 new owners invested another $10,000 in the Marie Celeste, increasing her length to 103 feet, and adding a second deck above the water line. 

One hundred tons heavier, and at anchor at Staten Island, New York City, by 3 November, 1872 the Mary Celeste had been loaded with 1,700 barrels of denatured alcohol, (meaning chemicals had been added making it poisonous to humans), This cargo was bound for a customer in Genoa Italy. That night her new captain and partial owner, Benjamin Spooner Biggs (above), wrote his mother in Marion, Massachusetts, describing his new quarters which he shared with his wife and 2 year old daughter. 

"It seems real homelike since Sarah and Sophia (above) got here, and we enjoy our little quarters…We seem to have a very good mate and steward and I hope I shall have a pleasant voyage… Our vessel is in beautiful trim and I hope we shall have a fine passage, but I have never been in her before and can’t say how she'll sail....Hoping to be with you in the spring with much love, I am yours, affectionately, Benjamin.”

Sarah Biggs wrote to her own mother that Monday night, urging her to remind the couple's 7 year old son Arthur, who had been left behind to attend school, to "be a good boy".  She also added to her that the crew appeared to be "quietly capable...if they continue as they have begun".

The Mary Celeste sailed from pier 50, Staten Island, with a crew of seven. Albert Richardson was the first mate, and had sailed under Captain Biggs before. Second mate was 25 year old Andrew Gilling from New York City. The steward was Edward William Head.  The able seamen were 4 Germans from the Frisian Islands - Arian Martens, Gottlieb Goudschaal, and brothers Volkert and Boz Lorenson. They were all experienced and well known to their peers as "calm, balanced...and highly qualified". " Captain Briggs wrote he was "extremely pleased with both the ship and the crew".

As the sun set that Tuesday, 5 November, 1872, the Mary Celeste passed through the 100 foot wide Verrazano Narrows, between Staten Island and Brooklyn and entered the North Atlantic. By night fall she had faded away - a tiny capsule of humanity on a vast indifferent ocean. Her next stop was scheduled to be would be two weeks later, at the port of Gibraltar, 3,520 miles away, at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, where she would resupply with food and water. 

Also docked on Staten Island that Tuesday was the merchant brigantine, Dei Gratia, Latin for "The Grace of God".  She was a decade younger than the Mary Celeste, and had been built in the village of Bear River, on Nova Scotia, also near the wide mouth of the Bay of Fundy. She was bigger than the Mary Celeste, weighing  296 tons, was 111 feet long and 28 feet wide. Under captain David Morehouse the Dei Gratia left Staten Island on 15 November, 1872,  ten days behind the Mary Celeste.  

The Dei Gratia had a smooth voyage and three weeks later, on 4 December, in the open sea, the lookout reported a ship at five miles distance which was sailing oddly. The sails, two of which were fully rigged, appeared to be slightly torn. 

As Captain Morehouse moved closer he realized she was the Mary Celeste. There were no distress flags flying and everything otherwise appeared normal except in two hours of observation not a soul appeared on deck. Three men were sent to board the Mary Celeste.

The boarding crew reported “…the whole ship was a thoroughly wet mess”, but fully seaworthy. She still carried a six month supply of food and fresh water. However,  there was not a single living soul on board, not even a cat.

The crew’s personal possessions appeared untouched, including their valuables, and their foul weather gear. There were no signs of a struggle, although the Captain’s cabin was in considerable disarray. No flag was found.

The log book, the sextant and chronometer were all missing, as was the 20 foot life boat with sail. A thick line had been tied to the Mary Celeste’s railing. The other end was frayed and dragging in the current.  A three man crew sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, where an Admiralty’s court was convened and a commission was appointed to investigate the mystery.  

The investigation found that nine of the 1,700 barrels of alcohol aboard the Mary Celeste were empty. But the boarding party had reported smelling no fumes. The last entry in the captain’s log was dated 24 November, 1872 - when the Mary Celeste was 100 miles off Santa Maria, the southern most of the Azores islands. This seemed to imply that the ship had sailed another 370 miles in nine days with no one at the helm.  

Frederick Solly-Flood, the Attorney General for Gibraltar (above), seems to have suspected the captain and crew of the Dei Gratia of some involvement, but all suggestion of evil was shown to be baseless after a suspected blood stain on a knife was proven to be mere rust.  A diver found the hull did not “…exhibit any trace of damage or injury or…had any collision or had struck upon any rock or shoal or had met with any accident or casualty.” The commission’s final judgment was that there was no evidence of foul play, piracy, mutiny or violence. 

But if that were so why would a healthy crew abandon a seaworthy ship in the middle of the ocean?  Water spouts? Sea monsters? Or could it have been a mutiny by the crew?  Why would experienced sailors abandon a sea worthy ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The British suspicions undoubtedly influenced what the Admiralty’s court did next. The crew of the Dei Gratia was awarded $46,000 in salvage rights for the Mary Celeste (the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars today). But this was barely 20% of what the ship and cargo had been insured for. 

Over the next year the owners and American authorities offered a reward and conducted a search in ports large and small around the Atlantic rim, for anyone matching the description of Captain Briggs, his wife and child, or any of the crew members from the Mary Celeste. Not a trace was found. It was as if they had simply vanished from the face of the earth. 

The Mary Celeste was returned to her owners and remained an unlucky ship.  She was sold 17 times over the next 13 years. Finally, in 1885, she was driven onto a reef off Haiti and then set afire in an insurance scam. But she refused to sink and the owner was jailed. The sad, unlucky Mary Celeste slowly decomposed on the reef until a storm finally freed her last timbers to slide into the sea (above).

This leaves me to ponder the fate of the human cargo of the Mary Celeste; a woman and child and eight men - ten souls in a twenty foot single masted yawl life boat. Did they panic? The condition of the cabins suggests they did not. Whatever their reason for abandoning the Mary Celeste, once they did they were fully exposed to the winds of fate. 

The weather service on the Azores records that on the morning of 24 November, 1872  -  the date of the Captain Benjamin Biggs' last log entry -  a gale blew up with torrential rains, a gale which finally blew itself out only on the morning of 4 December - the morning the lookout on the Dei Gratia spotted the abandoned Mary Celeste. This mean the Mary Celeste had suffered a very bad crossing. 

Suppose, for some reason - perhaps because of a leak of explosive alcohol fumes, or  crew members driven mad by drinking the denatured alcohol - or suppose a broken bilge pump, and a disassembled pump had been found on deck, suppose for whatever reason Captain Biggs had become convinced the ship was taking on water and foundering - suppose any of those events had convinced him to abandon ship in good weather.   

And suppose a gale had suddenly blown up, which separated the life boat from the ship, and had driven the desperate little yawl northeastward for three or four days while breaking the little life boat to bits. And suppose the survivors had gathered the flotsam into a pair of rafts.

The Azores current travels north eastward at 2 knots an hour away from the islands, toward Portugal and northern Spain,  Without food or water, suppose those rafts, carrying the remains of the crew, and still tied together, had drifted for five months into Biscayne Bay. 

And suppose the rope joining those rafts had finally separated, just before they were driven in toward The Beach of Silence, on the northern coast of Spain. Suppose all of that happened. That may have been what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste. 

I think it was possible. And I think, had she lived,  little Sophia would have grown into a very lovely young lady. 

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