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 meant 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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The Great Napoleon Rescue

 

I have a mission for you.  Succeed and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams. Fail and you will spend the rest of your life in the deepest darkest prison on earth. Assuming you live.  The object of this mission is a 48 year old white male, being held prisoner on a remote volcanic island (above).  It has no port and only one small beach.  Oh, and no helicopters, airplanes, or anything with winky, blinky lights. 

The nearest land is another island 800 miles to the northwest. The nearest major landmass  is 1,200 miles to the east. Your mission must be accomplished without using aircraft or balloons, motorboats, radio, high explosives or electricity. You see, it is 1817, before all of those tools were invented.

Your mission is to rescue Napoleon Bonaparte from his prison on the island of St. Helena.

It is hard to imagine today the terror Napoleon Bonaparte inspired in the British ruling class. He had not a drop of royal blood in his veins, and no privileged education. Yet, in 1796,  as a lowly general the "Corsican Ogre" humiliated and defeated an entire Austrian Army in northern Italy. 

Then in 1798, like a new Pharaoh, he conquered Egypt. 

He was elected Emperor of France in 1804, and six months later  also crowned King of Italy. For almost two years his Grand Army threatened an invasion of England. 

Then suddenly "Le petit Corporal"  spun about and almost without firing a shot, captured Vienna and an Austrian army of 30,000 men. 

A month later his Grande Armee' of 65,000 men was cornered in Czechoslovakia by a combined Russian and Austrian army of 85,000 men. In a matter of hours he forced them to surrender. After surrendering, Czar Alexander was forced to admit, “We are babies in the hands of a giant.”

The famous quatrains of Nostradamus were quoted as predicting Napoleon's rise: “An Emperor will be born near Italy”. Everywhere he went Kings were overthrown, kingdom's collapsed, and fortunes evaporated. Napoleon closed Europe to all English trade, and cost English bankers vast treasure, not even counting the wealth they had to spend on ships and men of their own. To the English Napoleon was the “bogeyman of Europe.” 

In 1814, after fifteen years and five million dead, Napoleon was finally cornered and forced to abdicate.

He was  exiled to the tiny island of Elba, 12 miles off the coast of Italy.  

A year later he escaped, and in the famous "One Hundred Days" reconquered France, recruited a new army of 72,000 men, invaded Belgium and defeated a Prussian army of 84,000 men. 

Finally, at the “very close” battle of Waterloo, on Sunday, 18 June, 1815, Napoleon was stopped only by the sacrifice of another 45,000 lives. This time the British were determined to lock “Boney” away where he could never escape.

The prison they picked in 1816 was St Helena (above), a wind swept tropical volcanic island rising 2,000 feet out of the south Atlantic, a third of the way between Africa and South America. 

Its arid coastal cliffs were cleaved by a half dozen V shaped canyons where rivers fell from the humid forested interior. Lord Liverpool, the British Prime Minister,  assured his cabinet, “At such a distance and in such a place, all intrigue would be impossible.” But they were still taking no chances.

Napoleon and his small retinue were watched round the clock by 2,800 soldiers and 500 cannon headquartered in a fort overlooking his single story mansion called Longwood near the island's center (above). A British officer was required to set eyes upon Napoleon twice a day to verify his captivity.

He was not allowed out side after sunset, nor if there was an unidentified sail on the horizon. He was never allowed near the shore, even atop the high cliffs. . Eleven British warships patrolled the seas around the island twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.  

Residents of the island's only village, Jamestown (above), were allowed out after 9 pm and only with a signed pass.  At sunset every boat on the tiny island was secured under armed guard and every bridge and gate was locked. 

But, of course, from the moment of his imprisonment there were those who wanted to set “The Thief of Europe” free again. As the small fleet carrying Napoleon sailed for St. Helena, they were forced to evade "The True Blooded Yankee", a privateer sailing under revolutionaries out of Buenos Aires. It was likely the ship had been financed by Napoleon's brother Joseph, one time King of Spain, who had escaped to America with 20 million francs.  A group of retired French officers, who had emigrated to Texas were also raising more funds and plotting further escape attempts. 

And there were others, more surprising, such as the legendary British Admiral Thomas Cochrane (above), AKA “the Sea Wolf”.   Two years after this brilliant officer commanded the naval squadron that burned Washington D.C.  in 1814,  Cochrane was convicted of stock fraud, and forced to resign from the British Navy. 

Bitter, he sold his skills to Chile, where he founded their navy and helped win their independence from Spain.  And whispers now hinted that the now aging Cochrane (above) was willing to assemble a fleet to free Napoleon so he could lead the revolutionaries in South America to establish a new empire.

But the man all the would-be rescuers sought out was a common smuggler named Tom Johnson (above). He'd been born to Irish parents living in southern England, and had become a successful smuggler by the age of 12. The revenue agents caught him twice, but after his second escape he somehow managed to reach France. 

Using his knowledge of the English coast Tom Johnson quickly again became such a successful smuggler that when Napoleon was planning his invasion of England, he met with Tom and offered him a command in the French navy.  Tom said no, so Napoleon threw the smuggler into prison. 

After nine months Tom escaped yet again, and was later caught by a British warship almost within sight of America. But this time the Admiralty was desperate enough to grant Tom a pardon and put him on the payroll. And one of the first jobs they gave him was to review a new invention being offered to save England from Napoleon's invasion fleet - a submarine.

In 1800 American Robert Fulton (above) built a working prototype for the French revolutionaries. The four man crew of the Nautilus were supplied with air up to 25 feet under the surface via a snorkel. Underwater she was faster than a row boat on the surface, and while on the surface the Nautilus was powered by a sail which ingeniously popped up from a deck hanger. But Napoleon took one look at the leaky thing and decided Fulton was a fraud. He ordered the prototype destroyed. That was when the British offered Fulton the modern equivalent of $10 million if he could build another submarine for England.

Maybe the Admiralty never thought it would work, and they hired Fulton just to keep him occupied. But the inventor still brought to the task his experience and plans for an even bigger submarine. The Nautilus II (above) would be 35 feet long, with a crew of six, two snorkels, a bigger sail and could remain at sea for up to 20 days. At Dover, the master smuggler Tom Johnson went over the plans with Fulton, and they discussed them in detail. 

But after the British Navy destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at the battle of Trafalgar (above) in 1805, they had no need of Fulton's submarine. Discouraged, Fulton took the offer to build a commercial surface steam boat in New York. But the smuggler Tom Johnson was still interested in the idea. That, plus Johnson's reputation for audacity,  convinced some body that the old smuggler should be offered the equivalent of $3 million to rescue Napoleon.

The plan conceived by Johnson involved two submarines. The larger one, ala the Nautilus II, would approach St. Helena at night from the leeward side (above), and then submerge at dawn. 

The next evening, the first submarine would resurface and launch the smaller sub (above), which would land Johnson and another man at the foot of the cliffs on the north side of the island . 

Johnson would ascend the cliff, where he would install a bosun's chair. Then he would make his way to Longwood, where he would slip past the British guards. The next evening, Johnson and Napoleon would sneak out for the cliff. Napoleon would be lowered in the chair, and be spirited away before dawn in the submarines.

In 1818 the Times of London reported on rumors of a plot to rescue Napoleon, and ex-Admiral Cochrane's wife assured several people that such a plan existed.  It might all have been a fantasy, except we know from British Admiralty records that early in 1820 a commission of senior officers reviewed expense accounts for a submarine, built by Johnson and funded by French and South American supporters of Napoleon. 

And leading that commission which studied the expense accounts was General Sir George Cockburn (above), the soldier who had burned down the White House in 1814, while under orders from his brother Admiral Thomas Cochrane. The records show Johnson was asking for 100,000 pounds, and the sailors gave him just 4,735 pounds. But clearly there was at least one submarine in existence in 1820, and Johnson had control of it.

It seems unlikely that Johnson’s submarine could have accomplished the rescue mission.   More than likely, Johnson's plot was a scam to obtain money from Napoleon's supporters, or the British, or both. But if Johnson had not intended upon trying, why, late one night in November of 1820, did Tom Johnson try to steal the sub he had built for the British Navy?  

He got as far as London Bridge (above), when the British navy caught up with him. And according to a Thames boatman who witnessed the scene, “Captain Johnson...(was) threatening to shoot them. But they paid no attention to his threats, seized her (the submarine) and taking her to Blackwall, burned her.” Thus ended the impossible mission.

And remember Ascension Island,  800 miles to the northwest of St. Helena?  Well, in 1815 British marines were sent ashore to occupy it, in the unlikely event that some one might wish to use it as a base to rescue Napoleon. And as they splashed ashore they reported some one had left a written a message in the beach sand; “Le mai l'Empereur Napoleon vit pour toujours”  It translated as, “May the Emperor Napoleon live forever!”

He did not. Napoleon Bonaparte died on St. Helena in May of 1821, possibly of stomach cancer, or possibly from arsenic poisoning: by whom is any one's guess. Tom Johnson was sent to debtors prison, and while there seems to have contributed to a fanciful retelling of his plan to rescue Napoleon. Perhaps, just to shut him up, upon his release ,Johnson was granted a pension of 20 pounds a month, and he retired to Southern England.  In 1832 Admiral Thomas Cochrane was restored to his full rank in the British Navy, and was later even promoted to Real Admiral. He died in 1860.

Considering the entire tale from beginning to end, I have to say, had it not involved Napoleon, I would have called it impossible. But with Napoleon, nothing was ever impossible.

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