The Mary Celeste: What Really Happened to the Ghost Ship's 10 People?

On the afternoon of December 4, 1872, the crew of a small ship in the middle of the Atlantic noticed something odd about a vessel six miles away. It was moving strangely. Not sailing so much as wandering. Drifting off course, then correcting, then drifting again.

They sent two men across in a boat to have a look.

There was no one on board. Not one person. The lifeboat was gone. The captain's navigation instruments were gone. But the ship itself was afloat, the cargo was mostly intact, and there was enough food and water aboard to last for months.

Ten people had left a ship that did not need to be abandoned. And none of them were ever seen again.

This is the true story of the Mary Celeste. Not the legend. The record.

The Amazon becomes the Mary Celeste

The ship that became the most famous ghost ship in history started life with a different name.

She was built at Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy, at the shipyard of a man named Joshua Dewis. Her keel was laid in late 1860, and she was launched on May 18, 1861. Her name was the Amazon.

She was a brigantine. Two masts, about ninety-nine feet long, around one hundred and ninety-eight tons. A working cargo ship, nothing special.

Her luck was bad from the start. Her first captain, Robert McLellan, who was also one of her owners, died on her maiden voyage in June 1861.

Six years later, in October 1867, a storm drove her ashore on Cape Breton Island. She was abandoned as a wreck. A man named Alexander McBean bought her as a derelict. She changed hands again, was sold to an American, Richard Haines, who paid seventeen hundred and fifty dollars for her and then spent more than eight thousand dollars restoring her.

In December 1868, she was registered in New York under a new name. Mary Celeste. Nobody is quite sure where the name came from.

Haines lost her to his creditors less than a year later. She was sold to a group of New York investors led by a man named James Winchester. In 1872, Winchester paid for a major refit. Ten thousand dollars. The ship was lengthened to about a hundred and three feet, and a second deck was added.

By the fall of 1872, the Mary Celeste was in the best shape of her life.

Ten people sail from New York

Her new captain was Benjamin Spooner Briggs. He was thirty-seven, from Wareham, Massachusetts. A deeply religious man, an experienced master, and part owner of the ship. He held four of her twelve shares.

He was bringing his family. His wife, Sarah, and their two-year-old daughter, Sophia. Their seven-year-old son, Arthur, stayed home in Massachusetts with his grandmother. He would never see his parents or his sister again.

The crew was seven men. First mate Albert Richardson, who had sailed with Briggs before. Second mate Andrew Gilling, about twenty-five. A steward named Edward Head, newly married. And four seamen from the Frisian Islands off the coast of Germany: two brothers, Volkert and Boz Lorenzen, plus Arian Martens and Gottlieb Goudschaal.

The cargo was one thousand seven hundred and one barrels of alcohol, loaded at Pier 50 on the East River. It was industrial alcohol, headed for Genoa, Italy.

Two days before they sailed, Briggs wrote a letter to his mother. He said the ship was "in beautiful trim."

On November 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste left the pier. She anchored off Staten Island for two days, waiting on the weather, and then, around November 7, she sailed out into the Atlantic.

Eight days later, another ship left New York harbor, bound for the same part of the world. A Canadian brigantine called the Dei Gratia, carrying petroleum to Gibraltar and Genoa. Her captain was David Morehouse.

December 4, 1872

Nearly a month later, on December 4, the Dei Gratia was in the open ocean roughly midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal.

Around one in the afternoon, Captain Morehouse spotted a ship about six miles off. She was moving erratically, like no one was steering.

Morehouse watched her for a while. She did not signal. She did not respond. He sent his first mate, Oliver Deveau, and his second mate, John Wright, across in a small boat.

They climbed aboard and called out. Nobody answered.

They searched the ship. Every cabin. Every hold. The deck, the galley, the crew's quarters, the captain's cabin.

There was no one on the Mary Celeste.

What the boarding party found

What Deveau and Wright found that day is the heart of this mystery, so let's go through it carefully, the way they described it.

The sails were partly set. Some were in poor condition. Some were missing. Ropes and rigging hung over the side.

The main hatch was closed and secure. Two smaller hatches, the fore hatch and the lazarette, were open, with their covers lying on the deck.

The binnacle, the stand that holds the ship's compass, had been knocked out of place, and its glass cover was broken.

Below deck, there was water. About three and a half feet of it in the hold. That sounds like a lot, but for a ship that size, it was not dangerous. She was nowhere near sinking.

On the deck, they found a makeshift sounding rod. That is a tool you drop into the pump well to measure how much water is in the hold. Somebody had been checking the water level. And then they had left the rod lying on the deck.

The cabins were wet and messy, from water coming in through doors and skylights, but otherwise in reasonable order. Personal belongings were still there. In the captain's cabin, there was a sword in its sheath under the bed.

There was no sign of a fight. No sign of a fire.

The small lifeboat, a yawl that had been stored across the main hatch, was gone.

Most of the ship's papers were gone. So was the captain's navigation equipment.

And the ship's log was in the first mate's cabin. The last entry was from eight in the morning on November 25. Nine days earlier. It put the Mary Celeste off Santa Maria, the southernmost island of the Azores. About four hundred nautical miles from where the Dei Gratia found her.

For nine days, the Mary Celeste had sailed on with no one aboard.

Morehouse made a decision. He split his crew and sent three men, led by Deveau, to sail the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar. If they brought her in, they could claim salvage money.

The Gibraltar inquiry

Both ships reached Gibraltar in December. And that is where the mystery turned into an investigation.

The salvage hearing opened on December 17, 1872. The case was handled by Gibraltar's attorney general, a man named Frederick Solly-Flood.

Solly-Flood did not like what he heard. He thought something criminal had happened.

His first theory was mutiny. He believed the crew had broken into the alcohol, gotten drunk, murdered the captain, his family, and the officers, and then escaped in the lifeboat. He pointed to marks on the ship's bow, which he thought had been cut to fake a collision. He pointed to stains on the captain's sword and on a rail, which he thought might be blood.

He also suspected the salvage crew who had found the ship. He thought they might have staged the whole thing for the salvage money. And at one point he even wondered whether the ship's owner was involved in some kind of insurance plot. None of it was ever proven, and nobody was ever charged.

But the evidence did not support him.

A diver examined the hull and found no damage from a collision. A U.S. Navy captain who inspected the ship said the marks on the bow were ordinary wear from the sea. And when the stains on the sword and the rail were tested, they turned out not to be blood.

The idea that the Dei Gratia had chased the Mary Celeste down also fell apart. The Dei Gratia was the slower ship, and she left New York more than a week later.

In the end, Solly-Flood released the ship. The court awarded the Dei Gratia's crew a salvage payment of seventeen hundred pounds, about one fifth of the value of the ship and cargo. Many people thought that was low. The judge criticized Morehouse for some of his choices. But nobody was ever charged with anything.

The Mary Celeste sailed on to Genoa with a new crew and delivered her cargo. Late, but delivered.

The myths, and where they came from

If you have heard this story before, you may have heard some details that are not in the record. That is not your fault. The Mary Celeste has attracted more invented details than almost any mystery in history.

In 1884, a young ship's doctor and aspiring writer named Arthur Conan Doyle, a few years before he created Sherlock Holmes, published a short story in a London magazine about a ship called the "Marie Celeste." In his version, the ship was found with everything in perfect order. The story was fiction. But it was so popular that the misspelled name, Marie Celeste, stuck for decades, and many of its invented details got mixed into the real history.

Newspapers made it worse. An article in the 1880s described the ship being found with a fire still burning and a meal on the table, untouched. That never happened. A magazine piece in the early 1900s gave the wrong location and claimed there were live chickens aboard. Others published fake accounts by supposed survivors, who claimed to have been on the ship and lived to tell the tale. In the 1920s, one of these hoaxes fooled a major New York newspaper.

None of those stories are true. There was no warm meal. No survivor. No perfectly set table.

What was real was strange enough on its own.

The theories that hold up

So what actually happened? Here are the explanations people take seriously, and the problems with each.

The first is the cargo. Alcohol gives off vapor. One theory says fumes built up in the hold and caused a small explosion or a frightening rumble, enough to make Briggs fear the whole cargo was about to blow. Two of the hatches were open, which might fit with someone venting the hold. In 2006, a chemist ran an experiment showing that alcohol vapor can produce a sudden burst that leaves no scorch marks behind. The problem is that there was no physical damage found on the ship at all. So this theory remains possible, but unproven.

The second is a false reading of the water level. Remember the sounding rod left on the deck. One theory says Briggs, or his crew, measured the water in the hold, got a reading that looked much worse than it was, perhaps because a pump was broken or partly taken apart, and believed the ship was sinking fast. Some researchers have also suggested that a waterspout, a tornado over the ocean, could have caused a sudden drop in pressure that pushed water up into the pump and fooled them.

Either way, the idea is the same. Something made an experienced captain believe, very quickly, that his ship was in danger. He got his wife, his daughter, and his crew into the small lifeboat, grabbed the instruments he would need to navigate, and left. Probably intending to stay close, maybe tied to the ship by a line, until the danger passed.

And then, somehow, they lost the ship. The line broke, or was never tied, or the wind took her. The Mary Celeste sailed on without them. And a small open boat with ten people in it was left alone in the Atlantic in late November.

Other ideas have been ruled out or have no evidence. Pirates would have taken the valuables, which were left behind. A mutiny would have left signs, and the supposed bloodstains were not blood. A giant squid could not have taken a lifeboat and navigation instruments. Sea monsters, the Bermuda Triangle, aliens: there is simply nothing in the record to support any of it.

What we still don't know

Here is the strangest thing about the Mary Celeste. The ship itself has an ending. She sailed for twelve more years. In 1885, her last captain deliberately wrecked her on a reef off Haiti in an insurance fraud scheme. He went on trial, and died poor a few months later. In 2001, an expedition claimed to have found her wreck, but testing of the wood showed it came from trees still growing years after she sank. Her remains have never been confirmed.

But the ten people have no ending at all.

Captain Briggs. Sarah. Two-year-old Sophia. Albert Richardson. Andrew Gilling. Edward Head. Volkert and Boz Lorenzen. Arian Martens. Gottlieb Goudschaal.

Somewhere between Santa Maria and the open ocean, something made them leave a sound ship for a small boat. And whatever it was, it happened so fast that the sounding rod was left on the deck and the sword was left under the bed.

What do you think made them leave? An explosion they thought was coming? A sinking that wasn't happening? Or something none of us have thought of yet?