The Mary Celeste was a Canadian built, 100 ft brigantine of 282 tons from Marion, MA.
At 9am on the morning of December 13, 1872, the vessel was seen entering the Bay of Gibraltar. No one was aboard. The captain, his wife, their two-year old daughter and a crew of eight were missing and was never heard from or seen again.
And so begins the mystery.....
What happened to the people aboard the Mary Celeste?
Mary Celeste was launched in Nova Scotia in 1860. Her original name was "Amazon". She was 103 ft overall displacing 280 tons and listed as a half-brig. Over the next 10 years she was involved in several accidents at sea and passed thru a number of owners. Eventually she turned up at a New York salvage auction where she was purchased for $3,000. After extensive repairs she was put under American registry and renamed "Mary Celeste".
The new captain of Mary Celeste was Benjamin Briggs, 37, a master with three previous commands. On November 7, 1872 the ship departed New York with Captain Briggs, his wife, young daughter and a crew of eight. The ship was cargoed with 1700 barrels of raw american alcohol bound for Genoa, Italy. The captain, his family and crew were never seen again.
A British Board of Inquiry in Gibraltar gathered evidence and testimony from the boarding party that had discovered Mary Celeste as a drifting derelict. Lack of evidence of violence ruled out piracy or foul play, but no conclusions as to the fate of the mortals aboard was forthcoming.
The real mystery did not begin until 1884 when Arthur Conan Doyle writing under a pseudonym published a story about a delelict ship called "Marie Celeste". This tale recounted the actual events of the Mary Celeste with enough added fictional and provocative detail to capture the public interest. Since then and to this day, no two accounts of the story are the same
The Mary Celeste was sailing for Genoa on November 7, and the Dei Gratia was to head-out a week later for Gibraltar. The Dei Gratia sighted the ship sailing erratically east of the Azores.
When officers Oliver Deveau and John Wright of the Dei Gratia went to investigate, they found that the only life boat had been launched, yet the ship was in perfect shape, with sails set. The cargo was still in good shape, two hatches were missing, while the binacle was toppled over. The sextant, and some other navigation instruments were not on board, while the steering wheel was still running free, indicating the ship was abondoned in great hurry.
Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year old daughter Sophia and the seven crew members had disappeared.
According to a note found on a slate dated November 25th (which was not copied to the logbook), the ship was that day at a position approximately 300 miles west of the place where it was discovered.
Deveau, with sailors Anderson and Lund went aboard of the Celeste, and after a few hours both ships went to Gibraltar, where they arrived a week later.
THEORIES & CONCLUSIONS
There were many theories as to why the crew had abandoned the ship. These range from hallucinations as the result of food poisoning to an attempt to scuttle the ship for the insurance money gone awry. Some people theorized that the crew had gotten into the alcohol shipment. Others said that fumes rising from the barrels of alcohol could have looked like smoke under certain conditions, causing the captain to believe that the shipment was on fire. Yet another theory holds that the ship ran aground on a "ghost island" , a moving sandbar. The crew abandoned the ship, and the sand bar eventually moved again sending the Mary Celeste drifting. Lack of evidence of violence caused most people to rule out piracy.
Sometime after eight in the morning on the 25th, something dreadful happened on board the Mary Celeste causing an experienced master mariner to place his wife and 2-year-old daughter into a twenty-foot yawl with eighteen inches of freeboard and 7 other adults besides himself, and hastily abandon a perfectly sea-worthy, 101-foot, 282 ton vessels.
He had to believe, as everyone on board, that remaining on the Mary Celeste was far more dangerous.
We know the ocean around the Azores is one of the most seismically threatened places in the world. The seismically active Azores Fracture Zone is located about thirty miles southwest of Santa Maria; about fifteen miles east-northeast lies another hot-spot for undersea earthquakes known as the Gloria Fracture Zone. According to a chart compiled by the Acoustics Division of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (1981), a major seaquake has occurred within sixty miles of Santa Maria Island every year since the beginning of man's ability to record such happenings.
We also know that an rather large earthquake was recorded by the seismological station in Zurich, Switzerland at 10:45 Zurich time on 25 November 1872, which would have been 8:45 A.M. in the Azores. The epicenter of the earthquake was listed as in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1,000 miles from Santa Maria. But, in 1872, locating the epicenter of a distant earthquake at sea was little more than guess work. What we know for sure is that a strong earthquake at sea did occur at about the time the Mary Celeste experienced problems. We also know that on 25 October of that year, and 8.1 Magnitude earthquake occurred in the Azores, only ~100 miles from Santa Marie Island. This was one of the largest events of the century--many smaller aftershocks and foreshocks occur weeks before and after such a major earthquake so we also know the timimg was rip for a seaquake.
Based on these facts, it is reasonable to conjure that the seaquake might have occur near the vessel and could have frightened the crew out of their wits, causing them to abandon ship. If the physical evidence noted by the crew of the Dei Gratia on the 5th of December supports a seaquake encounter as the reason for her abandonment, then it is reasonable to assume that this is indeed what caused the greatest sea mystery of all times.
