The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste E-Book

Graham Faiella

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

4 December 1872: The brigantine Dei Gratia chances upon another brigantine out on the Atlantic near the Azores. She is the Mary Celeste. She is under sail. But she is deserted. Silent as a drowned cadaver. For 150 years since then, the mystery of why the Mary Celeste was abandoned, and what happened to the ten souls on board, has spawned thousands of conjectures, conspiracy theories, fictions and fantasies. Some have thought they solved the mystery. Some have just spun yarns. One, at least, has claimed it was all a hoax. The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste: 150 Years of Myth and Mystique unveils those stories – the 'fake news', 'alternative facts' and the myths fabricated from fractured truths. These are the real facts in search of a truth that remains unfathomable to this day.

Leseprobe

The mystery of the Mary Celeste. (Shipping Wonders of the World, 19 January 1937)

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Graham Faiella, 2022

The right of Graham Faiella to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9815 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

PART I: THE MYSTERY

Origins of the Mary Celeste

The 1872 Mystery Voyage

Gibraltar Court of Inquiry

Last Years of the Mary Celeste

PART II: THE MYTH

Yarns, Tall Tales and ‘Fake News’

‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, Anonymous (Arthur Conan Doyle)

Jacob Hammell’s Story

‘The Case of the Marie Celeste: An Ocean Mystery’ by J.L. Hornibrook

‘Mystery of the Mary Celeste’ by John Ball Osborne

Abel Fosdyk’s Story

R.E. Greenhough’s ‘Message-in-a-Bottle’ Story

Captain Lukhmanoff’s Story

Captain Lucy’s Story

John Pemberton’s Story

PART III: THE MYSTIQUE

‘Solutions’

From ‘Mary Sellars’ to ‘Marie Celeste’ to Mary Celeste

Filling the Vacuum of Truth

Capt. T.E. Elwell: ‘A Chronometer Clue’

The Burning Ship Theory

The Mystic’s Version – or Vision – or … Something

The Brains Trustee ‘Solves’ the Mystery

A Sandbank-Stranded Solution

Dr Oliver Cobb and Charles Edey Fay

The Books: A Select Review

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

In truth, there was nothing unusual about the discovery of an abandoned sailing ship, adrift in the North Atlantic, in the nineteenth century. Hundreds of derelicts were recorded every year. Some drifted around for months, even years. Eventually, though, they simply broke up from the abuse of their watery wandering, or ended up wrecked.

But some were not left derelict. Some, when found, were taken by the finders for the prize of a potentially lucrative payday as salvage.

In December 1872 the discovery of one of these oceanic waifs was most unusual. The derelict was still under sail, which was odd enough. She seemed to be shipshape; somewhat shabby and sailing erratically, but otherwise in pretty good order. There was no one on board, which, still, was not odd: she was a derelict!

What was strange was that, as the finders who boarded her soon realised, there seemed to be no earthly reason why the crew had abandoned her.

A handful of men from the vessel that found the derelict halfway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal put her rigging in order, pumped the water out of her and sailed her to Gibraltar. Their own ship had arrived at Gibraltar the day before and put in a claim for salvage of the derelict when she arrived. The inquiry into the claim, to determine the salvage reward, was heard by a Vice-Admiralty Court over three months. It included the testimony of eyewitnesses who had found the derelict about the condition of the vessel when they boarded her, and others with interests in her. Eventually a salvage award was made to the finders.

The derelict had since been made seaworthy and shipshape, and had taken on a new crew. She carried her cargo to her original destination of Genoa, on the Ligurian coast of Italy. She sailed on for another dozen or so years, under different owners. Early in 1885 she was wrecked, suspiciously, on a reef off Haiti.

That ship was the Mary Celeste.

The reason why the ten people on board deserted her, and what happened to them, has become one of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea. From that enigmatic act of desperation 150 years ago there has sprouted a prolific (some might say profligate) garden (some might say veritable prairie) of myth and mystique.

A ghost ship, some have said. But the real ghost of the Mary Celeste is the truth about why she was abandoned. Relatively watertight, seaworthy solutions to that mystery have been floated by creative and fanciful and sometimes logical speculation over the decades, but have never anchored in a fair haven of certainty.

In truth, it has been a search for the truth. And that – the pursuit, and, as often, dereliction and perversion of truth – is the real story of the Mary Celeste.

Acknowledgements

I’m most grateful to Commissioning Editor Amy Rigg at The History Press for inviting me to write this book. From it, to my surprise, have emerged insights into the nature, manipulation and infectious corrosion of truth, as much as my investigation reveals the story, mythology and mystique of the great mystery of the Mary Celeste from 150 years ago.

Origins of the Mary Celeste

The Mary Celeste wasn’t always the Mary Celeste. More or less the same ship, yes, but she had a different identity from when she was born, so to speak, by the time she set sail on her mystery voyage of 1872.

So: to begin at the birthing.

Up at the northern end of the Bay of Fundy, the waterway that splits the island province of Nova Scotia to the east from mainland Canada to the west, there was, in the mid-nineteenth century, a small settlement called Spencer’s Island. The Glasgow-born Scots-Canadian journalist, historian, photographer and author Frederick William Wallace (1886–1958) described the place in his biography of square-rigged merchant ships in what was then British Canada, In the Wake of the Wind-Ships (1927):

Spencer’s Island and its Ships

At the head of the Bay of Fundy, and where Cape Spencer and Cape Split stand on opposite shores as portals to the Basin of Minas, one will find the small settlement of Spencer’s Island a short distance to the northward of the cape of the same name. The place is named after a little island which lies about a quarter of a mile off the mainland of Cumberland County, Nova Scotia.

Spencer’s Island is so small a place that it will only be found upon a topographical map of the county, but in shipping annals it is remarkable for the smart shipmasters it sent forth and for the particularly fine class of sailing ships built there. In numbers there were not many, but practically all the Spencer’s Island craft were noted for their fast passages. All were registered at Parrsboro, N.S. [about 25 miles/40km away to the east] …

The first vessel to be built at Spencer’s Island was the brigantine Amazon, 198 tons, which was launched in May 1861 by Joshua Dewis.

Dewis was born near Spencer’s Island. As a shipbuilder ‘in his early manhood’, he conceived the idea of setting up a shipbuilding business when he moved nearer Spencer’s Island sometime in the late 1850s. There, with like-minded neighbours, he built a modest little vessel named the Amazon. She was launched in May 1861 and duly registered at nearby Parrsboro. Amazon was the first ship to be built at Spencer’s Island (and the only one by Joshua Dewis), and she was the first incarnation of the Mary Celeste.

Amazon was a handspan over 99ft long, from her stem to her stern; her width, 25ft, and her depth, 11½ft. Her gross registered tonnage was 198.42.

And she was rigged as a brigantine.

The brigantine Amazon at Marseilles, November 1861, by unknown artist.

Nauticalia

It’s necessary here to say a word or two about ships’ measurements and other nautical esoterica relating to ships’ rigging. In a number of respects, a basic familiarity about this will be helpful in understanding certain particulars that crop up in the myth and mystery of our Mary Celeste.

TONNAGE

The term ‘tonnage’, as most generally applied to a ship, is not a measure of weight. It is a volume measure of the internal space of a vessel, in cubic feet, divided by 100. One ton register is 100 cubic feet (f3). So a ship of 198.42 registered tons, as Amazon was, is not equivalent to the weight of forty elephants but more like the volume of forty buses.

Gross register tonnage is the total volume of enclosed space within a ship, including her cargo holds, cabins and rooms to accommodate crew and passengers, the engine room (if any), deck-house and so on, as determined by an official survey. Deducting all the space in a ship that costs, rather than earns money (the latter being the hold or holds in which she carries her freight of cargo; the former being everything else), what is left is the space of her cargo-carrying capacity: her net registered tonnage.

The comparison of ships by size is usually in terms of gross registered tons (or GRT), as well as by their length from stem to stern (which excludes the length of a bowsprit, the pole pointing out from the stem of a sailing ship or boat, with sails attached to it), their width (or beam) at their widest point, and their depth (which is most simplistically from the bottom of the ship’s hull to her main deck).

RIGGING AND SHIP TYPES

One of the niggling little tics that has infested the shaggy dog stories about the Mary Celeste has been whether she was a brig, or a half-brig, or a small brig, or a hermaphrodite brig – or a brigantine. Amazon right from the start was rigged and officially registered as a brigantine. As Mary Celeste, she was also a brigantine. But even to some people who were otherwise knowledgeable about maritime matters, and to many others who wouldn’t have known a fid from a fiddle, she was a kind of brig – small, half or hermaphrodite – or a brigantine, depending on where they got the name from.

Brigantine rigs. (Harold Underhill, Sailing Ship Rigs and Rigging, Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1938)

Brigantine sails. (Harold Underhill, Sailing Ship Rigs and Rigging, Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1938)

A brig, in effect, was colloquial shorthand for any small, 200–300-ton or so vessel with two masts, one or both of which was square-rigged. The truth about brigs and brigantines in those days isn’t that they were as different as cats and dogs, but that they were more like cocker and springer spaniels. Technically, though, and correctly, Amazon/Mary Celeste was a brigantine.

In a simplified characterisation:

A brig is a sailing vessel with two masts – the foremast towards the bow, the mainmast behind it – both of which are rigged with square sails (square-rigged).

A brigantine also has two masts but is square-rigged only on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the mainmast. It was sometimes, away in the past, called a hermaphrodite brig because it was both square- and fore-and-aft rigged, and similarly a schooner brig, because it was fore-and-aft rigged on its mainmast, like a schooner.

Hermaphrodite brig, or brigantine. (E. Keble Chatterton, Sailing Ships and Their Story, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1909)

‘A. Ansted’, the author of the estimably comprehensive A Dictionary of Sea Terms (1920), defined ‘fore-and-aft’ as: ‘in the direction of a line drawn from stem to stern of a vessel; that is, from the forward or fore to the after or aft part’; and explained that: ‘Such sails as yachts and sailing boats carry are fore-and-aft sails; and such as are set in a direction across the ship are called square sails, constituting the square rig of most merchant [sailing vessels].’

(Ansted also included in his dictionary a term he defined with particular wit and, one suspects, first-hand experience: ‘Sea sickness.– A malady which, though originating at sea, receives but scant sympathy thereon.’)

The gaff mainsail on a brigantine is the big four-sided fore-and-aft mainsail on the mainmast. Along its upper edge the sail is attached to the gaff, a pole extending from the mast-side corner of the sail to its uppermost outer end, the peak. Sailors on deck hoist the gaff, and sail, by ropes, the halyards. The halyards that raise the outermost peak end of the gaff, usually attached at two points along it, are the peak halyards, an important detail in one of the proposed ‘solutions’ to the mystery of how, if not why, the Mary Celeste might have been abandoned.

Amazon had a single topsail on her foremast, the topsail being the second square sail up from the big square sail (or course) at the lowest level of a ship’s mast. Single topsails were very big, and a devil to handle in a rip-snorter of a storm on a bucking-bronco sea with their steel-hard canvas stretched taut by the wind. They were nail-rippingly treacherous for sailors to furl up on the yardarm on a dark and stormy night (or any time, come to that).

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the single topsail was most commonly divided into two smaller and therefore more manageable lower and upper topsails, to ease the plight of sailors for whom, never mind ‘one hand for the ship, one for yourself!’, it was ‘both hands for the ship and hold on the best you can with your legs!’ in order to control the bigger single topsail of earlier times.

Amazon was a single-topsail ship. That rig was later changed to smaller double topsails when she became the Mary Celeste, a minor but salient detail of the condition of her when she was found abandoned.

The brigantine-rigged Amazon was owned in shares of 64ths, as was the Nova Scotian custom of the day. Her builder, Dewis, was the biggest shareholder with a 16/64ths stake. Eight others – local farmers, mariners and merchants – each had between 4 and 8/64ths interests.

Amazon was a trim and well-built ship, not particularly speedy in the manner of the big clipper ships but of good, sturdy Nova Scotian shipbuilding pedigree. She was a utility vessel, a work-horse hauling her freights of cargo around the Canadian Maritime provinces, along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, through the West Indies and Gulf of Mexico, and back and forth across the Atlantic.

A painting of her at Marseilles by an unknown artist in November 1861 was done when she came into the French Mediterranean port at that time, the same year she was launched. The picture clearly shows the big single topsail on her foremast later divided into two smaller topsails on the Mary Celeste.

On 9 November 1867, on a voyage out of Halifax, Amazon was driven ashore in a gale at a place called Cow Bay (now Port Morien) on Cape Breton Island, a notoriously hazardous region for ships at the northern end of Nova Scotia. There followed a series of ownership changes, starting with a Cape Breton ‘gentleman’, Alexander McBean, who was by then the sole owner of all the shares in the salvaged ship.

Eventually Amazon was sold to a succession of New Yorkers. By the end of 1868 her sole owner then, Richard Haines, an American, had been granted a change of nationality for the ship from British to American under a new identity as the Mary Celeste. There seemed to have been, allegedly, a bit of jiggery-pokery about how the Mary Celeste obtained her American registry. Nevertheless, and by whatever means, by 1869 she had evolved from the Nova Scotian-born British-flagged brigantine Amazon of Parrsboro to her newly acquired nationality, flying the Stars and Stripes as the American brigantine Mary Celeste of New York.

A year later, in January 1870, after another series of ownership changes, shares in the Mary Celeste were divided between four men. Capt. James H. Winchester, a New York shipmaster who had a few years earlier retired from the sea to set up as a ship broker, agent and owner, owned a 4/8ths stake in her. Capt. Winchester and his shipping company, J.H. Winchester & Co., of New York, would play a prominent role in and after the Mary Celeste’s mystery voyage of 1872.

By the end of October 1872, a few weeks before the start of that voyage, Capt. Winchester still owned the one-half share of the Mary Celeste. Amongst the other three part-owners was Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, with a one-third holding of 8/24ths that Capt. Winchester had sold to him on the condition that Briggs take command of the Mary Celeste.

Capt. Winchester had by then known Capt. Briggs for some time, as master of some of his ships. J.H. Winchester & Co. was agent for Benjamin’s brother Oliver’s own ship, the brig Julia A. Hallock. He knew the quality of the man he now enjoined to take his brigantine and her cargo from New York to Genoa as an experienced, honest and peer-respected sea captain of twenty years’ standing. His Mary Celeste, he surely reckoned, would be in a safe pair of well-seasoned hands.

Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs

Yankee shipmasters from New England weren’t always a model of decorum and rectitude in the way they ran their ships and crews. Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, by all accounts, was. He came from a family brined in the seafaring tradition: four of his father Capt. Nathan Briggs’ five sons, including Benjamin, went to sea, ‘and two … became master mariners at an early stage’.

Capt. Nathan Briggs was spartan in his ship management: a disciplinarian, but fair. His teetotal principle of ‘No grog will be allowed on board’ from his earliest years as a sea captain was written into the articles of contract for all the crews he signed on his ships. His son, Capt. Benjamin Briggs, continued the practice on ships he later commanded.

Nathan was born in 1799 and had gone to sea early, as was the custom in those times. He commanded his first ship, the schooner Betsy & Jane, at the age of 21. He married his first wife, Maria Cobb, in 1827. She died just over a year later in 1828.

Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, master of the Mary Celeste, 1872.

Two years later Capt. Nathan married Maria’s sister, his sister-in-law, Sophia Matilda Cobb (born 28 October 1803 at Rochester, near Wareham on the Massachusetts coast). They had six offspring: Maria, the first, in 1831; then Nathan, Benjamin, Oliver, James and the youngest, Zenas. James was the only son not to go to sea as a profession, becoming a businessman in nearby New Bedford. Even first-born Maria was wedded to the sea, by marriage.

Benjamin Spooner Briggs was born at Wareham, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay across from and just south of Cape Cod, on 24 April 1835. His mother, Sophia Cobb, was the daughter of a Congregational church minister, the Rev. Oliver Cobb. After her husband Capt. Nathan suffered ‘severe financial reverses’ towards the end of the 1830s, from a failed investment in Wareham, Sophia and three of her children, including young Benjamin, then about 4 years old, were obliged to move into Rev. Cobb’s parsonage home at Marion, nearby along the coast.

By 1844 Capt. Nathan had redeemed his finances sufficiently to allow himself and his family to move into a new home, ‘Rose Cottage’, at Sippican Village, a mile or so away from the parsonage at Marion.

Young Benjamin’s upbringing there was within a Christian and disciplined family, ‘redolent of the sea’, and strongly influenced by mother Sophia, ‘a woman of strong character whose Christian faith enabled her to withstand, with grace and fortitude, the successive shocks caused by the loss at sea of two sons and a daughter by shipwreck; two sons by yellow fever while at sea and by the death of her husband, Captain Nathan, struck by lightning as he stood in the doorway of their home’.1

The two sons who died at sea of yellow fever were: Benjamin’s older brother Nathan H. Briggs, mate on a ship that sailed out of Galveston, Texas, in 1855, when he died three days out and was buried at sea; and the youngest Briggs boy, Zenas, who was mate on his older brother Oliver’s ship, the brig Julia A. Hallock, and died as the Hallock was coming into port in North Carolina, in October 1870. This was not long after patriarch Capt. Nathan himself was struck and killed by lightning, on 28 June 1870, standing in his ‘Rose Cottage’ doorway.

The only daughter of Sophia and Capt. Nathan was Maria. In 1856, aged 25, she married a family friend, Joseph Gibbs, yet another seafarer amongst the extended Briggs clan. Maria often sailed with husband Capt. Joseph. Both were drowned after their ship collided with a steamer off North Carolina in November 1859.

On 9 September 1862, Benjamin married his cousin, Sarah Elizabeth Cobb. Sarah was the daughter of her mother Sophia’s brother, the Rev. Leander Cobb who performed the marriage ceremony in his Congregational church at Marion. Sarah was 20 years old; Benjamin was 27. Their first-born, in 1865, was named Arthur, ostensibly after the ship Capt. Benjamin then commanded. Their only other child, Sophia Matilda, named after her grandmother, was born on 31 October 1870. When Capt. Briggs took command of the Mary Celeste two years later, he and Sarah agreed that Arthur, then aged 7, would stay at home at ‘Rose Cottage’ to get on with his schooling. Two-year-old Sophia would accompany them on the Genoa voyage.

Capt. Benjamin Briggs was already a seasoned sea captain by the time he married Sarah in 1862. They honeymooned in Europe on board the schooner he then commanded, the Forest King. She later accompanied her husband on ships he commanded, as she would when he captained the Mary Celeste for the first and only time in 1872.

The 1872 Mystery Voyage

In the months just before that fateful voyage, as she lay at New York, the Mary Celeste was modified in certain respects. The main changes were that she now had two decks, having previously had just the one. Her length was increased from 99ft to 103ft, her width, slightly greater than her original 25ft, and her depth from 11.7ft to just over 16ft. Her tonnage increased from just under 200 to just over 282, by the enlargement of her cargo hold and cabins for the crew and Capt. Briggs and his wife and daughter.

Her bottom was sheathed in copper, a common remedy in those days to protect a wooden ship’s hull from the dreaded teredo worm that bore into the wood like termites and compromised a ship’s seaworthiness.

And what had been Amazon’s single topsail was changed to two, a lower and upper topsail, on her Mary Celeste foremast.

After Capt. Briggs left home at Marion, he arrived in New York on 19 October 1872 to oversee the preparations and loading of the vessel he would soon be commanding on her transatlantic voyage to Genoa. By 2 November, the Mary Celeste had loaded a cargo of 1,701 casks of alcohol. This was a type of denatured industrial-grade alcohol, used for the fortification of certain wines. It was certainly not drinkable on its own as sailors’ grog, even if the crew had been hard-bitten or foolish enough to try. And the Mary Celeste’s crew were neither. The cargo only filled about half the expanded hold space of the vessel.

The alcohol cargo was owned by a German trading firm in New York, Meissner, Ackerman & Co., for delivery to the Genoa firm of H. Mascarenhas & Co. ‘The value of the cargo, said to have been insured abroad, was reported as £6,522-3-0 [$37,000].’2

The voyage was undertaken by the Mary Celeste’s agent and majority owner, J.H. Winchester & Co. The insurance on the ship’s hull, split amongst four companies, totalled $14,000. The freight, or charter value of the voyage – the amount J.H. Winchester would earn from the transport of the consignment of alcohol to Genoa – was $3,400. That value was insured against the risk of non-delivery with the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company. These are all details that would be central to the salvage claim hearings at Gibraltar, to determine the monetary reward for salvaging the abandoned Mary Celeste.

The Crew

Apart from 37-year-old Capt. Briggs, the crew of the Mary Celeste on her Genoa voyage comprised seven men: a first and second mate, a cook-cum-steward, and four ordinary seamen.

First mate Albert G. Richardson, aged 28, was from Stockton Springs, Maine. He was related by marriage to Capt. Winchester as the husband of his wife’s niece. Winchester characterised him as ‘a man of excellent character’. He had also previously sailed under Capt. Briggs and in Capt. Winchester’s ships for about two years before he signed on the Mary Celeste. Capt. Briggs noted to his wife that, with mate Richardson, they would be in ‘good hands’. He was, in short, a seaman held in high regard. His wife, Frances (Fannie), lived to a sprightly 91 years before her death in Brooklyn, New York, on 29 April 1937.

Second mate was a 25-year-old New Yorker, Andrew Gilling, about whom not much else is known. It is possible, from later correspondence by his mother in Denmark, ‘regarding news of his fate’, that he had a Danish background.

The steward-cum-cook was Edward William Head, a native New Yorker from Brooklyn, aged 23 and only recently married to his wife, Emma. The rest of the crew, the ordinary seamen, were Prussian-German: Volkert Lorenzen, 29; his brother Boz, 25; Arian Martens, 35; and Gottlieb Goodschaad (or Goodschaal), 23.

Sarah Briggs wrote a letter to her mother-in-law, Sophia, from on board the Mary Celeste, dated 7 November. It was shortly after the start of the voyage (and the last communication ever from the ship) as they were anchored off Staten Island, waiting for favourable weather to proceed. She noted that her husband ‘thinks we have got a pretty peaceable set [crew] this time all around if they continue as they have begun. Can’t tell yet how smart they are.’ However smart they might have been, they certainly weren’t the ruffians, possibly homicidal, that they were later characterised as by some myth-spinners.

The Mary Celeste was indeed crewed by a good ‘set’. As author Charles Edey Fay has remarked: ‘it seems reasonable to assume that Captain Briggs, experienced mariner that he was, would exercise more than ordinary care in the selection of a crew for a voyage on which his wife and two-year-old daughter were to accompany him’.