In early December 1872, a Canadian brigantine named the Dei Gratia was crossing the Atlantic near the Azores when her crew sighted another vessel. She was under sail but steering badly, yawing with no one at the helm.
The ship was the Mary Celeste. The Dei Gratia's captain, David Morehouse, sent a boarding party. What they found is still argued about more than 150 years later.
The two captains knew each other. Morehouse and Benjamin Briggs, master of the Mary Celeste, had dined together in New York in the weeks before both ships sailed. Morehouse had left New York on November 15; Briggs had left on November 7. The discovery happened roughly 400 nautical miles east of the Azores.
The Mary Celeste was not a new ship. She had been built in 1861 at Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia, and launched under the name Amazon, a brigantine of 282 gross tons. She had already changed hands several times and had already survived one serious accident before Briggs took command.
She had left New York bound for Genoa with a cargo of about 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol. Aboard were ten people: Captain Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven crew members.
When the boarding party climbed aboard, all ten were gone. So was the single lifeboat. The ship's papers, the captain's personal belongings, and the crew's tobacco pipes were still there. There was food and fresh water in the hold. The cargo was intact except for nine barrels that had leaked and were empty.
The last log entry was dated November 25. Nothing after that.
Several explanations have been proposed over the decades. Piracy and mutiny are generally dismissed, because nothing of value was taken. Waterspouts, undersea earthquakes, and icebergs have all been suggested. The explanation that has gained the most support among modern researchers involves the cargo itself: industrial alcohol can produce vapor under certain conditions, and a sudden vapor release or a small explosion on deck could have convinced the captain that the ship was about to blow up. That would explain an orderly evacuation into the lifeboat, with everyone expecting to wait nearby until the danger passed. The lifeboat, with ten people in it in open Atlantic weather, would not have survived long.
A detail that supports the vapor theory is the barrels. The nine that leaked were found to have been made of red oak rather than the white oak normally used for alcohol, a substitution that would make them more likely to seep. The theory is not proven, but it accounts for the two facts that most need accounting for: why the crew left in an orderly way, and why they left at all.
What makes the case durable is not the mystery of how they died. It is the evidence of what they were doing in the final moments. They took the lifeboat rather than the ship. They left the log current. They left their pipes.
The wreck was not the end of the ship. She was sailed to Gibraltar, where a vice-admiralty court heard the salvage claim and the attorney general of the colony, Frederick Solly Flood, spent weeks arguing that something criminal had happened aboard. Suspicion fell briefly on the crew of the Dei Gratia, who had both found the ship and stood to profit from saving her. The court eventually awarded salvage, but it reduced the amount sharply, and no charge was ever brought. For years afterwards the case was treated as possibly a murder inquiry rather than a mystery of the sea.
The Mary Celeste then returned to ordinary service under a succession of owners. In 1885 she was deliberately run aground off the coast of Haiti in what was investigated as an insurance fraud. The ship was a total loss. The captain was charged; the case collapsed when the insurer refused to pay, and no one was convicted.
One complication is worth noting. Arthur Conan Doyle published a fictional short story about the Mary Celeste in 1884, which invented details, including a half-eaten meal. It appeared in Cornhill Magazine when Doyle was twenty-three, five years before the first Sherlock Holmes story, and it misspelled the ship's name as "Marie Celeste." That misspelling is still widely repeated today, which is a fair measure of how thoroughly the fiction has displaced the record. The half-eaten meal, the still-warm tea, the abandoned pipe: none of it is in any primary document.
So the honest state of the case is this: a ship found afloat with everything in place, ten people gone in a boat no one ever found, and a set of behaviors that make sense only if the crew believed something the evidence on board does not show.