What happened
The brigantine “Mary Celeste” sailed from New York for Genoa on November 7, 1872, with a cargo of more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol. There were ten people on board: Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and seven crew members. On December 4, between the Azores and the coast of Portugal, the crew of the British ship “Dei Gratia” came upon her drifting under partially set sails. There was no one on board, the lifeboat was missing, and the last log entry was dated November 25. Food and water supplies were untouched, and personal belongings remained in place. The salvage hearing in Gibraltar even considered foul play, but nothing was proven. None of the ten people were ever found.
Witnesses
The crew of the “Dei Gratia,” who found the brigantine and brought her to Gibraltar; the case was examined by a British admiralty court.
Explanations and hypotheses
The most common assumption is that the captain ordered a hasty abandonment of the ship – out of fear of an explosion of alcohol fumes from leaking barrels, because of a mistaken sounding of the water in the hold, or because of a pump failure – and that the lifeboat was lost at sea. Hypotheses of mutiny, pirates, or a conspiracy with the crew of the “Dei Gratia” have not been confirmed. The legend was embellished by Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fictional 1884 story many readers took for a true account.
Unexplained There is no convincing explanation.
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