Baby Sophia was gone, committed to the sea with Sarah soon after.
Harbens, Gilling, and Richardson were gone as well. Goodschaad had died quietly in the night and lay in the bottom of the boat, while Head had died of a heart attack but three days adrift. A broken heart, Briggs had thought to himself as soon as he realized he would never again see his bride.
“Help me with Goodschaad,” Briggs said near 10 A.M. when some strength returned.
Boz and Volkert helped him over the side.
Briggs stared at the Germans — it gave him an idea of his own condition. The skin on both men’s faces was peeling off in sheets. Their cracked and dried lips were as plump as sausages. Dried blood was below Volkert’s nose, while greenish pus was visible at the comer of Boz’s eyes.
The French explorer La Salle’s L’Aimable
(Arist: Richard DeRosset)
Magnetic anomalies investigated by Ralph Wilbanks in the search for L’Aimable
(Ralph Wilbanks)
The New Orleans, the first steamboat on the Mississippi River (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
Full-size replicas of the Twin Sisters at the San Jacinto Monument on the 150th anniversary of the battle (University of Houston College of Technology, and Gary C. Touchton)
The first ironclad built in the United States, the C.S.S. Manassas (Artist: Daniel Dowdey)
The Battle of Charleston. The Keokuk upper left, the Patupsco right, and the Weehawken center (Clive Cussler)
The sinking of the Keokuk after she was struck by ninety-two Confederate shells (Clive Cussler)
Photograph of the U.S.S. Mississippi taken the day before she burned and sank (Louisiana State University Library Special Collection)
Painting of the Mississippi burning (Artist: Tom Freeman)
The Mary Celeste, the ghost ship whose crew vanished (Cumberland County Museum and Archives)
Rochelais Reef, now known as Conch Island. The remains of the Maf_v Celeste lie just off the white boat in the center. (ECO-NOVA Productions)
The ECO-NOVA and NUMA team in Haiti after finding the Mary Celeste. Left to right: Robert Guertin. John Davis, Lawrence Taylor, Jean Claude Dicquemare. Allan Gardner, Clive Cussler, Mike Fletchec (ECO-NOVA Productions)
The General Slocum turning into the East River just before the fire (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
The burned hulk of the General Slocum after the tragedy (Mariners Museum)
Magnetic signature of the General Slocum (Ralph Wilbanks)
The steamer Waratah, which vanished without a trace (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
The cargo ship Nailsea Meadow, sunk by a German U-boat off the east coast of South Africa (Emlyn Brown)
Carpathia on her heroic dash through the icebergs to rescue Titanic survivors (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
Carpathia picking up Titanic survivors, with California in the background (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
Sonar reading of the wreck of the Carpathia (ECO-NOVA Productions)
Charles Nungesser and François Coli before their attempt to fly from Paris to New York (Archires of William L. Nungesser)
L’Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird) just before takeoff from Paris, May 1927 (Archives of William L. Nungesser)
The NUMA team in Maine during the search for L’Oiseau Blanc. Left to right: Clive Cussler, Connie Young, Craig Dirgo, Ralph Wilbanks, Dirk Cussler (Cline Cussler)
The U.S. Navy dirigible Akron flying into the storm that destroyed her (Artist: Richard DeRosset)
The only known view of PT-109, as it was loaded on board the S.S. Joseph Stanton bound for the South Pacific, August 20, 1942 (Naval Historical Foundation)
The PT-109 search crew in the Solomons. Left to right: Dirk Cussler, Danny Kennedy, Biuku Gasa (one of the men who rescued John F. Kennedy and his crew), Craig Dirgo (Dirk Cussler)
Ralph Wilbanks, Jayne Hitchcock, and Sean McLean searching for Morey’s boat (Jayne Hitchcock)
The NUMA team that discovered the C.S.S. Hunley, during the submarine’s raising and removal to the Warren Lasch Preservation Center. Left to right: Harry Pecorelli III, Wes Hall, Clive Cussler, Ralph Wilbanks (Carole Bortholomeaux)
“Kill me,” he said to the brothers quietly.
Boz looked at his brother and nodded. They were trained not to question orders from their captain. Volkert took one stiff wooden paddle, his brother another. Then, with what little strength they had left, they complied.
Two hours passed before enough strength returned to put Briggs over the side.
They died within minutes of each other the following morning.
* * *
December 4, 1872, was a sunny day. Captain Moorhouse was at the wheel of Dei Gratia. The British brigantine had passed far north of the Azores out of sight of the islands and was now tacking southeast by south oh a course to drop down into the Gibraltar Straits. Moorhouse had just taken his position, recording it as 38 degrees 20 minutes north by 17 degrees 15 minutes west, when he spotted another ship approaching six miles distant off the port bow. The time was 1:52 P.M.
“Hand me the spyglass,” Moorhouse said to Second Officer Wright.
Wright reached into a drawer and handed Moorhouse the telescoping spyglass.
With a flick of the wrist, Moorhouse opened the telescope and stared at the vessel. The main sails were furled, and no one was visible on deck. Strange, but not overly so.
“She seems to be laden, but just plodding along,” Moorhouse noted.
“Our course will converge with her shortly,” Wright noted. “Should I signal her and find out the sea conditions?”
“All right,” Moorhouse said easily.
But the first and all subsequent signals went unanswered.
A few hundred yards ahead, the ghost ship continued west at a speed of one and a half to two knots. Moorhouse had yet to see anyone come on deck, and he was beginning to worry that the entire crew of the vessel had taken ill.
He stared at the vessel through the spyglass, then made a decision.
“Down with the mainsails,” he shouted to Seamen Anderson and Johnson.
Dei Gratia slowed until she was barely bobbing on the water.
“What should we do?” Deveau, who had now come on deck, asked.
“Ready the boat,” Moorhouse ordered. “I want you and Wright to board. Take Johnson with you to man the boat.”
“Ahoy,” he shouted over a megaphone to Mary Celeste.
There was no answer.
Once in the shore boat with Johnson at the oars, the trio of men watched the hull of the ship as they rowed closer. Not a single sailor was on deck; not a single sound could be heard save the slap of water against the hull. The men felt an eerie gloom, a sense of foreboding. They read the name on the stem as they approached: Mary Celeste.
“Stay here,” Deveau said to Johnson, as the shore boat came alongside. “Mr. Wright and I will investigate.”
Tossing a hooked ladder over the gunwale, Deveau and Wright climbed aboard.
“Ahoy,” Deveau shouted once he was on the main deck.
No answer.
He and Wright walked forward. The main and lazeret hatches were lying on deck, the forward one upside down — a bad sign. Sailors are superstitious, and an upside-down hatch spelled trouble. The main staysail lay across the forward hatch across the chimney for the galley cookstove. No sailor in his right mind would allow that. The jib and the fore topmast staysail were set on a starboard tack, while the foresail and upper foretopsail had been blown away. The lower foretopsail was hanging by threads at four comers. No shore boat was visible on deck.
“Let’s go below,” Deveau said.
Climbing down the ladder, Deveau reached the lower deck. He began to open the cabin doors but found not a single soul. He and Wright searched through the cabins. In the captain’s cabin, Deveau noted that the chronometer, sextant, ship’s register, and navigation book were missing. In the mate’s cabin, Wright found the logbook and log slate. In the galley, where both men converged, there was no
prepared food nor was there any food or drink on the crew’s table.
“I’ll check the stores,” Wright said.
“I’m going to check the hold,” Deveau said.
Wright found a six-month supply of food and water; Deveau a strong odor of alcohol and almost four feet of water in the hold. He began to pump the hold dry, and that was where Wright found him a few moments later.
“No one aboard,” Deveau said, “but no major problems, save this water.”
“I don’t know if you noticed it earlier when we were on deck,” Wright said, “but the binnacle was knocked loose and the compass destroyed.”
“That is most odd,” Deveau agreed. “Let’s pump out the hold, then report back to Mr. Moorhouse.”
After lowering the remaining sails and tossing out the sea anchor, they did.
“Sir,” Deveau reported, “she’s a ghost ship.”
He and Wright had just explained what they had found, and now Moorhouse was puffing on his pipe and thinking. Less than a hundred yards away, Mary Celeste, the ship without a crew, sat awaiting a decision.
“My first duty is to my ship and cargo,” Moorhouse said slowly.
“I understand,” Deveau said, “and the choice is yours. However, if you give me two seamen and some food, I think we can make Gibraltar and claim salvage rights.”
“Do you have your own navigation tools?”
Deveau had been a commanding captain in the past.
“Yes, sir,” Deveau said. “If you could spare a barometer, watch, another compass, and some food, I think we can make port.”
Sparing three men from Dei Gratia would leave Moorhouse seriously shorthanded.
“Let’s try it,” Moorhouse said at last, “but if we run into trouble we cast Mary Celeste adrift, transfer your men back, and report the loss upon reaching port.”
“Thank you, sir,” Deveau said.
“Take Lund and Anderson,” Moorhouse said. “We’ll wait here until you have the ship seaworthy.”
At 8:26 that evening, the hold was pumped and the spare sails set in place. They set off for the six-hundred-mile journey to Gibraltar just as the moon rose over the horizon. A fool’s moon lit the ghostly journey.
The weather stayed fair until the Straits of Gibraltar. Then, for the first time since taking command of Mary Celeste, Deveau lost sight of Dei Gratia in the rough seas. On Friday the thirteenth, nine days since the ghost ship had first been spotted, Deveau entered the port of Gibraltar. Dei Gratia was already there.
* * *
“Here’s your change,” the telegraph clerk said to Captain Moorhouse.
On Saturday the fourteenth of December, the disaster clerk at the New York offices of Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company received the following cablegram from Gibraltar:
FOUND FOURTH AND BROUGHT HERE “MARY CELESTE.”
ABANDONED SEAWORTHY.
ADMIRALTY IMPOST.
NOTIFY ALL PARTIES TELEGRAPH OFFER OF SALVAGE.
MOORHOUSE.
The cable was the first notice in the United States that something had gone terribly wrong on Mary Celeste.
Of its crew and passengers, nothing would ever be found. The Mary Celeste itself would be put back into service, but a little over twelve years later, on January 3, 1885, the ship would be wrecked on the Reefs of the Rochelais near Miragoane, Haiti.
And while the ship was gone, the legend continued to grow.
II
Paradise Gone 2001
The tale of the Mary Celeste makes the hair rise on the nape of the neck. She is enshrined as the most famous ghost ship in the history of the sea. There are other accounts of ships being found abandoned, their crews having vanished, but none has the fascination and the intrigue that fire the imagination like Mary Celeste. She still wears the crown of haunted ships.
I was drawn into her web at least twenty years ago when I asked Bob Fleming, NUMA’s researcher in Washington, D.C., to probe the archives for her ultimate end. Had she sunk during a storm while on a voyage, or had she simply outlived her usefulness and ended up a derelict in the mudflats of some port’s backwater, along with so many of her sister ships? Only a few records, and fewer yet of more than a hundred books written since her tragedy, held the answer.
Mary Celeste was sailed for another twelve years and two months after being abandoned in the Azores in 1872. During this time, she went through a number of different owners. She set sail on her final passage from New York to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December of 1884, under the command of Captain Gilman Parker of Wmthrop, Massachusetts. On January 3, 1885, she was sailing on a southeasterly course through a narrow channel between the Haitian southern peninsula and Gonâve Island. The sky was empty of clouds, and the seas no higher than a man’s knee.
Rising ominously in the middle of the channel was Rochelais Reef, a small rocky mountain rising from the seafloor, its peak capped with thick coral. The reef was plainly marked on the chart and sharply visible to the helmsman. He set a new course around the reef and was beginning to turn the spokes of the wheel when Captain Parker gripped him roughly by the arm.
“Belay that! Stay on course.”
“But, sir, we’ll run onto the reef for sure,” protested the helmsman.
“Damn you!” Parker snapped. “Do as you’re ordered.”
Knowing the ship was headed for certain disaster, the helmsman, out of fear of punishment, steered for the reef dead ahead. At high tide, the menacing Rochelais Reef barely rose above the surface of the water, as the once-beautiful ship came closer to what would be her grave. The helmsman gave the captain one last desperate look, but Parker remained resolute and nodded straight ahead where the waves were rolling over the reef.
Mary Celeste struck dead center of Rochelais Reef. Her keel and hull planking cut a gouge through the coral, but the sharp spines cut through her copper-sheathed bottom and ripped into her bowels, sending tons of water inside her lower decks. Her bow drove up onto the reef as her stern settled beneath the water. In her death throes, Mary Celeste groaned horribly, as her hull and timbers were crushed by her momentum into the unyielding coral. At last, the agonized sounds died across the water and the ship became silent.
Calmly, Captain Parker sent his crew into the boats and ordered them to row to the nearby port of Miragoane, Haiti, not more than twelve miles to the south. Unfortunately for Captain Parker, Mary Celeste did not immediately sink. It would not be long before an inspection of the wrecked hulk and its cargo revealed that it carried little more than fish and rubber shoes, which were not the expensive cargo listed in the manifest. The vessel, as it turned out, was exorbitantly insured to the tune of $25,000, far above the value of the ship and its cargo. Today, we call it an insurance scam. Back then, it was referred to as barratry, and was an offense punishable under U.S. law and carried the death penalty.
It seemed that Parker’s bad luck had no end. Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, happened to be in Haiti at the time and was hired by the insurance underwriters to conduct an examination. His examination of the waterlogged cargo was instrumental in Parker’s arrest when he returned to New York. Parker was tried in court, but the jury hung, and another trial was immediately ordered by the court. True to form, Parker died before a new trial could be held.
Mary Celeste soon disappeared into the coral that grew over her timbers and buried her decks. Despite her previous notoriety, she died neglected and forgotten, her drama played out on a barren reef in Haiti, perhaps in revenge by the ghosts of her vanished crew.
* * *
Armed with enough research data to give it a good shot, I began making plans to charter a boat and sail to Rochelais Reef. I contacted Mr. Mark Sheldon, who had purchased my favorite old search boat, Arvor III. This was the vessel I had sailed on when searching for the Bonhomme Richard in 1980. I chartered her again in 1984, when my team and I encountered all sorts of wild adventures in the North Sea, finding sixteen shipwrecks while losing a war of words with the French navy in Cherbourg, Fra
nce, who refused to allow us to search for the Confederate raider Alabama.
I had planned to meet the boat in Kingston, Jamaica, and then run across the Jamaica Channel and around Cape Dame Marie to Rochelais Reef, about a two-day trip. Unfortunately, Sheldon became ill and was not available for charter until the following year.
John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions then stepped in and offered to set up an expedition to conduct the search. Since John and his team are from Nova Scotia and Mary Celeste was built in Nova Scotia, they had a strong incentive to find the wreck. They were also enthusiastic about making a Sea Hunters documentary about the ship.
In April of 2001, John set up the logistics, chartered a boat, and sent me round-trip airline tickets to Haiti. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the evening and was mildly surprised to see no one there to meet me. I hailed a shuttle van and headed for the Sheraton Hotel, then walked alone into the lobby, to the surprise of Davis. He had sent a friend to meet me, who had somehow missed picking me out of the deplaning crowd.
With a face like mine, I wondered how I could be lost in the crowd. I began to wonder if this was the start of an ordeal. I was sure my guardian angel had gone on vacation and an evil demon taken his place, especially when I found I’d forgotten my passport. How’s that for dementia?
John didn’t give it a thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. “The Haitians won’t care.”
The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks Page 21