by Colin Wilson
Morehouse sent three men to investigate, led by his first mate Oliver Deveau, a man of great physical strength and courage. As they clambered aboard they saw that the ship’s decks were deserted; a search below revealed that there was not a living soul on board. But the lifeboat was missing, indicating that Captain Briggs had decided to abandon ship.
There was a great deal of water below decks; two sails had been blown away, and the lower foretop sails were hanging by their corners. Yet the ship seemed seaworthy, and was certainly in no danger of sinking. Then why had the crew abandoned her? Further research revealed that the binnacle, the box containing the ship’s compass, had been smashed, and the compass itself was broken. Two cargo hatches had been ripped off, and one of the casks of crude alcohol had been stoved in. Both forward and aft storage lockers contained a plentiful supply of food and water.
The seamen’s chests were still in the crew’s quarters, an indication of the haste in which the ship had been deserted. But a search of the captain’s cabin revealed that the navigation instruments and navigation log were missing. The last entry in the general log was dated 25 November; it meant that the Mary Celeste had sailed without crew for at least nine days, and that she was now some 700 miles north-east of her last recorded position.
Apart from Captain Briggs and a crew of seven, the Mary Celeste had also sailed with Brigg’s wife Sarah and his two-year old daughter Sophia Matilda. Faced with the mystery of why they had abandoned ship for no obvious reason, Morehouse experienced a certain superstitious alarm when Deveau suggested that two of the Dei Gratia’s crew should sail the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar; it was the prospect of £5,000 salvage money that finally made him agree to Deveau’s scheme.
Both ships arrived in Gibraltar harbour six days later. And instead of the welcome he expected, Deveau was greeted by an English bureaucrat who nailed an order of immediate arrest to the Mary Celeste’s mainmast. The date significantly was Friday the 13th.
From the beginning the Mary Celeste had been an unlucky ship. She was registered originally as the Amazon, and her first captain had died within forty-eight hours. On her maiden voyage she had hit a fishing weir off the coast of Maine, and damaged her hull. While this was being repaired a fire had broken out amidships. Later, while sailing through the Straits of Dover, she hit another brig, which sank. This had occurred under her third captain; her fourth accidentally ran the ship aground on Cape Brenton Island and wrecked her.
The Amazon was salvaged, and passed through the hands of three more owners before she was bought by J.H. Winchester, the founder of a successful shipping line which still operates in New York. Winchester discovered that the brig – which had now been renamed Mary Celeste – had dry rot in her timbers, and he had the bottom rebuilt with copper lining and the deck cabin lengthened. These repairs had ensured that the ship was in excellent condition before she had sailed for Genoa under the experienced Captain Briggs – this helped to explain why she had survived so long in the wintry Atlantic after the crew had taken to the lifeboat.
British officials at Gibraltar seemed to suspect either mutiny or some Yankee plot – the latter theory based on the fact that Captain Morehouse and Captain Briggs had been friends, and had apparently dined together the day before the Mary Celeste had sailed from New York. But at the inquiry that followed, the idea of mutiny seemed to have gained favour. To back this theory the Court of Inquiry was shown an axe-mark on one of the ship’s rails, scoring on her hull that was described as a crude attempt to make the ship look as if she had hit rocks, and a stained sword that was found beneath the captain’s bunk. All this, it was claimed, pointed to the crew getting drunk, killing the master and his family, and escaping in the ship’s boat.
The Americans were insulted by what they felt was a slur on the honour of the US Merchant Navy, and indignantly denied this story. They pointed out that Briggs was not only known to be a fair man who was not likely to provoke his crew to mutiny, but also that he ran a dry ship; the only alcohol on the Mary Celeste was the cargo. And even a thirsty sailor would not be likely to drink more than a mouthful of crude alcohol – it would cause severe stomach pains and eventual blindness. Besides, if the crew had mutinied, why should they leave behind their sea-chests together with such items as family photographs, razors and sea-boots?
The British Admiralty remained unconvinced, but had to admit that if the alternative theory was correct, and Briggs and Morehouse had decided to make a false claim for salvage, Briggs would actually have lost by the deal – he was part-owner of the ship, and his share of any salvage would have come to a fraction of what he could have made by selling his share in the normal way.
In March 1873 the court was finally forced to admit that it was unable to decide why the Mary Celeste had been abandoned, the first time in its history that it had failed to come to a definite conclusion. The Dei Gratia’s owners were awarded one-fifth of the value of the Mary Celeste and her cargo. The brig herself was returned to her owner, who lost no time in selling her the moment she got back to New York.
During the next eleven years the Mary Celeste had many owners, but brought little profit to any of them. Sailors were convinced she was unlucky. Her last owner, Captain Gilman C. Parker, ran her aground on a reef in the West Indies and made a claim for insurance. The insurers became suspicious, and Parker and his associates were brought to trial. At that time the penalty for deliberately scuttling a ship on the high seas was death by hanging; but the judge, mindful of the Mary Celeste’s previous record of bad luck, allowed the men to be released on a technicality. Within eight months Captain Parker was dead, one of the associates had gone mad, and another had committed suicide. The Mary Celeste herself had been left to break up on the reef.
Over the next decade or so, as no new evidence came to light, interest in the story waned. During the trial, when fraud was still suspected, a careful watch had been kept on the major ports of England and America. But there was no sign of any of the missing crew.
In the year 1882 a 23-year-old newly qualified doctor named Arthur Doyle moved to Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, and screwed up his nameplate. And during the long weeks of waiting for patients he whiled away the time writing short stories. It was in the autumn of 1882 that he began a story: “In the month of December 1873, the British ship Dei Gratia steered into Gibraltar, having in tow a derelict brigantine Marie Celeste, which had been picked up in the latitude 38°40´, longitude 70°15´ west”.
For such a short sentence, this contains a remarkable number of inaccuracies. The year was actually 1872; the Dei Gratia did not tow the Marie Celeste, the latter came under its own sail; the latitude and longitude are wrong; and the ship was called plain English Mary, not Marie. All the same, when “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” was published in the Cornhill magazine in 1884 it caused a sensation, launching Arthur Doyle’s career as a writer – he was soon using the name A. Conan Doyle. Most people took it for the truth, and from then on it was widely accepted that the Mary Celeste had been taken over by a kind of Black Power leader with a hatred of Whites. Mr Solly Flood, the chief investigator in the Mary Celeste case, was so indignant that he sent a telegram to the Central News Agency denouncing J. Habakuk Jephson as a fraud and a liar. From then on the Cornhill was willing to publish most of Conan Doyle’s stories at thirty guineas a time instead of the three guineas he had been paid so far.
Doyle’s story was the signal for a new interest in the mystery, and over the next few years there were a number of hoax accounts of the last days of the Mary Celeste. They told all kinds of stories from straightforward mutinies to mass accidents – such as everyone falling into the sea when a platform made to watch a swimming race gave way, or the finding of another derelict carrying gold bullion, which tempted Captain Briggs to leave his own ship drifting while he escaped in the other one. One author argued that all the crew had been dragged through the ship’s portholes at night by a ravenous giant squid, while Charles Fort, the eminent paranormal researcher, su
ggested the crew had been snatched away by the same strange force that causes rains of frogs and live fish. Fort added, “I have a collection of yarns, by highly individualized liars, or artists who scorned, in any particular, to imitate one another; who told, thirty, forty, or fifty years later, of having been members of this crew”. Even today the Mary Celeste often sails unsuspectingly into TV serials and Sci-Fi movies to become involved in time warps or attacked by aliens in UFOs.
In fact, a careful study of the facts reveals that the solution of this particular mystery is obvious.
The man most responsible for the perpetuation of the myth about the Mary Celeste was Conan Doyle: it was he who insisted that the ship’s boats were still intact. This small inaccuracy made an otherwise simple problem virtually insoluble.
In fact, once we know that the boat was missing, we at least know one thing for certain: that the crew abandoned ship, apparently in great haste – the wheel was not lashed, an indication that the ship was abandoned in a hurry. The question then presents itself: what could have caused everyone on board to abandon the ship in such a hurry?
Captain James Briggs, the brother of the Mary Celeste’s skipper, was convinced that the clue lay in the last entry in the log, for the morning of 25 November 1872: it stated that the wind had dropped after a night of heavy squalls. James Briggs believed the ship may have become becalmed in the Azores, and started to drift towards the dangerous rocks of Santa Maria Island. The gash-marks found along the side of the Mary Celeste – which the British investigators had claimed were deliberately made by the ship’s mutinous crew – may have been made when she actually rubbed against a submerged rock, convincing the crew that she was about to sink.
Oliver Deveau proposed that during the storms some water had found its way from between decks into the hold, giving the impression that the ship was leaking.
Another popular explanation is that a waterspout hit the Mary Celeste. The atmospheric pressure inside a waterspout is low; this could have caused the hatch-covers to blow open and forced bilge water into the pump well; this would have made it look as if the ship had taken on six to eight feet of water and was sinking fast.
There are basic objections to all these three answers. If the ship scraped dangerous rocks off Santa Maria Island, then the lifeboat would have been close enough to land on the Island. Since no survivors were found and no wreckage from the lifeboat, this seems unlikely.
Oliver Deveau’s theory has a great deal more in its favour. There have often been panics at sea. When Captain Cook’s Endeavour was in difficulties off the coast of eastern Australia the ship’s carpenter was sent to take a reading of the water in the hold. He made a mistake, and the resulting hysteria might have ended with the crew leaving the ship if Cook had not been able to control the panic. On another occasion a ship which was carrying a hold full of timber dumped the whole lot into the sea off Newfoundland, before anyone realized that it would be next to impossible to sink a ship full of wood. But it seems unlikely that a captain of Briggs’s known efficiency would allow some simple misreading to cause a panic.
The objection to the waterspout theory is that, apart from the open hatches, the ship was completely undamaged. If a waterspout was big enough to cause such a panic, it would surely have caused far more havoc.
In any case, the real mystery is why, if the crew left the Mary Celeste in the lifeboat, they made no attempt to get back on board when they saw that the ship was in no danger of sinking.
Only one explanation covers all the facts. Briggs had never shipped crude alcohol before, and being a typical New England puritan, undoubtedly mistrusted it. The change in temperature between New York and the Azores would have caused casks of alcohol to sweat and leak. The night of storms, in which the barrels would have been shaken violently, would have caused vapour to form inside the casks, slowly building up pressure until the lids of two or three blew off. The explosion, though basically harmless, might have blown the hatches off the cargo hold on to the deck in the positions in which Deveau later found them. Convinced that the whole ship was about to explode, Briggs ordered everyone into the lifeboat. In his haste, he failed to take the one simple precaution that would have saved their lives – to secure the lifeboat to the Mary Celeste by a few hundred yards of cable. The sea was fairly calm when the boat was lowered, as we know from the last entry in the log, but the evidence of the torn sails indicates that the ship then encountered severe gales. We may conjecture that the rising wind blew the Mary Celeste into the distance, while the crew in the lifeboat rowed frantically in a futile effort to catch up. The remainder of the story is tragically obvious.
34
Glenn Miller
The Strange Disappearance of a Bandleader
On 24 December 1944, an official press release stated that “Major Alton Glenn Miller, Director of the famous United States Army Air Force Band, which has been playing in Paris, is reported missing while on a flight from London to Paris. The plane in which he was a passenger left England on 15 December and no trace of it has been found since its takeoff”.
Glenn Miller’s rise to fame and wealth had not been an easy one. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, in March 1904, he learned to play the trombone at thirteen and helped to pay his way at the University of Colorado by playing with local dance bands. He joined Ben Pollack’s band at the age of twenty and over the next ten years became known in New York as an arranger as well as a trombonist, playing with Red Nichols, Smith Ballew, and the Dorsey brothers. A dance orchestra he organized for Ray Noble in 1934 became popular through its broadcasts, but Miller’s own orchestra, organized in 1937, was a failure. A second orchestra, organized in the following year, did little better.
The breakthrough came in March 1939, when the band played at the Glen Island Casino in a suburb of New York and the audience was overwhelmed with enthusiasm at this new, distinctive, Glenn Miller sound, with its smooth, almost syrupy, brass. Radio broadcasts spread the fever across the country, and Miller was soon a rich man. Although he lacked the sheer inventive genius of other jazzmen of the period – Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, for example – the “seamless and rich” perfection of numbers like “Moonlight Serenade” made him the favourite of the American middle classes, while “hot” numbers like “In the Mood” and “Tuxedo Junction” made him popular with a younger generation that was learning to jive. He went to Hollywood and made two classic films, Orchestra Wives (1941) and Sun Valley Serenade (1942). During this period he became a friend of actor David Niven – a friendship that, as we shall see, plays an odd part in the mystery of Glenn Miller’s disappearance.
In 1942, as a patriotic gesture, Miller joined the air force. He soon assembled another band and was assigned to entertaining the troops abroad. He was sent to London. David Niven had also joined up – but in the British Army. Since he was a famous show-business personality, he was also given an important post in armed-forces entertainment, and one of his jobs was to organize Glenn Miller’s tours. He was, in effect, Miller’s boss. The man actually in charge of organizing the details of Miller’s tours – hotel and travel arrangements – was Lieutenant Don Haynes, Miller’s former booking agent, now also in the U.S. Air Force.
In November 1944 Niven organized a six-week tour for Miller’s band, starting on Saturday, 16 December. The band was due to fly to Paris on that day. But on 12 December, as Don Haynes and Miller were walking back to their London hotel, Miller told Haynes – according to Haynes’s later story – that he wanted to go a day early because he had a social engagement. Haynes said he would book Miller on a flight from RAF Bovingdon, northwest of London, the usual takeoff point for Continental flights.
The following day, Wednesday, 13 December, Haynes claims he left Miller in London and drove back to Bedford, where the band was housed in billets, to arrange their flight. The following morning, he claims, he ran into Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Baessell, who was special assistant to the station commander at RAF Milton Ernest, near Bedford. Baessell
mentioned that he would be flying to Paris the next day – Thursday – and offered Haynes a lift. Haynes declined, saying he would be flying with the band on Saturday, but mentioned that Glenn Miller would like a lift. Haynes telephoned Miller, who accepted the offer; Haynes went to London to collect him and took him back to RAF Milton Ernest.
The next morning Haynes collected Miller and Baessell and took them to the nearby airfield, Twinwood Farm. At about 1:40, their plane arrived – a small American prop-driven plane called a Norseman, piloted by Flight Officer John R. S. Morgan. In spite of appalling weather conditions, they took off five minutes later – and vanished.
We now know what happened to the plane. It flew across the channel toward Dieppe but began to experience engine trouble; the pilot was forced to ditch in the sea only six miles west of Le Touquet, which is some distance north of Dieppe. The plane was located in 1973 and examined by an independent diver seven years later. Its propeller was missing. This suggested a leak in the hydraulic system, which failed to adjust the blades to the required speed; the propeller “oversped” and probably fell off.
Now as strange as it sounds, no one at the time seems to have realized what had happened. On Monday (the flight was delayed by bad weather) the band arrived at Orly Airport, near Paris, and Haynes was puzzled when Miller failed to turn up to meet them. Haynes spent the rest of Monday, and the whole of the following day, searching Paris – which had recently been liberated – for the bandleader. He finally contacted General Ray Barker, who was in charge of all U.S. military personnel in Paris. Two days later, when the band played its first Paris engagement, the audience was simply told that “Major Miller could not be with the band”. Miller’s death was announced three days later.