The Mary Celeste

by Stan Mason

  Farewell, Yours aff’ly, SARAH

  With reference to “Mother” Briggs, it does not go without notice there are certain facets of life which seem without rhyme or reason. These include agonies of the soul, the pain of emotion, and personal tragedy. For the Briggs family there was a true mixture of all these.....none more searching than the suffering of mother Sophia Briggs, the true Christian God-fearing wife of Captain Nathan Briggs, and mother of four sons and one daughter. To her, the Mary Celeste was to become one of significant concern with the loss of a son, a daughter-in-law and a grand-daughter. But troubles come not single spies but in battalions. It was yet another of the many tragedies not uncommon among families whose kin travelled the high seas. For her there came a whole series of personal family disasters .....each one striking a blow from which she would never recover. It began with Captain Oliver Briggs, Benjamin’s brother, who was lost in his own ship, the Julia A. Hallock, in the Bay of Biscay. Oliver and Benjamin had arranged to meet in the Spring of 1873 at Barcelona to load fruit for the homeward voyage to New York. However, two days out from Vigo in Northern Spain, the Julia A. Hallock, which was carrying a cargo of fine coal, sprang a leak. The ship’s pumps became clogged and unworkable and the vessel filled with water and capsized. All on board were drowned except Second-Mate Perry who, after drifting for five days on a piece of wreckage, was rescued by a Spanish vessel. This disaster must have preceded, by only a short period of time, the one that befell his brother, Benjamin, on the Mary Celeste.

  Then news arrived that her third son had succumbed to yellow fever at sea. The following year, her only daughter perished at sea when the vessel struck a rock. To end the series of tragedies, a communication arrived thereafter announcing the death of the last son from yellow fever during a voyage. Captain Nathan, on the other hand, was far too experienced a mariner to go to his maker through unworthy navigation, and he was too resilient to submit to a disease. His exit in life was destined to be much more spectacular than those of his offspring, with the exception of Benjamin who was expected by many to surface along some distant shore at a future date.

  One evening, at Rose Cottage, the atmosphere became very humid and Captain Nathan left the house to get some air. A storm was brewing and he could feel the electricity in the air through the hairs on the back of his bare arms. He wandered to some trees close by and stared at the dark clouds above which covered the sky. As luck would have it, a flash of lightning shafted through the heavens to strike the Captain who fell senseless to the ground. It was a chance in a million to die from a bolt of lightning but it created a situation whereby Sophia Briggs, the devoted housewife and dedicated mother, deserted so often by an itinerant sea-going family, outlived them all!

  On the morning of Thursday the seventh of November, 1872, the Mary Celeste left her anchorage at Staten Island with the wind light but favourable. She slipped out into the Atlantic Ocean to commence a voyage which would cause her to remain supreme in the annals of all mysteries of the sea. On the fifth of December, 1872, the vessel was seen drifting listlessly with no one aboard, with no apparent reason for dereliction. It was the beginning of a mystery, the start of rumours and suspicion, and the groundwork for a strange and unusual Court case.

  Genesis of a Legend

  After the initial excitement surrounding the discovery of the derelict, and the subsequent enquiry at the Supreme Court in Gibraltar, the public became tired of trying to find the true solution and allowed the matter rest. No doubt, if such an event had occurred in modern times, companies involved in marketing would have kept the myth alive producing computer games and a multitude of toys and products, as well as competitions offering grand prizes, for solving the mystery. In 1883, however, creative ability, mass production, as well as effective channels of advertising and distribution were distant dreams. There were so many other matters on which to dwell. After all, in the days when steamships were taking over from sail, the plight of a small cargo vessel carrying ten people was hardly significant. Indeed, there were a number of mysteries of the sea which had never been resolved.....much to the concern of some insurance companies.....and this one would certainly not be the last. In fact it was not an unknown feature for a ship to be found at sea having been abandoned by its crew. Such incidents were reported and recorded from time to time. For example, in 1888, the schooner William L. White, was abandoned off Delaware in a blizzard but it kept afloat for more than ten months and sailed five thousand miles. Another schooner, the Fannie E. Wolston, was abandoned in December 1891 but failed to sink until February 1894, during which time she had drifted halfway across the Atlantic and back again.....for thousands of miles.....finally sinking off the New Jersey coast only a few miles from the position where she had been abandoned. In 1914, the British barque, Dalgonar, drifted five thousand miles across the Pacific after her Master and three crew had lost their lives in a gale and the surviving crew had been taken off by a French vessel, the Loire. The Dalgonar’s ballast had shifted and she developed a heavy list, but she drifted westward for six months.....past Easter Island, Pitcairn and innumerable other islets.....until grounding on a coral reef in the Society Islands. This would have been another mystery had the surviving crew not managed to get safely home in the Loire.

  But all these incidents happened after the Mary Celeste was found derelict. When the news was issued by the Press it stunned the world. Imagination ran rife and speculation took place everywhere on what might have happened, what did happen, and what was likely to have happened. There were the pessimists who claimed that the passengers and crew had jumped overboard to their deaths after a drunken orgy. If they believed that they knew nothing of the facts. The Briggs were God-fearing people who never drank alcohol.....although Captain Briggs did imbibe one alcoholic drink when he dined with Captain Morehouse in New York, the night before the Mary Celeste sailed. Nonetheless, no alcohol was allowed on board.....with the exception of the cargo, which happened to be crude alcohol and hardly palatable. Ultimately, it was extremely unlikely that a drunken orgy took place. In effect, the First-Mate was a trustworthy and experienced mariner so he was unlikely to become involved in such activities. The optimists naturally took an entirely different view. They believed that something happened on board, either relating to the fumes of the alcohol or because the ship started to take in water. As such, the Captain and crew took to the long-boat and headed for the nearest island in the Azores. In their opinion, they would eventually hear news that the Captain, his wife and daughter and the crew managed to land somewhere and had been rescued. Thereafter, information would be quickly communicated to New York explaining how they had taken to the boat in an emergency to land on some unknown shore waiting for another ship to take them back to civilisation. There were others who considered that the Mary Celeste was the subject of an insurance fraud which went badly wrong. Why else would a seaworthy ship be found derelict.....unless fraud was involved? Freelance reporters seeking an exclusive scoop visited the islands of the Azores and even made enquiries as far south as the Canary Islands, in case the Mary Celeste had been swept that far off course before being blown northwards by strong winds. The coasts of Portugal and Southern Spain were scanned.....but all to no avail. Clearly, there was no evidence that Captain Briggs or his family and crew had ever landed on foreign soil.

  As time passed one would have expected interest in the incident to fade in the minds of the public and become another unsolved mystery of the sea. But it did not. In normal circumstances ships capsized and sank for one reason or another, usually in storms or against savage rocks. The Mary Celeste, however, remained afloat as a ‘ghost’ ship, and that was something altogether different. It was certainly too good a story to slip through the fingers of creative writers. In 1883, in Portsmouth, England, a young doctor was struggling to establish a practice but found himself in financial difficulties. He approached a company publishing magazines for boys and began to write stories for each issue. Within a few mont
hs he began to realise the potential of his artistic talent and decided to develop his theory of the mystery of the Mary Celeste in between surgery hours and visits to the sick. The attempt to solve this mystery was the start of a new career of mystery writing for the young doctor who, four years later, wrote ‘The Study in Scarlet’.....the first Sherlock Holmes story. The doctor, of course, was Arthur Conan Doyle.

  His theory of the mystery of the Mary Celeste included an indelicate reconstruction, with only threadbare evidence of the true facts of the case as they were reported eleven years earlier. The editor of the Cornhill Magazine was enthused by the idea and encouraged him to write his story. In January, 1884, it was published anonymously as “J. Habbakuk Jephson’s Statement”. If it had not been for this story, the tale of the Mary Celeste may have receded into the dark corners of history never to be recalled again after, say, thirty years had passed. However, not only was it resurrected, fuelled by false information and a plethora of rumour, but the ramifications spread wider and wider through authorities, one at least taking a view that some, if not all, of the details presented were actual fact. As such, enquiries were started in Europe and America solely on the basis of this story.

  Conan Doyle tried to provide reason to the mystery by introducing the fact that five passengers had been taken on board, one of whom, remarkably was the only survivor of the voyage. Jephson, ostensibly, was the lone survivor and had related details of himself and of the ship to the author. But there were a number of strange discrepancies, sufficient to allow those people acquainted with the real facts, or astute enough to realise that Conan Doyle had introduced fiction deliberately, to know that he had used the Mary Celeste merely to expound his own ideas of mystery and imagination. For example, he mentioned that reports had been published by the Gibraltar Gazette.....which did not exist; that the boats were intact and slung upon their davits.....there was only one boat and that had been smashed in the cargo accident at New York Harbour. Worst of all, a mis-spelling of the name of the vessel as the ‘Marie’ Celeste which, although wrong, was still used almost one hundred years later by British libraries in their indexing system.

  Of the five passengers aboard, one of them was Dr. J. Habbakuk Jephson.....the well-known Brooklyn specialist on consumption.....so the story unravels. He was apparently a distinguished advocate for the Abolition of Slavery who had exercised a strong influence on public opinion in America and felt it his duty to society to tell all he knew about the ill-fated voyage. Dr. Jephson relates that he had tried to explain the events on board the Mary Celeste over the first few years but without success, as both officials and relatives refused to acknowledge his story as being true. He admitted finally that pressure by his son to let the matter sink into oblivion forced him to allow reticence to gain the upper hand, and the matter was dropped. Without any doubt, it was a well-written yarn but the story was total fiction. Yet there was an element of truth on the point relating to the carriage of a passenger, although this was lost in the myriad of matters surrounding the characters and the plot. According to Dr. Jephson, a half-caste from New Orleans, Septimus Goring, murdered the Captain and crew of the ship, disposed of them over the side into the ocean, replacing them with two other passengers named Harton and Hyson, and a Captain Tibbs. The latter, however, suddenly went mad and committed suicide while Goring took charge of the ship’s navigational instruments to head the vessel to the west coast of Africa. It is his intention, he declared, to found a black empire, and he cast the Doctor adrift in a boat to leave him to his own devices. Fortunately, Jephson was in possession of a black stone, shaped like a human ear, an object of veneration by negroes, which protected him at all times. He was sighted five days later and saved by a steamer bound for Liverpool.....but no one would believe his story. The author finalised as follows:

  “From the day on which I found myself once more in the bosom of my family, I have said little of what I have undergone. The subject is still an intensely painful one to me, and the little which I have dropped has been discredited. I now put the facts before the public as they occurred, careless how far they may be believed, and simply writing them down because my lung is growing weaker, and I feel the responsibility of holding my peace longer. I make no vague statement. Turn to your map of Africa. There above Cape Blanc where the land trends away north and south from the westernmost point of the continent, there it is that Septimus Goring still reigns over his dark subjects, unless retribution has overtaken him; and there, where the long green ridges run swiftly in to roar and hiss upon the hot yellow sand, it is there that Harton (a passenger) lies with Hyson (the Mate) and the other poor fellows who were done to death in the Mary Celeste.”

  The story sparked off a series of communications after its publication in the Cornhill magazine, especially by those officials involved with the case from the outset. Frederick Solly Flood, the Queen’s Proctor in Her Office of Admiralty, and Attorney-General of Gibraltar, who appeared for the Crown, was extremely excited by the story. Over ten years earlier he was utterly convinced that some kind of criminal offence had been perpetrated for the purpose of obtaining insurance or salvage fraudulently. Regardless of his efforts to prove that such a crime had been committed, however, he was unable to establish a case of any kind and bore down heavily, in the end, on the those who salvaged her, which served to gain them a pittance for their part in finding the abandoned vessel and bringing her safely into Gibraltar with its full cargo. Mr. Flood deliberately led himself to believe that Conan Doyle’s story was factual and that Dr. Jephson had been an eye-witness. He expressed himself to the American Consul Sprague, stating that he was corresponding with officials in Germany in the belief that survivors of the Mary Celeste were hiding in that country. He knew that three of the crew were German and that they lived in or near the Parish of Utersum auf Fohr, but letters written from the Chief of the Parish indicated that matters were to the contrary.....although it did not mean that any were not in Germany. It merely indicated they had not returned home.

  Consul Sprague took a more conservative view of the story. He felt it was his duty to send a copy to the State Department in Washington, prefaced by remarks suggesting it appeared replete with romance of a very unlikely or exaggerated nature. In a rider to his report, he suggested that the American authorities might consider tracing the author. He eventually received a reply that the State Department did not deem it essential to propose any particular enquiries into the antecedents of the writer of the article in question. In their opinion, the mystery had not been explained satisfactorily and the file would remain closed until further evidence was submitted.

  At that particular moment, the Mary Celeste was still carrying cargoes across the Western world, which must have had some effect on the subconscious thoughts of its crew, but her life was coming swiftly to a close. Within a year, she lay in ruins off Rochelle’s Reef in Haiti, deliberately wrecked. The Captain was arraigned for barratry, her hold was full of junk for which an insurance company was supposed to pay a princely sum, and the timbers were left to rot or be taken by the tide. She was soon forgotten again as the legend faded but her memory was brought back to life again in 1890 when a collection of sea stories written by Conan Doyle were published in a book entitled “The Captain of the Polestar”. It would appear that the ghost of the Mary Celeste was never to be allowed to rest in peace!

  The difference between fact and fiction is often very narrow so that fortune favours the writer with a wide imagination because readers may believe all that is written to be true. On the other hand, it may be considered unfair to criticise writers too harshly on the matter of a strange sea mystery. However, in some cases, not only was logic cast to the wind by means of rumour but there has to be some foundation for allegations to be made that the truth was totally distorted on a story supposed to contain the truth. Conan Doyle began a new era in printed speculation when he accepted thirty pounds for his “anonymous” story about Dr. J. Habbakuk Jephson. There is no
doubt whatsoever that he used the framework of the story of the Mary Celeste, albeit solely as a fictional base. Nonetheless, the fact that he endeavoured to record his own solution ot the mystery has to be considered a false premise. His bold or foolhardy approach to a tragedy in which ten people lost their lives, much to the bereavement of their living relatives, encouraged other people to come forward with their view, and other writers to create new work on the subject. Fortunately, the numbers were relatively few, although numerous barrack-room lawyers and new-found mystery solvers held the attention of eager listeners in many local taverns in both America and Britain.