The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

by Valerie Martin

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” I replied. “Her promise that it would stop was very clear and final. I think we need worry no more about the subject.”

  “Sallie,” he said, laying his hand on my arm as we arrived at the grave. “You’re so serious. Of course I won’t press you.”

  I smiled. “I appreciate that,” I said. “I just can’t say more, not yet.”

  Benjamin took up the old bouquets much pummeled by the storm. The stone vases were full of rainwater, so we had only to replace the flowers and we were done. At Mother’s marker, I pulled a few weeds that had cropped up among the columbine I planted there some years ago, which has done well there, being shade tolerant. The blooms are fading now, but the plants are healthy. Then Benjamin and I stepped back and gazed at the grave that contains the remains of my mother and the two boys I never knew. I couldn’t help thinking of Hannah’s remark, that Mother was pleased about my engagement. Well, she would have been, had she lived. Benjamin remembers her well; he was eighteen when she died and she was fond of him. He had his heart set on following the sea and she teasingly called him “shipmate,” and “sailor boy.” As if he read my thoughts, Benjamin said, “Your mother was light at heart. She always brightened a room when she came in.”

  “She did,” I agreed. “When she could no longer leave her bed, she claimed her illness was a grand opportunity to read frivolous novels.” Whereas, I thought, Mother Briggs will still be chewing over the Bible at death’s door.

  “Well,” he said, “I wish she was with us now.”

  And oh, I did too. I need my dear mother to tell me what to do about my sister.

  “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” That was a favorite saying of Mother’s, especially when her children were idle. She took her religion to be a practice, not a test, and she was an active, not a submissive, Christian. She wanted her children to be alive to the possibilities of life, to show in our actions our moral engagement with our fellows. And, of course, we were her fruits and by us she would be known; I do think that was implied in her remark. I’ve been thinking of her so much today, though, unlike my sister, I haven’t seen her lurking about the house. Does she watch over us here? Does Father believe that? After her death he said, “She will always be with us.” Presumably he meant in our memories and in our hearts.

  I confess that there is a shred of jealousy in my conflict with my sister. Why wouldn’t Mother show herself to me, if she could? That is a thought not worth pursuing.

  But what I’ve been thinking about Mother is how she would feel, and what she would say, if she were here to guide Hannah past this crisis in her young life. She never gave orders or forbade actions, unless we were rude in public, which merited a frank rebuke. She had a way of looking at you with sympathy and understanding and hope and then asking the exact question that placed the matter in a clear moral light. The answer came of its own accord, and one cheerfully mended one’s ways.

  Have I done this with Hannah? Have I asked her the right question, the one that will bring her back to me?

  I have not.

  Last night I woke from a frightening dream. Benjamin and I were running through a forest, running away from something, an animal or a man. We held hands, but the ground was uneven and I tripped, losing his grip. When I got to my feet, I found he had gone ahead without me. I followed, but the space between us grew wider and wider and I could hear the pursuer, whatever he/it was, coming closer. There was a harsh sound, very close to my ear, a snarl of rage, and then I woke.

  I lay still in the bed, waiting for my heart to slow, and wondering, in a dreamy sort of way, why Benjamin hadn’t waited for me. Gradually I became aware of an odd sound in the real world, a kind of scratching, like nails against wood. It was soft, barely audible, but insistent. I thought it might be a mouse nibbling inside the wall. I closed my eyes, waiting for the embrace of Morpheus, but the scratching distracted me. I listened and listened; was it in the hall? At last I decided to get up and investigate. I lit the candle, crossed to the door, and looked into the hall. A thin, milky light spilled across the floor from beneath Hannah’s door. She was still awake.

  The sound paused, then resumed, paused again. I was barefoot and the floorboards were chilly under my feet. I stepped along quickly to her door. The scratching took up again. What was she doing? “Hannah,” I said softly, laying my palm against the door panel. The latch was up and the door drifted open before me, revealing bit by bit a nightmare far worse than the one I’d just escaped. Would that it had been a dream.

  Hannah was seated at her writing table, where the lamp burned brightly, with a pen in her hand and a page before her. Strangely, her body leaned away from the table, supported by her right arm propped rigidly against the seat of her chair. Her head was thrown back as if she had been struck, her loosened hair tumbled past her shoulders, her mouth was agape, and her eyes, unnaturally wide, fixed on a corner of the ceiling. The muscles of her face were so strained and tense she was hardly recognizable. Her left hand, holding the pen, scribbled hurriedly, moving from right to left on the page, seemingly without her knowledge or her will.

  I had the sense that I was entering the equivalent of a gale at sea. Nothing moved, save that demonic hand. My skin tingled the way it does when the barometer drops suddenly and those with old injuries claim to feel them anew. “Hannah,” I said again, firmly this time, but she gave no evidence of hearing me. I approached—what else could I do?—and though I stood looking down at the writing spiraling from the pen, I couldn’t read it. It was that same cryptic language I’d seen in her journal. I looked at her face, which was turned away from the light, as if to keep as far away as possible from the writing hand. Her eyes were utterly vacant, flat, and unmoving as the false eyes in a china doll.

  I brought my palm down hard upon the writing hand. There was no resistance, her fingers sprawled. Hannah screamed, rose from the chair, and collapsed in my arms. I heard Father’s feet hit the floor in his bedroom, and then his hurried steps coming toward us in the hall.

  DOCUMENTS

  CONCERNING THE RECOVERY OF THE BRIG MARY CELESTE, FOUND DERELICT EAST OF THE AZORES ON DECEMBER 4, 1872

  Cable: Gibraltar, December 13, 1872

  To: Board of Underwriters, New York

  BRIG MARY CELESTE HERE DERELICT IMPORTANT SEND POWER ATTORNEY TO CLAIM HER FROM ADMIRALTY COURT

  HORATIO J. SPRAGUE

  Cable: New York, December 13, 1872

  To: Horatio J. Sprague, United States Consul at Gibraltar

  PROTECT BRIG MARY CELESTE WANT VOYAGE PERFORMED

  OGDEN

  Cable: Gibraltar, December 14, 1872

  To: Parker, New York

  FOUND FOURTH AND BROUGHT HERE MARY CELESTE ABANDONED SEAWORTHY ADMIRALTY IMPOST NOTIFY ALL PARTIES TELEGRAPH OFFER OF SALVAGE MOREHOUSE

  New York Times—Dateline Gibraltar

  December 14, 1872

  The brig Mary Celeste is in the possession of the Admiralty Court.

  New Bedford Evening Standard—Marine Intelligence

  December 21, 1872

  Brig Mary Celeste, from New York Nov. 17 for Genoa, is reported by cable as having been picked up derelict and towed into Gibraltar 16th inst. She was commanded by Capt. Benjamin Briggs, of Marion, who had his wife and child with him, and much anxiety is felt for their safety.

  The Boston Post

  February 24, 1873

  It is now believed that the fine brig Mary Celeste, of about 236 tons, commanded by Capt. Benjamin Briggs of Marion, Mass., was seized by pirates in the latter part of November, and that, after murdering the Captain, his wife, child, and the officers, the vessel was abandoned near the western Islands, where the miscreants are supposed to have landed. The brig left New York on the 17th of November for Genoa, with a cargo of alcohol, and is said to have had a crew consisting mostly of foreigners. The theory now is that some of the men probably obtained access to the cargo, and were thus stimulated to the desperate deed.

  The Mary Ce
leste was fallen in with by the British brig Dei Gratia, Capt. Morehouse, who left New York about the middle of November. The hull of the Celeste was found in good condition, and safely towed into Gibraltar, where she has since remained. The confusion in which many things were found on board (including ladies’ apparel, &c.,) led, with other circumstances, to suspicion of wrong and outrage, which has by no means died out. One of the latest letters from Gibraltar received in Boston says: The Vice Admiralty Court sat yesterday and will sit again to-morrow. The cargo of the brig has been claimed, and to-morrow the vessel will be claimed.

  The general opinion is that there has been foul play on board, as spots of blood on the blade of a sword, in the cabin, and on the rails, with a sharp cut on the wood, indicate force or violence having been used, but how or by whom is the question. Soon after the vessel was picked up, it was considered possible that a collision might have taken place. Had this been the case, and the brig’s officers and crew saved, they would have been landed long ere this. We trust that if any of New-England’s shipmasters can give any information or hint of strange boats or seamen landing at any of the islands during the past ninety days, that they will see the importance thereof.

  The Boston Journal

  March 15, 1873

  The brig Mary Celeste, found deserted at sea and taken into Gibraltar, as before mentioned, has been libeled and a suit commenced in the United States District Court in this city, the libel alleging that the vessel had obtained American registry by fraud. It has recently been stated that there are strong suspicions that her desertion at sea was done to defraud the insurance companies. Nothing is known as to the fate of her crew. And the whole affair is involved in mystery.

  Letter: April 4, 1873

  To: Department of State, Washington, D.C.

  I beg to enclose a copy of a communication which I have this day received from Prussia, asking for information regarding some of the missing crew of the derelict Mary Celeste. It is somewhat gratifying to learn three out of the five men composing the crew of the Mary Celeste were known to the writer of that communication as being peaceable and first-class sailors, as it further diminishes the probability that any violence was committed on board of this vessel by her crew.

  Horatio J. Sprague, United States Consul at Gibraltar

  Letter Enclosure

  March 21, 1873

  INVENTORY of the contents of a desk found on board the American Brig Mary Celeste of New York, by the Marshal of the Vice Admiralty Court of Gibraltar, and delivered to me this day, by the said Marshal; the said desk is supposed to belong to Captain B. S. Briggs, the missing Master.

  A desk containing: Twenty one letters; an account book; a pocket-book; a ruler; two pieces of sealing wax; four United States postal stamps; a pencil; a paper cover containing sundry papers, envelopes and accounts; wafers; a case of leads; three receipts signed by J. H. Winchester & Co., New York, viz: for $1,500 dated 3rd October 1872, for $500 dated 16th October 1872; for $1,600 dated 22nd October 1872

  Consulate of the United States of America,

  Gibraltar March 21, 1873

  (Signed) Horatio J. Sprague, U. S. C

  AN AFRICAN ADVENTURE

  S.S. Mayumba, 1881

  A SUMMONS

  One wondered whether the colonies were really worth the price we had to pay.

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  A loud rap at the house door startled the young doctor, who was carefully embellishing architectural curlicues in the margins of a page half-filled with his own neat cursive script. As there was no one but himself to answer, he crossed the small parlor in three steps and pulled the door open wide. There he found a thin, bedraggled boy, dressed in a dark-green woolen jacket bearing some resemblance to a uniform and some to a jockey’s coat, stovepipe pants that ended well above his bare, scrawny ankles, and dusty brown boots with the nail heads exposed around the soles. In his gloved left hand he held out a yellow envelope. “Dr. Doyle, innit?” he inquired.

  “So it is, my boy,” said the doctor, taking the envelope. It was a telegram. The doctor produced a penny from his coat pocket and pressed it on the boy, who, taking the coin without a word, dashed off down the street.

  A telegram. Was it the longed-for hospital appointment? Was it evil news concerning his poor father? The doctor carried the envelope back to his writing desk, where the half-finished page rebuked him. Ignoring it, he tore open the flap and drew out the brief message.

  Here was news. The African Steam Navigation Company was cordially responding to his now ancient and nearly forgotten query with orders for Dr. Conan Doyle to proceed at once to Liverpool and there take medical charge of the steamer Mayumba, bound for Madeira and the West Coast of Africa.

  Africa. He glanced down at the page he had yet to finish, a tale of the American West, a place he had visited only in his imagination, or, more correctly, in the imagination of Bret Harte, whose adventure stories had brightened many a gloomy hour of his youth. Africa meant Stanley and Livingstone, Victoria Falls, jungles screaming with monkeys, villages populated by naked cannibals, so black they could not be seen in the dark and the whites of their eyes disembodied in the humid night air accosted the unwary. As ship’s surgeon, he was unlikely to see much beyond the coast; the interior of the continent would be closed to him. The experience would be geographically speaking the opposite of his previous post on the Arctic whaler Hope, during which he had clubbed seals and gone out with the harpooner in the boat, holding fast to the rope beneath the mountainous side of a right whale. The blue sky, the white gleam of the drift ice, the endless daylight, the intoxicating air—for seven months every moment had been filled with wonders, and the work so constant and challenging that in none of those moments had he been idle or bored.

  The steamer Mayumba would be an adventure of a different order, his function an official one, doubtless requiring a coat of blue serge, gilt buttons, white duck trousers, and shoes that would slip on the decks and take on water when the ship did. The captain wouldn’t encourage him to participate in the business of the voyage, which was purely the transport of goods and passengers to Africa, discharging them, taking on new goods and passengers, and turning the prow for home. His work would be among and at the behest of these passengers, and he was unlikely to visit the forecastle unless a man was dying there. Instead of shifting ice and sparkling skies, there would be beaches, rivers, and tropical jungles. The doctor’s brain buzzed pleasantly over the contrast between his seagoing excursions, the first to the white world, where men pursued and slaughtered beasts as big as houses, the next to the dark continent, on a mission to administer quinine and morphine to various valiant servants and civilizers of the Empire.

  In a week he was in Liverpool, lining up his books on the narrow shelf in his berth. Compared to the cramped and heavily populated whaler, the Mayumba was enormous, with space for twenty passengers and two saloons; the passengers’ saloon was as ponderously furnished as a hotel lobby. But unlike the Hope, she was dirty. Rust had a grip on her rails and spars, the skylights were streaked, and the upholstery faded and dingy.

  The passengers would equally have benefited by a sprucing up. Among them were a parson named Fairfax, his wife, and two cadaverous boys of eight and ten, bound for Lagos; a pretty brunette, Miss Fox, not in her first youth, possessed of an educated air and an oversize bonnet, going out to meet her father in Sierra Leone; a Scottish crone, forever nameless, with bad lungs and a face like an ailing horse; two Negro tradesmen, dressed showily in the worst possible taste and escorted to the gangway by a phalanx of evil-smelling prostitutes; a British Negress with the manners of a she-wolf, who was betrothed to a missionary in the interior; and finally an Englishwoman, Mrs. Rowbotham, lively, cheerful, neatly dressed, and immediately flirtatious upon meeting the doctor as she was passing out of the saloon.

  The captain, Duncan Henderson Wallace, a small man, bald on top with a flowing, well-tended white beard that thrust out from his face suggesting the prominent chin beneath, pro
mised to be good company. He moved gracefully, without fuss, inside a force field of authority. He greeted the doctor with a firm handshake and a bright eye that ran over his new colleague appreciatively, as if he’d seldom seen such a fine figure of a man, and indeed, the doctor was several inches taller and stones heavier than his commander. “Come and have a brandy in my office,” said Captain Wallace. “First time to Africa, is it?”

  “It is,” said the doctor, following the captain into his private quarters, which were cleaner than the rest of the ship, and neatly appointed. In the conversation that followed, Doyle learned Mrs. Rowbotham was en route to her husband in Sierra Leone, and the querulous Negress was some madman’s idea of a desirable wife.

  “I’ve had Parson Fairfax and his family before,” Wallace continued. “They go out once a year for six weeks, then back at the missionary work. It’s killing the wife, but she doesn’t complain.”

  “The boys don’t look fit for much either,” the doctor observed.

  “It’s the beastly climate. If they left those boys in Edinburgh, or better yet, Dundee, they’d fatten up in no time. But you’ll see, as we go on.”

  “And we sail?”

  “At dawn. It may be rough going this time of year.”

  In the morning the weather was fine, but it deteriorated as the Mayumba made her way down the Mersey. At Holyhead there was such a gale blowing they had to put in for the night. The next day, in rough weather, they made for the Irish Sea, pitching and rolling, plowing through a fog thick as cream. The lighthouse beam was only a dull sheeny patch in the white sheet off the starboard bow. The crew labored earnestly, each wrapped in a white shroud that kept him from seeing his mates. Nor did conditions improve on the open water.