The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

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The Ghost of the Mary Celeste Page 11

by Valerie Martin


  Dr. Jephson, a vain, pompous, observant, credulous personage, sociable and self-important, introduces himself as a prominent Boston lung specialist and noted abolitionist. He twice reminds the reader of his influential pamphlet “Who Is Thy Brother?” carefully including the name of the publisher and year—Swarburgh, Lister & Co., 1859—for the perspicacious reader who may wish to look out for this noteworthy though now moot argument for the abolition of slavery, which attracted “considerable attention” at the time of its publication. After a lengthy aside about an odd encounter during the Civil War, in which a dying slave woman entrusted him with a curiously carved black stone, Jephson turns to the year 1873. At that time overwork in both his professional and social capacities had taken a severe toll on his health and, having received a diagnosis of “consolidation” in his left lung, he was advised to take an ocean voyage.

  His wife is eager to accompany her husband, but “she has always been a very poor sailor and there were strong family reasons against her exposing herself to any risk at the time, so we determined that she should remain at home.” A meeting with a young acquaintance who is the heir to a shipping company results in Jephson’s booking passage on the Marie Celeste. “She is a snug little ship,” his friend assures Jephson, “And Tibbs, the captain, is an excellent fellow. There is nothing like a sailing ship for an invalid.”

  Thence follows the complex account of Dr. Jephson’s voyage aboard the Marie Celeste, a bizarre tale that includes the African talisman and a mysterious fellow passenger, one Septimus Goring, a mulatto from New Orleans, unpleasant to look upon but well educated and evidently wealthy, who has made up his mind to murder as many members of the white race as he possibly can.

  “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” like the abolitionist pamphlet touted by its narrator, attracted considerable attention at the time of its publication. The New York Times reviewer derided the absurdity of its plot and pronounced it a story that “would make Thackeray turn in his grave,” but The Illustrated London News praised it as “an exceedingly powerful story,” which might have come from the pen of Robert Louis Stevenson, though the American theme and the elements of mystery and madness suggested, at least as inspiration, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe.

  Though most of its critics recognized Jephson’s “Statement” as fiction and placed it in the long and honorable tradition of elaborate flights of imagination inspired by real events, there were, there always are, readers who believed the article to be a true account.

  Immediately upon publication, five copies of the Cornhill left London bound for Gibraltar, where two important gentlemen took immediate and vocal offense. One of these was Horatio James Sprague, the American consul, who had been instrumental in freeing the Mary Celeste from the clutches of the other, Frederick Solly Flood, the queen’s proctor at Gibraltar. Flood had impounded the derelict vessel and waylaid the captain and crew of the Dei Gratia for a salvage hearing that more resembled a criminal trial. Within two weeks of the journal’s publication, Consul Sprague redirected a copy of the Cornhill to the attention of the Honorable John Davis, assistant secretary of state in Washington, D.C., referring to the “full particulars” of the salvage hearing that had, eleven years earlier, been “duly transmitted to the department.”

  It having ever since remained a mystery, regarding the fate of the master and crew of the Mary Celeste, or even the cause that induced or forced them to abandon their vessel which, with her cargo, were found when met by the Dei Gratia to be in perfect order, I ask to myself, what motives can have prompted the writer of the article in question to refer to this mysterious affair after the lapse of eleven years; especially as the statement given, is not only replete with inaccuracies as regards the date, voyage and destination of the vessel, names of the parties constituting her crew, and the fact of her having no passengers on board beyond the master’s wife and child, but seems to me to be replete with romance of a very unlikely or exaggerated nature.

  Frederick Solly Flood, equally appalled by the inaccuracies of the article, issued a public statement, which appeared in the British press, denouncing “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” as “a complete fraud from start to finish.” It was still his conviction, he reminded the public, that the officers had been murdered by the crew, who had then abandoned the vessel in the ship’s boat and were probably still alive. The Cornhill article, in his considered view, might well have been concocted by one of the survivors to throw off the investigation, which had never been closed in the mind of the queen’s proctor these eleven years.

  On January 8, fifty copies of the Cornhill set sail from Liverpool in the deep hold of the brig Claudius, which after a smooth crossing encountered severe weather off the Nantucket coast and limped into Boston harbor partially dismasted, the rigging in a tangle, and the crew bedraggled from lack of sleep and double shifts at the pumps. Once unloaded, the copies were quickly dispersed along the Eastern seaboard.

  On February 3, Prosper Hayes, an aspiring poet and literary critic for the Boston Herald, was pleased to find the familiar journal in the stack of transatlantic mail on his desk. He had been closely following a serial, The Giant’s Robe, and was eager to read the next installment, which promised an important revelation. There was always something of interest in the Cornhill, unlike Blackwood’s, which had, in his opinion, rather fallen down in recent times. James Payn at the Cornhill was ambitious for his journal and ever on the watch for the coming men of letters, though it was hard to tell, sometimes, exactly who was coming, as the stories and articles were all unsigned. Prosper opened the cover to the contents page. Here was a writer who had found a way around this problem of attribution; he’d put his name in the title of his piece, and what an almighty biblical moniker it was: J. Habakuk Jephson. When Hayes turned to Jephson’s contribution, he found that it commenced with a description of the famous ghost ship, the Marie Celeste, being towed into Gibraltar harbor.

  Prosper Hayes raised his eyes from the page and gazed out the window alongside his desk, which gave onto the chilly confusion and noise of Beacon Street. He noticed little about the scene, as his thoughts strayed to the unsolved mystery of the abandoned ship, a tale he had not thought of in many years. He’d been at Harvard College when the goings-on at Gibraltar were first reported in the press. Early versions suggested that the crew had murdered the officers in a drunken fury, then, when sobriety set in, thrown the bodies overboard and escaped on the ship’s boat. As the captain hailed from Marion, that lovely but cantankerous village on Buzzards Bay run entirely by retired sea captains, the fate of the ship had been of considerable local interest. Hayes had a classmate from Marion who knew the family. The captain of the ghost ship was survived by his mother, who didn’t believe the mutiny story. It was rumored that she was convinced her son and his family, for he had his wife and daughter aboard, had been picked up by a passing vessel and would, in due course, arrive at some destination where they might announce their survival to the world.

  But they never had. The trial had ended unsatisfactorily, with only a small award to the salvagers, because the judge believed they might have had a hand in the murder of the captain. Others maintained that the captain of the salvage ship and the captain of the derelict ship were friends, and that the whole abandonment and recovery of the vessel was some species of insurance fraud. Whatever happened, it was a sad and strange business, and one that Prosper Hayes had followed for a bit and then forgotten. Was the family still waiting for some word from their lost ones after all these years? And what might this new article by Dr. Jephson add to the sum of available knowledge about the case?

  A rattle and fizz from the stove jolted the reviewer from his reverie. He laid the journal on the desk, scooped up a shovel of coal from the scuttle, opened the grate, and dumped in the fuel. As he settled into his reading chair, pulling his blanket around his shoulders, he noticed the first flakes of snow drifting past the window. A sea yarn on a snowy day, safe in his cozy offic
e—what better employment could a young man find?

  The mysterious passenger, Septimus Goring, was bending over the dead captain Tibbs, who held in his rigid hand the pistol with which he had taken his own life, when Hayes looked up from the page and observed that the snow was falling thickly, clotting in the hollows of the maple stripling across the road and forming neat white caps on the light posts. He returned to his reading. At long last, here was the truth about the infamous ghost ship, the crew of which had suffered a fate more diabolical than anyone could have guessed.

  Those light flakes gathering silently upon the throbbing metropolis of Boston constituted the western edge of a blizzard that would pack the East Coast from Maine to New York City in ten feet of heavy, wet snow, leaving the streets impassible and travelers trapped far from home. By morning the beach at Truro would be littered with rubble from the clipper Miltonia. Thanks to the sure command of Captain Reginald Berry, the crew and passengers, sixteen in number, took to the small boats from which, after ten hours in storm-tossed waters, they were picked up by the passing steamer Endor. All landed safely at Philadelphia the following morning, with much praise for the courage and courtesy of the rescuing vessel’s captain and crew.

  When the streets were cleared of snow, five copies of the Cornhill left Boston in a mailbag on the ferry Bernadette, bound for New Bedford. The following morning one copy was delivered to Mr. David Hamley, the librarian at the New Bedford Public Library, which had a subscription to the journal. A week later, in the drafty reading room of this stately edifice, Dr. Samuel Moody of Marion took up the journal, and settled himself in a comfortable chair near the tall west-facing window, content to pass a few hours in perusal of the current literary scene in Britain. He had not been long absorbed in his reading before a soft huff of surprise escaped his lips. He had come to a description of an event with which he was well acquainted. For the next hour, punctuated by the occasional grunt, and a general increase in the intensity of his interest, Dr. Moody read what was, he assumed, a fantastical tale. Though the author had changed many of the names, presumably to protect himself from accusations of libel, there was too much resemblance to the facts of the famous incident for any reader to doubt his true intention, which was to raise the specter of the long unsolved mystery of the derelict brigantine the Mary Celeste.

  At length Dr. Moody returned the Cornhill to the shelf and strode out into the freezing afternoon, directing his steps toward the home of his friend James Briggs, the youngest brother of the ill-fated Briggs family of Marion, who had lost seven of his closest family members to the sea. Three of that number—his brother Benjamin, his sister-in-law Sarah, and an infant niece Sophia Matilda—had disappeared from the Mary Celeste. James lived with his wife, two daughters, and widowed mother in a new section of town, a mile’s walk from the center. The house was of solid construction, spacious, yet cozy. There was a kitchen garden on one side, and an arbor over the walk that led to the front door.

  At the specific request of its owner the house was so situated that, unlike its neighbors, it offered no view of the sea.

  A second copy of the Cornhill was delivered to the Italianate mansion of the widowed New Bedford socialite Mrs. Amanda McClinton Pink, who was not at home to receive it. The January editions of Blackwood’s and Longman’s Magazine arrived in the same mail. Mrs. Pink was an anglophile—how she regretted the revolution. She traced her own descent to a British viscount and a Scottish bard. There was an Irish strain as well, indistinguishable in her name as well as in her conversation, yet evident in her temper and her psychology. Like her Irish ancestors, Mrs. Pink possessed the “sight” and communicated with spirits of all kinds on a regular basis.

  The housemaid arranged the journals on the hall table, alongside the tray laden with letters and cards from tradesmen. When Mrs. Pink returned from her round of social calls, she snatched the British magazines and carried them to her own bedroom. It was her habit to lie abed in the mornings, drinking her tea and reading. She placed the Cornhill atop the stack on the rosewood table next to her bed. She was following The Giant’s Robe and looked forward to the next installment.

  That night, before she turned out her light, Mrs. Pink couldn’t resist having a look at The Giant’s Robe to reassure herself that the new installment concerned the difficulties of the somewhat dubious character named Mark. As she opened the journal, her eyes fell upon the title of an article by someone named J. Habakuk Jephson, but neither the style nor the subject appealed to her, and she flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. To her delight, Mark was mentioned in the first sentence and he was clearly in interesting difficulties.

  The perils of Mark kept Mrs. Pink up to a late hour. In the morning when the maid arrived with her tea, she found her mistress in a petulant mood. She’d devoured the treat she’d meant to save for morning and now, like a child who has gorged herself on a box of chocolates and wakes to find the empty papers scattered about her bed, she had the unpleasant sense of having done something shameful. When the maid went out, Mrs. Pink pushed the Cornhill from the stack and muttered to herself as it slipped off the table edge to the carpet. Nothing for it but Blackwood’s, she thought, without enthusiasm. But a glance at Blackwood’s table of contents lifted her spirits to a giddy height; here was a new work by Mrs. Oliphant, who never failed to please.

  Two hours later a jubilant reader closed the journal decisively. The story was so exactly to her taste it had caused her to pause in her reading, savoring the details of the characters and the plot. It concerned a wealthy widow, like herself, who, unlike Mrs. Pink, has failed to make a will and dies intestate. But how beautifully she dies, passing from her bedroom to another place where, for some time, though time means nothing there, she can’t comprehend that she is no longer alive. When she does, against the advice of her new and old friends, she determines that she must go back among the living and right the wrong done to her goddaughter, the rightful heir to her grand estate. And—this was the exciting part—she is allowed to return to her house. Children, in their innocence, can see her, but no one else does, no one else can, or perhaps it’s that no one else will.

  Mrs. Pink rose from her downy pillows and luxurious bed linens in a state of exaltation. She would go straight to her friend Mrs. Drover, and bring her the welcome news that the divine Oliphant was clearly in sympathy with their own enlightened Spiritualist company.

  The Cornhill lay facedown on the carpet until the afternoon, when the maid set it back on the nightstand. Mrs. Pink didn’t open it again; other matters claimed her attention. Mrs. Drover had invited her to a séance with a distinguished medium from England, and she had no doubt that her beloved Captain Pink would have some message for her. It had been ten years since his ship had gone down in a hurricane off the coast of Mauritius with all hands lost, but she had never lost faith, as she had never lost it when he was alive, that he would find a way to return to her.

  The next day the Cornhill joined the July through December issues on the shelf in the drawing room. Months passed. Spring came, brutal and tender by turns. The walls of snow that lined every human passageway turned to slush, the tips of the tree branches swelled, the sap rose in their trunks, and every maple in town sprouted a spigot and a bucket.

  At last it was full summer and the preparatory bustle of the annual migration to Lake Pleasant enlivened the atmosphere at the house of Pink. Twelve volumes each of the Cornhill, Blackwood’s, and Longman’s were packed into boxes and carried away in a cart, along with three trunks of clothing, a selection of pots and pans carefully chosen by the cook, four carpets of various sizes, another trunk of linens, a medicine cabinet, a box of expensive British tea, a full tea service, a china and flatware service for six packed in a specially designed crate, and a hamper of smoked meats and hard cheese.

  In the opinion of Mrs. Pink, it was a pity and a disgrace that so many of her fellow Spiritualists, who kept up well enough with politics and were acquainted with the reputations
, if not the actual persons, of the most excellent mediums from Chicago to the Russian court, could not tell you the name of a single contemporary British poet or novelist. On her arrival at her simple cottage on the lakeshore, carefully timed so that the maid and the cook should have a full day to arrange everything to their mistress’s taste, Mrs. Pink sent to the hotel for a boy with a handcart to collect the boxes of British journals. On the next day she supervised the placement of the year’s editions in the glass-fronted bookcase she had herself purchased expressly to provide guests who might seek to entertain themselves in the lounge with matter of more substance than Godey’s or the Woman’s Home Companion might provide.

  And so it was that on a rainy July morning in 1884, Phoebe Grant, a journalist employed by the Philadelphia Sun, having settled herself in an armchair in the lounge of the Lake Pleasant Hotel, opened a copy of Cornhill magazine and began reading an article with the ungainly title “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” Unbeknownst to her, another lady entered at the door and with elaborate stealth came up behind her chair. At first, this lady contemplated the shoulders and bowed head of the absorbed reader with an amused expression, as if she intended to play some girlish prank. But after a moment her eyes drifted to the page held aloft before her and a frown of interest lightly pursed her lips.

  “I know you’re there,” said the journalist calmly.

  But her friend made no reply, continuing her silent inspection of the opening lines of the article. After a moment, in a tone suggesting righteous offense, she observed, “That isn’t correct. It was 1872. And the ship wasn’t in tow. They sailed her to Gibraltar.”

  From: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS: MY LIFE IN JOURNALISM

  BY PHOEBE GRANT, EDITED BY LUCY DIAL

 

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