The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Travel in those distant times was infused with glamour. Everyone aboard was planning and imagining what they might do when the ship made landfall in Italy, a country which none had visited. But the travellers’ dreams and hopes were to come to nothing. Not one soul aboard Mary Celeste would ever reach Genoa…

  4 December 1872. Atlantic Ocean, near the Azores

  David Morehouse, captain of the British cargo brig Dei Gratia, sensed immediately that something was wrong. The vessel, roughly two miles (three kilometres) to the north-west, sails set and blossoming, seemed to be moving erratically in the light breeze.

  Morehouse signalled. There was no reply. Dei Gratia steered closer. The keen-eyed deckboy was first to notice it. ‘There’s no one at the wheel!’ he shouted. ‘No one there!’

  Before long the mysterious ship was looming above the little Dei Gratia - and everybody aboard could now read its name: Mary Celeste.

  To Captain Morehouse, the revelation came as a shock. He knew this ship, and her captain, well. He and Benjamin Briggs had dined together only a few weeks earlier.

  Morehouse ordered his first mate, Oliver Deveau, and two seamen to take a boat and board Mary Celeste. The three men searched the brigantine from end to end. It was completely, and eerily, deserted. But everywhere they found signs of seemingly recent occupation. Mrs Briggs’s sewing machine had been used for hemming a small girl’s dress, which lay folded on a chair. A phial of oil, standing beside the machine, bore witness to the ship’s apparent stability at the time of its evacuation. There had been no natural disaster here - no storm or freakish wave.

  The captain’s clothes and fobwatch were hanging in his cabin. On a table nearby, a meal, cutlery arranged neatly beside it, lay untouched. In the forecastle hung what seemed to be most of the crew’s boots and clothing. Fixed to a wall was a rack containing their pipes. For reasons that could only be guessed at, the men had quit their ship without tobacco or warm clothes. As Oliver Deveau and his subordinates would subsequently testify, everything aboard looked normal, as if the people who had sailed aboard Mary Celeste were about to return at any moment.

  Deveau inspected the cargo. The 1,700 redwood barrels of grain alcohol were, with one exception, unbreached and firmly secured. He checked the log. The last entry, made on 24 November, recorded a position 800 miles (1,300 kilometres) from where the brigantine now drifted. A logslate notation, dated 25 November, revealed that captain and crew had sighted the island of St Mary, in the Azores.

  And then, nothing.

  Working night and day, Deveau and his two men sailed the ghost ship 600 miles (965 kilometres) to Gibraltar, where they dropped anchor on 13 December. In the 40 years that followed, almost to the time of his death, aged 80, in 1912, Oliver Deveau courteously allowed himself to be subjected to hundreds of newspaper and magazine interviews. He answered all questions and constructively considered all theories, but insisted always that he could think of ‘no rational reason’ for the mass exodus from Mary Celeste.

  But the authorities were convinced that there must be an explanation for the strange affair. In late December 1872, F. Solly-Flood, queen’s proctor in the Admiralty Court, ordered a ‘special survey’ of the derelict vessel. The initial investigators were the master of the court, T.R. Vecchio, surveyor of shipping, Gerald Austin, and a diver, Ricardo Fortunato. The trio’s findings, as reported in the Gibraltar Chronicle’s 30 January 1873 issue were that:

  The derelict known as the American brigantine Mary Celeste ‘appeared to be in a substantially serviceable condition.’ The hull exterior, below the waterline, ‘exhibited not the smallest trace of damage, and nor was there the appearance that the vessel had come into any kind of collision’.

  The state of the ship’s interior only intensified the investigators’ puzzlement. ‘A very minute survey showed most clearly that not only had the vessel not sustained any accident, but that she could not have encountered seriously heavy weather…The deckhouse, made of thin planking, was perfect; there not being a crack, even in the paint. The seamen’s chests and the clothing found were perfectly dry, some razors even being quite free from rust. Spare panes of glass were also found stowed, unbroken; and a small phial containing oil for use in a sewing machine was found in a perpendicular position which, together with a thimble and a reel of cotton nearby, had not been upset, as must have been the case if the ship had been subject to any stress of weather.’

  And of the grain alcohol, valued at about $80,000, which might have motivated a pirate attack, the report said: ‘All of the barrels were well-stowed and in good order and condition, except one barrel which had been started. Nothing had been stolen.’

  Mr Austin concluded, ‘The captain, B.S. Briggs by name, is well-known in Gibraltar and bore the highest character… The effects found in his cabin were of considerable value… and proved that a lady and child had been aboard. Up to this date, not a word has been heard, or a trace discovered, of the captain and his crew, or the lady and her child.’

  The American Consul’s Letter

  ON 18 JANUARY 1873 Horatio Sprague, the US Consul in Gibraltar, wrote an official memo, on the subject of Mary Celeste, to Worthington C. Ford of the State Department.

  Sprague said, in part:

  The case of the Mary Celeste, as you justly remark, is startling, since it appears to be one of those mysteries which no human ingenuity can recreate sufficiently to account for the abandonment of this vessel, and the disappearance of her master, family and crew, about whom nothing has ever transpired. Believe me.

  Mary Celeste quickly became the most talked-about ship in the world. Theories about what might have befallen her doomed passengers and crew dominated the international press. A Board of Inquiry, established to throw a cool judicial light on the affair, only succeeded in fomenting further confusion.

  A principal witness at the hearing was the brig’s defacto captain, Oliver Deveau. He testified that during his search he had come upon ‘a ceremonial sword, stained with rust’. Within days, rumour had transformed the weapon into a pirate’s bloodied sabre. The hysteria prompted a retired sea captain, F.W. Stainton, to write a letter to The Times of London, urging restraint. ‘Were a pirate band to bear blame,’ he wrote, ‘they would surely have been a group of men singularly lacking in greed, for nothing of value was taken.’

  * * *

  On London’s streets, earnest Temperance crusaders distributed a pamphlet, The Matter of the ‘Mary Celeste’Resolved. Responsibility for the tragedy, the publication averred, could be sheeted squarely to the ‘thousands of barrels of alcohol’ carried as cargo. Fumes from these inadequately sealed containers had driven the sailors mad, prompting them to kill the captain along with his wife and child, then dumping them into the ocean before fleeing by boat. The fatal weakness in this argument was that the Gibraltar investigators had checked the cargo and found it securely stored.

  Another theory, rejected by the inquiry, was that the crew had been eating bread made from rye, rather than wheat. When wet, rye breeds a fungus that can cause insanity if ingested. But again, the Gibraltar investigators and others that followed them had declared the brigantine’s food and water stores to be in excellent condition and sufficient for six months at sea. No wet, or even previously wet, bread had been found.

  In 1884 Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, muddied the issue further by writing a short story, Habakuk Jephson’s Statement, for the Cornhill Magazine. The narrative, filled with sensation and surmise, described the fate of a brigantine, Marie (sic) Celeste. Forgivably, many readers confused this imaginary vessel with the Mary Celeste of 1872. More than one popular historian in the late nineteenth century ignorantly aped Doyle’s spelling of the ship’s name, presenting his fictions as fact.

  False trails continued to appear up to the eve of World War I. In 1913 a schoolmaster, Howard Linford, published in London’s Strand magazine a collection of letters and notes which, he claimed, had been given to him by a dying employee, Abel Fosdyk. In
these journals, subsequently proved spurious, ‘Fosdyk’ alleged that Captain Briggs had taken him aboard Mary Celeste as a ‘secret passenger’ - after Fosdyk confided to the captain that he had to leave New York in a hurry.

  One afternoon (the almost certainly fictitious Fosdyk wrote) the captain and first mate Richardson had had a bitter argument about a man’s ability to swim fully clothed. To demonstrate that it was a simple matter, Captain Briggs jumped overboard - challenging Richardson to join him in the water. The entire crew, accompanied by Mrs Briggs and her child, crowded onto a small upper deck, which had been built exclusively for the little girl to play on. Abruptly the structure collapsed under the crowd’s combined weight. All fell into the sea, where they either drowned or were devoured by sharks. Fosdyk, the only survivor, escaped by boat.

  The report won exceptional sales for the Strand magazine. But it swiftly became apparent that the shadowy Fosdyk’s tale couldn’t possibly be true. Neither the scrupulous Gibraltar investigators, nor the exhaustive Board of Inquiry, had found the faintest evidence of a collapsed deck. Had they done so, the conundrum would have been resolved in an instant.

  Despite all the purported revelations and proof presented over the years, the fate of the lost souls aboard Mary Celeste has remained a mystery.

  But as this book will reveal, it is far from being a unique mystery.

  The profound puzzle of Mary Celeste is part of a pattern which has repeated itself through the centuries. A pattern whose meaning, at this time, eludes understanding.

  As any patient and painstaking researcher can ascertain, cases eerily similar to the enigma of Mary Celeste had been chronicled decades before 1872. And the roll-call of these inexplicable events continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first:

  Ships discovered drifting through open ocean, with no human life aboard.

  Systems intact, with no evidence of significantly disabling damage. Food and water supplies adequate. Meals sometimes found on tables. The crew’s clothing and other personal effects left behind.

  No sign of violent impact, either from the weather or from intruders.

  Ships in whose cabins valuables (jewellery, cash, documents) remained undisturbed.

  Ships whose principal shared characteristic was, in short, the uncanny absence of people.

  I will focus first on the most recent of these events: the disappearance, early in the present century, of the captain and crew of High Aim 6…

  Indian Ocean, 250 km off Broome, Western Australia. 9 January 2003

  It was the nauseating stench that alerted the captain and officers aboard Australian naval vessel HMAS Stuart that something was amiss. The afternoon was hot and cloudless, with the lightest of breezes - but the flow of air was strong enough, nevertheless, to be swamping the Stuart’s decks with a foul odour.

  Plainly the stomach-churning smell was emanating from the modern long-line fishing boat that bobbed on the swells ahead, drifting in circles. She was Indonesian-flagged. Her name, painted on the hull in both Taiwanese and English, was High Aim 6.

  When he received no answer to his signals, the Australian ship’s captain sent a party of men aboard the 150-tonne derelict. They found it silent, deserted. Seemingly it had been abandoned in a hurry. Clothes lay neatly folded in the lockers, along with international documents belonging to ship personnel. Seven toothbrushes hung neatly from a rack: a possible indication, an officer initially surmised, that there might have been a captain, a first mate and five crew. On the dash in the wheelhouse lay a pair of reading glasses, subsequently identified as belonging to the captain; a jar of Nescafé and an open carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

  The boarding party followed their noses to the source of the fetid smell. In the hold they found a rotting mess of mackerel and tuna. Subsequent tests showed that the fish had been caught two weeks earlier and weighed a total of three tonnes. High Aim’s freezer had failed when its engine stopped.

  Bemused, the Australians looked for further clues. There was no sign of violence or natural damage. If pirates had stormed the fishing boat, they had been exceedingly inefficient, leaving wallets containing considerable sums of Taiwanese and Indonesian cash behind - not to speak of the untouched documents, which would have fetched good prices in the wharfside underworld. The vessel was carrying sufficient drinking water, fruit and canned food to last several months. Her fuel tanks were half-full. If the captain and crew had simply abandoned ship, it was hard to imagine what their motive might have been.

  The men of HMAS Stuart nicknamed the ghost craft Mary Celeste. They towed her to a quarantine bay off Broome, where Australian Federal Police immediately began an intensive forensic investigation.

  Meanwhile the Royal Australian Navy, aided by coastwatch aircraft and a PC-3 Orion conducted a 25,000-kilometre search around the area where the fishing vessel was intercepted. They found no trace of the missing seafarers.

  Police established that the mystery ship had left Taiwan on 31 October 2002, and had last made radio contact with the owners, Tsai Huang Shuehe-er on 13 December, when she reported being near the Marshall Islands.

  Her Taiwanese captain was Chen Tai-chen; her chief engineer, Lee Ah-Duey. There were 10 Indonesian crew. The search coordinator, Bill Graham, told media reporters that he could find ‘no plausible reason’ for the men’s disappearance.

  Theories that pirates might have attacked the ship were widely dismissed in the press. A typical comment came from the Taipei Times, which described the notion as ‘unlikely’. The newspaper added: ‘There was no sign of a struggle - and the hijackers almost certainly would have made off with the boat.’

  * * *

  After eight months of fruitless investigation, the Federal Police transferred control of High Aim 6 to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority. The Taiwanese owners wrote to say that they did not want the vessel back - explaining that it would cost too much to make her seaworthy again. (They omitted to add that superstitious seamen might baulk at sailing in her.) On 13 January 2004, the fisheries authority announced that High Aim 6 would be hauled from the Broome mudflats on which she had lain beached through the previous year - and sunk offshore as an artificial reef.

  Next day Queensland’s Courier Mail summated this decision in the terse headline: GHOST SHIP WILL TAKE HER SECRETS TO THE GRAVE.

  As this book went to press, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Australian authorities continued to make it clear that they would welcome any information about the fate of the travellers aboard High Aim 6. However, as realists, they were unhopeful of hearing anything. Search coordinator Bill Graham had encapsulated the official feeling quite early when he said: As time goes on, the prospects of locating the crew alive decrease.’

  In the annals of the sea, cases of sailors disappearing without trace from their abandoned Mary Celeste-like vessels can be traced back 164 years. Probably the syndrome extends much further into the past, but contemporary chronicles, and official reports that distinguish fact from myth, are harder to find.

  Among the maritime enigmas (both pre- and post-Mary Celeste) enumerated below, similarities abound. But the greatest similarity of all is that not one of the captains, crewmen or passengers who had travelled aboard these abandoned ships was ever seen again. Alive or dead.

  Overture to the Mary Celeste Mystery: 1840-1857

  Rosalie, 1840

  THE RECORDS OF the British Maritime Museum reveal that the large French merchant ship Rosalie was built in 1838, from 222 tons of timber. The vessel came to the general public’s attention in 1840, when The Times of London, in its 6 November edition, reported that she had been intercepted ‘in peculiar circumstances’ in the Atlantic Ocean. Rosalie, laden with what the newspaper described as ‘valuable cargo’, had been en route from Hamburg to Havana. She was discovered with sails fully set and on course, despite the fact that nobody was at the wheel.

  In the forecastle, trapped in its cage, drooped a starving canary. Along the deck, domestic he
ns pecked desperately for any trace of nourishment.

  Aside from the squawking of the fowls and the hushing of the calm sea, all was quiet aboard Rosalie. The ship’s captain, officers, crew and passengers were nowhere to be found. This, as The Times remarked, was a puzzle, because there seemed to have been no reason for the mass desertion.

  Everything aboard the ship was in exemplary condition. There were no leaks. Food and water supplies were plentiful. The ‘obvious’ explanation - that the voyagers aboard Rosalie had been murdered by pirates - was ruled out both in France and Britain. There was not a crumb of evidence pointing to criminal intrusion. There was no sign of a struggle. No trace of blood. No bodies. The cargo, along with money and valuables belonging to all aboard, was untouched.

  For no discernible reason, every soul aboard Rosalie had vanished. No trace of them was ever found.

  Hermania, 1849

  In October 1849, 23 years before the fate of Mary Celeste would baffle the world, a fishing vessel happened upon a Dutch schooner, Hermania, adrift off the coast of Cornwall in southern England. Like the other craft in these cases she was in good condition, carrying adequate provisions. Her lifeboats had not been launched. But her captain and crew had vanished. Again, no remains were discovered.

  Unidentified Barque, 1852

  Another curious case, which preceded the Mary Celeste drama by two decades, was reported from the Gaspe Peninsula, Canada. The incident was recalled - under the heading MYSTERY SHIP - in the Berwick Register of 15 December 1915. The newspaper republished a correspondent’s detailed and circumstantial bulletin from Miramichi on 23 February 1852: