The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  The courier from Perce to Restigouche has informed me that when he left below there was a large barque in the ice off Gaspe. The barque had her fore-top sail and jib set.

  Two men by means of a skiff got on board and found her laden with red pine. There were 60 bags of bread and 20 barrels of flour, also the ship’s papers. There appears nothing wrong with her apart from the loss of her rudder and part of the bow-sprit. A crew of men are going on board with the intention of working her out of the ice, and taking her to some port in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland.

  There was not a soul to be found on board, yet strange to say, none of the boats belonging to the ship were gone, all being in their proper place, so that what has become of the crew remains a mystery.

  James B. Chester, 1857

  In October 1857 (December in some reports) the barque James B. Chester was reportedly found becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. Her chairs were upended, plates of food lay putrefying on a table - and nobody was aboard.

  Mysteries in Mary Celeste’s Wake

  Resolven, 1884

  THE 143-TONNE brigantine Resolven was built from softwood in Nova Scotia. During the 1880s she plied a profitable trade as a carrier. Her principal cargo was fish.

  On 27 August 1884, under the captaincy of Stephen James, with six crew and three passengers, Resolven left Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, for Snug Harbour, Labrador. Two days later a British naval vessel, HMS Mallard, encountered her, sails set and ‘steering strangely’ in relatively calm waters, 63 miles (100 kilometres) from her intended destination.

  When his signals were ignored, Mallard’s captain despatched a boarding party. His officers and men could find no sign of life on the brigantine - but there was evidence that people had been present quite recently. The ashes of a fire that had been burning in the galley were still warm. There was no indication of damage, either natural or caused by man.

  Neither the British officers, nor a subsequent inquiry, could find any reason why all aboard Resolven had suddenly abandoned ship.

  Freya, 1902

  In its April 1907 edition the British scientific journal Nature looked back on the eerie disappearance of yet another ship’s captain and crew. The men, in this case, had been sailing on the German barque Freya.

  On 3 October 1902 the barque left Manzanilla for Punto Arenas on the west coast of Mexico. On 20 October fishermen found Freya at sea, partly dismasted and completely deserted. Her anchor was still hanging free at the bow, suggesting that a calamity of some kind had occurred relatively soon after she left port. This theory was strengthened by the date on a calendar in the captain’s cabin: 4 October - one day after Freya had begun her journey.

  Weather reports showed that on 4 and 5 October conditions in the area had been fine, with light winds. German maritime authorities could find no reason why the voyagers on Freya had abandoned ship. No bodies were found…

  Carroll A. Deering, 1921

  The fathomless enigma of the Carroll A. Deering sparked headlines and increasingly shrill argument around the globe.

  The immense five-masted schooner, launched from Bathe, Maine, in 1919, had spent most of her brief working life carrying goods between US ports and South America.

  On 1 December 1920, she unloaded a cargo of coal at Rio de Janeiro, then set sail for her home harbour: Portland, Maine. Almost two months later (31 January 1921) the men of Ocracoke Island coastguard station, off North Carolina, spotted through their telescopes a five-masted ship, all sails set, hard aground four miles (six kilometres) distant, on Diamond Shoals.

  After three days in which surfboats, fighting mountainous waves, failed to reach the vessel, rescuers sent out a tugboat, whose crew managed to board the stricken ship. They identified her as Carroll A. Deering.

  The men of the boarding party were greeted by an unsettling (but, in the context of this narrative) familiar scene. There was no sign of humanity aboard. The only living creatures were three famished ship’s cats. On the galley table, plates of spare ribs, along with a large tureen of pea soup and a pot of coffee, stood untouched. The food seemed still to be fresh, but as the coastguards later testified, it could well have been preserved for days by the bitter weather.

  The ship’s boats were gone. The coastguards were at a loss to know why. The grounded schooner was stable - and the sailors aboard would have been sensible to use her as a shelter until they were rescued. Obviously, something had prompted this mass desertion. The coastguards searched the schooner from stem to stern. They found no blood, no bodies, no evidence of any form of violence.

  * * *

  The captain, on this tragic final voyage, had been a 66-year-old master mariner, Willis B. Wormwell. He had plied this and associated routes for 25 years. Witnesses at the subsequent inquiry found it inconceivable that a sailor of such experience would have led his crew to the lifeboats without firing distress rockets beforehand - signals that would easily have been seen by the 24-hour lookout four miles (six kilometres) distant. By simply quitting the schooner, Captain Wormwell and his men would surely have gone to certain death among the shoals.

  What had driven them to such a suicidal act?

  Over the following 10 days shipping and coastguard vessels scoured thousands of square kilometres of ocean, coves and beaches, seeking any trace of the 11 missing men, or wreckage of the lifeboats in which presumably they had escaped. The search produced nothing.

  The controversy surrounding the crew’s fate inspired such enormous press coverage that the then US Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, placed himself in charge of the investigation. May 1921 brought an apparent breakthrough. A local seaman, Christopher Gray, went to coastguard headquarters with a letter which, he said, he had found in a bottle washed up on a beach near his Buxton home. The message, purportedly from Carroll A. Deering’s engineer, Herbert Bates, read:

  Oil-burning boat captured us. Crew hiding all over ship. Some in handcuffs. Finder please notify authorities.

  Herbert Hoover promptly summoned Bates’s mother, the schooner’s owner, Gardner Deering, and three handwriting experts. All confirmed that the letter was indeed in the hand of the chief engineer.

  But the bottle’s finder, seaman Gray, seemed to be enjoying his new fame rather too much. Suspicious, Hoover despatched two federal agents to question him at exhaustive length. Gray buckled under the tough questioning and admitted that he had written the note - basing its uprights and distinctive narrow loops on a specimen of the engineer’s penmanship.

  The federal investigation was back where it had begun. Despite attempts, decades later, to rationalise the mass disappearance with stories of ‘intrigue’ aboard ship, the fate of Captain Willis B. Wormwell and the 10 who had journeyed with him would never be known.

  Joyita, 1955

  The 70-foot (21-metre) luxury yacht Joyita (‘Little Jewel’) was built in 1931 at the Wilmington Boat Works, Los Angeles. Her first owner was the film producer Roland West. He little imagined, when he took delivery of his expensive new toy, that it would one day become the focus of the Pacific Ocean’s most uncanny mystery.

  Joyita was a twin-screw, two-diesel-engine motor vessel, thickly insulated with cork: an addition, her designers boasted, that made her virtually unsinkable. But despite her palatial fittings and sybaritic comforts - and a sparkling cargo of French Champagnes and gourmet delicacies - the yacht brought little happiness to those who sailed in her. Joyita was the focus of trauma and ill-luck almost from the day she was launched.

  At Roland West’s invitation many motion picture performers enjoyed weekends and holidays aboard the spacious craft. One was West’s lover, the then-celebrated actress Thelma Todd. When she was murdered, the more raucous American tabloids ascribed the tragedy to a curse. The accidents, illnesses and mishaps that had plagued Joyita during her first months at sea were evidence of a jinx, the journalists claimed.

  Stung by the bad publicity Roland West sold the yacht for considerably less than he had paid. Joyita was passed among various owners u
ntil, in 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Navy requisitioned her as a patrol boat.

  After World War II Joyita spent several years plying the Samoan and Fijian coasts as a fishing vessel and copra ship. During this period she ran aground three times. The writer Robin Maugham, who briefly owned the yacht in 1950, was so disturbed by her dark reputation that he asked an Anglican priest to conduct an exorcism ceremony on the deck. The request went all the way to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is not believed to have given his assent. In 1952 Dr Katharine Luomola of the University of Hawaii bought the yacht and chartered her to a Welsh friend, Captain T.H. (‘Dusty’) Miller. He would meet his fate aboard Joyita.

  * * *

  For much of the twentieth century the people of the Tokelau Islands had been fighting a bitter struggle for existence. Their Pacific neighbours were in the habit of helping out - and in September 1955 the Tokelauans urgently asked for aid again. Poor food crops and an ailing economy had reduced living standards to below subsistence level. The islands’ flour, sugar, vegetables and fruit were almost gone. Medical stocks were dangerously low. The farmers had more than 100 tonnes of cut copra awaiting export: a crop that would bring desperately needed cash, if only they could afford the transport.

  The governments of New Zealand and Western Samoa commissioned Dusty Miller, captain of Joyita, to take a cargo of relief supplies to Tokelau, then to load the copra and deliver it to Australian buyers.

  On 3 October 1955 Joyita swept out of the harbour at Apia, Western Samoa, heading for Fakaofo in the Tokelau Islands, over 430 kilometres distant. Aboard were 25 people, comprising Captain Miller, 12 Samoan crewmen, three government officials and nine paying passengers - among them, two children.

  None of them would ever be seen again.

  The voyage from Apia to Fakaofo should not have taken more than 48 hours. After three days, with no sign of Joyita on the horizon, the Tokelauans used their primitive radio equipment to raise the alarm. The Royal New Zealand Air Force mounted an extensive search which eventually covered more than 260,000 square kilometres of ocean - but found nothing.

  The breakthrough came five weeks later, on 10 November 1955. Captain Gerald Douglas, master of the Tuvalu, en route from Suva to Funafuti, spotted a vessel drifting off the Fijian coast. It was Joyita - waterlogged, but in no danger of sinking. She was completely deserted.

  A Chinese tug towed the yacht into Fiji. Meanwhile, three RNZAF officers scoured the ship. They reported that the tanks contained fuel enough for 4,800 kilometres and that there were ample supplies of water and food. The searchers opened hatches, forced a cabin door and shouted continuously - encouraging anyone who might be lying injured somewhere to shout back. Silence greeted them.

  One of the officers who went aboard that day was Gerry Ayre, a member of NZAF 5 Squadron. ‘It was scary looking for the people who should have been on Joyita,’ he later recalled. ‘We found nothing - not even a scrap of paper or a pencil. The ship was clean - no rags, nothing.’

  But there was one small trail of evidence. The searchers discovered clues that led them to believe the abandonment of the grand yacht had occurred in two stages. They deduced that someone must have stayed on board after the others left; using an awning, either to catch water or provide shelter from the furious Pacific sun.

  * * *

  In December 1955 a Commission of Inquiry sat in Western Samoa. After several weeks of intense investigation it delivered a 315-page finding. Its conclusion: the fate of Joyita’s passengers and crew was ‘inexplicable’.

  But the world beyond the sweltering courtroom, with its lazily thwacking ceiling fans, wanted more satisfactory answers:

  Why had every soul aboard abandoned ship? Joyita was partly waterlogged, certainly - but she remained safe for human occupation. Everyone, from Captain Miller down, knew that the ship’s cork lining rendered her virtually unsinkable. Surely they would not have been so foolish as to take their chances in lifeboats, in shark- ridden waters when they could have stayed on board and awaited rescue.

  This was the same question that had been asked about the vanished men of the Carroll A. Deering…and of the people aboard Mary Celeste…and of Rosalie and Resolven and Zebrina and…

  And what had happened aboard Joyita? The inquiry had offered no more than theories, assumptions and exclusions. Could it be possible, some observers asked, that there might be a more bizarre explanation for the mystery than officialdom cared publicly to speculate upon?

  * * *

  The mysterious history of Mary Celeste and her vanished captain, passengers and crew has been chronicled on the postage stamps of several nations.

  FOR MORE THAN 130 years writers and historians have habitually referred to the case of the brigantine Mary Celeste. This is a misnomer. The fate of Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his daughter and his crew was far less a case than part of a syndrome - a phenomenon so profoundly strange that it defies conventional analysis.

  I have confined this survey to larger vessels from which there have been multiple arcane disappearances. But the Mary Celeste syndrome has also affected smaller craft with crews of two or three.

  A common thread runs through all these ship-abandonments - namely that every person aboard every vessel has been missing.

  It might seem reasonable to expect that the law of averages, or of fate, or even of sheer fumbling luck would dictate that at least one life on one of these ships had been preserved. That at least a single person had been spared to tell the world what actually happened.

  But no. Nobody - from 1840 through to 2003 - has ever survived the Mary Celeste syndrome.

  The vanishing rate is always 100 per cent.

  Enigma of the Empty Boat

  EIGHT YEARS after the Mary Celeste revelations mystified the world, a comparably strange disappearance occurred on the coast of the vast Australian continent.

  On a warm spring afternoon (10 October 1880) farmworker William Johnston was riding his horse near the coastal town of Bermagui, New South Wales, when he noticed ‘something shining’ on the rocks. Walking closer, he realised it was a green fishing boat, its mast and sail lashed to the thwarts.

  Constable Berry, the policeman supervising Bermagui’s newly discovered goldfields, inspected the boat and found papers and clothing belonging to two recently arrived Mines Department employees, English geologist Lamont Young and his German field assistant, Maximilian Schneider.

  Also in the boat were effects belonging to its owner Thomas Towers and the seamen he regularly employed, William Lloyd and Daniel Casey.

  On the rocks near the boat were the remains of a meal. But the five men who, conceivably, had eaten it were nowhere to be found. The New South Wales authorities mounted a major investigation. Like Constable Berry before them, detectives could find no signs of a struggle. Significantly, no footprints led across the stretch of hard sand between the rocks on which the boat rested and the bushland beyond.

  Despite the NSW government’s postings of increasingly large rewards, no one came forward to explain how five strong men - one of them described as ‘a governmental servant of some importance’ - had vanished without trace. Police dismissed theories that the men might have drowned. If that had occurred, who had painstakingly dragged the boat across sharp rocks before depositing it 67 metres from the sea?

  * * *

  After four weeks of searches involving almost 1,000 officials and volunteers failed to find any sign of the missing men, geologist Lamont Young’s parents decided to take matters into their own hands. In a passionate petition to Queen Victoria, Mrs Emma Young asked that Britain despatch a new search party to find her ‘most excellent and noble son’. (Through an aide, the queen coldly expressed confidence in the efforts her colonial subjects were already making.)

  Lamont’s father, Major General C.B. Young, lobbied actively too - but overall he felt as baffled and helpless as everyone else. On 31 December 1880, in a long letter to the NSW Under-Secretary of Mines, he wrote:
‘The universal conclusion of all parties in this country is that the five men could not have drowned or been murdered without leaving some trace behind.’

  A journalist writing in the Sydney Morning Herald described the entire affair as ‘unintelligible’ - adding, ‘This business is a puzzle enshrouded in an enigma.’

  When Australia became a federation in 1901, police in all states still kept active files on the five missing men of Bermagui. But their fate remains as great a mystery today as when their empty green boat was first noticed, on that sunny October afternoon.

  * * *

  The Secret Agent and

  the Uncanny Cloud

  Wartime Mysteries

  * * *

  Josephine Butler was an elite intelligence agent directly answerable to Winston Churchill. She parachuted more than 50 times into Nazi-occupied France to lead a network of Resistance fighters. When one of those drops went wrong - and she was wandering lost and injured - a ‘benign force’ intervened and guided her to safety. Many people embroiled in the horror of World War II have described similarly mysterious rescues…

  THE IDENTITY OF JOSEPHINE BUTLER (CODENAME ‘JAY BEE’) was unknown even to Britain’s War Office and MI5. As the sole female member of Winston Churchill’s ‘Secret Circle’ she clandestinely organised several of the Allies’ most devastating blows against the Nazi regime in France - coups that remained top-secret until long after the war ended.

  A small part of her courageous work was first noted in Paris, whose newspapers hailed her as one of the French people’s greatest friends. When the British press picked up the trail she retreated, at first, into hiding. All she wanted was a quiet life in peaceful, albeit bomb-scarred, Britain.