Full Transcript for 47. Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship That Wasn't

for a reason. This wasn't a warship lost in battle or a fishing boat that never came home with no witnesses. This was a commercial vessel found by another commercial vessel, boarded in daylight, sailed into the British port, and put under oath In the Admiralty Court, and so the mystery sits on paper. You can't argue about what the paper means. You can't pretend the abandonment didn't happen. Naval officer Rupert Gord later listed among other deserted ship reports from the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. But it's Mary Celeste or Maria Celeste that locked into the language. And what makes this one a little bit different from the Campfire Ghost Story is how much paper it left behind. There was a British Vice Admiralty salvage hearing in Gibraltar that ran from December 1872 until the spring of 1873. And there were surveys of the holes, chemical tests on supposed bloodstains, opinions from Royal Navy captains. Correspondence from American Consul, Horai, Horadio, Sprig, and other newspaper coverage on both sides of the Atlantic that jumped to foul play before the cart had even finished its work. And then 12 years later, a young ship surgeon named Arthur Conan Doyle published a short story that got so many of the details wrong, and many of the details became a popular memory. He even renamed the ship Marie, not Mary. And that misspelling is still what a lot of people type into a search bar. Royal Museums Greenwich still has to warn visitors that Doyle's inventions account is sometimes taken as fact, and that gap between the core file and the legend is what the episode today is about. Okay, getting into the background and history. The keel was laid in late 1860 at Joshua Dewey's Yard in Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia, off the Bay of Fundy. That's a fun word to say, fundy, fundy, fundy. Anyway, and the ship launched on May 18th, 1861, under the name Amazon. She was a Carvel built brigid Brigitteine, whole planking, flush rather than overlapping. And about 90 feet long as built, just under 200 yards gross ton, and registered near Parsborough. And her first captain, Robert Lelin, fell ill on the maiden loading run and died on June 19th before the voyage really got going. So this ship was already off to a great start. And so John Nuttingburn Parker took over and pushed the trip forward. And even that run picked up trouble. A collision with the fishing gear off Eastport Maine and later a collision with English Channel that sank another brig. That is just the opening chapter. And it is already a rough start for this vessel that people would later call cursed. And I can't blame them. now quiet years did come. Mate testimony from the mid-sixties says the West Indies, England, and Mediterranean trade went along with nothing unusual happening. So it did have some smooth patches. It's not all bad. And then in October 1867, Amazon was driven ashore at Cat at Cape Brenton in a storm and abandoned as a wreck. Within a month, she had a new local owner, and by November 1868, an American mariner named Richard Haynes. Had bought the vessel. Let's see, had bought I need to fix this, had brought the derelict for about seventeen hundred and fifty dollars and poured roughly eight hundred more into restoring her. In December 1868, he registered her in New York under the same name, Mary Celeste. Why that name, it's it's a little bit unclear. You know what? We're gonna do this part again. And then in October 1867, Amazon was driven ashore at Cape Brenton in a storm and abandoned as a wreck. Within a month, she had a new local owner, and by November 1868, an American mariner named Richard Haynes had bought the derelict for about seventeen hundred and fifty dollars. Jeez, that's a steal. I think I feel like for a boat, I would kill for a boat that cheap nowadays. And he poured, let's see, roughly eight hundred more into restoring her. In December 1868, he registered her in New York under a new name, Mary Celeste. So we went from Amazon to Mary Celeste. Why that name exactly, it's still unclear. Writers have floated everything from Galileo's daughter to nun to a nun. The registration itself is firm. The reason for the choice of the name is not. And by early 1872, she had built let's see, she had been rebuilt again at the cost of about ten thousand dollars. lengthened to roughly a hundred and three feet, broadened, deepened, given a second deck, and pushed up to about two hundred and eighty t 82 tons gross. On October 29th of that year, the ownership consortium had James Winchester holding six of twelve shares, two minor investors with each one, and Captain Benjamin Briggs holding one remaining four. So Briggs was not just hired help on the Genoa run. He actually owned one third of the ship. Briggs was born in Werriman, Massachusetts on April 24th, 1835, into a sea captain family. Nathan Briggs' sons mostly went to sea and two of them made captain. had a solid professional reputation by 1872, and a serious Christian faith that showed up in letters and prayer meeting accounts. He married his cousin, Sarah Elizabeth Cobb, which I guess was okay back then. eighteen sixty two, honeymooned on his schooner for as king in the Mediterranean, and then they had two children, Arthur in September eighteen sixty-five, and Soph Sophia Matilda in October eighteen seventy. And for this Genoa run, Briggs brought Sarah and his little Sophia with him and left seven year old Arthur home with his grandmother so the boy could stay in school. That detail matters later when the conspiracy theories claim Briggs planned to vanish on purpose. And in a letter to his mother just before sailing, Brake said he was eminently satisfied with a shift in crew. So that doesn't sound like the voice of a man writing to himself into a ghost story. That's just the captain getting ready to take off for a voyage. And the crew was picked carefully. First mate Albert Richardson had sailed under Briggs before and was married to the niece of Winchesters. second

mate Andrew Gilling was about twenty-five, New York born, a Danish extraction, Stephen Edward Millard Head, was newly married and came with a personal recommendation from the Winchester himself. The four seamen were Germans from the Frisbon Islands, brothers Vulcan and Boz Lausnen. Wouldn't be Mitch, it wouldn't be one of our episodes, even if Mitch is here. If I'm not butchering these people's names, so I apologize. Plus, Arian Martins and Gullib later described in a testimonial as a peaceful and first class sailor. Let's see. As Sarah wrote to her mother that the men seemed quite capable, if they continued as they had begun. Now, one later film theory tried to hang suspicion on the L Lorenz brothers because none of their personal gear was found aboard. Lorenz descendant told a document documentarian Anne McGregor the pair had already lost their kit when the ship wrecked earlier in eighteen seventy two. So that missing gear detail, even if it is accurate accurate, is a mund has a mundane explanation next to it. Sadly, they just lost their gear previously. It's not It's nothing suspicious. All right. On October 20th, 1872, Briggs was at Pier 50 on the East River supervising the loading of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol billed for Genoa. His wife and invid daughter joined him about a week later. On Sunday, November 3rd, Briggs wrote to his mother that he intended to leave Tuesday, adding that the vessel was in beautiful trim and he hoped for a fine passage. And the morning of Tuesday, November fifth, Mary Celeste Mary Celeste left with a pe left the pier with all ten aboard and anchored off Staten Island to wait out uncertain island. Sorry, w outwave outways uncertain weather. It's too late for this guy. I need Mitch here to help keep me straight. And Sarah used the delay to send one last letter asking Arthur be told that she would depend on his letters and would try to remember everything on the voyage he would want to hear. Two days later, the weather eased and the Mary Celeste entered the Atlantic. That letter is one of the last ordinary human documents in this whole file. After that, the paper turns into logs, surveys, and court minutes. Eight days behind them, on November fifteenth, the Canadian brid Brigantine Del Gradia left Hobican with a petroleum cargo for Genoa via Gibraltar under Captain David Morehouse and his first mate Oliver DeVoo. Both Nova Scotians, both experience. Some later accounts say Briggs and Morehouse were close friends who dined together the night before Mary Celeste sailed. That claim rests mainly on recollection from Morehouse's widow fifty years after the fact, and Briggs' family never independently actually confirmed a close friendship during the hearing, so you can treat that dinner story or take it with a grain of salt, I guess I should say. And what is firm is in the parallel route, the eight day gap and the afternoon in early December when Diagradia found Mary Celeste drifting with nobody answering. Paul Begg has pointed out that if a deep friendship had really existed, it almost inc it's almost inconceivable that it would not have been mentioned other under oath in Gibraltar also And so the safe version is the two captains on the same general trade lane, eight days apart, and then one ship is empty. Friendship unknown. All right, now that we've gone through all the background leading up onto like what happened, why they were on their voyage, who found them, now we're gonna get actually into what the boarding party found. So around one in the afternoon on December 4th, 1872, December 5th in sea time, because the 19th century sea time ran 12 hours ahead of land time, Diagradia was nearly 38 degrees 20 no 20 minutes north, 17 degrees 15 west. When the sorry. When Morehouse sent DeVoo and Wright across, they identified Mary Celeste by the name on the stern and climbed onto the ship that was deserted but not dead. Sails partly set and in poor condition, some missing, rigging damage, ropes hanging loose over the sides. Four and Lazant hatches were open with their covers on deck, but the main hatch was secure. And then the single lifeboat A small yawl, normally stowed across the main hatch, was missing. The binnacle housing, the compass had shifted, and its glass was broken. About three and a half feet of water sat in the hold, which for a ship this size was significant but not fatal. And a vuo later sailed her, so she was still a working vessel. Wood's hole ocean oceanographer, Phil Richardson, would put it plainly more than a century later. It wasn't flooded or horribly damaged. This I mean the Discovery crew sailed it, so it was in pretty good shape. and in the mate's cabin they found the daily log and the final entry was dated eight in the morning on november twenty fifth, nine days earlier. It put Mary Celeste at thirty seven degrees one minute north, twenty five degrees one minute west off Santa Maria in the Azores. nearly four hundred nautical miles from where de Gradia had found her. The cabin interior were wet and untidy from the water through the doorways and the skylights, but otherwise they were in reasonable order. Personal items were scattered in Briggs' cabin, including a sheathed sword under one bed. And most of the ship's papers were gone, and so were the captain's navigational instruments. No obvious signs of a fire, no obvious signs of a fight, The picture that comes through DeVu's rapport is an orderly departure into a missing yawl, not a mid breakfast vanish, and the gap between that last log and the boarding, that nine days of empty ocean is the stretch that that theory has to cross. DeVu also noted a makeshift sounding rod left abandoned on deck, the tool that you use to measure how much water is in the hold. One of the ship's pumps was disassembled. Mary Celeste had carried coal on a previous voyage and had just come through a major rebuild. The coal dust plus the construction debris can foul a pump. And so DeVoo later floated

an explanation built around that rod. If the pump was wrong or if a fault sounding Or if a false sounding made Brig think the water was rising fast, an experienced captain might order everyone into the boat as a temporary precaution, but that's not proven. It's one of the earliest documented reading of sight of the physical scene, and it starts from the gear left on the deck rather than the ghost story. Brig's cousin, Oliver Cobb, later suggested that the yawl may have been meant as a temporary safety measure, possibly even trailed on the line so the company would return. the other writers have called that illogical. Why hit yourself to a ship but think it is about to explode or sink? The rod itself does not answer that. It just puts water anxiety on the table. So if you didn't get that last little bit, it's talking about that they got into their little rowboat, their little dinghy thing or whatever, and potentially tied a line where they could kind of get tugged along behind their boat to make sure everything was gonna be fine and it wasn't gonna sink before they got back on. But who knows, maybe the rope snapped or something like that. Alright, so Moorhouse split his eight men crew and sent DeVoo plus two seamen to sail Mary Celeste roughly 600 nautical miles to Gibraltar. DeGradia arrived December twelfth. Mary Celeste, slowed by fog, arrived the next morning and was immediately impounded. DeVu wrote his fa sorry, wrote his wife that he could hardly tell what was made of the What was made of after the ordeal, but he did not care so long as he got in safe. And then he expected to be well paid for the Mary Celeste. Salvage hearings operated December seventeenth under Chief Justice Sir James Cochrane, with attorney general Frederick Sully Flood driving the inquiry. So as a side note, everybody listening. basically if you could f if you found an ab if you basically found like an old man and ship, you could turn it in for like a bounty, like to the salvage court. So like they w they returned the ship to Gibraltar so they could get paid. And Flood became convinced almost immediately that a crime had happened. The New York shipping and commercial list printed on the mood on December 21st, the inference was foul play somewhere, and alcohol was on the bottom of it was at the bottom of it. Historians of the case have not been gentle about Flood. Once called as arrogance, irreversibly proportional to his IQ. Another said that he made up his mind. Once he made up his mind, it could not be shifted, just like everybody else. And so the hearing that should have been about salvage money turned into a three month hunt for a murder flood could not quite prove. So getting into the sword and the stains on December twenty third, surveyor of the shipping John A Austin examined the vessel with diver Ricardo Portonado. Austin noted cuts on each side of the bow that came from a sharp instrument, and he flat he flagged possible blood on the captain's sword found underneath the bed. He also leaned on the vial of sewing machine oil found upright as proof that the ship had not been through heavy weather. That makes sense, it would have tipped over. without acknowledgement that the vial might have been set back in place after the abandonment. Royal Navy captains later endorsed the idea of deliberate bow cuts. and pointed to the stains on the rail and deep mark that might have just been from an axe. And Flood built a murder theory on that material. Crew into the alcohol, Briggs family killed, bows cut to fake a collision, yaw fled in the unknown fate. Then the scientific analysis showed up that the stains were in fact not blood. The result was not was known to Cochrane and Flood, But it was kept out of the public print for about 14 years, which left the bloodshed version free to circulate the newspapers and later to folklore. So once again, it's a lot harder to get the genie back in the bottle once it's out there. So people ran wild with the story that there was blood found on the ship, even though it was later proved that it wasn't. So the court file and the public story div diverged early and they never really ever came back together. So marks on the bow. American consul Auradio Sprague commissioned a separate look from Captain Shuffled of the US Navy and Shuffold's read was different. In his view, the battle marks were not man-made at all. They were a natural action of the sea ship's timbers. Portonado's whole report had already said that Mary Celeste had not been in a collision and had not been run aground. James Wintersters arrived on Gibraltar on July on January fifteenth. Trying to free his cargo, and Flood demanded a fifteen thousand surety Winchester did not have. While floating the idea, Winchester might have hired a crew to kill Briggs as part of some conspiracy. And so by late winter 1873, Flood's concrete supports were collapsing even as his own conviction held. Winchester testified to Briggs' high character and insisted he would not have banded shipped except for an extreme extremity. The court released Mary Celeste on February twenty-fifth. Two weeks later, under Captain George Blatchford and a locally raised crew, she finally left for Genoa with the alcohol cargo. The salvaged award, decided April eighteenth, came in at about seventeen hundred pounds, roughly a fifth of the combined value, low enough that the commentators read it as a lasting suspicion. So they did get their salvage money for it, but it was not as much as they were hoping. When the cargo was checked in Genoa, nine of those thousand one thousand seven hundred barrels were empty. The rest were intact. And that level of loss was treated as acceptable for that kind of shipment. I mean, we're talking this is ages ago. We're talking barrels of alcohol, like it's understandable you're gonna lose some of them. But later researchers noted that those nine empty barrels have been recorded as red oak, not white oak like the others. And

red oak is more porous and more likely to leak. And that detail matters for the fumes theory without proving an explosion. It also undercuts the simple idea that the crew drank the cargo. The empty barrels lined up with a wood type and the seepage better than with the drunken binge and desiccadents sorry descendants interviewed much later for the documentary were pushed back on the mutiny as a motive. Flood's alcohol murker stroke murder thory needed drunken sailors. The cargo paper gives him leaky barrels instead. Those are not the same thing. So getting into the alcohol view's account. Briggs cousin Oliver Cobb became a strong proponent of the alcohol vapor scenario, which I've heard people discuss on other podcasts as well as a as an explanation for what happened on this shift. On this ship, my gosh, this shift, this ship. All right. So let's see, rumbling from the hole, the smell of the escaping fumes, maybe a blast scare, and then an evacuation into the all before the ship could explode. The open four and Lazari hatches fit an inspection or attempted airing. Arthur N. Putten, a New York insurance appraiser, looked at the records in 1910. Claimed the log mentioned ominous rumbling and small explosion sounds from the hold that claim is a single sourced through later summaries. So you can take that for what it's worth, especially considering the original log is believed to be unlost after 1885. So who knows? And the hard objection has always been the evidence of bur the sorry, the absence of burn marks or blast damage. If the ship had suffered a conventional explosion, you would expect scorched wood or ruined barrels, and the boarding party did not report that. So the fumes account stays alive as panic theory. It stays consisted as physical damage theory, and those are not the same claim. One is about fear, and the other is about fire. So Once again, what we're talking about here is potentially the crew smelt the vapors, thought there was going to be an explosion, and got onto their yaw, like their little boat, as a precaution because they thought the boat was going to explode. In 2006, chemist Andrea Sella at University College London ran a hold metal experiment for a Channel 5 documentary using butane to stand in for alcohol vapor. The blast produced a spectacular wave of flame and behind it relatively cool air. No suit, no burning or scorch on the model, and Cela described it as a pressure wave type of explosion. Drat dramatic enough to terrify the crew, quiet enough on the wood that the later boarding pirate party might find no story written into the timbers. That doesn't exactly close this theory, but it does remove one of the main objections people use to dismiss the fumes theory flat. A later university in Manchester model using wood and ethanol pushed the same direction for another channel five film. A rapid vapor blast could scare people off without leaving the without leaving a burning pattern. Everyone assumed you n everyone assumed

you would need. So I don't know if any of you have seen this experiment as a kid, like when you were in scholar school or anything like that, where People pour like seventy percent alcohol on something and light it on fire and you see it burn, the alcohol burns, but the object you actually put it on. I remember as a kid, they did like a twenty dollar bill, they dipped it in like seventy percent alcohol and lit it on fire, and the dollar bill was untouched or the twenty-dollar bill was untouched after. So I could very much see an alcohol explosion seeming like a big deal, but not actually leaving a lot about damage behind. So the Corn Hill magazine story. In january eighteen eighty-four, Cornhill magazine published J. Havcook's Jeffson statement, an early piece of fiction by 25-year-old ship surgeon named Arthur Kennan Doyle. Conan Doyle. Name he renamed the ship Mary Celeste Celeste. I'm sorry guys. He me my gosh. He renamed the ship Mary Marie Celeste. He moved the voyage to 1873, shifted the ports from New York, Genoa to Boston, Lipson, invented passengers, changed the cabin's name captain's name to J.W. Tibbs, and built a revenge plot including fanatic named Septimus Goring that almost has nothing to do with the Gibraltar file. Duill did not expect the story to be taken as fact. So, have you ever had that moment where you maybe like Push the story a little bit, you exaggerate a little bit, and then suddenly it starts getting spread around. You're like, crap. Yeah, so something like that. Horatio Sprague, still in the US console in Gerbarture, was intrigued enough to ask whether any of part of it might be true. The misspilling, the invented atmosphere, traveling farther than the court testimony. Half-finished breakfast, warm tea, a ship pause mid-life. That folklore mostly traces to a later retelling's. fed by Doyle's fame and by press embroidery like the Los Angeles Timepiece of June 1883. Not to DeVoe's sworn description of a wet mess. And once Marie Celeste Celeste was in print, Mary Celeste had to fight for her own name. So once again, there's the boring court documents about what was found on the ship, and then there's the more fantastic and exciting version of a ship that basically like mid breakfast meal, just the crew disappeared. That was kind of spread by Conan Doyle. So later survivor stories. Once the legend had market, the hoax is just got bolder and bolder. In 1913, the Strand magazine ran the able ran an able physical I don't know how to say that, Fosdyke survivor account full of basic mistakes. Griggs for Briggs Spoil for Morehouse, the daughter aged seven instead of two, a crew of 13, and their ignorance of nautical language that should have killed the piece on contact. In the 1920s, Irish Florence Keating sold another survivor tale, so convincing that the New York Herald Tribune piece on July 26, 1926, treated it as beyond dispute. And even while It reused Doyle's Marie spelling and mangled key personnel. And Captain R. Lucy's floated a botswain informant in the Daily Express, though not such Botswain appears in the registered crew list. McDonald Hasting, later called King's Horse, an imprudent trick by a man not without imaginative ability. These stories matter because they show how the Mary Celeste industry works. print authority first, verification second, and the court record the court record farther and farther back in the stack. Alright, so Mary Celeste did deliver to Genoa late on June twenty-sixth, eighteen seventy-three, and returned to New York on September nineteenth. The Gibraltar hearings with a newspaper trail of bloodshed and murder had made her an unpopular ship. Hastings wrote that she rotted on wharves where nobody wanted her. She changed hands at a loss in 1874, worked West India and Indian Ocean routes. And kept losing money. In February 1879, she put into St. Helena so Captain Edgar Tuthill could get a medical help. Tuthill died on the island, the third captain tied to the vessel to die prematurely. And honestly, that just fueled the curse even more. And in January 1885, Captain Gilman C. Parker deliberately wrecked her on the Ricolaeus bank off Haiti as part of an insurance fraud built on worthless cargo, listed as valuable goods, and insured for about $30,000. The conspiracy case ended with a hung jury and a deal that forced the defendants to drop claims and repay what they had taken. Parker died in poverty, poverty months later. In 2001, Clive Custler's team thought they had found her timbers in the reef, but then Dendodrachnology showed that the wood came from trees still growing around eighteen ninety-four, about a decade after the wreck. So even the ship's grave got a false identification. And the people from eighteen seventy-two were never found.