An Abandoned Merchant Ship Was Discovered Floating in the Atlantic in 1872. The Mystery of Its Missing Crew Was Never Solved

On December 4, 1872, sailors aboard the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia spotted a ship named the Mary Celeste in the distance. The vessel appeared to be drifting aimlessly in the restless Atlantic, about 400 miles east of the Azores.

But though the ship was seaworthy and well-stocked with cargo and supplies, its lifeboat was missing and not a single person was aboard.

“Thus was born one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history,” wrote Jess Blumberg for Smithsonian magazine. “What happened to the ten people who had sailed aboard the Mary Celeste?”

The mysterious ship, first named the Amazon, was built in Nova Scotia in 1861. For the most part, the Amazon was unremarkable, engaged in a typical trading route between the West Indies, England and the Mediterranean. After a series of mishaps and a wreck off Cape Breton, however, Richard W. Haines, an American businessman, bought the ship, made significant repairs and renamed it the Mary Celeste.

In fall 1872, the Mary Celeste was loaded with a cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol bound for Genoa, Italy. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs left his home in Marion, Massachusetts, traveling to New York to embark on the ship’s latest journey.

As the ship “left her Staten Island anchorage, she began a voyage destined to lift her from comparative obscurity to a place of enduring fame in the chronicles of the sea,” Charles Edey Fay wrote in The Story of the Mary Celeste.

Briggs, his wife, 2-year-old daughter and seven crew members were aboard the ship as it headed to the Azores, battling two weeks of bad weather and stormy seas on the Atlantic. But entries in the ship’s log stopped on November 25. Nothing more was heard of the Mary Celeste until the Dei Gratia arrived nine days later.

Captain David Morehouse of the Dei Gratia brought his ship close to offer help or directions to the other vessel. But despite its full cargo and fine sailing condition, no one was aboard the other ship. From Gibraltar, another 800 miles past where he discovered the Mary Celeste, Morehouse sent a cablegram to the disaster clerk of the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company in New York describing the “seaworthy” vessel he found abandoned in the middle of the ocean.

Back in the United States, speculation about why a captain, his wife, his baby and his seven-man crew abandoned a well-provisioned and seaworthy ship fueled itself. An article in the Alexandria Gazette claimed that the circumstances were “strongly indicative of unfair dealing. … The inference is that there has been foul play somewhere and that alcohol is at the bottom of it.”

The True Story of the Mary Celeste

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The Mary Celeste’s crew was never heard from again.

British authorities in Gibraltar ultimately ruled against claims of foul play. But that verdict, which didn’t offer any alternative explanations for the disappearance of the ship’s crew, did nothing to settle restless minds.

Ten years later, stories still abounded. In one case, the Los Angeles Times embellished details about the Mary Celeste for dramatic effect, changing the captain’s name and turning the real-life mystery into a dubious myth.

Even esteemed writer Arthur Conan Doyle got in on the action, writing a tall tale called “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement” from the perspective of the ship’s fictional sole survivor. Doyle’s proposed solution to the mystery—that a group of Africans killed every crew member except for the narrator and set the ship adrift into the Atlantic—hardly stands to reason.

A more reasonable theory, advanced in “The True Story of the Mary Celeste,” a Smithsonian Channel documentary, argues that Briggs might have ordered an evacuation because he believed that the Mary Celeste was taking on too much water after coal dust from a previous voyage clogged the ship’s pumps.

But with no survivors to testify about what happened aboard the Mary Celeste, questions remain about the reason the crew abandoned the ship and what happened afterward. Explanations of the mysterious crew’s fate remain only theories, adrift on a sea of speculation.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.