The Mary Celeste Mystery: A Mini-Essay

     In November of 1872, the one-hundred-ninety-eight-ton Mary Celeste left New York with a load of alcohol bound for Italy. Although it was his first voyage aboard this vessel, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs was an experienced mariner and he hired a crew of seven skilled sailors.[1] The voyage promised to be routine and uneventful and Briggs viewed it safe enough to take along his wife, Sarah, and their two-year-old daughter, Sophia. On December 4, Mary Celeste was found three-hundred miles west of her last charted position.[2] For the crew of the brigantine Dei Gratia who stumbled upon her, the entire ordeal was surreal and unnerving. Mary Celeste was discovered yawning erratically in the Atlantic. After boarding the ship, the men noticed the tattered foremast sail, the untended wheel, the abandoned foul-weather gear and personal belongings, the form of a sleeping child imprinted in one of the bunks’ mattresses, several broken and leaking barrels of alcohol in the cargo hold, and the logbook which detailed a normal and unexciting voyage.[3] There were no signs of serious water damage or any hint of struggle which would have prompted the veteran captain and his qualified crew to abandon ship, but the lifeboat was missing. The crew of Dei Gratia were perplexed and, as details of their encounter with the ghost ship reached both sides of the Atlantic, much of Europe and the United States shared that bewilderment. Over the following months, theories emerged: pirates had abducted the crew, a mutiny aboard the ship had gone horribly wrong, the entire incident was a botched insurance scam, and Die Gratia’s sailors had pillaged the ship and killed those aboard.[4] In 1884, conclusions went from semi-plausible to irrational when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned a fictional account of the doomed voyage and twisted the facts, including the presence of Mary Celeste’s untouched lifeboats.[5] Since then, the details continued to blur – hot meals found on the galley’s table, for example – and the hypotheses grew wilder, incorporating aliens, government conspiracies, the Bermuda Triangle, and a family curse.[6] Bizarre weather anomalies and space/time wormholes aside, what really happened? Although we many never wholly know, historian Brian Hicks presents a plausible argument which shows the event may have been far more tragic than supernatural.
     Drawing on the report by the American consul in Genoa, Hicks reveals that Mary Celeste had taken on ballast at Hunter’s Point a week before her sailing, nine barrels of alcohol had broken open at some point during the voyage, every hatch, door, and window were found open, and the halyard was discovered snapped and trailing behind the ship.[7] Viewing this information as pieces of a puzzle, Hicks assembles what he believes is the most likely scenario. At the time Mary Celeste docked in Hunter’s Point, Long Island City was home to several refineries and factories which were dumping methanol and formaldehyde into the water. It was these chemicals that were unknowingly brought aboard as Mary Celeste collected ballast in her bilge and these chemicals which interacted with the alcohol (450 gallons of it) as it poured from the nine broken barrels.[8] The chemical combination would have had physiological effects on the crew, causing light-headedness and nausea, and, most likely, they opened all of the ship’s doors, hatches, and windows to air out the vessel. It proved useless and, as Hicks theorizes, they took to the lifeboat, but not to abandon ship. Realizing it would take time to rid Mary Celeste of the vapors, they fastened the halyard to the boat and used it as a tether to trail behind the vessel at a distance safe enough from the fumes but close enough to reel themselves back in once everything had abated.[9] They were planning to return shortly after the air became hospitable, Hicks argues, which is why they left behind their belongings. What they did not plan on, though, was the halyard that served as their lifeline snapping and their desperate efforts to row back to the ship proving useless. As Hicks states, “they drifted to their death, leaving behind a world that for more than a century would ponder their fate.”[10] 

Works Referenced

Hicks, Brian. Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and her Missing Crew. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.
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[1] Hicks, 7.
[2] Hicks, 5.
[3] Hicks, 4-5.
[4] Hicks, 8.
[5] Hicks, 8-9.
[6] Hicks, 9.
[7] Hicks, 238-242.
[8] Hicks, 240-241.
[9] Hicks, 242-247.
[10] Hicks, 247.