December 5, 2018

On Dec. 5, 1872, 146 years ago today, British sailors boarded Mary Celeste, an American sailing ship, which they had spotted adrift in the North Atlantic Ocean. The sailors cautiously explored the ship, which was in operating condition, but to their astonishment and fright, found no one on board. Mary Celeste’s captain, his wife and daughter, and the seven members of the crew had disappeared without a trace. No conclusive evidence ever proved the cause of the abandonment of Mary Celeste, and it remains one of history’s great sea mysteries.

The 100-foot brig Mary Celeste, which set sail from New York in November 1872 with 10 souls (people on board), was found drifting a month later with no one on board. A wood engraving by Rudolph Ruzicaka.

The brig (two-masted sailing vessel with square sails) Mary Celeste was built in 1861 in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was later transferred to American ownership. On Nov. 7, 1872, it left New York City for Genoa, Italy, carrying a cargo of industrial alcohol. About a month later, the crew of the British ship Dei Gratia sighted Mary Celeste halfway between the Azores and the Portuguese coast. A boarding party found nobody on board, although the cargo, the provisions, and most of the equipment were there. The only things missing were the lifeboat and the navigation instruments. The ship was taken to Gibraltar, where a naval court of investigation examined all the available evidence.

Many theories have been put forward for the abandonment of Mary Celeste. Some investigators believed that the crew tried to escape in the lifeboat because the ship was in danger of sinking, or because the casks of alcohol were exploding. Some people suggested that pirates had attacked the ship, that it had collided with a giant squid, or even that a supernatural event had vanished the crew. No trace of the lifeboat or any survivor of Mary Celeste was ever found.

In 1884, the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who later became famous as the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, penned a popular short story based on the abandonment of Mary Celeste called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.” In 1935, the Hollywood film Phantom Ship, or The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, starring Bela Lugosi, offered a murderous explanation for the vanishing of the ship’s crew.

In 2007, a more realistic theory for the crew’s disappearance was given in the Smithsonian Channel television documentary, “The True Story of the Mary Celeste.” The documentary suggested that during extremely rough weather, the ship’s pumps had clogged, leaving the captain unable to determine how much seawater had leaked into the ship’s hull. Nearing Santa Maria Island in the Azores, perhaps the captain made the tough decision to abandon ship, but the lifeboat was lost at sea.