Proposed explanations
Foul play
The evidence in Gibraltar failed to support Flood's theories
of murder and conspiracy, yet suspicion of foul play lingered. Flood, and some
newspaper reports, briefly suspected insurance fraud on the part of Winchester
on the basis that Mary Celeste had been heavily overinsured. Winchester was
able to refute these allegations, and no inquiry was instituted by the
insurance companies that had issued the policies. In 1931, an article in the
Quarterly Review suggested that Morehouse could have lain in wait for Mary
Celeste, then lured Briggs and his crew aboard Dei Gratia and killed them
there. Paul Begg argues that this theory ignores the fact that Dei Gratia was
the slower ship; she left New York eight days after Mary Celeste departed and
would not have caught Mary Celeste before she reached Gibraltar.
Another theory posits that Briggs and Morehouse were
partners in a conspiracy to share the salvage proceeds, although no evidence
exists of a friendship between the two captains. Hicks comments that "if Morehouse and Briggs had been
planning such a scam, they would not have devised such an attention-drawing
mystery." He also asks why Briggs abandoned his son Arthur if he had
intended to disappear permanently.
Although Riffian pirates were active off the coast of
Morocco in the 1870s, Charles Edey Fay observes that pirates would have looted
the ship, but the personal possessions, some of significant value, of the
captain and crew were left undisturbed. In 1925, historian John Gilbert
Lockhart surmised that Briggs slaughtered all on board and then killed himself
in a fit of religious mania. Lockhart later spoke to Briggs's descendants, and
he apologized and withdrew this theory in a later edition of his book.
Lifeboat
Briggs's cousin Oliver Cobb later suggested that the
transfer of personnel to the yawl may have been intended as a temporary safety
measure. He speculated from Deveau's report on the state of the rigging and
ropes that the ship's main halliard may have been used to attach the yawl to
the ship, enabling the company to return to Mary Celeste when the danger had
passed. However, Mary Celeste would have sailed away empty if the line had
parted, leaving the yawl adrift with its occupants. Begg notes that it would be
illogical to attach the yawl to a vessel that the crew thought was about to
explode or sink. Macdonald Hastings argues that Briggs was an experienced
captain who would not have led a panicked abandonment, writing: "If the Mary Celeste had blown her
timbers, she would still have been a better bet for survival than the ship's
boat." According to Hastings, if Briggs had relied on the ship's boat
for survival rather than on Mary Celeste, he would have "behaved like a fool; worse, a frightened one."
Arthur N. Putman, a New York insurance appraiser, was a
leading investigator in sea mysteries in the early 20th century and wrote a
similar lifeboat theory stressing that only a single lifeboat was missing from
the vessel. He discovered that the boat's rope was cut, not untied, which
indicated that the abandonment of Mary Celeste was performed quickly. The
ship's log contained several mentions of ominous rumbling and small explosions
from the hold, although cargos of alcohol naturally emit explosive gas and such
sounds are commonly heard. He supposes that there had been a more intense
explosion and, in response, a sailor ventured below deck with an open flame or
lit cigar that ignited the fumes, causing an explosion violent enough to
dislodge the top of the hatch, which had been found in an unusual position.
Putman also postulated that in a panicked terror the captain, his family and
the crew boarded the lone lifeboat, cut the rope and abandoned Mary Celeste.
Natural phenomena
Commentators generally agree that some extraordinary and
alarming circumstance must have arisen to cause the entire crew to abandon a
sound and seaworthy ship with ample provisions. Deveau ventured an explanation
based on the sounding rod found on deck. He suggested that Briggs abandoned
ship after a false sounding because of a malfunction, perhaps of the pumps,
that created a false impression that the vessel was rapidly accumulating water.
A severe waterspout strike before the abandonment could explain the amount of
water in the ship and the ragged state of her rigging and sails. The low
barometric pressure generated by the spout could have driven water from the
bilges up into the pumps, leading the crew to overestimate the amount of water
on Mary Celeste and believe that she was in danger of sinking.
Other explanations include the possible appearance of a
displaced iceberg, the fear of running aground while becalmed and a sudden
submarine earthquake. Hydrographical evidence suggests that an iceberg drifting
so far south was improbable and other ships would have seen it. Begg gives more
consideration to a theory that Mary Celeste began drifting towards the
Dollabarat reef off Santa Maria Island when she was becalmed. The theory
supposes that Briggs feared his ship would run aground and launched the yawl in
the hope of reaching land. The wind could then have lifted and blown the ship
away from the reef while the rising seas swamped and sank the yawl. However, if
the ship had been becalmed, all sails would have been set to catch any
available breeze, and Mary Celeste was found with many of its sails furled.
An earthquake on the seabed could have caused sufficient
turbulence on the surface to damage parts of Mary Celeste's cargo, thus
releasing noxious fumes. Rising fears of an imminent explosion could have led
Briggs to order the ship's abandonment; the displaced hatches suggest that an
inspection, or an attempted airing, had taken place. The New York World of
January 24, 1886 drew attention to a case in which a vessel carrying alcohol
had exploded. The same newspaper's issue of February 9, 1913 cited seepage of
alcohol through a few porous barrels as the source of gases that may have
caused or threatened an explosion in Mary Celeste's hold. Briggs's cousin
Oliver Cobb was a strong proponent of this theory, in which a sufficiently
alarming scenario—rumblings from the hold, the smell of escaping fumes and
possibly an explosion—could have caused Briggs to have ordered the evacuation
of the ship. In his haste to leave the ship before it exploded, Briggs may have
failed to properly secure the yawl to the tow line. A sudden breeze could have
blown the ship away from the occupants of the yawl, leaving them to succumb to
the elements. The lack of damage from an explosion and the generally sound
state of the cargo upon discovery tend to weaken this case.
In 2006, an experiment was performed for Channel Five
television by chemist Andrea Sella of University College, London, and the
results helped to revive the explosion theory. Sella built a model of the hold,
with paper cartons representing the barrels. Using butane gas, he created an
explosion that caused a considerable blast and ball of flame, but contrary to
expectation, there was no fire damage within the replica hold. He said: "What we created was a pressure-wave
type of explosion. There was a spectacular wave of flame but, behind it, was
relatively cool air. No soot was left behind and there was no burning or
scorching."
Retellings and false
histories
Fact and fiction became intertwined in the decades that
followed. The Los Angeles Times retold the Mary Celeste story in June 1883 with
invented detail. "Every sail was
set, the tiller was lashed fast, and not a rope was out of place. ... The fire
was burning in the galley. The dinner was standing untasted and scarcely cold …
the log written up to the hour of her discovery." The November 1906
Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine reported that Mary Celeste drifted off
the Cape Verde Islands, some 1,400 nautical miles (2,600 km) south of the
actual location. Among many inaccuracies, the first mate was "a man named
Briggs," and there were live chickens on board.
The most influential retelling, according to many
commentators, was a story in the January 1884 issue of the Cornhill Magazine
which ensured that the Mary Celeste affair would never be forgotten. This was
an early work of Arthur Conan Doyle, a 25 year-old ship's surgeon at the time.
Doyle's story "J. Habakuk Jephson's
Statement" did not adhere to the facts. He renamed the ship Marie
Celeste, the captain's name was J. W. Tibbs, the fatal voyage took place in
1873, and it was from Boston to Lisbon. The vessel carried passengers, among
them the titular Jephson. In the story, a fanatic named Septimius Goring with a
hatred of the white race has suborned members of the crew to murder Tibbs and
take the vessel to the shores of Western Africa. The rest of the ship's company
is killed; save for Jephson who is spared because he possesses a magical charm
that is venerated by Goring and his accomplices. Doyle had not expected his
story to be taken seriously, but Sprague was still serving as the U.S. consul
in Gibraltar and was sufficiently intrigued to inquire if any part of the story
might be true.
Chambers's Journal of September 17, 1904, suggests that the
entire complement of Mary Celeste was plucked off one by one by a giant octopus
or squid. According to the Natural History Museum, giant squid (Architeuthis
dux) can reach 15 meters (49 ft) in length and have been known to attack ships.
Begg remarks that such a creature could conceivably have picked off a crew
member, but it could hardly have taken the yawl and the captain's navigation
instruments.
In 1913, The Strand Magazine provided an alleged survivor's
account from one Abel Fosdyk, supposedly Mary Celeste's steward. In this
version, the crew had gathered on a temporary swimming platform to watch a
swimming contest, when the platform suddenly collapsed. All except Fosdyk were
drowned or eaten by sharks. Unlike Doyle's story, the magazine proposed this as
a serious solution to the enigma, but it contained many simple mistakes,
including "Griggs" for
Briggs, "Boyce" for
Morehouse, Briggs's daughter as a seven-year-old child rather than a
two-year-old, a crew of 13, and an ignorance of nautical language. Many more
people were convinced by a plausible literary hoax of the 1920s perpetrated by
Irish writer Laurence J. Keating, again presented as a survivor's story of one
John Pemberton. This one told a complex tale of murder, madness, and collusion
with the Dei Gratia. It included basic errors, such as using Doyle's name ("Marie Celeste") and misnaming
key personnel. Nevertheless, the story was so convincingly told that the New
York Herald Tribune of July 26, 1926, believed its truth to be beyond dispute.
Hastings describes Keating's hoax as "an
impudent trick by a man not without imaginative ability."
In 1924, the Daily Express published a story by Captain R.
Lucy, whose alleged informant was Mary Celeste's former boatswain, although no
such person is recorded in the registered crew list. In this tale, Briggs and
his crew are cast in the role of predators; they cite a derelict steamer, which
they board and find deserted with £3,500 of gold and silver in its safe. They
decide to split the money, abandon Mary Celeste, and seek new lives in Spain,
which they reach by using the steamer's lifeboats. Hastings finds it
astonishing that such an unlikely story was widely believed for a time;
readers, he says, "were fooled by
the magic of print."
Other explanations have suggested paranormal intervention;
an undated edition of the British Journal of Astrology describes the Mary
Celeste story as "a mystical experience",
connecting it "with the Great
Pyramid of Gizeh, the lost continent of Atlantis, and the British Israel Movement".
The Bermuda Triangle has been invoked, even though Mary Celeste was
abandoned in a completely different part of the Atlantic. Similar fantasies
have considered theories of abduction by aliens in flying saucers.
Later career and
final voyage
Mary Celeste left Genoa on June 26, 1873, and arrived in New
York on September 19. The Gibraltar hearings, with newspaper stories of
bloodshed and murder, had made her an unpopular ship; Hastings records that she
"... rotted on wharves where nobody
wanted her." In February 1874, the consortium sold the ship, at a
considerable loss, to a partnership of New York businessmen.
Under this new ownership, Mary Celeste sailed mainly in the
West Indian and Indian Ocean routes, regularly losing money. Details of her
movements occasionally appeared in the shipping news; in February 1879, she was
reported at the island of St. Helena, where she had called to seek medical
assistance for her captain, Edgar Tuthill, who had fallen ill. Tuthill died on
the island, encouraging the idea that the ship was cursed—he was her third captain
to die prematurely. In February 1880, the owners sold Mary Celeste to a
partnership of Bostonians headed by Wesley Gove. A new captain, Thomas L.
Fleming, remained in the post until August 1884, when he was replaced by Gilman
C. Parker. During these years, the ship's port of registration changed several
times, before reverting to Boston. There are no records of her voyages during
this time, although Brian Hicks, in his study of the affair, asserts that Gove
tried hard to make a success of her.
In November 1884, Parker conspired with a group of Boston
shippers, who filled Mary Celeste with a largely worthless cargo,
misrepresented on the ship's manifest as valuable goods and insured for
US$30,000 ($1,050,000 today). On December 16, Parker set out for
Port-au-Prince, the capital and chief port of Haiti. On January 3, 1885, Mary
Celeste approached the port via the channel between Gonâve Island and the
mainland, in which lay a large and well-charted coral reef, the Rochelois Bank.
Parker deliberately ran the ship on to this reef, ripping out her bottom and
wrecking her beyond repair. He and the crew then rowed themselves ashore, where
Parker sold the salvageable cargo for $500 to the American consul, and
instituted insurance claims for the alleged value.
When the consul reported that what he had bought was almost
worthless, the ship's insurers began a thorough investigation, which soon
revealed the truth of the over-insured cargo. In July 1885, Parker and the
shippers were tried in Boston for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. Parker
was additionally charged with "wilfully
cast[ing] away the ship," a crime known as barratry, which at the time
carried the death penalty. The conspiracy case was heard first, but on August
15, the jury announced that they could not agree on a verdict. Some jurors were
unwilling to risk prejudicing Parker's forthcoming capital trial by finding him
guilty on the conspiracy charge. Rather than ordering an expensive retrial, the
judge negotiated an arrangement whereby the defendants withdrew their insurance
claims and repaid all they had received. The barratry charge against Parker was
deferred, and he was allowed to go free. Nevertheless, his professional
reputation was ruined, and he died in poverty three months later. One of his
co-defendants went mad, and another killed himself. Begg observes that "if the court of man could not punish
these men ... the curse that had devilled the ship since her first skipper
Robert McLellan had died on her maiden voyage could reach beyond the vessel's
watery grave and exact its own terrible retribution."
In August 2001, an expedition headed by the marine
archaeologist and author Clive Cussler announced that they had found the
remains of a ship embedded in the Rochelois reef. Only a few pieces of timber
and some metal artifacts could be salvaged, the remainder of the wreckage being
lost within the coral. Initial tests on the wood indicated that it was the type
extensively used in New York shipyards at the time of Mary Celeste's 1872
refit, and it seemed the remains of Mary Celeste had been found. However,
dendrochronological tests carried out by Scott St George of the Geological
Survey of Canada showed that the wood came from trees, most probably from the
US state of Georgia, which would still have been growing in 1894, about ten
years after Mary Celeste's demise.
Legacy and
commemorations
Mary Celeste was not the first reported case of a ship being
found strangely deserted on the high seas. Rupert Gould, a naval officer and
investigator of maritime mysteries, lists other such occurrences between 1840
and 1855. Whatever the truth of these stories, it is the Mary Celeste that is
remembered; the ship's name, or the misspelled Marie Celeste, has become fixed
in people's minds as synonymous with inexplicable desertion.
In October 1955, MV Joyita, a 70-ton motor vessel,
disappeared in the South Pacific while traveling between Samoa and Tokelau,
with 25 people on board. The vessel was found a month later, deserted and
drifting north of Vanua Levu, 600 miles (970 km) from its route. None of those
aboard were seen again, and a commission of inquiry failed to establish an
explanation. David Wright, the affair's principal historian, has described the
case as "... a classic marine
mystery of Mary Celeste proportions."
There has never been a
clear consensus on any one scenario. It is a mystery that has tormented
countless people, including the families of the lost sailors and hundreds of
others who have tried in vain to solve the riddle. The Ghost Ship may be the
best example of the old proverb that the sea never gives up its secrets. – Brian Hicks: Ghost Ship (2004)
The Mary Celeste story inspired two well-received radio
plays in the 1930s, by L. Du Garde Peach and Tim Healey respectively, and a
stage version of Peach's play in 1949. Several novels have been published,
generally offering natural rather than fantastic explanations.[m] In 1935, the
British film company Hammer Film Productions issued The Mystery of the Mary
Celeste (retitled Phantom Ship for American audiences), starring Bela Lugosi as
a deranged sailor. It was not a commercial success, although Begg considers it "a period piece well worth
watching". A 1938 short film titled The Ship That Died presents
dramatizations of a range of theories to explain the abandonment: mutiny, fear
of explosion due to alcohol fumes, and the supernatural.
In November 2007, the Smithsonian Channel screened a
documentary, The True Story of the Mary Celeste, which investigated many
aspects of the case without offering any definite solution. One theory proposed
pump congestion and instrument malfunction. The Mary Celeste had been used for
transporting coal, which is known for its dust, before it was loaded with
alcohol. The pump was found disassembled on deck, so the crew may have been
attempting to repair it. The hull was packed full, and the captain would have
no way of judging how much water had been taken on while navigating rough seas.
The filmmakers postulated that the chronometer was faulty, meaning that Briggs
could have ordered abandonment thinking that they were close to Santa Maria,
when they were 120 miles (190 km) farther west.
At Spencer's Island, Mary Celeste and her lost crew are
commemorated by a monument at the site of the brigantine's construction and by
a memorial outdoor cinema built in the shape of the vessel's hull. Postage
stamps commemorating the incident have been issued by Gibraltar (twice) and by
the Maldives (twice, once with the name of the ship misspelt as Marie Celeste).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste
No comments:
Post a Comment