"Ghost Ship" Mary Celeste
- History Fix Podcast
- 5 hours ago
- 24 min read
Episode 136: How the Discovery of This Abandoned Ship Became a Mystery We Have Yet to Solve
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It was a Wednesday afternoon, December 4th, 1872. Captain Morehouse squinted into the distance aboard the ship Dei Gratia on its way from New Jersey to Genoa, Italy. Only moments ago, the helmsman had called him out on deck, and now he could see why. In the distance, still some six miles away, a ship was heading towards them. But, something was off about this ship. The way it moved was all wrong, drifting unsteadily one way and then the other, rolling and bobbing like a cork. And its sails were off too. No captain who knew anything about sailing a ship would position the sails that way. The Dei Gratia cautiously drew closer to the ship, scanning its decks for signs of life. As they approached, no crew materialized on board and no one replied to their signals. Morehouse soon recognized the ship. This was the Mary Celeste. This ship had left New York eight days before them and should have already made its way to Genoa. Instead, here it was bobbing along around 400 nautical miles from the nearest land completely abandoned. But, why? How? And more importantly, how has the mystery of the “ghost ship” Mary Celeste been twisted into nothing short of an urban legend in the hundred and fifty some odd years since? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I have a mystery for you this week. You guys know how I love a good mystery. I really, really do. So I’m super excited to delve into this one and try to get to the bottom of what in the world happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste. But before we get into that, I want to tell you that I released a History Fix Trivia this week over on Patreon, back by popular demand. I’ve been wanting to do another one of these forever and I finally made it happen. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when I make my husband Joey, who admittedly knows very little about history, sit down with me and answer 20 trivia questions that all come directly from History Fix episodes. So the idea is that, if you’re a big listener of the show, you might actually know the answers to these questions. So watch it, play it, see if you can beat Joey at History Fix Trivia. You can watch the full thing, all 20 questions, over at Patreon.com/historyfixpodcast, always linked in the description. Here’s a quick preview:
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Remember, you can watch the rest of that and play along at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. Alright, let’s get into today’s story. We’re going to come back to the moment Captain Morehouse and the crew aboard the Dei Gratia stumbled upon the abandoned Mary Celeste soon, but first let’s go back even farther to figure out what exactly these ships were even doing there. The ship, Mary Celeste, was built in 1860 and it was originally named Amazon. It was owned by a group of nine people including its first captain, a man by the name of Robert McLellan. But this ship, it turns out, was doomed from the start. Even its maiden voyage in 1861 was a complete disaster. McLellan was supposed to sail the ship from Nova Scotia to London to deliver some cargo. But, before they could even leave the docks, McLellan got sick and died a few days later. No worries, we’ll just pop another captain on board and on with the show. Captain John Nutting Parker took over next and successfully sailed the ship to London to deliver the cargo, barely. I mean there was that mishap where they ran into some fishing equipment off the coast of Maine, oh and then on the return voyage they collided with and straight up sank another ship in the English Channel. So not exactly a smooth trip. All was relatively quiet after that until October of 1867 when the Amazon was driven ashore by a storm off of Nova Scotia and damaged so badly that the owners abandoned it as a wreck. So 7 years in now, girl is already almost dunzo.
But that’s not the end of the story for this ship, obviously. The wreck of the Amazon was eventually sold to a man named Richard W. Haines who restored it and renamed it Mary Celeste. But Haines wasn’t great with money and so the ship was seized by creditors who sold it to a group of guys in New York led by a James H. Winchester. Mary Celeste got a major facelift in 1872 including just making the whole ship bigger, adding a second deck, that sort of thing. So Winchester owned this ship with a group of people. There were 4 total people who owned shares of this ship. So the idea here is that you would use the ship to transport goods, sell them, and then split the money depending on how many shares you owned. Winchester owned half the shares. The second highest shareholder, who owned a third of the shares, was a man named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. Briggs was also to be the captain of the Mary Celeste. He was the guy who was actually going to sail it across the ocean.
So enter Briggs. Let’s talk about Briggs for a minute. Benjamin Spooner Briggs was born in Massachusetts in 1834 and he was one of 5 sons born to a sea captain named Nathan Briggs. So sea captaining apparently runs in the family. All but one of the five sons ended up working at sea and two of them, our Briggs, Benjamin Briggs, and one of his brothers both became captains like their father. In 1862, he married his cousin, Sarah Elizabeth Cobb, cause that was still okay back in the 1860s. Frowned upon today but, yeah, you could still marry your cousin in the 1800s. Look at Queen Victoria who married her first cousin in 1840. She was a trendsetter for sure. Christmas trees and cousin husbands. So anyway, Briggs gets married and he and Sarah have two children, a son named Arthur and a daughter named Sophia.
So fast forward to 1872, Briggs has bought himself shares of this ship the Mary Celeste, and he is to be the captain on its first voyage after the refit where it got made bigger. So this first voyage is a trip from New York City to Genoa, Italy. He’s supposed to deliver 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol. So this isn’t like alcohol that you drink. This is the industrial stuff for like industry purposes. Okay so, big trip coming up. Briggs decides to take his wife Sarah and their two year old daughter Sophia along. But, they are going to leave seven year old Arthur behind with his grandmother. They don’t want him to miss too much school. So they’re leaving him behind, BRB. Now they have a small crew with them too of course because his wife and two year old daughter certainly aren’t going to be sailing the ship. They have seven crew members: First Mate Albert Richardson, Second Mate Andrew Gilling, steward Edward William Head, and four general seamen who were all German, brothers Volkert and Boz Lorenson or maybe it was Boy Lorenson, the sources are split on that, Arian Martens, and Gottlieb Goudschaal. So the crew is ready and they depart New York’s Pier 50 on the morning of Tuesday, November 5th 1872. The weather is immediately not great though so Briggs decides to stall a little. He anchors off of Staten Island for a couple days to await better weather. From there, Sarah wrote a letter to her mother-in-law who was keeping their seven year old son Arthur while they were gone. She wrote quote “Tell Arthur I make great dependence on the letters I shall get from him, and will try to remember anything that happens on the voyage which he would be pleased to hear,” end quote. Which is basically the 1870s version of I love you. No but really, I feel for Sarah. As the mother of an almost seven year old boy myself, I can’t imagine the heartache of leaving him behind like that. I imagine her anxiety as their departure is delayed, stalled out near Staten Island, and all she can do is write him one more letter while she still can, tell him one more thing she’s probably already told him over and over. Write to me, translation, I love you. Just say it girl. Let it out.
Anyway, the weather clears on November 7th and they head out for real this time. Now, meanwhile, Dei Gratia, the other ship is laying in wait near Hoboken, New Jersey. They are also going to Genoa, just like the Mary Celeste, but they are still waiting for their cargo of petroleum to arrive. They don’t end up leaving until November 15th, eight days after the Mary Celeste. Dei Gratia is captained by a man named David Morehouse. There are some who think Morehouse and Briggs may have known each other, they certainly shared common interests. They were both respected sea captains so they likely at least somewhat ran in the same circles. Morehouse was Canadian though so they aren’t exactly chumming it up regularly in New York together. Although, there are some who assert that they were close friends who actually dined together the night before Mary Celeste departed. And this will become suspicious later. This is based on a recollection by Morehouse’s widow some 50 years after the fact though so it isn’t super solid evidence that they had that kind of relationship. Who knows. I’d really like to know but who knows.
Anyway, Mary Celeste leaves New York on November 7th, Dei Gratia leaves New Jersey eight days later on November 15th. They are both headed for Genoa, Italy. To get to Genoa, you have to pass by the Azores Islands off of Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean Sea. So fast forward to December 4th around 1 pm. Dei Grattia is about halfway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal. They’ve been at sea for 19 days now, they are nearing Europe. This is when they spot the Mary Celeste sailing erratically towards them and realize that something is up. On Captain Morehouse’s orders, they approach the ship which has clearly been abandoned. Morehouse sends First Mate Oliver Deveau and Second Mate John Wright to board the ship and like go see what’s going on. So, you know, you board an unmanned ship 400 nautical miles from land, you’re kind of expecting the worst. I’m sure they were expecting to find dead people on this ship right? Like, clearly, something has happened. They are all dead. Otherwise, where are they? So these two guys board the ship and start poking around. First they confirm that it is the Mary Celeste because the name is on the ship’s stern. Then they board the ship and find it completely deserted. There is no one on board, dead or alive. The sails are only partly set and they’re in bad condition. Some of the sails are missing altogether and a lot of the rigging was damaged with loose ropes hanging down just not attached to anything. It’s a mess. Some of the hatches were left open with the hatch covers laying next to them on the deck in odd positions. You wouldn’t typically leave these hatches open because it would let in rainwater and like rogue waves and whatnot. The ship’s main lifeboat is missing. Its rope had been cut, not untied which suggests a sense of urgency. Whoever took the lifeboat was in a hurry or else they would have untied the knot, not cut the rope. There was about three and a half feet of water in the hold which isn’t great but it’s also not enough to sink a ship of that size. They also found a makeshift sounding rod, which is used for determining how much water is in the hold, they found this laying on the deck. And they also found that one of its two bilge pumps which are used for pumping water out of the ship, one of the pumps had been disassembled like someone was possibly trying to fix it or figure out what was wrong with it. So the disassembled pump and the sounding rod both suggest that water had entered the ship before it was abandoned and they were trying to get a handle on it, figure out how much water was down there and how they could pump it out or whatever.
All of the 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol were intact although 9 of them were empty. All of the empty barrels, though, were made out of red oak instead of white oak like the others and red oak barrels are apparently notorious for leaking. So, interesting clue there. We’ll come back to that. There were no signs of a fire or any kind of violence or struggle onboard the ship. The personal items of the crew were still in their cabins. Although the cabins were a bit wet because of rainwater that had entered through doorways and skylights. However, two of the crewmembers didn’t appear to have any personal items left on board, the two German brothers Volkert and Boz or Boy Lorenson. We’ll come back to that as well. They had a six month supply of food on board. There was no food left out in the galley or in the process of being prepared or anything like that. They hadn’t left with like food still on the table. They go into Captain Briggs cabin. His stuff all seems to be there although it is a bit scattered around. They find a sheathed sword under the bed. They do notice that a lot of the ship's papers are missing though, as are most of Captain Brigg’s navigational instruments. Next they go to the cabin belonging to First Mate Richardson where they find the ship’s log. The last entry in the log was from 8 am on November 25. So that’s 9 days ago now. It recorded the position of the ship just off Santa Maria Island in the Azores which is around 400 nautical miles away from where the ship is now. So it appears from all of this, it appears as though something caused the ten people aboard the Mary Celeste to get into the lifeboat and abandon the ship with enough haste to leave their personal belongings and cut the rope that attached the lifeboat, not untie it. They most likely did this on November 25th, the day of the last recording in the ship’s log and so, since then, in those 9 days, the ship had half drifted half sailed itself, because some of the sails were up, 400 miles unmanned.
Captain Morehouse aboard Dei Gratia decides to sail the ship, Mary Celeste, which appears to still be in fine working order despite the few feet of water in the hold. He splits his crew and sends three men over to Mary Celeste to sail it to Gibraltar 600 nautical miles away to salvage it. So, under maritime law, if you did this, if you salvaged a ship like this, you could expect to receive a share of the value of the vessel and all the cargo that it carried. You got more money depending on how dangerous the salvage was and this one was pretty sketchy. Only three men were sailing Mary Celeste. That was very difficult. And they didn’t know why the last crew abandoned the ship. Was there some serious issue they didn’t know about? They ran into a patch of fog and were delayed a day. It’s not super smooth sailing. First Mate Deveau later wrote to his wife about the ordeal quote “I can hardly tell what I am made of, but I do not care so long as I got in safe. I shall be well paid for the Mary Celeste,” end quote.
They get both ships to Gibraltar, which, by the way, is like a territory of Great Britain. It’s like connected to Spain on the Iberian peninsula but it’s not actually part of Spain. It’s British. So they get the Mary Celeste there and it is impounded pending a salvage hearing. They have to figure out what money, if any, the crew of the Dei Gratia will get for salvaging it. But suspicions arise almost immediately. Deveau and Wright, the two guys who went aboard Mary Celeste initially to investigate, get in front of the court at Gibraltar and give their testimony, what they found, how they found the ship. Attorney General of Gibraltar Frederick Solly-Flood hears their testimony and is like “yeahhh, no. That’s fishy.” He immediately believes that a crime had taken place. This theory spread quickly. On December 21st, the New York Shipping and Commercial List reported quote “The inference is that there has been foul play somewhere, and that alcohol is at the bottom of it,” end quote.
So Flood’s theory is that the crew aboard Mary Celeste drank the alcohol that the ship was carrying. Nine barrels seems excessive for a handful of guys but, I don’t know, he thinks they at least drank enough to make them act irrationally. Then he thinks they killed the Briggs family and the ship’s officers in a drunken frenzy, threw them overboard, and left in the lifeboat. And here’s his evidence for this theory. He had ordered an examination of the ship and they found what he thought were blood stains on one of the ship’s rails as well as intentional cut marks in the bow caused by some kind of sharp instrument. There is also a deep mark near the blood stains, possibly caused by an axe. So Flood, based on all this, Flood is thinking some kind of mutiny took place, a violent attack.
On January 15th, James Winchester finally made his way to Gibraltar. Winchester, remember, was the main owner of the ship, he owned 6 of the 12 shares. He goes to Gibraltar to try to get Mary Celeste unimpounded so that she can finally deliver her cargo of alcohol to Genoa. Flood is like, sure you can take the boat but you have to pay a surety of $15,000 which is kind of like posting bail, right? Like he’s getting Mary Celeste out of jail but he has to pay $15,000 as collateral that he will bring her back afterwards. Except Winchester doesn’t have $15,000. That was a lot of money back then. $15,000 in 1873 is equivalent to over $400,000 dollars today. With Winchester now in Gibraltar, Flood’s gears start turning again. He starts to suspect that Winchester was in on it. Maybe Winchester arranged the whole thing. He planned for the crew to kill Briggs as part of some kind of conspiracy, insurance fraud or something like that. But, Flood’s theories about mutiny and murder and conspiracy sort of fall flat after the results of some tests come back. They had analyzed the supposed blood stains on the railing of the ship and found that it wasn’t actually blood at all. They had also had the marks in the bow examined by experts who concluded they were not man made, but caused instead by the natural action of the sea on the ship’s timbers. So everything Flood was basing his mutiny, murder, conspiracy theory on has now been debunked. He has no choice but to release the ship to Winchester.
On April 8th, the salvage hearing concluded, awarding Captain Morehouse and the crew of Dei Gratia around $2,200 which is close to sixty grand today. This was about one fifth of the total value of the ship and its cargo. So this was very low especially considering the risk they took in sailing it, with only three men, 600 nautical miles. According to Wikipedia quote “one authority thought that the award should have been twice or even three times that amount, given the level of hazard in bringing the derelict into port,” end quote. But it is what it is. They take their money, they deliver their petroleum, and they go home. Everyone moves on. But the mystery of course endures, because what the heck happened aboard the Mary Celeste on November 25th, 1872?
Well, initially there were a lot of very bad theories that were all over the place because they were based more on fiction than fact. Writer Arthur Conan Doyle made the story of the Mary Celeste famous with his 1884 short story based on it called J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement. Now this is a fictional story, it’s not based on any kind of evidence. In the story, Doyle comes to the conclusion that the ship had been captured by a vengeful ex-slave. Mary Celeste made its way to the big screens in 1935 in the movie The Mystery of the Mary Celeste where Bela Lugosi of Dracula fame plays a homicidal sailor who murders the crew. Very similar to Flood’s initial theory, this mutiny theory. But of course, both of these are fiction and there’s really not much evidence of mutiny or any kind of violence onboard. Other early theories include sea monsters, pirates, and killer waterspouts. Except that sea monsters aren’t real, the pirates didn’t take any of the loot which is kind of the whole point of piracy, and as for the water spout, well we’ll come back to that one.
So now let’s look at some theories that even halfway sort of make sense. Theories of foul play persist, despite the lack of evidence of physical violence. It does not appear as though anyone was attacked and murdered aboard the Mary Celeste as Flood had initially thought. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t foul play. There’s the question of insurance fraud. The Mary Celeste was, turns out, heavily over-insured. Winchester had purchased more insurance than he actually needed to cover the cost of the ship and the cargo. Was there some plot to essentially fake the death of the ship in order to claim insurance? Winchester firmly denied these allegations and the insurance company didn’t seem to think this was the case. There was no inquiry, they didn’t look into it or anything like that.
Another foul play theory is that Dei Gratia’s Captain Morehouse could have laid in wait for the Mary Celeste and lured her captain and crew on board Dei Gratia where they were killed. And this would have been, of course, to salvage the ship and the cargo and get the money for it. The problem with that theory is that Dei Gratia left 8 days after Mary Celeste and it was the slower ship. There was no chance of it reaching that location near the Azores before Mary Celeste or even halfway catching up to Mary Celeste to be able to pull off this plan. A similar theory is that Morehouse and Briggs, the captains of each ship, were partners in this conspiracy to claim the salvage money. They were both in on it. This is where the question of did they even know each other come into play. Did they really have dinner together the night before departure? Or was Morehouse’s elderly widow going batty 50 years later. But if they did conspire together then, where did Briggs go and was he planning to abandon his son Arthur permanently or what? Plus, Brian Hicks, author of Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew points out quote “if Morehouse and Briggs had been planning such a scam, they would not have devised such an attention-drawing mystery,” end quote. None of the foul play theories really hold water for me.
You know what did hold water though? The Mary Celeste. Let’s look at the ship itself. What was possibly going on with the ship that might have caused Briggs to order an evacuation. That is not something he would have done lightly. In almost every scenario, the crew would have been safer remaining on the ship than in the lifeboat. English journalist Macdonald Hastings wrote quote “If the Mary Celeste had blown her timbers, she would still have been a better bet for survival than the ship's boat,” end quote. So, if that’s what happened, if they truly abandoned ship for the lifeboat, why? It’s possible the alcohol was to blame but not because the crew was drinking it. The ship’s log reported several times rumbling sounds and small explosions coming from the hold where the barrels of alcohol were stored. Now this isn’t out of the ordinary. That would have been expected on a ship carrying barrels of alcohol which regularly emit explosive gasses. Remember some of the hatches were even left open like they were trying to air out the fumes. These log book recordings about rumblings and small explosions interested Arthur N. Putnam. Putnam was a New York insurance appraiser who often, in that line of work, investigated mysteries at sea in the early 20th century. He wasn’t investigating the Mary Celeste in any official way but, as a guy who regularly investigated this sort of thing, he shared his two cents. Putnam believed that there might have been a more intense explosion from the alcohol barrels in the hold and that one of the crew members went down to investigate and make sure everything was okay. He thought it was possible that this crew member had an open flame, like a candle, or a lit cigar which may have ignited the fumes. This would have caused an actual explosion violent enough to dislodge the top of the hatch, which, remember, was found open and in an unusual position. Putnam concluded his theory that, in a blind panic, Briggs ordered everyone to abandon ship, get into the lifeboat, and cut the rope, separating themselves from the Mary Celeste.
But, I don’t know. That journalist Hastings remarked that, if it went down this way, Briggs had quote “behaved like a fool; worse, a frightened one,” end quote. And there were tons and tons of super positive character testimonies about how capable and qualified and cool under pressure Captain Briggs was. It doesn’t seem likely, especially considering, if there was an explosion, it didn’t even damage the ship. There were no signs of fire damage at all. Although it’s apparently still possible that an explosion took place even without fire damage. According to Wikipedia quote “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: [quote within a quote] ‘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.’” end quote. So it’s possible that this pressure-wave explosion scared them enough to make them get into the lifeboat in a hurry.
Brigg’s cousin Oliver Cobb suggested that maybe they got into the lifeboat as a temporary safety measure but intended to keep it attached to the ship. So they could sort of watch and wait from a safe distance and make sure the whole ship wasn’t about to explode with them on it. He looked at First Mate Deveau’s reports about the positioning of the sails and rigging and thought maybe the lifeboat had been attached by a rope to the main halliard because it was positioned weirdly, but that, hastily tied, it had come detached and the ship had sailed off without them. Abandoned in a lifeboat with no supplies, they wouldn’t have lasted very long. And they wouldn’t have brought any supplies with them because they had planned to return to the ship once they were sure it was safe.
Then there’s that sounding rod that was left on the deck, this sort of makeshift device for measuring how much water was in the ship’s hold, and the disassembled pump. Dei Gratia’s First Mate Deveau actually first proposed this theory. He suggested that the pump had malfunctioned in some way, which explains why it was taken apart, but that they were actually still working okay. Deveau thought they were using the sounding rod to see how much water was in the hold and may have gotten the impression that there was way more water in the hold than there actually was and that it was rising. They may have believed that the ship was sinking based on these false reads and decided to abandon it in a hurry. Now they obviously wouldn’t have attached themselves to a sinking ship so in this case I guess they thought their chances of survival were better in the lifeboat, even without any supplies, which I guess they didn’t think they would have time to get. I mean I guess they had grabbed some papers and navigational instruments which were missing but they left all their personal belongings so that’s odd.
Speaking of personal belongings, let’s circle back to foul play for a minute. Remember how the two German brothers, the Lorenzens, didn't have any personal belongings left behind? Well this was initially really suspicious. It kind of seemed like these two had killed everyone else and escaped with their things in the lifeboat. Flood certainly latched onto that when he was getting all conspiratorial and it’s the whole premise behind that 1935 movie starring Bela Lugosi. He plays one of the Lorenzen brothers. But, it came out later that these guys actually just didn’t have any personal things to begin with. Apparently descendents of the Lorenzen brothers later confirmed that they had lost all of their personal possessions in a shipwreck earlier in 1872. So these dudes apparently just waltzed onto the ship for this months long voyage with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Germans are crazy.
And then there’s the waterspout theory I mentioned earlier. A waterspout would explain why there was 3 and a half feet of water in the hold and the sort of mangled messed up state of the sails and the rigging when the ship was found. This theory goes along with Deveau’s theory about incorrectly measuring the amount of water in the hold and thinking the ship was sinking when it wasn’t. The idea is that low barometric pressure caused by the waterspout might have pushed water from the bilges up into the pumps which caused the crew to overestimate how much water was actually in the hold.
So I don’t know if it was an explosion or an incorrect reading of the water in the hold or something else. But it does seem as though something caused Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two year old daughter Sophia, and their 7 man crew to abandon the ship for the lifeboat. Something serious because that was an extreme measure. It’s possible they intended to return to the ship but became detached and watched in despair as it sailed away. Having obviously left in a hurry, they didn’t bring the necessary supplies to survive and so succumbed to the elements or possibly were overturned in rough seas and drowned. Either way, it’s a horribly sad ending especially considering the captain brought along his wife and two year old daughter. But, while we don’t know the exact details of what happened, probably will never know, I don’t know that it really deserves its reputation as this great mystery that’s come mostly through fictional retellings and factless speculation. A ghost ship. That’s what they call the Mary Celeste, the “ghost ship,” as if actual spirits of the dead were sailing it along on that fateful day in December of 1872. I don’t think I’d go as far as to call the Mary Celeste a ghost ship, but I might call her a cursed ship.
Bad luck plagued this ship from the very beginning - captains dying, running aground, wrecking other ships, financial problems, whatever the heck happened in 1872, and she wasn’t even done yet. Finally returning to New York after completing that voyage to Genoa in 1873, Mary Celeste was a very unpopular ship. The story had been all over the newspapers by now. Hastings recorded that she quote “rotted on wharves where nobody wanted her,” end quote. Eventually Winchester and the other shareholders sold the ship at a major loss to a group of New York businessmen. According to Wikipedia quote “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,” end quote.
After that the ship was sold to a group of new owners in Boston from where it launched its final hurrah. Yeah we’ll call it that. The captain of the ship, Gilman C. Parker, actually did partake in a conspiracy this time in November of 1884. You know a lot of people thought what happened back in 1872 was part of some big conspiracy to get insurance money or salvage money or whatever but it just didn’t seem to be. This time it actually is. Captain Parker teams up with a group of Boston shippers and together they fill the Mary Celeste’s cargo hold with mostly useless junk. Then, on the ship’s manifest they list the cargo as all of these really valuable goods. They misrepresent the value of the cargo and they do this to take out a huge insurance policy. They insure the cargo for $30,000 which is close to million dollars today. But remember, this was useless junk. It wasn’t worth anywhere near that much. It was barely worth anything. On December 16th, Parker sets out in the Mary Celeste with all this useless junk for Haiti. As he approached on January 3rd, he intentionally ran the ship aground hitting a big reef that everyone knew was there. It was on all the charts. Everyone knew this shallow reef was there and not to run into it. But he ran into it on purpose, ripping out the whole bottom of the Mary Celeste which damaged the ship beyond repair. He and the crew row to shore in the lifeboats but they aren’t even done with this hairbrained scheme yet. They then sell some of the cargo that they were able to salvage to an American consul for $500 or $16,000 today and they take out an insurance claim on the rest of it.
Everything is going according to plan until the American consul actually takes a look at what he bought with that $500 and he realizes that it’s completely worthless. These guys had pulled a fast one on him. He knows how to get them back though. He reports this to the insurance company. He’s like “just so you know, everything they had on that ship was worthless garbage. Maybe don’t give them that 30 grand” which remember is like a million dollars today. So the insurance company launches an investigation and discovers that, yeah, they had way way overinsured the cargo. Parker and his accomplices go on trial in Boston for insurance fraud. Parker is also charged with quote “willfully casting away the ship” which is also super illegal and, at the time, punishable by death. Which seems extreme but whatever. The trials didn’t really amount to anything of course because these are white men committing white collar crimes in the 1880s. Nobody was convicted of anything although they were ordered to withdraw the insurance claims and repay any money they had already received. Wah. But even though he got away with a crime usually punishable by death, Parker’s reputation was destroyed and he died in poverty three months later. I don’t know how he died but I have to imagine it was in some way related to this scandal. And so the Mary Celeste claimed her fourth captain. That’s not all though, one of the men charged with Parker for these crimes reportedly went mad and still another killed himself after this. Paul Begg, a historian, lecturer, and author of the book Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea commented quote “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,” end quote.
The wreck of the Mary Celeste was never recovered and has never been found. They thought they found it back in 2001, they found some pieces of timber and metal artifacts embedded in the reef where Parker ran the ship aground. But, after analyzing the wood, they realized that the timber was still trees that were still growing as late as 1894, 34 years after the Mary Celeste was built. So it couldn’t be her. This was a newer ship. But you know, maybe that’s fine. Maybe we don’t need to go looking for the Mary Celeste. Maybe we just let that girl rest cause… she nasty. Ghost ship? Nah. Cursed ship? Yeah, I’ll give you that.
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Information used in this episode was sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea by Paul Begg, and Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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