Mary Celeste After the Mary Celeste's ill-fated voyage, theories focused on everything from mutiny to pirates to sea monsters to waterspouts.

Click image for more photos / Cumberland County Museum and Archives, Amherst, Nova Scotia Canada

Abandoned Ship

What really happened aboard the Mary Celeste? More than a century after her crew went missing, a scenario is emerging

  • By Jess Blumberg
  • Smithsonian magazine, November 2007

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    Abandoned Ship

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    The British brig Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores on December 5, 1872, when crew members spotted a ship adrift in the choppy seas. Capt. David Morehouse was taken aback to discover that the unguided vessel was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York City eight days before him and should have already arrived in Genoa, Italy. He changed course to offer help.

    Morehouse sent a boarding party to the ship. Belowdecks, the ship's charts had been tossed about, and the crewmen's belongings were still in their quarters. The ship's only lifeboat was missing, and one of its two pumps had been disassembled. Three and a half feet of water was sloshing in the ship's bottom, though the cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol was largely intact. There was a six-month supply of food and water—but not a soul to consume it.

    Thus was born one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history: What happened to the ten people who had sailed aboard the Mary Celeste? Through the decades, a lack of hard facts has only spurred speculation as to what might have taken place. Theories have ranged from mutiny to pirates to sea monsters to killer waterspouts. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1884 short story based on the case posited a capture by a vengeful ex-slave, a 1935 movie featured Bela Lugosi as a homicidal sailor. Now, a new investigation, drawing on modern maritime technology and newly discovered documents, has pieced together the most likely scenario.

    "I love the idea of mysteries, but you should always revisit these things using knowledge that has since come to light," says Anne MacGregor, the documentarian who launched the investigation and wrote, directed and produced The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste,' partly with funding from Smithsonian Networks.

    The ship began its fateful voyage on November 7, 1872, sailing with seven crewmen and Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Sophia. The 282-ton brigantine battled heavy weather for two weeks to reach the Azores, where the ship log's last entry was recorded at 5 a.m. on November 25.

    After spotting the Mary Celeste ten days later, the Dei Gratia crewmen sailed the ship some 800 miles to Gibraltar, where a British vice admiralty court convened a salvage hearing, which was usually limited to determining whether the salvagers—in this case, the Dei Gratia crewmen—were entitled to payment from the ship's insurers. But the attorney general in charge of the inquiry, Frederick Solly-Flood, suspected mischief and investigated accordingly. After more than three months, the court found no evidence of foul play. Eventually, the salvagers received a payment, but only one-sixth of the $46,000 for which the ship and its cargo had been insured, suggesting that the authorities were not entirely convinced of the Dei Gratia crew's innocence.

    The story of the Mary Celeste might have drifted into history if Conan Doyle hadn't published "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" in 1884; his sensationalistic account, printed in Cornhill Magazine, set off waves of theorizing about the ship's fate. Even Attorney General Solly-Flood revisited the case, writing summaries of his interviews and notes. But the mystery remained unsolved. MacGregor picked up the trail in 2002. "There's so much nonsense written about this legend," she said. "I felt compelled to find the truth."

    MacGregor's four previous investigative documentaries, including The Hindenburg Disaster: Probable Cause (2001), applied modern forensic techniques to historical questions. "There are obvious limitations for historic cases," she says. "But using the latest technology, you can come to a different conclusion."

    For her Mary Celeste film, MacGregor began by asking what didn't happen. Speculation concerning sea monsters was easy to dismiss. The ship's condition—intact and with full cargo—seemed to rule out pirates. One theory bandied about in the 19th century held that crew members drank the alcohol onboard and mutinied; after interviewing crewmen's descendants, MacGregor deemed that scenario unlikely. Another theory assumed that alcohol vapors expanded in the Azores heat and blew off the main hatch, prompting those aboard to fear an imminent explosion. But MacGregor notes that the boarding party found the main hatch secured and did not report smelling any fumes. True, she says, nine of the 1,701 barrels in the hold were empty, but the empty nine had been recorded as being made of red oak, not white oak like the others. Red oak is known to be a more porous wood and therefore more likely to leak.

    As for that homicidal sailor played by Lugosi in The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, he may have been drawn from two German crewmen, brothers Volkert and Boye Lorenzen, who fell under suspicion because none of their personal possessions were found on the abandoned ship. But a Lorenzen descendant told MacGregor that the pair had lost their gear in a shipwreck earlier in 1872. "They had no motive," MacGregor says.

    After ruling out what didn't happen, MacGregor confronted the question of what might have.

    Abandoning a ship in the open sea is the last thing a captain would order and a sailor would do. But is that what Captain Briggs ordered? If so, why?

    The British brig Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores on December 5, 1872, when crew members spotted a ship adrift in the choppy seas. Capt. David Morehouse was taken aback to discover that the unguided vessel was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York City eight days before him and should have already arrived in Genoa, Italy. He changed course to offer help.

    Morehouse sent a boarding party to the ship. Belowdecks, the ship's charts had been tossed about, and the crewmen's belongings were still in their quarters. The ship's only lifeboat was missing, and one of its two pumps had been disassembled. Three and a half feet of water was sloshing in the ship's bottom, though the cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol was largely intact. There was a six-month supply of food and water—but not a soul to consume it.

    Thus was born one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history: What happened to the ten people who had sailed aboard the Mary Celeste? Through the decades, a lack of hard facts has only spurred speculation as to what might have taken place. Theories have ranged from mutiny to pirates to sea monsters to killer waterspouts. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1884 short story based on the case posited a capture by a vengeful ex-slave, a 1935 movie featured Bela Lugosi as a homicidal sailor. Now, a new investigation, drawing on modern maritime technology and newly discovered documents, has pieced together the most likely scenario.

    "I love the idea of mysteries, but you should always revisit these things using knowledge that has since come to light," says Anne MacGregor, the documentarian who launched the investigation and wrote, directed and produced The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste,' partly with funding from Smithsonian Networks.

    The ship began its fateful voyage on November 7, 1872, sailing with seven crewmen and Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Sophia. The 282-ton brigantine battled heavy weather for two weeks to reach the Azores, where the ship log's last entry was recorded at 5 a.m. on November 25.

    After spotting the Mary Celeste ten days later, the Dei Gratia crewmen sailed the ship some 800 miles to Gibraltar, where a British vice admiralty court convened a salvage hearing, which was usually limited to determining whether the salvagers—in this case, the Dei Gratia crewmen—were entitled to payment from the ship's insurers. But the attorney general in charge of the inquiry, Frederick Solly-Flood, suspected mischief and investigated accordingly. After more than three months, the court found no evidence of foul play. Eventually, the salvagers received a payment, but only one-sixth of the $46,000 for which the ship and its cargo had been insured, suggesting that the authorities were not entirely convinced of the Dei Gratia crew's innocence.

    The story of the Mary Celeste might have drifted into history if Conan Doyle hadn't published "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" in 1884; his sensationalistic account, printed in Cornhill Magazine, set off waves of theorizing about the ship's fate. Even Attorney General Solly-Flood revisited the case, writing summaries of his interviews and notes. But the mystery remained unsolved. MacGregor picked up the trail in 2002. "There's so much nonsense written about this legend," she said. "I felt compelled to find the truth."

    MacGregor's four previous investigative documentaries, including The Hindenburg Disaster: Probable Cause (2001), applied modern forensic techniques to historical questions. "There are obvious limitations for historic cases," she says. "But using the latest technology, you can come to a different conclusion."

    For her Mary Celeste film, MacGregor began by asking what didn't happen. Speculation concerning sea monsters was easy to dismiss. The ship's condition—intact and with full cargo—seemed to rule out pirates. One theory bandied about in the 19th century held that crew members drank the alcohol onboard and mutinied; after interviewing crewmen's descendants, MacGregor deemed that scenario unlikely. Another theory assumed that alcohol vapors expanded in the Azores heat and blew off the main hatch, prompting those aboard to fear an imminent explosion. But MacGregor notes that the boarding party found the main hatch secured and did not report smelling any fumes. True, she says, nine of the 1,701 barrels in the hold were empty, but the empty nine had been recorded as being made of red oak, not white oak like the others. Red oak is known to be a more porous wood and therefore more likely to leak.

    As for that homicidal sailor played by Lugosi in The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, he may have been drawn from two German crewmen, brothers Volkert and Boye Lorenzen, who fell under suspicion because none of their personal possessions were found on the abandoned ship. But a Lorenzen descendant told MacGregor that the pair had lost their gear in a shipwreck earlier in 1872. "They had no motive," MacGregor says.

    After ruling out what didn't happen, MacGregor confronted the question of what might have.

    Abandoning a ship in the open sea is the last thing a captain would order and a sailor would do. But is that what Captain Briggs ordered? If so, why?

    His ship was seaworthy. "It wasn't flooded or horribly damaged," says Phil Richardson, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and an expert in derelict vessels, whom MacGregor enlisted in her investigation. "The discovery crew sailed it, so it was in really good shape."

    Briggs' life before the Mary Celeste offered no clues, says MacGregor, who visited the captain's hometown of Marion, Massachusetts, and interviewed descendants of Arthur Briggs, the 7-year-old son the Briggses had left behind so he could attend school. MacGregor learned that the captain was experienced and respected in shipping circles. "There was never a question that he would do something irrational," she says.

    Did Briggs, then, have a rational reason to abandon ship? MacGregor figured that if she could determine the precise spot from which Briggs, his family and crew abandoned ship, she might be able to shed light on why. She knew from the transcriptions of the Mary Celeste's log slate—where notations were made before they were transcribed into the log—that the ship was six miles from, and within sight of, the Azores island of Santa Maria on November 25; she knew from the testimony of the Dei Gratia crew that ten days later, the ship was some 400 miles east of the island. MacGregor asked Richardson "to work backward and create a path between these two points."

    Richardson said he would need water temperatures, wind speeds and wind directions at the time, data that MacGregor found in the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), a database that stores global marine information from 1784 to 2007 and is used to study climate change. She, her yachtsman husband, Scott, and Richardson drew on the data to determine whether the Mary Celeste could have drifted from its recorded location on November 25 to where the Dei Gratia crew reported finding it on December 5. Their conclusion: yes, it could have, even without a crew to sail it. "We found out it basically just sailed itself," Richardson says.

    At that point, MacGregor considered the fact that a captain would most likely order a ship abandoned within sight of land. Since Santa Maria was the last land for hundreds of miles, it seemed safe to assume that the Mary Celeste had been abandoned the morning of November 25, after the last log entry was written.

    But why?

    On this point, MacGregor says, Attorney General Solly-Flood's notes are crucial. He wrote that he saw nothing unusual about the voyage until the last five days, which is why he transcribed the ship's log starting five days from the end. The ship's log is believed to have been lost in 1885, so those transcriptions provided the only means for MacGregor and Richardson to plot the course and positions logged for the ship. The two then reconsidered those positions in light of ICOADS data and other information on sea conditions at the time. Their conclusion: Briggs was actually 120 miles west of where he thought he was, probably because of an inaccurate chronometer. By the captain's calculations, he should have sighted land three days earlier than he did.

    Solly-Flood's notes yielded one other piece of information that MacGregor and Richardson consider significant: the day before he reached the Azores, Briggs changed course and headed north of Santa Maria Island, perhaps seeking haven.

    The night before the last entry in the ship's log, the Mary Celeste again faced rough seas and winds of more than 35 knots. Still, MacGregor reasons, rough seas and a faulty chronometer wouldn't, by themselves, prompt an experienced captain to abandon ship. Was there something else?

    MacGregor learned that on its previous voyage, the Mary Celeste had carried coal and that the ship had recently been extensively refitted. Coal dust and construction debris could have fouled the ship's pumps, which would explain the disassembled pump found on the Mary Celeste. With the pump inoperative, Briggs would not have known how much seawater was in his ship's hull, which was too fully packed for him to measure visually.

    At that point, says MacGregor, Briggs—having come through rough weather, having finally and belatedly sighted land and having no way of determining whether his ship would sink—might well have issued an order to abandon ship.

    But, like Attorney General Solly-Flood, MacGregor can't leave the story of the Mary Celeste alone; she is continuing her investigation for a book. "The research goes on," she says. "Because I have been touched by the story, as I hope other people will be."

    Jess Blumberg is an intern at Smithsonian.

    The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste' will première November 4 on the Smithsonian Channel on high-definition DirecTV.


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    Comments

    Attorney general Frederick Sollyflood erred in his verdict.He found out that DeiGratias crew was not culpable in anyway towards the disaster that happened onboard MaryCeleste,yet he approved stipends for them,such action at that period of time could have sent wrong signals to other salvagers to be,innocent lifes could have been lost because of such decisions.It means back then that Captains who are not in good terms with another will definitely refused to render help and the spirit of crewmanship is destroyed.If modern forensic investigation proved them innocent which i believe they are,then the full wcrth of the monetary value should be paid to their legacies.

    Posted by BRUNO OSUCHUKWU on November 19,2007 | 02:05AM

    I wish to add my name to the list . The full value should be paid to the crews legacies.

    Posted by Paul M McCluskey on November 19,2007 | 01:02PM

    A few years ago I read a rather persuasive online article arguing that the Mary Celeste encountered a large wave generated by an earthquake (not uncommon in the vicinity of the Azores); it caused some of the damage that was later observed on the ship, and would likely have sent the panicked crew into the lifeboats. The author said that he'd attempted to research earthquakes in the area, but couldn't find any British record of them. A pity that none of the British investigators went out and ASKED the nearest people whether anything unusual had happened on Nov. 25; the Portuguese of the Azores were plenty familiar with the seas and the seismology. (My grandfather actually lived on Santa Maria, a few miles away from the Mary Celeste's position, but as he was only 1.5 years old in Nov. 1872 he couldn't have told them much.)

    Posted by Paula Lozar on November 27,2007 | 01:57PM

    I do not have cable or satellite tv... is there anyway to see this movie? Will it be made available on DVD?

    Posted by Andrea on December 10,2007 | 02:22PM

    Charles Fay certainly asked the Portuguese authorities about the weather and the possibility of earthquakes; The answer he received in 1940 was: "No record of any earthquake is kept in the registers, neither in the local newspapers which we have searched." Jim Watt www.maryceleste.net

    Posted by Jim Watt on January 18,2008 | 10:52AM

    There's more than a few errors perpetuated in the article about Mary Celeste, the major being that the photo shown is definitely NOT Mary Celeste. I could digress but feel it more positive to add that my research has established the fact that 13 other sailing ships were abandoned in those waters at that time in what was called in ship's logs a "perfect hurricane". Many lives were lost. Furthermore there was a major meteor storm on that date. These facts were never introduced at the Gibraltar hearings and alone could have dispelled any mysteries to come. The reason for abandonment, known to me, is scientific, not imaginative.

    Posted by roger campbell on February 1,2008 | 10:17AM

    I Think It Was A Fume Theory x!

    Posted by Teagan on March 6,2008 | 09:22AM

    The brothers,Volkert and Boy Lorenzen,who were part of the ship's crew, were more than likely from the Isle of Fohr in the North Fresian islands off the coast of Denmark and Germany where these names are very common. They were part of many generations of able-bodied seamen from that tiny island. My ancestry is riddled with these names and combinations of these names- Lorenz Boysen, Boy Volkerts, Volkert Lorenzen, etc.

    Posted by Nancy Hunt on March 24,2008 | 10:22PM

    What happened to the Marie Celeste after it was found. Was it for salvage, or was it preserved/reconstructed?

    Posted by Gilly Thornton on June 24,2008 | 08:24AM

    In reference to the comment from Roger Campbell 2/1/08 I believe that picture was a photo taken from a painting that Capt. Morehouse had done after his return home. My mothers oldest and dearest friend was his granddaughter, Elizabeth Jennings and that very large oil painting hung over her fireplace up until her death in her nineties. I imagine the Fairfield Historical Society probably has it as many of her priceless possessions were left to the Society.

    Posted by Elisabeth A. Smith on July 18,2008 | 01:31PM

    I read a book about this and I want to find out more. So if anyone who reads this has some information they would like to share with me, I would love it so email me at bluepenguin12346@yahoo.com.

    Posted by Katherine on December 15,2008 | 08:41AM

    I spend every summer in Nova Scotia.In Spencers Island to be exact. The master builder of the Mary Celeste was an Uncle of mine. My great great Grandmother's sister was married to him. My great great Grandfather was a share holder as well. The Mary Celeste is family to me. Let me know what info or pictures anyone woulf like to see.

    Posted by Derek on January 6,2009 | 06:23PM

    Derek, I would be interested in information regarding the descendents of Captain Briggs and any crew members. I know Captain Briggs left a son behind and beleive there are descendants from him. Do you know if any of the other crew members left children behind? Also interested in photos that you may have if possible to email. Thankyou

    Posted by wendy robson on May 11,2009 | 01:35PM

    I have been heavily researching MC for 10 years and the only known picture of her is by Honore Pellegrini of Marseille in 1861 as Amazon. As Mary Celeste she had an additional deck added in 1872 and the account of changes made do not correspond to the photograph. It is a different ship. The only known photos of her were taken by Clive Cussler's team, of the wreck such as it is, in Haiti. Capt Morehouse of Dei Gratia commissioned a painting of his ship by Giuseppi Coli in Sicily April 1873. I have nearly completed my book which will forever change what is known about Mary Celeste including how she got her name. Arthur Briggs died in 1931 sans issue. Benjamin's surviving brother James Cannon Briggs married Zenas Briggs' (1844-70) fiancee Mary Reynolds and had four sons. The lineage continues. P.S. I have now authenticated over 100 souls lost in the N Atlantic hurricane Nov 19-30 1872. I don't want to give too much away but can say without reservation that it was a "perfect hurricane" that caused her misfortune that November. You read it here first.

    Posted by Roger Campbell on June 22,2009 | 01:33PM

    I find a certain irony to the fact that the reason for the Mary Celeste to be abandoned was simply because of a clogged pump. Sea Monsters, tidal waves are theories that a fanciful mind would produce. It might be possible that the Mary Celeste might be last century's news and no one here would write about it today if people looked at the facts with a clear and sensible head. I'm glad the mystery has finally been brought to light.

    Posted by jake on June 24,2009 | 02:39PM

    Common sense should explain the disappearance of the unfortunate crew of the Mary Celeste. First look at some vital clues such as clogged pump and missing life boat and possibility of alchol-caused explosion. Obviously Captain Briggs no longer trust his boat to be safe for long and therefore ordered everyone to abandon ship ASAP. The hapless souls simply drifted into the unknown in their life boat most likely victims of bad weather and rough seas- their remains became instant food to sharks and other creatures of the sea leaving no trace. It's people's love of mystery and intrigue that lives on!

    Posted by DALE ROBERTS on October 24,2009 | 03:16PM

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