Brian Hicks - Ghost Ship : the mysterious true story of the Mary Celesteand her missing crew

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,

Twas sad as sad could be;

And we did speak only to break

The silence of the sea!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Is the ship accursed? Was there ever a voyage which began so fairly and which changed so disastrously?

Arthur Conan Doyle,

J. Habakuk Jephsons Statement

The crew of the American brigantine Mary Celeste, November 1872

The crew of the Nova Scotia brigantine Dei Gratia, November/December 1872

The Briggs Family of Sippican Village

Nathan Briggs m. Sophia Cobb 1830

Joshua Dewisbuilder of Amazon, later renamed Mary Celeste

Robert McLellanAmazons first captain

George Spicera young sailor from Fundy

James Henry WinchesterNew York shipping agent, majority shareholder of Mary Celeste

Horatio Jones SpragueAmerican consul at Gibraltar

Frederick Solly Floodqueens advocate and proctor, attorney general of Gibraltar

Hon. James CochraneJudge of the Vice Admiralty Court of Gibraltar

Henry Pisaniattorney for the Dei Gratia crew

John Austinsurveyor at Gibraltar

R. W. ShufeldtU.S. Navy commander and investigator

Arthur Conan Doyleauthor of some note, wrote J. Habakuk Jephsons Statement

Gilman C. Parkerfinal captain of the Mary Celeste

Oliver Cobbcousin of Benjamin Spooner Briggs, family biographer

Arthur Briggsorphaned son of Benjamin S. and Sarah Briggs

Clive Cusslerauthor of some note, founder of National Underwater Marine Agency

Mike FletcherEco-Nova diver, Nova Scotia

The ship drifted restlessly through the whitecaps, like a lost soul wandering among tombstones. There was no hurry or purpose in its movement, no discernible momentum urging it along. Its circuitous path through the North Atlantic suggested nothing beyond mindless, random motion.

It had appeared out of nowhere, very much like the ghost ship sighted by Samuel Taylor Coleridges wayward sailor in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the epic poem, the skeletal vessel that haunted the mariner first emerged from the mist as a little speck on the horizon, a ship that plunged and tacked and veered with only a hint of sail hanging from its masts. Coleridge hardly could have described the scene better had he been there on that colorless December day when the men of the Nova Scotia freighter Dei Gratia first spotted the ship destined to haunt them forever. The only difference was that, unlike the mariner, the sailors who discovered this wayfaring vessel detected no hint of malevolenceat least not initially.

The men had watched this curious sight from a distance all afternoon, hypnotized by its awkward, almost primitive, rhythm. At first glance, they thought little of the anonymous ship, but later changed course to intercept it when they finally decided it must be in some sort of distress. Something about its gait seemed, well, unnatural.

At the wheel of the Dei Gratia, seaman John Johnson most likely did not know the similarities between the approaching vessel and the ship of doom described in Coleridges verse, which by 1872 was already a classic. But then Johnson, a Russian Lutheran, could barely speak the Kings English, much less read it. His knowledge of seafaring lore was limited to whatever his fellow sailors related to him on long, cold deck watches. That afternoon, however, Johnson would join that mythology as he played a small role in an incident destined to become one of the ultimate stories of the sea; for on that day, December 4, 1872, the crew of the Dei Gratia sailed into maritime history after a chance encounter with a small merchant ship called the Mary Celeste.

For nearly an hour after first spying her, the men watched the ship yawing erratically as it lumbered along with only a few sails flying. The Dei Gratias captain attempted to signal her crew several times, but received no reply. A cautious man, he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong, and knew he must lend whatever assistance he couldthat was the unwritten law of the sea. So, when the two ships passed within a quarter mile of one another, the captain sent three of his men, including Johnson, to investigate.

The sailors rowed over in a small lifeboat and climbed aboard the vessel, where they stumbled onto a chilling scene: an empty deck, a tattered sail hanging from the foremast, the ships wheel spinning untended. More than 400 miles from the coast of Portugal, the Mary Celeste was sailing without a soul on board.

Perhaps the oddest thing was that, for the most part, she appeared to be in fine shapealmost eerily so. The Dei Gratia crew found no serious weather damage, no trace of a struggle, or any other sign of trouble that would have made veteran sailors abandon ship in the middle of the ocean. Stranger still, the crew had left behind foul-weather gear, personal belongings, even their pipesthings they almost certainly would have taken, or would have been wearing during a storm.