MARY CELESTE
MARY CELESTE:
The Greatest Mystery of the Sea
PAUL BEGG
First published 2005 by Pearson Education Limited
Hardback edition published in Great Britain in 2005
This paperback edition published 2007
Published 2014 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4058-3621-0 (pbk)
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CONTENTS
(In the text)
(In central plate section)
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
The Peabody Essex Museum for .
We are also grateful to Reynolds DeWalt Printing Inc. for permission to reproduce an extract from Rose Cottage by Oliver Cobb, 1968 and John Murray Gillings for permission to use an extract from Edge of the Sepia.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
For Paul Fitzgibbon
At about 1.00 p.m. on Thursday, 5 December 1872, sea time, a sailor named John Johnson was at the wheel of the brigantine Dei Gratia when he sighted a vessel about six miles off the port bow. The state of the strangers sails caught his attention and suggested to him that there was something wrong. He called to the second mate, John Wright, and pointed the ship out to him. The Dei Gratias skipper, Captain Morehouse, who was coming on deck from below, also saw the stranger and scanned her through his glass (telescope). With the greater clarity this provided it was obvious that something was indeed wrong. The two vessels were sailing towards each other and as they closed the distance, Captain Morehouse ordered Dei Gratias boat be readied to take some of his men across to the ship to render whatever assistance they could.
The two ships came within hailing distance, but there seemed to be no life aboard the stranger. It was decided to lower the boat and for Dei Gratias mate, Oliver Deveau, to take two men, Second Mate John Wright and seaman John Johnson, over to investigate. They accordingly piled into the small boat and rowed over to the stranger.
It was now mid-afternoon. On the strangers boards they could see her name painted, Mary Celeste, but had no cause to imagine as they clambered over the side and dropped to her deck that they were about to enter the history books as participants in the greatest of all maritime mysteries. The only sounds that greeted them aboard Mary Celeste were those normally encountered aboard a ship, otherwise she was strangely silent.
Mary Celeste was deserted.
In the months to come Captain Morehouse, Mate Deveau and the crew of Dei Gratia would be suspected of piracy, of having boarded Mary Celeste and slaughtering everyone on board. Other thinkers speculated that they had colluded with the crew of Mary Celeste in a scam in which they first took them to land and then claimed the salvage reward with the intention of splitting it between them. The captain and crew of Mary Celeste would fare even worse, being accused of almost everything from murderous religious fanaticism through most seafaring crimes imaginable to rank stupidity.
Over the years a myth would also grow up around Mary Celeste, ensuring that she would pass into the common language to describe any strangely deserted place. This myth entailed a minor name change Mary Celeste is more often than not called Marie Celeste and the story of her discovery and the mysterious disappearance of all those aboard her is immeasurably enhanced. In the popular imagination by details such as all the lifeboats being found secure in place on board, half-eaten meals and cups of warm coffee left on the galley table, and the aroma of fresh tobacco smoke lingering in the Captains cabin, where a cat is supposed to have been found sleeping peacefully on a bed.
Disappointingly, none of this is true.
The disappearance of the crew from Mary Celeste is a real, genuine and impenetrable mystery, but even real, genuine and impenetrable mysteries attract embellishments like a magnet attracts iron filings. I have no idea why this happens, why it is that people take a good mystery and try to make it even more mysterious, but it is a sad fact that a really good mystery, enjoyably taxing to the imagination, seems far less interesting when stripped of these embellishments. Happily, that is not the case with Mary Celeste.
True, the story is far less excitingly mysterious than the half-eaten meals, warm mugs of tea and the lingering aroma of fresh tobacco smoke make it seem, but instead of such things leading to wild and supernatural theories such as the terrified crew being snatched one by one from the deck of the vessel by the tentacles of a massive octopus or of being beamed aboard a flying saucer in a Close Encounter of the Third Kind to join other abductees such as the captain and crew of the Cyclops or the pilots and navigators of Flight 19, we are confronted with the need for prosaic explanations of the closed room kind. Aficionados of detective fiction will be familiar with this type of crime story: a person is murdered inside a room from which there is no apparent means of access or egress except through a door that is locked from the inside. How did the murderer escape the room? The death of Julia Stoner in Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes mystery The Speckled Band is just such a closed room mystery.
