Unsolved mysteries

The crew vanished; the ship sailed on for another 13 years

In December 1872 a Canadian ship called Dei Gratia came across another vessel drifting oddly in the Atlantic between the Azores and Portugal, its sails half-set and nobody aboard. That ship was the Mary Celeste, bound from New York to Genoa with a cargo of alcohol, and everyone who had been on it—Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and young daughter, and seven crew—was simply gone, never to be found. The ship itself was in decent shape, still carrying its cargo and the crew's belongings, with only the lifeboat and some navigational papers missing, and the log's final entry was ten days old. That gap between an orderly-looking ship and a vanished crew is what turned an ordinary shipping mishap into a permanent puzzle.

When the ship was brought in for salvage hearings at Gibraltar, the presiding official became convinced a crime had occurred, pointing to marks on the hull and stains he took for blood, and he pushed theories of mutiny, piracy or insurance conspiracy. Those suspicions collapsed once the stains proved not to be blood and naval experts attributed the hull marks to ordinary wear, but the damage to the ship's reputation lingered, and the salvage payment awarded was unusually low. Over the following decades the mystery attracted a flood of embellishment: newspapers invented lifelike details, a young Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a heavily fictionalized short story that popularized the misspelling

Even the ship's name is wrong in popular memory: the widespread "Marie Celeste" spelling comes from a short story Conan Doyle published in 1884.

Read the whole of Mary Celeste on Wikipedia

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