The Mary Celeste was a Canadian built brigantine weighting 282 tons. It was registered in New York in the names James H Winchester, Sylvester Goodwin and Benjamin Spooner Briggs.

The ship´s master Benjamin Spooner Briggs was known in Gibraltar as a staunch abstainer from drink and a devout Christian. He was married to Sarah and had a two year old daughter called Sophia Matilda and had it not been for a book written by Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, then a struggling and unknown writer, and no doubt very grateful for the 30pound his editor paid him, the tale of the Mary Celeste may just have slipped in to maritime history as yet another sad loss of life at sea.

The facts are that Captain Briggs was a highly respected Captain. Indeed the main owner of the ship, James Henry Winchester when giving evidence at the inquiry stated that Briggs would never dessert his ship except to save his life but still, Briggs, his wife Sarah, their child and 7 crew have never been found nor has any trace of their disappearance been uncovered. There has been great speculation about sea monsters, pirates and the like but not one piece of clothing, not one hair nor one bone has ever been found to give a clue to what actually happened to them.

What is known, thanks to the avid record keeping of both the court inquiry and the shipping companies, is that the ship hailed from New York and on 7 November it was bound for Genoa with a cargo of American industrial alcohol, some 1701 barrels, being shipped for Meissner Ackermann & Co. The value of this shipment was approximately 35,000 dollars and its purpose was to fortify wine. In addition, there was assorted freight with a value of 3,400 dollars and the ship itself was insured for 14,000 dollars. The cargo was insured in Europe and the hull insurance was carried by American companies. The assorted freight was insured by the Atlantic Mutual Insurance of New York.

On the 15 November the Mary Celeste was followed out of port by another ship called the Dei Gratia carrying a cargo of 1735 barrels of petroleum. This ship took an almost parallel course across the Atlantic and on the afternoon of 5 December, half way between the Azores and Portugal the Dei Gratia spotted a Brigantine which Captain Morehouse, the captain of the Dei Gratia, recognised to be the Mary Celeste. Knowing Captain Briggs and having dined with him before sailing, he was puzzled as to why the ship was yawing, coming in to the wind then falling off, it was clear to the experienced Captain that the Mary Celeste was not under control. He knew that not only Captain Briggs should be on board but also his second in command, Albert Richardson, who was considered to be capable of captaincy himself. So the sight of the ship in this condition bewildered Morehouse not to mention that it should by now have reached Genoa and docked.

No distress signal had been sighted by the Dei Gratia so they kept watch on the Mary Celeste for two hours, repeatedly hailing her to no avail. Becoming very concerned about the ship and its crew, Morehouse took the decision to send a small boat over to board her.

On boarding, the ship was found to be in good condition. It was certainly seaworthy and the impression was that the crew had left in a great hurry confirmed by the presence of their oil skin boots and pipes, still on board. Captain Morehouse thought that they had perhaps abandoned ship thinking that it was about to sink for some reason. One reason for this thought was that the chronometer and sextant were not found on board nor the lifeboat which was also missing. The chronometer and sextant were items that any competent Captain would take with him, when abandoning ship. The last entry in the ships log was for 25 November when the ship passed St Mary Island in the Azores. Still stranger, one of the ships two pumps had been disassembled and three and half feet of water was sloshing around in the bottom of the vessel. However, 1701 barrels of industrial alcohol were still present and there was a substantial supply of fresh water and food, enough for some months, still on board.

What had been the fate of the ship? Well, if you put aside sea monsters, killer waterspouts, pirates and the possibility of a homicidal sailor taking over the ship, as played by Bela Lugosi in the 1935 film The Mystery of The Mary Celeste, then there has to be a more realistic explanation.

The men from the Dei Gratia sailed the abandoned ship some 800 miles to Gibraltar where the British vice admiralty court convened under Sir James Cochrane with the Gibraltar Attorney General Frederick Solly-Flood as principal officer of the court. The court convened a salvage hearing which usually was set up to determine whether the salvagers, in this case the crew of the Dei Gratia were entitled to any payment from the ship´s insurers. However, Solly Flood suspected foul play may have been the cause of the mystery and the inquiry trailed on for some 3 months before it was decided that there was no evidence of foul play and the salvagers received their payment, but only one sixth of the 46,000 dollars for which the ship and cargo had been insured. It is thought that this underpayment suggested that the authorities were not totally satisfied that the Dei Gratia crew were innocent. Whether they were or were not, there was still no decisive explanation as to what happened to Captain Briggs, his family and the crew.

Frederick Solly-Flood was obsessed with the Mary Celeste and for years after the inquiry he revisited the case, writing summaries of his interviews and notes, but still, the mystery remained – nobody knew what really happened.

In 2002, Anne MacGregor a documentarian who uses modern forensic techniques to unravel past mysteries such as what happened to the Hindenburg, took an interest in the Mary Celeste and with funding from Smithsonian Networks, she directed and produced “The True Story of The Mary Celeste”. Anne said “there is so much nonsense written about this legend, that I felt compelled to find the truth. There are obvious limitations for historic cases but using the latest technology, you can come to a conclusion”.

Anne started by eliminating the obvious, as they say, “if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”. Sea monsters were easy to dismiss and the fact that the cargo was intact, seems to rule out pirates. There was also a theory in the 1800´s that the crew drank the alcohol on board and mutinied in a drink crazed haze. But after interviewing decendants of the crew, Anne was relatively happy that was not an option. Another theory suggested that vapours had escaped from the barrels of alcohol as it expanded in the Azores heat and blown off the hatch to the hold, causing fear and alarm that the whole ship was about to blow up and resulting in the crew abandoning the ship, but this theory was dashed as the Dei Gratia crew noted the ship hatch as being secured when they boarded the ship and there were no reports of fumes being smelled. Anne says “it is true that 9 of the 1701 barrels were empty but they were made form red oak which is considerably more porous than white oak so it is likely that they leaked causing the loss of those barrels. As for the homicidal sailor in the 1935 film, it is thought he may have been modelled on two German brothers, Volkert and Boye Lorenzen. They came under some suspicion as their possessions were not found on board by Morehouse´s men, but they had lost their property in an earlier shipwreck and had no motive so they were discounted.

Anne now turned to possible explanations and enlisted Phil Richardson a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and an expert on derelict vessels. He makes the point that the ship was in good condition because the crew from the Dei Gratia sailed her 800 miles back to Gibraltar with no problems. Anne had also visited Captain Briggs home town of Marion, Massachusetts and interviewed decendants of Arthur Briggs, the Captain´s 7 year old son. Arthur was left behind to attend school when the Mary Celeste set off. The outcome of that meeting was that Captain Briggs was an intelligent, experience Captain who would never have done anything irrational.

Anne thought if she could work backwards and identify where Briggs and the crew actually abandoned the ship, that might offer some clues. She went to the ships slate where notations are made before they are entered in the ship´s log. She discovered that on 25 November, the ship was six miles from, and within sight of Santa Maria, an island in the Azores. Furthermore, from the testimony of the crew who boarded the vessel, she knew that some 10 days later, the ship was 400 miles off to the east of the island, so she asked Phil Richardson to work out a path between these two points. Drawing on water temperatures, wind speeds and the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), a database that stores global marine information from 1784 to 2007, she, her yachtsman husband and Richardson managed to work out that indeed, the Mary Celeste could have drifted from its recorded position on 25 November to where it was finally found without a crew to sail it. Basically, it sailed itself to its final location.

Anne then considered where a competent captain would abandon ship. The most likely place would be within sight of land. Since Santa Maria Island was the last land for hundreds of miles, it seemed safe to assume that the Mary Celeste was abandoned on the morning of 25 November. All that now remained was to work out why they left the safety of the ship. Here Frederick Solly Flood´s notes became invaluable because the ships log is believed to have been lost in 1885 so his transcripts provided the only means for Anne and Phil Richardson to obtain the data to plot the course logged for the ship. Once they had that they compared it to the ICOADS data and other information on sea conditions at the time. The conclusion, Captain Briggs was 120 miles west of where he thought he was, this was probably due to a faulty chronometer. This meant that Captain Briggs should have sighted land three days before he did. Solly-Flood´s notes also state that the day before he reached the Azores, Briggs changed course and headed north of Santa Maria Island perhaps seeking a haven. But, bad weather and a faulty chronometer would not be enough for a good captain like Briggs to abandon ship alone, there had to be another reason.
Further research threw up a very plausible reason….. on its previous voyage the Mary Celeste had carried coal and it had recently been refitted so it is possible that there was debris still on board from the refit and dust from the coal transport. This could have clogged the pump causing it to be disassembled. Without the pump, Captain Briggs could not have known how much seawater was in the ship´s hull, it was impossible to see due to the tightly packed cargo and perhaps sighting land and with the threat of more stormy weather ahead, a faulty chronometer and possibly a hull filling up with water, he decided to abandon ship. The lifeboat never made it to dry land and we can only speculate that it was swamped by a wave or overturned and the 10 people on board drowned.

After what happened to the Mary Celeste, not many traders fancied putting their cargo on a cursed ship so when she was released by the court in Gibraltar, she was sailed back to Boston without a cargo. She remained in service for another 13 years. Nobody wanted to hire her and when she was put up for sale, there were no offers. Eventually the remaining two owners of the ship put her back in to service but another captain died on board, adding to her unpopularity. She was finally sold and continued to change hands until 3 January, 1885 when Captain Gilman Parker purposefully ran the ship aground on Rochelais Coral Reef off Haiti. She was totally lost, with the damage being irreparable. Being the Mary Celeste, the story did not die there though. Her owners became embroiled in an insurance fraud investigation over the loss of her cargo. The cargo contained – boots and cat food.