Crypto Corner Returns?! The ship with nobody on it

 

It’s almost time for Halloween, and I have been thinking about the future of my blogging. That brought me back to one of the things that got me here in the first place, my interest in Forteana. That, in turn, got me thinking about something that I had never really thought about trying my own hand at either way. It’s the most famous and iconic of mysteries, the one that is still hailed as “unsolved”… and the one that has the highest volume of absolute nonsense. I speak of the Mary Celeste, the greatest of maritime mysteries… and I will be presenting the explicit hypothesis that it was a scam.

The facts of the case are already so frequently retold as to be moot in serious discussion. In 1872, a ship named Dei Gratia sighted another ship near the Strait of Gibraltar, moving erratically. The captain, David Morehouse, gave orders to approach what was presumed to be a vessel in distress, only to find that it in fact had no crew aboard at all. Its name was the Mary Celeste, an already disreputable vessel commanded by one Benjamin Briggs, a well-regarded if undistinguished seaman who had set off from New England with a cargo of alcohol, a handpicked crew and his wife Sarah and young daughter sophy on board. Though the lifeboat was gone, the ship was still largely seaworthy. But what made it remarkable was that a logbook found aboard recorded the ship’s last position as hundreds of miles further west. Further investigations would raise allegations of mutiny, murder, conspiracies and outright insurance fraud. Yet, in the end, multiple inquests could give no explanation, and neither the captain nor the crew nor his missing family members were ever found. So, of course, decades of literature suggested that it was the work of mutineers, or murderous ex-slaves, or pirates, or giant squid, or aliens, or… Yeah, we all know, this was bunk.

Now, to back this up, what’s really noteworthy are the two figures who gave the story its eventual form. One was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, who turned out an early yarn with a fictionalized retelling of the vessel, subtly renamed Marie Celeste. In his telling, the tale became a racially charged tale of vengeance. Though it specifically lacked a supernatural element, he made a number of additions and omissions to present a scenario that was far more mysterious than the mundane facts, notably portraying the vessel with its lifeboat still in place and with a “hot meal” on the table. (The latter detail seems to have come from a slightly earlier retelling in the Los Angeles Times.) The other is the infamous Frederick Solly Flood, an attorney general who investigated the case. He was quite justifiably incredulous at the truthfulness of the received account of events, but could not come up with a better alternative than increasingly contrived speculations that the captain and the crew had either murdered each other or been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia. It is worth further note that, prior to the rise of the Fortean community, his was the dominant “narrative” of the event, as further reflected in the multiple lurid hoaxes that made the worst school library Forteana look like naïve exuberance.

Now is the point where we can double back to the “savvy” version of events, represented by Ian Wilson’s frequently cited Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries and Brian Hendricks’ fine scholarly rundown Ghost Ship. These accounts have at least set a bar of discussion higher than the self-mystification of the “true mysteries” books. We intelligent anomalists and historical investigators all know now that the lifeboat was gone from the ship. It has long since been agreed that, while the Mary Celeste was reasonably intact at the time of discovery, it had suffered significant damage that would probably have claimed it if not for its seemingly happenstance encounter with another ship. Finally, while items of significant value were left aboard ship, as well as the ship’s log book, the captain and crew did take the time to bring navigational instruments. The upshot has been at least to place the “mystery” in the realm of psychology rather than the paranormal. Obviously, the captain and crew decided to leave the ship, without believing the situation so dire that they deserted without preparation. It is sensibly postulated that they believed they could either reach land or simply return to the ship once some temporary problem resolved itself. At some point, they miscalculated or had a further mishap, leaving the captain, crew and a woman and child to a fate that was, in Wilson’s words, “tragically obvious”.

What is most noteworthy in all this is that these revisionist takes have done very little to put Flood in a better light. If anything, he has been the foil of the debunkers as he was to the credulous lay Forteans. In their accounts, he becomes a kind of misguided extremist, trying mightily to refute the posited facts of the case only to see them affirmed again and again. What is undoubtedly true is that there was precious little that was reasonable in his conjectures. The one thing that can still put him in a sympathetic light is the desperation that must have driven to it. He becomes the epitome of the specifically Victorian brand of rationalism, determined to find a “reasonable” explanation even for what was by all appearances a series of irrational acts. As the centerpiece of my own scenario, I posit what I find closest to the truth: He was the kind of prosecutor who, given the opportunity, would overstate and distort his case to the point of irreparable harm even if the facts and evidence were already in favor of the accused being guilty. We can thus frame the question as, just how much did Flood set rational inquiries back?

On this vein, we can see that Flood fundamentally botched his case as soon as he arbitrarily fixated on the notion that the crew had mutinied after getting drunk on alcohol from the ship’s hold. In fact, even if the alcohol was not strictly toxic as usually reported (only Hicks seems to admit any uncertainty on that point), it was certainly never intended for recreational consumption in any quantity. Beyond that, an uprising of intoxicated and enraged sailors changes the scenario from a crime of passion rather than cold-blooded fraud, without any advantage in accounting for the evidence. It was notably unlikely that such a ragtag band could act without resistance from loyalists in the crew and/ or infighting in their own ranks, either of which would almost certainly have left clear signs of struggle. What should have ended the discussion is and if such a group had given any thought at all to covering their tracks, they would simply set fire to the ship and its flammable cargo. Then the most consequential and malign error was that Flood all but rejected the simplest solution of all, that Briggs decided to abandon, burn or flat-out explode his own ship to collect the insurance. On this point, it must be considered that even if Flood was right, his unwillingness to accuse a captain of wrongdoing surely reveals a cultural blind spot that could easily have cost us key facts and context.

Now, we get to the infamous details, and I freely maintain that if my scenario does not explain everything, it leaves no more plot holes than any other. For example, we know that a certain amount of alcohol had leaked into the hold, and that at least one hatch was secured open. This was in fact a reasonably favorable circumstance for the kind of fuel-air explosion already prominently discussed by revisionists, as much as a man of the 1800s could have understood the phenomenon. It is especially noteworthy that this would allow for multiple contingencies. If whatever igniting mechanism was set up failed to produce an explosion, the resulting blaze could still destroy the ship. If it had not, then the flames could still burn up the cargo along with any evidence of intentional sabotage. The one thing would-be arsonists might well have been unprepared for was for a carefully planned detonation to fail entirely. That would have left the crew in the position we already know, either paddling away from the ship in the lifeboat or watching from a calculated safe distance. In the latter scenario, we can envision an argument whether to go back to the ship, just possibly long enough to delay a decision that would have changed their fate.

Another detail this can account for is the abandoned logbook, and the further fact that the last entry was 9 days prior to the ship’s discovery. From what we know now, this was probably at least a day or two before the abandonment of the ship, and of course, the apparent gap in the nominally daily log is all the more strange if anything untoward had happened in the meantime. It has also been freely noted that several calculations of the ship’s position may have been incorrect. This is precisely where outright fraud becomes, at a minimum, more economical than any other solution. Perhaps Briggs discontinued the log when his real plan started. If he had cared enough to make the effort, he might have kept two separate logs, a fraud known to Christopher Columbus. Or, for simplicity, the logbook may have been abandoned because the captain realized it contained information that would contradict whatever story he planned to tell.

At this point, the problem once again falls into the realm of psychology. Much has been said about Briggs’ piety and mild temperament, which is certainly a fair point against the broken-record guessing that he drove his crew to mutiny. But if the charge is premeditated fraud, the story of the scrupulous and reliable professional taking the money and run has long since become its own cliché. Of course, it can be further allowed that he objected to the plan only to be overruled by other conspirators, most obviously the ship’s frequently discussed owner, James Winchester. We might also reconsider a role for Morehouse, the one point where even Flood backed off. If Morehouse and any of his crew had been let in on a plot, they could have been induced by a chance to play hero by picking up the survivors as much as any share in an expected payout. If they were not, it could very well have been planned for the Mary Celeste to cross paths with his ship, notwithstanding the known discrepancies in their known and intended courses, and ideally give truthful witnesses to the destruction of the Mary Celeste in the process. Then we might wonder about a comment reported by his widow: “Poor Briggs! He and his wife and crew must have perished in that small, open yawl. There can be no other way out of it.” It is the same conclusion reached by others much further removed from the case, but wouldn’t the certainty and finality of his remark make all the more sense if that was what he expected to find on the fateful day?

The one obvious counterpoint is that Briggs would have to have embarked on the plot with not only his wife but the younger of their two children onboard. On consideration, this is no more or less than one more unknown, and another point where the lingering filters of Victorian morality have done us no favors. The later hoaxers were especially apt to push Sarah Briggs into the role of a passive damsel, which is in fact the one thing we can be sure she was not. In reality, she was  an intelligent and resourceful woman who had accompanied her husband often enough to be an seasoned mariner in her on right. From what can be known, Briggs in turn respected her as a partner in his ventures. If a plot to sink the Mary Celeste had been discussed between them, it is at least not preposterous that she might have approved. As usual, we can spin further motivations. She may have already wanted to return to a life on land and bring her wayfaring mate with her. Perhaps she would have seen a scheme as no more than a romantically piratical adventure. And of course, the only thing that needs to be added to this “what if” is, as usual, that something went very, very wrong.

And that brings us back around to the aftermath, as Dei Gratia’s crew surveyed the scene. We have already seen that it is not essential that they were party to a conspiracy, if one occurred, but it is all too easy to envision a spontaneous and organic “coverup”. If even the suspicious Flood was unwilling to sustain an accusation of wrongdoing against Briggs, his peers and friends would have been all the more reluctant to implicate him in a petty plot or for that matter a simple error that in all likelihood cost him, his crew and his wife and daughter their lives. Then, if the scenario laid out here is anywhere close to correct, there are plenty of things that would only have been “obvious” to experienced seaman, and many of those might only have been seen by a single person. It would have been easy to dispose of some crucial piece of evidence or remove it from context, easier still simply to omit it from the reports and subsequent testimony. The unavoidable irony is that if anyone had tried to come clean, it might only have further antagonized the likes of Flood.

Now as an epilogue, we might consider a deeper part of maritime lore, the supposedly “cursed” ship. As we all know, the Mary Celeste was the epitome of the legend even without the incident that made her infamous, from a maiden voyage with a captain who got sick and died to a wreck and costly rebuild that gave the ship its name to a final trip where she was in fact wrecked in what a court of law ruled to be deliberate insurance fraud. Through it all, we can see a bedrock of rational plausibility. The ship started as an undistinguished specimen of a type that would soon become both obsolete and unprofitable. In its rebuilt form, it became an awkward compromise, larger than it was meant to be yet only marginally improved, with a sunk cost that would weigh down its profitability. Along the way, it acquired a bad reputation that on objective scrutiny can be counted as nothing more or less than self-fulfilled prophecy. Captains and crew were increasingly unwilling to sail aboard the ship, especially after the disappearance of the Briggs and its crew. More tellingly, it passed through a series of increasingly indifferent or malicious owners, until it finally came to one who was willing to destroy it on purpose. The truth of the matter was that the ship was doomed not by any curse, but by economics that left it unprofitable yet too expensive to abandon until the very end.

And that ends this little rabbit trail. So, what do I think? I’m willing to say, I still don’t know. I have run with my scenario just to see how far it can go. Having come to the end, I will be the first to admit that it’s not a very likely solution. But I can also say, it certainly is not so unlikely that it can be dismissed out of hand. The real lesson of Mary Celeste research is that there will never be a perfect answer to every question. To believe otherwise is to enable the mystification that prevailed for so long, and also to overlook the true horror. If we cannot figure out why an experienced captain would take his wife and child as well as his crew onto the open ocean on a marginal lifeboat, does that not simply show us the limits of our reason? And who are we to say that any of us could not make an equally unfathomable decision, if we had to make it under the same limitations? That should terrify us more than any spooky yarn, and that is why the mystery will live on.