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| The Mary Celeste (Inset: The captain's wife and daughter) |
Finding
abandoned ships floating on the high seas are not uncommon occurrences. As an
example, the MV Alta, a 2,400 ton vessel, was found floating near the Irish
coast in the beginning of this year. It had had broken down near Bermuda and while
the crew had been rescued, the ship had been drifting for nearly seventeen
months, skirting Africa, the Americas and Europe. The details after that remain
murky: the owners might have abandoned it in international waters; it might
have been hijacked, and finally, left to drift.
One
such abandonment, captured the imagination of the world, and the subsequent varied
explanations became a sort of cottage industry. The fate of the Mary Celeste, built
in Nova Scotia under British registration and sold to American interests in
1868, remains a mystery to this day.
In
December of 1872, off the coast of the Azores, the Mary Celeste was discovered floating
alone, in a disheveled but seaworthy condition, by the Dei Gratia, a Canadian merchant
vessel. The ship’s ample supplies, its cargo and all the crew’s belongings
remained on board. Only the lifeboat, a small yawl, was missing. The ships’ log
revealed nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed that the ship had been
abandoned in a hurry, yet no reason for its abandonment could be discovered and
the ship’s crew could never be found.
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| The Dei Gratia |
The
story might have ended there, except for two things. One was the personal
tragedy of the Captain, Benjamin Briggs, who arranged to have his wife and baby
daughter on board. He left his son, who was seven at the time, with his mother.
The death of the mother, the daughter and the orphaning of the son aroused
public sympathy.
The
second reason was due to a fictionalized report written by a twenty-five year
old ship’s surgeon named Arthur Conan Doyle. While he had no connection to the
Mary Celeste, the creator of Sherlock Holmes wrote the report in the first
person, claiming the disaster to be the result of a white-race hating fanatic
named Jephson, who commandeers the ship to Africa.
While
thoroughly un-factual, the story caused a sensation when published in the
Cornhill Magazine. Immediately, other publications came out with even more
fantastic accounts. Other “survivors” told their tales (despite the fact that
no survivors were ever located,) each more lurid that the rest.
The
accounts included thievery, murder, madness, treasures of gold and silver,
giant squid and even “mystical experiences” that somehow tied the ship’s
abandonment to the lost continent of Atlantis. The more bizarre the story, the
more it was lapped up. In the 1930’s two well-received radio plays aired, movies
were filmed in 1935 and in 1938, and a play performed in 1949. In 2007, the Smithsonian
Chanel aired a documentary on the subject.
In
the end, the Mary Celeste, could not outrun her bad luck. Despite being made again
sea-worthy, she sat in a dock unused, having gained a reputation for bad luck. After
a change in ownership, she sailed again, resulting in heavy losses. Her owners,
in desperation, ran her aground on a reef near Haiti, hoping to collect
insurance. Their plot was discovered, resulting in the suicide of one of the
owners, madness of another and the impoverishment, death and disgrace of the third,
three months after the trial.
Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)
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