What is the Mary Celeste?
The Mary Celeste was an American sailing ship found drifting unmanned in December 1872 at sea between the Azores and Portugal. All ten people who should have been aboard, Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their young daughter and seven crew members, had vanished without a trace.
A ghost ship wrapped in mystery
When the crew of the British ship Dei Gratia, which found her, examined the vessel, the hull was largely intact, nearly all the barrels of alcohol in the cargo remained, and there were six months’ worth of food and water. There was no sign of a struggle; only the ship’s lifeboat was missing. The puzzling situation drew great attention, and in 1884 a young Arthur Conan Doyle published a short story based on the incident, making it known worldwide. Embellishments from the story were later sometimes told as fact.
Has the mystery been solved?
Many theories have been proposed for why the crew vanished, from pirates and mutiny to giant squid and paranormal phenomena like the Bermuda Triangle. The leading theory today is that fumes leaking from the alcohol cargo, or worries about the ship taking on water, led the captain to fear an explosion or sinking and move everyone into the lifeboat for the time being, but they were unable to get back to the ship, perhaps because the rope came loose. The truth, however, is still unknown.
