December 4, 1872: The Mary Celeste Is Found, Abandoned

December 4, 1872: The merchant vessel Mary Celeste is found in the Atlantic Ocean -- fully intact and fully stocked, but completely uncrewed.

This story sounds like it should have been told by singer Gordon Lightfoot, a la "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

The Mary Celeste was brigantine, a two-masted sailing vessel, built in Canada and launched in 1861 as the Amazon. In 1869, she was bought by American owners and received the name by which she would be known. On November 7, 1872, she set sail for Genoa, Italy, under the command of Captain Benjamin Briggs, a 37-year-old native of Wareham, Massachusetts, who brought his wife Sarah, their 2-year-old daughter Sophia, and 7 crew. (Benjamin and Sarah also had a 5-year-old son, Arthur. Already in school, he was left in the care of a grandmother.)

On December 4, the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia saw the Mary Celeste, about 600 miles west of Portugal, sailing erratically. When Dei Gratia crewmembers boarded, they found a few feet of water in the hold, which was concerning, but, by itself, hardly a reason to abandon ship. The cargo was all there, and there were no signs of violence. There had been one lifeboat, and it was missing. So were some of the ship's papers and navigation instruments. The last log entry was dated November 25, 9 days earlier, and it suggested nothing amiss. The ship wasn't "fine," but it was still seaworthy. But there was no one to sail it. What happened to them?

No one on board is known to have ever been found. This was one of the earliest events to have started conspiracy theories in America, from to pirates to mutiny, with the wilder ones suggesting sea monsters -- after all, this was just 2 years after Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The conspiracy theories were so "romantic," the simplest explanation got drowned out and forgotten. The Dei Gratia crew discovered that one of the ship’s pumps was inoperative, causing her to take on water. But with the hold jammed with cargo it was hard to tell just how much water.

There was also a faulty chronometer, which may have led Briggs to believe he should have sighted land days earlier. Indeed, the aforementioned final log entry revealed they had caught sight of the Azores, which were a thousand miles west of Portugal, but had established ports, and would have seemed like a reasonable place to go for safety. Except they were never found, suggesting that they never made it, going to Davy Jones' locker before they could reach the Azores or any other land.

David Morehouse, captain of the Dei Gratia, sent some of his crew to take the Mary Celeste with them, to their intended destination of Gibraltar, reaching it on December 12. The Mary Celeste was assigned a replacement crew, who took her originally-intended destination of Genoa. It left there on June 26, 1873, and arrived in New York on September 19.

No one wanted to trust her with their cargo, and it sat at a New York wharf until being sold in February 1874. Her new owners gave her an Indian Ocean route. In 1879, she docked at St. Helena, the island to which Napoleon Bonaparte had been exiled. Her Captain, Edgar Tuthill, had fallen ill, and died on St. Helena, encouraging the idea that the ship was cursed: He was her 3rd captain to die prematurely, if the missing Briggs is to be counted as dead.

The ship was sold again in February 1880, and in August 1884, received a new Captain, Gilman Parker. He and the new owners decided enough was enough, and on January 3, 1885, he purposely wrecked the Mary Celeste at Gonâve Island, off the coast of Haiti. A jury could not agree on whether insurance fraud was committed, and the company only received $500. 

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December 4, 1872 was a Wednesday. There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball was out of season, football barely existed on an organized level, hockey didn't even exist on that level, and basketball wouldn't be invented at all for another 19 years.