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.

June 15, 1919: The 1st Transatlantic Flight

Arthur Brown (left) and John Alcock

June 15, 1919: The 1st transatlantic flight is made.

What's that? You thought it was by Charles Lindbergh in 1927? No, that was the 1st flight between the North American and European continents, an achievement made famous well before it was done, due to a cash prize being awarded.

It's also worth noting that Lindbergh's fame was greater than it might otherwise have been because he did it alone, hence his nickname, "The Lone Eagle." It didn't have to go to a solo pilot. Indeed, mere days before Lindbergh did it, a 2-man team of Frenchmen, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, attempted to go the other way, from Paris to New York. They were seen flying over Ireland, and were never seen again. Their wreckage has never been found: It may have fallen into the Atlantic Ocean, or it may have crashed into the dense woods in Maine or Canada's Maritime Provinces.

John Alcock, 24, was a native of Greater Manchester. Arthur Whitten Brown, 32, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Manchester. Both served in the Royal Air Force in World War I, and both were prisoners of war. Alcock's His plane's engine failed while he was providing air support during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915, and he was taken prisoner by the Ottomans. Brown was shot down by the Germans. Both survived their ordeal.

They met shortly after the Armistice, and, both intrigued by the £10,000 prize offered by national newspaper The Daily Mail for the 1st transatlantic air crossing in under 72 hours, decided to go for it. They chose a modified Vickers Vimy bomber biplane with Rolls-Royce engines. Unlike Lindbergh with his Spirit of St. Louis, and Nungesser and Coli with their White Bird, they did not choose a special name for their plane.

They chose the closest possible route: From St. John's, Newfoundland, the easternmost city in the Western Hemisphere, to the west coast of Ireland, the westernmost point in Europe. (Newfoundland would remain a British Dominion until 1949, when they applied for admission to Canada as a Province, and got it.)

At 1:45 PM on June 14, they took off from Lester's Field in St. John's. The takeoff was difficult, and they just missed the tops of some trees. Within their 1st 4 hours, their generator failed, costing them their radio and their heat. Then an exhaust pipe burst, causing a noise that meant that Alcock and Brown couldn't even hear each other. And then they hit fog.

In the 10th hour of the flight, the fog lifted, and Brown could see the stars and use a sextant, and found that they were on course. But their electric heating suits had failed, and in the open cockpit, they were terribly cold. In their 13th hour, they hit snow. They got wet, and their instruments began to ice up. It began to look like they would have to fly low and bail out, and hope that someone would rescue them before they drowned or died of hypothermia.

But their luck held out. At 8:40 AM, Greenwich Mean Time, less than 16 hours after takeoff, they saw what they thought was a suitable green field, and set down. It was a rough landing, because the field was actually Derrygilmalgh Bog, near Clifden in County Galway, Ireland. But you know the old saying: Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

They had done it. Brown, perhaps feeling a bit cocky, said that if the weather had been good, they would have had enough fuel left to go all the way to London. They were honored by their country, as King George V invested them as Knight Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire at Windsor Castle a week after the achievement.

Alcock did not have long to enjoy his share of the laurels and the publicity. On December 18, 1919, he was flying the new Vickers Viking amphibious aircraft at the Paris Airshow, but crashed, and was killed. Brown lived a bit longer: Like co-inventor of the airplane Orville Wright, he died in 1948.

In 1954, a statue of them was dedicated at London Heathrow Airport. In 2019, to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the flight, the statue was moved to Clifden, near the site of the landing. Another statue is in their shared hometown of Manchester. The plane was repaired, and is on display at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London.

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June 15, 1919 was a Sunday. Sunday baseball was not yet legal in all cities, or all States, that were home to teams in what we now call Major League Baseball. Only 8 of a possible 16 teams were in action. Not in action: In the American League, the Boston Red Sox, the Cleveland Indians, the Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Browns; and in the National League, the Boston Braves, the Cincinnati Reds, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates. But these games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the St. Louis Browns, 1-0 at the Polo Grounds. Urban Shocker, possessor of one of the great names in baseball history, and a pitcher whom the Yankees had traded away, came back to haunt them, pitching a 5-hit shutout.

* The New York Giants beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-4 in 10 innings at Cubs Park, later to be renamed Wrigley Field. Ironically, one of the players on the losing side for the Cubs was Fred Merkle, whose baserunning "Boner" cost the Giants the 1908 National League Pennant against the Cubs. Grover Cleveland Alexander was the losing pitcher in relief.

* The Brooklyn Robins, the once-and-future Dodgers, beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-2 at Robison Field in St. Louis.

* And the Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 8-5 at National Park in Washington, later to be renamed Griffith Stadium. Ty Cobb went 1-for-4 for the Tigers. 

May 8, 1933: The 1st Southern Transatlantic Flight

May 8, 1933: Lieutenant Colonel Stanisław Skarżyński of the Polish Air Force completes his flight from Saint-Louis, Senegal, then a French colony, to Maceió, the capital city of the State of Alagoas, the easternmost city in Brazil. It is the 1st nonstop transatlantic flight between the continents of Africa and South America.

It wasn't the 1st successful attempt to fly across the South Atlantic Ocean. In 1922, in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Brazil's independence, Portuguese pilots Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral flew in several stages from Lisbon, Portugal to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It took 3 different planes, and from March 30 to June 17. Although a notable achievement in aviation, it was hardly the same thing as what Skarżyński did 11 years later.

Born on May 1, 1899 in Warta, in the Łódź Voivodeship, Skarżyński fought in the infantry in World War I and the Polish-Soviet War. In 1925, he completed pilot training, and, in 1931, he and Lieutenant Andrzej Markiewicz completed the 1st aerial circumnavigation of Africa. It required several stops, and it took from February 1 to May 5.

He took off from Saint-Louis on May 7, 1933, in a single-seater RWD-5bis, and flew across the Southern Atlantic Ocean to Macelo in 20 hours and 30 minutes. The plane had no radio and no safety equipment, and it remains the lightest plane ever to fly across the Atlantic. He then flew his plane to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and put himself and the plane on a ship to return to Europe.

After the outbreak of World War II, he helped in transporting Polish pilots, fleeing from Poland, through Romania to France, a centuries-old ally of Poland's, where the Polish Air Force was recreated. In 1940, after the fall of France, Lieutenant Colonel Skarżyński helped ship 17,000 Polish airmen to Britain, where he became commanding officer of Polish Flying Schools at RAF Hucknall and then RAF Newton. Britain's Royal Air Force assigned him as commanding officer of RAF Lindholme.

On June 26, 1942, while returning in a Wellington from a bombing mission over Bremen, Germany, an engine stalled above the North Sea. He made sure his entire crew parachuted to safety, and was the only one killed. He was 43 years old, and was posthumously promoted to a full Colonel. A Polish air base outside Kraków has been named for him.

His 1931 flying partner, Andrzej Markiewicz, was killed in a crash during a military exercise on May 7, 1943. He was also 43 at the time of his death. Neither lived to see the Nazis kicked out of Poland -- or the establishment of the pro-Soviet Communist state there, which might have dealt with them harshly.

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May 8, 1933 was a Monday. There were 4 baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Chicago White Sox, 7-3 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each went 1-for-2 with a walk and an RBI, although neither hit a home run. Don Brennan, who would finish his career with 21 wins, outpitched Ted Lyons, who would finish his career with 260.

* The New York Giants lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-3 at the Polo Grounds. Rather than put himself in his usual position of 1st base, Giant player-manager Bill Terry put Sam Leslie there, and he drove in all the Giants' runs with a home run. Mel Ott went 2-for-4. But Joe Medwick and former Giant Frankie Frisch, now the Cards' player-manager, hit home runs to beat the Giants.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Braves 3-0 at Braves Field in Boston. Paul Waner went 1-for-4. Lloyd Waner went 2-for-4. And Larry French pitched a 3-hit shutout.

* And the Washington Senators beat the St. Louis Browns, 10-8 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Bob Boken won the game with a home run in the top of the 12th inning.