Emily Chan
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the surface of the Earth. Due to such a wide range, there’s still so much we haven’t explored, from unknown sea monsters to missing ships that were lost centuries ago.
The depths of the ocean are rife with maritime mysteries that have remained truly puzzling. One of the strangest cases of vanishing vessels is the mystery of the Mary Celeste.
On November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste departed from New York to its destination of Genoa, Italy. The ship’s captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and eight crew members were on board.
Nearly a month later, on December 5, a passing British ship called the Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste adrift about 400 miles east of the Azores. There were no signs of life on the vessel.
David Morehouse, the captain of the Dei Gratia, sent a boarding party to the ship to see what was the matter. They found that the crew’s belongings were still in their quarters, but the lifeboat was missing. Three and a half feet of water filled the bottom of the ship, and one of its two pumps had been taken apart.
Furthermore, there was a six-month supply of food and water, along with the ship’s cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol that never got delivered. It appeared that the vessel was abandoned.
So, what happened to the people who sailed aboard the Mary Celeste? The lack of clues on the boat made it difficult to decipher the events that led to the desertion. Theories have ranged from mutiny to sea monsters.
The 282-ton ship’s last entry in the logbook was on November 25 at five in the morning. Before reaching the Azores, it had to navigate through bad weather for two weeks.
The novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story based on the missing Mary Celeste that was published in 1884. It was about how the inhabitants of the ghost ship were attacked by a vengeful ex-slave. Experts conducted investigations into the disappearance of the vessel but couldn’t solve the mystery.
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