January 7, 2020 • 41 mins
Once upon a time the Mary Celeste was just a ship like any other, ferrying goods to and fro across the oceans -- at least, that is, until December 1872, when the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia found the Mary Celeste adrift and abandoned. The ship showed no signs of a struggle. The cargo was intact. The lifeboat was missing, but the occupants of the Mary Celeste were never seen again. Learn how this story became one of the most enduring (and misunderstood) mysteries in maritime history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History as a production of I Heart Radio. We
(00:27):
were west of the Azores, five days out of New
York when we spotted the Mary Celeste. She was listening
to leeward, but still under sail, with no obvious sign
of distress. That is the first verse from the Mary
Celeste by John F. McCullough. Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians.
(00:48):
Thank you so much for tuning in on our first
episode of that we're recording. At least. My name is Ben,
My name is all Ben. You know what. I'm a
big fan of uh nautical terms, and that poem did
a gang by ster's job of incorporating one of my
other favorite things, alliteration and nautical terms, listing leeward. How
about that? Yeah? Yeah. This poem is just one of
(01:09):
the many poems you can find about the famous or
infamous Mary Celeste. There's the other one, The ghost Ship
Mary Selest by Leland Waldrop. I love a good Waldrop.
It's a weird name, right else, I love a good
ghost ship. Who doesn't like a ghost ship. It's one
of the all time kind of creepy things. Is this
idea of a massive vessel meant to be inhabited by
(01:30):
humans and delivering goods and cargo and and of course
humans to a destination to discover it completely abandoned, just
drifting out there in the sea. Very unsettling thing. And
ghost ships like ghost trains, were a common trope in
the pioneering days of European naval expansion. The Flying Dutchman
(01:51):
is another one. But the thing about the Mary Slest
is that it actually was physically discovered before we started
the show today. I I had asked you and our
super producer, Casey Pegram. I don't think I forgot that.
Casey Ben was doing a really just to give you
a visual, doing a nice almost finger guns kind of
point at Casey Pegram over there after the window. It's
(02:11):
just glass. It's good to see. It's good to see
you man. Don't tap on the glass though. He doesn't
like that. No, no, no no, And don't feed him
after midnight. So it was interesting. I was asking guys
if if you had ever heard of the Mary Celeste,
and Casey you said that this was somewhat unfamiliar to you. Yeah,
I don't think I've ever. It didn't ring a bell,
It did not ring a bell. Certainly, ghost ships. I
(02:33):
don't know if you guys ever saw that ghost ship movie.
I was about to say that that's the one I
think of in popular cold and I never even saw
the movie. I just saw the first scene, the first
pretty much have to watch. Incredible. It's it's like they're
having a ball on the deck of the ship and
what like a wire gets cut loose and like very
sharp final destination style, slices everyone in in half. Everyone
(02:55):
like slowly slides down in two sections. I love it.
And you thought, you thought that's perfect, That's all I need.
She was out at that point. I was like, what
more can this movie do? This is amazing. That's one
with Gabriel Burne in it, right? Is he in that? Okay?
Maybe so, I don't know. He doesn't get sliced in
the opening anyway. I'm assuming Casey, you might not know
(03:17):
because you haven't seen the film, that you might have
read some synopsis. Are the sliced people the ones who
become the titular ghosts of the ghost ship? I would imagine,
so yeah, I would imagine those people kind of come
back in a ghostly form because they're doing sort of
a play on the idea of a ghost ship, because
a ghost ship is an abandoned ship or a ship
where everyone's dead. But this one is about a spooky,
(03:37):
haunted ship a k a. A ghost ship. Yeah, it's
like a ghost ghost ship. The whole setup I pulled
up the plot here. The whole setup is that in
nineteen sixty two, everybody dies because of this Why her
final destination asked death except for one person, a girl
named Katie who is short, so she survived. Sure, people
(04:01):
got plenty of reason to live, apparently right, and then
it fast forwards forty years. I'm probably most familiar with
the concept of Mary Celeste because I grew up reading
all those books like the Mysteries of the Unknown, the
Old Time Life books. Yeah, I still have that full collection,
and I had a bunch of other silly well, I
don't want to say silly, but titles that were obviously knockoffs,
(04:23):
like Paranormal unexplained an enigmatic conundrums. You know that maybe
a relative would get me because they were cheaper than
the Time Life totally. H you gotta look out for
those relatives. Um. So here's the thing. There's another film, uh,
not super famous, um, but from called Phantom Ship that
(04:44):
actually is a dramatization of what may or may not
likely definitely did not happen aboard the Mary Celeste, starring
Bella Legosie in a non vampiric role. Um. But he
still does that spooky thing with his hand. I think
that might have been medical. Yeah, maybe, kid, who knows.
I mean, it was definitely his trademarked I'm doing it
(05:05):
right now with just the three fingers, kind of like
clawing at the the abyss, I guess we could say.
But yeah, he plays a crazed sailor um who is
ultimately responsible for what ends up um producing the the
effect of the ghost ship on the Mary Celeste. Um.
So let's do the setup. What you gave us that poem, um,
(05:26):
and that was from the perspective of another ship that
discovers the the abandoned Mary Celeste. What was the name
of that ship? That's right, yes, So the Mary Celeste
was an American merchant Brigotine, which, in addition to being
one of my favorite words, is a two masted sailing vessel. Essentially,
(05:48):
picture any sailing vessel from from what you would think
of as pirate days kind of, that's that's what a
brigotine roughly looks like without making this a nautical pod
cast the Mary Celeste. Construction on it first began back
in late eighteen sixty and the vessel was launched on
(06:09):
May eighteenth, eighteen sixty one. Was given the name Amazon,
which we'll we'll get into later. But before we get
to that, the big thing you need to know about
the Mary Celeste is that was discovered adrift on December fourth,
eighteen seventy two, by another brigotee, the day of Grazia. Uh.
And it was weird because we being our species, the
(06:30):
survivors found a lot of interesting things, Like we we
know a lot about the Mary Celeste before its disappearance, right,
we know the captain Benjamin Briggs, We know the time
they left New York November eighteen seventy two. We know
how many people were there. We know what they were hauling, right,
it was quite a few barrels of industrial grade alcohol um. Interestingly,
(06:57):
and this will come into play stored in wooden barrels.
The thing I like about this story as it combines history,
sensationalized journalism, and a good old fashioned who done it?
So the immediate thought when you discover an abandoned ship,
like this is where'd everybody go? Why did they abandon ship?
(07:18):
What's the evidence of a catastrophe of some kind that
would cause people to have jumped ship? Um? What we
did see what when the folks boarded the ship from
the Dia gratia Um was the following. There were a
few hatch doors that had been disassembled, been taken off
their hinges. Uh. There was a water pump that had
(07:40):
also been disassembled. UM. I think of the several thousand,
seventeen hundred and one barrels of industrial strength alcohol, Uh,
there were I believe six of them that had been
drained completely. And the ship had one lifeboat. This lifeboat
was missy, but there was still a six month supply
(08:02):
of food and water on board. Right, So we're gonna
look at these is almost like clues. Um. Then you
also in the hold where the barrels were stowed, Uh,
there was a bit of flooding. There were about three
and a half feet of water um at the bottom
of the ship. We also had every most of the
(08:25):
personal effects of the individuals that have been on board. Um.
How many how many people do we have in the crew?
It wasn't very many, ben it's ten. Ten yeah, ten,
people's personal effects pretty much intact and in their quarters,
and we had the captain's um navigational instruments missing. We
had a sex tent, I believe, which is what you
(08:46):
used to gauge, you know, the direction based on the stars.
Isn't that right? Yeah? I mean I've never made one,
but that sounds right. Yeah. It sort of looks like
it's like a combination of a U telescope and almost
like remember those compass compass from from Geography Platford for
doing circles chometry, right, So it allows you to measure
(09:06):
the distance between two fixed visible objects, and that is
how you can navigate. Using them, you can figure out
what direction. Again, I'm not enable captain, but that is
my basic understanding. But here's the point. He had enough
time to grab those things. The lifeboat was missing. Um.
Clearly they it would appear anyway that they abandoned ship
and a pretty orderly fashion, right right right. They contained
(09:29):
the panic or chaos, which means they must have had
a heads up and a strong suspicion that things were
not salvageable. They also took a chronometer, which is an
instrument that's supposed to keep accurate time despite of variations
in weather, temperature, air pressure, and so on. Got it.
So I I think it's even too far to say
they took. At this point, we know the stuff that
(09:52):
was missing. Builds a likely case that someone or some
are all of the people on the boat felt they
had to leave urgently and took only what they needed
to make their way in the lifeboat. And apparently they also,
you know, they either felt that they didn't have time
to get food or their personal effects, or they felt
(10:14):
that they didn't need to so over the years, over
the intervening centuries between then and now, in what what
we see is that this story becomes a victim of
the great game of telephone, and over the years, so
many different theories or I don't know, complete embellishments have
(10:37):
arisen regarding the Mary celestial. You might grow up, like
like young me, hearing people say, I don't know, maybe aliads,
maybe sea monsters, which makes no sense. By the way,
it scares me more than anything. Sea monsters really was
that because you can't see them because the other the
other water so deep, and like there's no way of
(10:57):
knowing if they're there. I'm a little perturbed by ocean
open ocean, honestly. Yeah. And you know, when I say
seamonster doesn't necessarily mean like cryptids or anything. I just
mean like large. I consider like a giant blue whale
as sea monster. Dude, what do you tell you like?
Seals are the puppy dogs of the sea. But I
still don't want to see one in uh, in the
wild close proximity. Yeah, Jelson would probably try to have
(11:19):
sex with you all those animals you think are cute
or doing incredibly depraved things. You know, do we ever mentioned, uh,
do we ever mentioned the penguin the penguin tail? We
must have mentioned it on air a while ago when
penguins were originally spotted, the people who spotted them notice
(11:41):
them committing acts of necrophilia and edited it out of
the official report. What necrophilia defiling their falling comrades. Penguin philia?
Oh my god, that's terrified. This is anotherthing and totally
off the off the subject. And there's another thing that
I just found out. Did you know that the whole
idea of lemmings committing mass suicide is totally made up
(12:02):
for a Disney thing. Yes, they essentially forced them to
do it, or they, like them, drove them off the cliff.
And what a weird thing to come up with. I
like to think that Walt was not directly involved, but
I don't know the details. Maybe we should return to
that because that might be an episode of its own, right, yeah,
I think so. Yeah. And uh, misconceptions right about animals
(12:24):
and how they came about? Oh man, yeah, we could
go a number of ways with that, right in, let
us know about your favorite misconceptions are historical misconceptions about animals,
as we proceed to bust some myths about the Mary Celeste.
So we know that the crew of the Day of
Gracia sailed the Mary Celeste eight hundred miles away to Gibraltar,
(12:50):
and then they wanted to and they did this not
out the goodness of their hearts. Now, they wanted some scratch, right,
This is interesting. I didn't know about this. The idea
of salvage, right, or you know, if you're another ship
and you find an abandoned ship floating a drift like that, um,
you can essentially get paid for dismantling everything and you know,
(13:12):
selling it off for scrap or salvage or whatever whatever.
The uh you know the cargo is, which is interesting
to me because I would think that there was a
company at the other end of that uh situation, and
those barrels of alcohol that was their property. I don't
know how how does that fit in like if insurance?
My friends, Ah, yes, okay, So they wanted to see
the crew of the Dick Graca wanted to see if
(13:35):
they could get paid by the ship's insurers. However, their
plan went awry because the attorney in charge of the
legal matters, a guy named get this, Frederick Sali Flood
it s O L L. Y dash Flood, said I
suspect mischief and shall investigate. We're getting some of this information,
(13:58):
by the way, from a fantastig article via the Smithsonian
called abandoned ship the Mary Celeste by Just Blumberg. And
in these accounts, which is what my question was a
minute ago, I haven't seen anything referencing like the holding company,
like the company that the Mary Celeste represented. My point is,
those barrels of alcohol would have been the property of
(14:20):
that company. So how come a random ship can just
come up and say, oh, this is ours? Now? Surely
the actual company held a claim on that ship and
it's you know, and it's contents and would have said
we would like that return to us please. Is that
why they are able to get paid? Like, I don't
understand why they would get the full amount of what
the ship was insured for. You'd think the owners of
(14:41):
the ship would get that, not in the people that
discovered it. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting that's an interesting
question there. Did you find anything? I didn't really, because
what I keep seeing is the crew and the captain
of the De Gracia Um went and staked this claim
that they were due something in the neighborhood of forty
(15:02):
six thousand dollars that the ship was ensured for that
they would have split between them, which is that's all
I That's all I found. I found no mention of
like the parent company, for lack of a better term,
for this ship and its contents um. But like you said,
that really wonderfully named cantankerous judge. Uh, he sensed foul
(15:23):
play because you know, I mean, if someone has something
to gain in a situation like this. There looks to
have been some sort of unusual occurrence that left the
ship abandoned. Uh, it's pretty clear who may have been
to blame, which you know. The one theory is that
these uh, these folks aboard this other vessel killed them
(15:45):
through them overboard, staged it to make it look like
they had jumped ship and then um rather than stealing
the contents, which they would have had to then fence
or god gotta gotta. They knew about these salvage laws,
and the laws of the sea are different than the
laws of man and the laws of and so they
knew that they could get paid if they just returned
to the ship and said, hey, we want to get
(16:05):
you know, that insurance money. So the judge was like,
I don't know, it's a little fishy. I'm gonna do
some digging. And he did do some digging, and it
took how long did it take? Three months? Yeah, three
months of digging um and determined that there was no
foul play, but yet still did not pay out the
full amount. I think each member of the crew went
home with a round eight hundred bucks. Yeah. In total,
(16:27):
they got one six of the forty six grand that
the ship in its cargo had been in short for. Also,
I want to go back, it would be remiss. I
do remember who quote unquote owned that alcohol. H It's
it's weird. It was a New York consortium headed by
James H. Winchester. And the thing that makes it sticky
(16:51):
murky is that the members of the consortium changed multiple
times from eighteen sixty nine all the way to seventy two.
But it was Winchester, uh, and then two other investors,
and then the ship's captain, Benjamin Briggs. Where are they
in all this though? Where Winchester and all this? You
don't see mention of him coming and saying, hey, I
(17:12):
want my money, I want my alcohol. Well, at the
risk of uh, at the risk of sounding cynical, it's
it's a lot like asking where were the banks uh
in many great wars and conflicts? Right? Or who owns
the banks? You know, it's a good point. I mean,
it's just I don't think that's a situation where there's
some kind of shadowy proto hydra that's that's attempting to
(17:36):
hide its denatured alcohol trade. I think they may have
just gotten lost to the sands of history here, because
we see very quickly that within a few years people
begin focusing on the more sensationalized aspects of the story,
or they begin creating the sensationalism themselves, because ordinarily Mary
(17:59):
Celest would have has been a boat that was salvaged, right,
and insurance took the loss. But that's what insurances for
boats sink somewhere every day. Except that is for a
guy named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you may recognize him
as the mastermind behind Sherlock Holmes Ino. Doyle publishes this
(18:30):
let's call it account, a narrative of the abandonment of
the Mary Celeste, and he does it under a under
a fake name, a different title j Habakuk Jepsum's statement.
So he's essentially pulling a war of the world's here right,
like he's taken back. He's taking like a thing that
is fictionalized as a real thing, like um, you know,
(18:54):
so it's not presented as a short story. It's presented
as an account. Like you said, the title was Jay
have a Cook Jeffson's statement, as though this were someone
just telling recounting a story. This is a new information
that has gone so you know, he knew it was
the work of fiction, but he probably you know, was
trying to get more readers by making people believe that
(19:15):
it was potentially real and it was actually twelve years
after the event, and like you said, Ben, it was
more or less abandoned. The idea of this being some
you know, people kind of forgot about it. But because
Arthur Conan Doyle, which I would say twelve years is
a pretty respectable amount of time, uh, for you know,
let's let's let's make something interesting out of this. Yeah,
(19:36):
he's not dancing on a great I don't know that
he expected it to to go crazy in the way
that it did, but it did. Yeah. Yeah, And once
it was published in eighteen eighty four in Cornhill Magazine,
people went nuts and began theorizing about the ship's fate.
It's kind of like for any of us in the
audience today who are on Reddit, it's kind of like
(19:58):
when something of global im portants happens on Reddit and
all the sudden, people who are uh purportedly experts in
that field come out of the woodwork. You know. There
are people are saying, well with my uh, my experience
as as a captain, I can say this definitively about
the Mary Celeste, and then someone else might be saying,
well with my experience as a medium, I can say so,
(20:20):
and so about the Mary celest And there's someone saying like, look,
I've been around d natured alcohol for ni on twenty
seven fortnights, and i know a lot about that, so
I'm an expert. Even the Attorney General Sali Flood, goes
back to the case and he writes summaries of his
interviews and his notes. But the fact that we were
(20:42):
unable to solve this mystery means that people continued to
speculate about this. They said, perhaps the crew mutined, perhaps
pirates were involved, or sea monsters, or you know, just
a big gass wave. Does one big wave that caught everybody?
Who are they're standing on deck? Uh? And then the
(21:03):
eight four story by Conan Doyle says, maybe they were
captured by a vengeful ex slave. And I think that
leads into what was the name of that Bella Leegosi
film you mentioned, Phantom Ship. Phantom Ship. Yeah, I think
it leads into Phantom Ship where he's an evil sailor.
(21:23):
So now we can turn to people like and McGregor,
who created the True Story of the Mary Celestia, a
documentary with some funding from Smithsonian to try to use
modern techniques to shed some light on these these tragic events. Yeah,
(21:43):
or even just kind of applying some critical thinking and
deductive reasoning to all this stuff, because we really do
have again we did, you know, stuff they don't want
you to know. Style laid out the facts at the
beginning of the show, and those remain the facts. There's nothing.
They don't have a ton of new information based on
this investigation. Yeah, there's not like a two other mystery
(22:04):
people who are on there. Let's start with, you know,
maybe one of the lowest hanging fruit, um, you know possibilities,
which would be the idea that the ship was boarded,
they were robbed and murdered, thrown overboard by pirates. Right. Well,
with what we do know is that the cargo was
undisturbed for the most part, aside from those empty barrels,
(22:26):
right yeah, why would you what what kind of robber
would you be if you went on board and then
you didn't take anything, Because you could say, maybe they
were maybe they didn't know what the cargo was and
they were taking a crapshoot at it and they said, uh,
this is not even alcohol. We can drinks, you know,
(22:47):
it's it's all for not But the problem with that
is they still would have taken valuable personal effects, you
know what I mean, which they didn't. One thing that
is a bit of an interesting clue is that there
were two German brothers on the crew named Volcat and
boy Lawrence En, and they were suspect as potentially having
(23:09):
you know, done some kind of dirty dealings because because
well yeah maybe I'm so sorry German audience thought the
joke was worth who knows, um. But the main thing
was that their personal effects were missing. UM. So there
was this notion that maybe they were the homicidal sailors
that were depicted by Legosi in that UM film. But
(23:34):
according to McGregor, who interviewed their descendant UM, they had
supposedly lost some of their possessions or lost all of
their possessions, their gear as as as it says in
the interview UM in a previous shipwreck. Yeah, yeah, that's correct.
Shipwreck that was earlier in eighteen seventy two. And then
(23:55):
if we say, okay, what if it wasn't pirates, what
if it was d the crew of the day Garcia.
The problem with that is that the captain of that ship,
Captain Moorehouse, was actually friends with Captain Benjamin Briggs. There
was no evidence of violence, and again, nothing really was stolen.
(24:18):
What's the motive to right? Like, I mean, well, well, okay,
never mind. We even know what the motive might have been.
It would have been to collect that insurance money. But
why this one. I mean, I guess since they knew
each other, maybe there's that connection that you know, he
would have been aware of this vessel and its cargo,
and maybe it's a lot of money. It seems like
a lot of money the time for a ship to
(24:39):
be insured for in the eighteen hundreds, um, but still
cargo ships like this went back and forth constantly. A
ship is also a huge investment. So that's an argument
against the mutiny because if there was if there were
a mutiny and Briggs and his family who are on
board with him were allowed to survive, they would have
been pushed off the life and the crew would have stayed,
(25:02):
you know what I mean, Like if you take over
uh battleship, a cruiser or something like that, something of
that size, then you're not going to immediately leave it.
We should also say that there was quite a bit
of superstition involved in stories of the Mary Celeste. That's
why we set it up in the beginning to say
(25:23):
that it was originally given the name the Amazon, and
then it was renamed because it encountered uh several different,
uh several different unfortunate events. The original one of the
captains felt ill and died. The ship under the name
(25:45):
Amazon collided with other fishing equipment, It ran into and
sank another boat in the English Channel, and this started
becoming rich fodder fertile soil for the more supernatural out
their legends of the Mary Celeste. With that being said,
(26:05):
because of the nature of this show and what the
show is, we're going to focus on two theories about
what may have happened that actually have some sand to them.
One of them is the idea of an explosion, but
not in the way you might think, right, Yeah, no,
not at all. Remember the seventeen hundred and one barrels
(26:27):
of industrial grade alcohol um. Also, remember those hatch doors
that were removed, Remember the water pump that was disassembled.
A lot of this kind of goes together and coalesces
into this notion that, uh, the leaking barrels. Remember there
were nine empty barrels um that they had leaked and
(26:48):
caused and and evaporated you know, the contents of them
and caused like alcohol, you know, very combustible alcohol vapor
to fill up the tight quarters of the hold of
the ship, and that some sort of explosion could have
happened that would have blown the doors off of the
holds right right, And so we can say that even
(27:08):
if if let's put ourselves in the position of Captain
Briggs and say that, even though we have experience, even
though we are seasoned old salts with plenty of maritime stripes,
as it were, you're going to freak out when you
hear this massive explosion below deck during you know, a
relatively calm day at sea. There's nothing to explain what
(27:32):
has happened. So it's possible that this alcohol seeping out
had created a small explosion, or maybe the crew started
to say it's a ticking time, Bob, we gotta go.
We've got it at least, And it may be further
possible that they got out of the lifeboat with the
intention to come back to the ship and they just
meant to, like, you know, like a fire drill at
(27:55):
your school when you're growing up and all the kids
have to go into the parking lot for a second,
for sure, that's right. This Captain Briggs had a reputation
as being really you know, cool headed under pressure. Um.
He was very well liked, very organized, a pretty cracker
jack sea captain and so um. Since there was no
evidence of an explosion, because that would have caused some charring,
(28:17):
or there would have been there would have been, you know,
ways to detect that that had happened, even a small one,
there would have been some evidence. Even in those days
without forensic stuff, they could have figured out that, Okay,
something happened that you know, this whole idea of blowing
the doors off, That wouldn't have just taken them off surgically,
like by the hinges like they were, um, which may
have been. They may have done that to air out
(28:38):
the cabin. Maybe like you said, they evacuated with the
idea of doing it temporarily while the fumes aired out. Right,
then they were going to come back. But something happened,
maybe their toe line was severed, or they they somehow
lost their attachment to the ship and began to drift off.
(28:59):
Um and seeing the mary celestue drifting in the other
direction or whatever. Uh, And that would have been a
pretty horrific moment. But he's the thing though, I mean,
he took the he took those those, he took those, um,
those navigational tools. So it's almost like he intended to
you wouldn't need those if you were just hanging out
by the boat, but what if you thought there was
a possibility it would explode, then you would want to
(29:22):
have He was thinking ahead. He was trying to boy
scout his way around it. But we know, you know,
we know that when the Canadian bricotine found Mary Celeste,
they also saw a strong rope leading into the ocean. Right,
So it sounds it sounds like there's a reasonable case
(29:42):
to be made arguing that they had detached the lifeboat
but kept it somehow, as you said, moored to the
larger ship, and then something happened they lost it. It
was a you know, some through some you know screw up,
they lost that that attachment. UM. And here's the interesting part.
Those barrels, those nine barrels that had leaked UM. It
(30:03):
was very specifically due to the material they were made
out of. It's really strange. Out of all of those
thousands of you know, almost two thousand barrels, nine of
them the ones that leaked were made out of red oak,
while I believe all of the rest were made out
of white oak. White oak is water tight, red oak
is porous, right, so it's much more likely to leak.
(30:31):
So typically when you see investigative shows or or research
into what actually happened that faithful day for the Mary Slest,
you will find that people conclude it was something to
do with the leaking barrels of alcohol, specifically those red
oak barrels. But there's another there's another theory out there.
(30:55):
It's it's pretty interesting, and it's this the idea that
the chronometer, the one we mentioned earlier, was faulty, and
then there was also a bum pump going on. This
comes to us from a little bit of comparison. We
look at Attorney General Sally Floods notes on this case
compared to ocean and graphic data. Researchers have found that
(31:18):
the Mary Celeste was actually way far away from where
the captain believed it to be. They were full one
and twenty miles further west than he had he had assumed,
and so he had already become disoriented. Right. They also
(31:41):
appeared to change course. Maybe the seas were rougher than
we thought, or maybe there was something wrong with his instruments. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So we have to note that Sally Floods UM Sally
Floods Research is the closest thing we have to a
primary source, because the actual log book that was found
(32:01):
aboard was lost in But yeah, you're you're right. There
was something wrong with the equipment. This theory argues, because
they had these pumps right on its previous voyage that
Mary Selest was transporting coal, and it had also been,
as we mentioned earlier, repaired and extensively renovated. And maybe,
the argument goes a pump became clogged with coal and sawdust,
(32:25):
and without the pump, and with a cargo with all
this industrial strength alcohol, some of it leaking, Briggs wouldn't
be able to tell how much seawater it actually come
into the whole. So he may have thought it was
legit sinking. That's right. And what we do know is
that they were within sight of land uh, and he
(32:47):
figured maybe let's cut our losses and abandoned ships since
we don't know how much seawater is coming in um,
and just take our chances on the lifeboat because it's
not that far to to dry land. But what we
do know is that none of these folks were ever
heard of again. And whenever you have a situation like that,
that leads to wild speculation because we can never hear
(33:09):
from a primary source, like you said, ben aside from
the person who did an investigation, Um that Attorney General
Sali Flood Um will never really hear what actually happened
because you know, they're they're just gone. Yeah. And that's
the spooky part, right, because if they were that close
to land with an expert sea captain at the helm,
(33:29):
what why what I mean, what what could have possibly happened?
Six miles There's six miles away, which doesn't seem like
that far away, right when you consider how large the
ocean is, What would a lifeboat be like in these days?
It would be like a rowboat, right, So they would
have had to row against maybe choppy waters. Well, it
would be assuming that they had ten souls aboard. Yeah,
(33:52):
we it would be. It's method of propulsion would be rowing,
would be oars, that's it would be. It would still
be too small, probably need to have a mass of
any sort, you know, the sale, so they would have
to row. But six miles rowing against choppy waters though
that would be no small task, right, especially if you're
going against like the current or whatever. I mean, that
(34:13):
would be tough. That's the question too, because then it
calls to mind, like what was the weather at during
this time, where the original accounts of calm weather just
accounts of what the weather was like the day the
boat was discovered abandoned, you know, because a storm can
come and go very quickly in the yture. So we
(34:34):
don't know what happened to Briggs and his crew and
his family, but we do have a little bit more
information about the fate of the boat itself because in
eighteen seventy four, the Mary Celeste, despite this the smirched reputation,
was sold at a loss to a partnership that wanted
(34:55):
to operate the boat in the Indian Ocean, and because
the lady's reputation preceded her, the Mary Celeste never made
a profit, lost money on every voyage in In eighteen
seventy nine, another sea captain in charge of the ship
fell ill and died, and this gave more um more
(35:16):
fuel to the rumor that the ship was cursed. Later,
she was sold to a firm in Boston. And then
I think there's there's this, you know, fairly frequents series
of handoffs and sales and resales because people don't want
to get rid of a ship again. It's such an
enormous investment, even a cursed ship. It's like, hey, well,
(35:40):
welcome to my murder mansion. You know, people die here,
uh midnight once every seven years. But it is a mansion,
and I like to emphasize that part of it. It's
very true. It's very true, ben Um. And there's even
another kind of potential insurance scam situation that happens in
eighteen eighty four when the commanding officer at the time,
(36:01):
a Gilman See Parker, tries to perpetrate insurance fraud against
the company that had ensured the ship. And they did
this by putting a bunch of useless crap into the
ship's hold. Um, and then they made a fake manifest
and uh just tried to ensure it for a value
(36:22):
of thirty thousand dollars. And then and then uh Parker
sails off for Haiti. As they approached the port, he
deliberately wrecks the ship. He steers it into a reef,
and it's a reef that everybody knows about. Ever been
on a boat in the Atlantic, if you're a sailor,
(36:44):
you know about this reef. So the collision rips the
boat apart, recks the ship, everybody abandoned ship. And then
Parker immediately goes to file his claim, right, Yeah, he does,
and doesn't doesn't go over so well. Um, it's discovered
pretty quick that he had forged this manifest that the
material inside the ship was absolutely over insured. Um. And
(37:07):
then he was put on trial, but it ended in
a mistrial, but irreparably damaged the man's reputation, and he
died three months later. Yea, So maybe in that case,
the curse of the Mary Celeste was his self fulfilling prophecy.
(37:28):
After that, the breck of the ship was never recovered,
and the natural world took over. The reef began to
grow to literally eat the timbers the bones of the
Mary Celeste. In two thousand and one, an expedition said
they discovered partial remains, but as of now that has
(37:50):
not been definitively proven. And here our story pauses, and
perhaps this will also be the end of the story.
We look at the evidence available and we see that
the mystery of the Mary Celeste probably does boil down
(38:11):
to these these relatively mundane but no less terrifying factors. Uh.
And the stories that the Mary Celeste has inspired in
fiction and film, poetry and art and so on have
taken on a life of their own. You know what
I mean. I think most people watching any fiction inspired
(38:31):
by the Mary Celeste are not swayed by it, right. No,
that's the thing I mean, And that's what we've seen
from the beginning of this is that the fiction is
probably a little more interesting and compelling than what actually happened. Uh.
And yet we still don't fully know what actually happened.
But I don't believe in cursed ships, do you, Ben? Yeah? Man? Really,
I mean for fun, Okay, that's what I'm saying. Like,
(38:52):
when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kind of blew this thing up, Um,
that's when it started being a lot of fun, because
it's great fodder for a story, because there's so any
unanswered questions. You can fill in the gaps of the
narrative of yourself with your imagination. Yeah. I have a
sci fi story that starts after actually a triptych that
starts with the Mary Celeste, so I I cannot throw
(39:15):
stones in this glasshouse. I definitely used as a jumping
off point. And there's something I don't know, you know,
the the idea of curses. We we've seen this in
multiple other historical accounts, right like the curse the so
called as you would say, the curse of King Tutt,
(39:36):
right that turned out to have some uh some explicable factors,
the curse of the Hope Diamond. I'm just thinking of curses. Now.
Let us know your favorite historical curse, or let us
know the one that you think has the most um
plausibility to it. You can find us on Instagram. You
(39:57):
can find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter.
We are some derivation of Ridiculous History. Check out our
Facebook group Ridiculous Historians, where you can share your stories
with our favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners.
You can also follow uh, Noel and I on our
own social needs. I am Ben Bowling and Instagram and
(40:19):
Ben Bowling hs W on Twitter, and you can find
me exclusively on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown Big
Thanks to super producer Casey Pegram as always happen to
be back in the shipping container after a most enjoyable holiday.
Thanks to Gabe, our research associate extraordinaire um. Thanks to
Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks of course to
Christopher hascy Otis who, as we said, well return very soon.
(40:43):
Thanks of course to Eve's Jeff Cote uh, the mastermind
behind this day in History class as well as apro punk.
Thanks of course to Jonathan Strickland's a k a. The
Quister who has has a cursed all of his own right.
And of course, of course no thanks to you man
Happy twenty Thanks but you two man see you next time. Folks.
(41:15):
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History as a production of I Heart Radio. We
(00:27):
were west of the Azores, five days out of New
York when we spotted the Mary Celeste. She was listening
to leeward, but still under sail, with no obvious sign
of distress. That is the first verse from the Mary
Celeste by John F. McCullough. Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians.
(00:48):
Thank you so much for tuning in on our first
episode of that we're recording. At least. My name is Ben,
My name is all Ben. You know what. I'm a
big fan of uh nautical terms, and that poem did
a gang by ster's job of incorporating one of my
other favorite things, alliteration and nautical terms, listing leeward. How
about that? Yeah? Yeah. This poem is just one of
(01:09):
the many poems you can find about the famous or
infamous Mary Celeste. There's the other one, The ghost Ship
Mary Selest by Leland Waldrop. I love a good Waldrop.
It's a weird name, right else, I love a good
ghost ship. Who doesn't like a ghost ship. It's one
of the all time kind of creepy things. Is this
idea of a massive vessel meant to be inhabited by
(01:30):
humans and delivering goods and cargo and and of course
humans to a destination to discover it completely abandoned, just
drifting out there in the sea. Very unsettling thing. And
ghost ships like ghost trains, were a common trope in
the pioneering days of European naval expansion. The Flying Dutchman
(01:51):
is another one. But the thing about the Mary Slest
is that it actually was physically discovered before we started
the show today. I I had asked you and our
super producer, Casey Pegram. I don't think I forgot that.
Casey Ben was doing a really just to give you
a visual, doing a nice almost finger guns kind of
point at Casey Pegram over there after the window. It's
(02:11):
just glass. It's good to see. It's good to see
you man. Don't tap on the glass though. He doesn't
like that. No, no, no no, And don't feed him
after midnight. So it was interesting. I was asking guys
if if you had ever heard of the Mary Celeste,
and Casey you said that this was somewhat unfamiliar to you. Yeah,
I don't think I've ever. It didn't ring a bell,
It did not ring a bell. Certainly, ghost ships. I
(02:33):
don't know if you guys ever saw that ghost ship movie.
I was about to say that that's the one I
think of in popular cold and I never even saw
the movie. I just saw the first scene, the first
pretty much have to watch. Incredible. It's it's like they're
having a ball on the deck of the ship and
what like a wire gets cut loose and like very
sharp final destination style, slices everyone in in half. Everyone
(02:55):
like slowly slides down in two sections. I love it.
And you thought, you thought that's perfect, That's all I need.
She was out at that point. I was like, what
more can this movie do? This is amazing. That's one
with Gabriel Burne in it, right? Is he in that? Okay?
Maybe so, I don't know. He doesn't get sliced in
the opening anyway. I'm assuming Casey, you might not know
(03:17):
because you haven't seen the film, that you might have
read some synopsis. Are the sliced people the ones who
become the titular ghosts of the ghost ship? I would imagine,
so yeah, I would imagine those people kind of come
back in a ghostly form because they're doing sort of
a play on the idea of a ghost ship, because
a ghost ship is an abandoned ship or a ship
where everyone's dead. But this one is about a spooky,
(03:37):
haunted ship a k a. A ghost ship. Yeah, it's
like a ghost ghost ship. The whole setup I pulled
up the plot here. The whole setup is that in
nineteen sixty two, everybody dies because of this Why her
final destination asked death except for one person, a girl
named Katie who is short, so she survived. Sure, people
(04:01):
got plenty of reason to live, apparently right, and then
it fast forwards forty years. I'm probably most familiar with
the concept of Mary Celeste because I grew up reading
all those books like the Mysteries of the Unknown, the
Old Time Life books. Yeah, I still have that full collection,
and I had a bunch of other silly well, I
don't want to say silly, but titles that were obviously knockoffs,
(04:23):
like Paranormal unexplained an enigmatic conundrums. You know that maybe
a relative would get me because they were cheaper than
the Time Life totally. H you gotta look out for
those relatives. Um. So here's the thing. There's another film, uh,
not super famous, um, but from called Phantom Ship that
(04:44):
actually is a dramatization of what may or may not
likely definitely did not happen aboard the Mary Celeste, starring
Bella Legosie in a non vampiric role. Um. But he
still does that spooky thing with his hand. I think
that might have been medical. Yeah, maybe, kid, who knows.
I mean, it was definitely his trademarked I'm doing it
(05:05):
right now with just the three fingers, kind of like
clawing at the the abyss, I guess we could say.
But yeah, he plays a crazed sailor um who is
ultimately responsible for what ends up um producing the the
effect of the ghost ship on the Mary Celeste. Um.
So let's do the setup. What you gave us that poem, um,
(05:26):
and that was from the perspective of another ship that
discovers the the abandoned Mary Celeste. What was the name
of that ship? That's right, yes, So the Mary Celeste
was an American merchant Brigotine, which, in addition to being
one of my favorite words, is a two masted sailing vessel. Essentially,
(05:48):
picture any sailing vessel from from what you would think
of as pirate days kind of, that's that's what a
brigotine roughly looks like without making this a nautical pod
cast the Mary Celeste. Construction on it first began back
in late eighteen sixty and the vessel was launched on
(06:09):
May eighteenth, eighteen sixty one. Was given the name Amazon,
which we'll we'll get into later. But before we get
to that, the big thing you need to know about
the Mary Celeste is that was discovered adrift on December fourth,
eighteen seventy two, by another brigotee, the day of Grazia. Uh.
And it was weird because we being our species, the
(06:30):
survivors found a lot of interesting things, Like we we
know a lot about the Mary Celeste before its disappearance, right,
we know the captain Benjamin Briggs, We know the time
they left New York November eighteen seventy two. We know
how many people were there. We know what they were hauling, right,
it was quite a few barrels of industrial grade alcohol um. Interestingly,
(06:57):
and this will come into play stored in wooden barrels.
The thing I like about this story as it combines history,
sensationalized journalism, and a good old fashioned who done it?
So the immediate thought when you discover an abandoned ship,
like this is where'd everybody go? Why did they abandon ship?
(07:18):
What's the evidence of a catastrophe of some kind that
would cause people to have jumped ship? Um? What we
did see what when the folks boarded the ship from
the Dia gratia Um was the following. There were a
few hatch doors that had been disassembled, been taken off
their hinges. Uh. There was a water pump that had
(07:40):
also been disassembled. UM. I think of the several thousand,
seventeen hundred and one barrels of industrial strength alcohol, Uh,
there were I believe six of them that had been
drained completely. And the ship had one lifeboat. This lifeboat
was missy, but there was still a six month supply
(08:02):
of food and water on board. Right, So we're gonna
look at these is almost like clues. Um. Then you
also in the hold where the barrels were stowed, Uh,
there was a bit of flooding. There were about three
and a half feet of water um at the bottom
of the ship. We also had every most of the
(08:25):
personal effects of the individuals that have been on board. Um.
How many how many people do we have in the crew?
It wasn't very many, ben it's ten. Ten yeah, ten,
people's personal effects pretty much intact and in their quarters,
and we had the captain's um navigational instruments missing. We
had a sex tent, I believe, which is what you
(08:46):
used to gauge, you know, the direction based on the stars.
Isn't that right? Yeah? I mean I've never made one,
but that sounds right. Yeah. It sort of looks like
it's like a combination of a U telescope and almost
like remember those compass compass from from Geography Platford for
doing circles chometry, right, So it allows you to measure
(09:06):
the distance between two fixed visible objects, and that is
how you can navigate. Using them, you can figure out
what direction. Again, I'm not enable captain, but that is
my basic understanding. But here's the point. He had enough
time to grab those things. The lifeboat was missing. Um.
Clearly they it would appear anyway that they abandoned ship
and a pretty orderly fashion, right right right. They contained
(09:29):
the panic or chaos, which means they must have had
a heads up and a strong suspicion that things were
not salvageable. They also took a chronometer, which is an
instrument that's supposed to keep accurate time despite of variations
in weather, temperature, air pressure, and so on. Got it.
So I I think it's even too far to say
they took. At this point, we know the stuff that
(09:52):
was missing. Builds a likely case that someone or some
are all of the people on the boat felt they
had to leave urgently and took only what they needed
to make their way in the lifeboat. And apparently they also,
you know, they either felt that they didn't have time
to get food or their personal effects, or they felt
(10:14):
that they didn't need to so over the years, over
the intervening centuries between then and now, in what what
we see is that this story becomes a victim of
the great game of telephone, and over the years, so
many different theories or I don't know, complete embellishments have
(10:37):
arisen regarding the Mary celestial. You might grow up, like
like young me, hearing people say, I don't know, maybe aliads,
maybe sea monsters, which makes no sense. By the way,
it scares me more than anything. Sea monsters really was
that because you can't see them because the other the
other water so deep, and like there's no way of
(10:57):
knowing if they're there. I'm a little perturbed by ocean
open ocean, honestly. Yeah. And you know, when I say
seamonster doesn't necessarily mean like cryptids or anything. I just
mean like large. I consider like a giant blue whale
as sea monster. Dude, what do you tell you like?
Seals are the puppy dogs of the sea. But I
still don't want to see one in uh, in the
wild close proximity. Yeah, Jelson would probably try to have
(11:19):
sex with you all those animals you think are cute
or doing incredibly depraved things. You know, do we ever mentioned, uh,
do we ever mentioned the penguin the penguin tail? We
must have mentioned it on air a while ago when
penguins were originally spotted, the people who spotted them notice
(11:41):
them committing acts of necrophilia and edited it out of
the official report. What necrophilia defiling their falling comrades. Penguin philia?
Oh my god, that's terrified. This is anotherthing and totally
off the off the subject. And there's another thing that
I just found out. Did you know that the whole
idea of lemmings committing mass suicide is totally made up
(12:02):
for a Disney thing. Yes, they essentially forced them to
do it, or they, like them, drove them off the cliff.
And what a weird thing to come up with. I
like to think that Walt was not directly involved, but
I don't know the details. Maybe we should return to
that because that might be an episode of its own, right, yeah,
I think so. Yeah. And uh, misconceptions right about animals
(12:24):
and how they came about? Oh man, yeah, we could
go a number of ways with that, right in, let
us know about your favorite misconceptions are historical misconceptions about animals,
as we proceed to bust some myths about the Mary Celeste.
So we know that the crew of the Day of
Gracia sailed the Mary Celeste eight hundred miles away to Gibraltar,
(12:50):
and then they wanted to and they did this not
out the goodness of their hearts. Now, they wanted some scratch, right,
This is interesting. I didn't know about this. The idea
of salvage, right, or you know, if you're another ship
and you find an abandoned ship floating a drift like that, um,
you can essentially get paid for dismantling everything and you know,
(13:12):
selling it off for scrap or salvage or whatever whatever.
The uh you know the cargo is, which is interesting
to me because I would think that there was a
company at the other end of that uh situation, and
those barrels of alcohol that was their property. I don't
know how how does that fit in like if insurance?
My friends, Ah, yes, okay, So they wanted to see
the crew of the Dick Graca wanted to see if
(13:35):
they could get paid by the ship's insurers. However, their
plan went awry because the attorney in charge of the
legal matters, a guy named get this, Frederick Sali Flood
it s O L L. Y dash Flood, said I
suspect mischief and shall investigate. We're getting some of this information,
(13:58):
by the way, from a fantastig article via the Smithsonian
called abandoned ship the Mary Celeste by Just Blumberg. And
in these accounts, which is what my question was a
minute ago, I haven't seen anything referencing like the holding company,
like the company that the Mary Celeste represented. My point is,
those barrels of alcohol would have been the property of
(14:20):
that company. So how come a random ship can just
come up and say, oh, this is ours? Now? Surely
the actual company held a claim on that ship and
it's you know, and it's contents and would have said
we would like that return to us please. Is that
why they are able to get paid? Like, I don't
understand why they would get the full amount of what
the ship was insured for. You'd think the owners of
(14:41):
the ship would get that, not in the people that
discovered it. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting that's an interesting
question there. Did you find anything? I didn't really, because
what I keep seeing is the crew and the captain
of the De Gracia Um went and staked this claim
that they were due something in the neighborhood of forty
(15:02):
six thousand dollars that the ship was ensured for that
they would have split between them, which is that's all
I That's all I found. I found no mention of
like the parent company, for lack of a better term,
for this ship and its contents um. But like you said,
that really wonderfully named cantankerous judge. Uh, he sensed foul
(15:23):
play because you know, I mean, if someone has something
to gain in a situation like this. There looks to
have been some sort of unusual occurrence that left the
ship abandoned. Uh, it's pretty clear who may have been
to blame, which you know. The one theory is that
these uh, these folks aboard this other vessel killed them
(15:45):
through them overboard, staged it to make it look like
they had jumped ship and then um rather than stealing
the contents, which they would have had to then fence
or god gotta gotta. They knew about these salvage laws,
and the laws of the sea are different than the
laws of man and the laws of and so they
knew that they could get paid if they just returned
to the ship and said, hey, we want to get
(16:05):
you know, that insurance money. So the judge was like,
I don't know, it's a little fishy. I'm gonna do
some digging. And he did do some digging, and it
took how long did it take? Three months? Yeah, three
months of digging um and determined that there was no
foul play, but yet still did not pay out the
full amount. I think each member of the crew went
home with a round eight hundred bucks. Yeah. In total,
(16:27):
they got one six of the forty six grand that
the ship in its cargo had been in short for. Also,
I want to go back, it would be remiss. I
do remember who quote unquote owned that alcohol. H It's
it's weird. It was a New York consortium headed by
James H. Winchester. And the thing that makes it sticky
(16:51):
murky is that the members of the consortium changed multiple
times from eighteen sixty nine all the way to seventy two.
But it was Winchester, uh, and then two other investors,
and then the ship's captain, Benjamin Briggs. Where are they
in all this though? Where Winchester and all this? You
don't see mention of him coming and saying, hey, I
(17:12):
want my money, I want my alcohol. Well, at the
risk of uh, at the risk of sounding cynical, it's
it's a lot like asking where were the banks uh
in many great wars and conflicts? Right? Or who owns
the banks? You know, it's a good point. I mean,
it's just I don't think that's a situation where there's
some kind of shadowy proto hydra that's that's attempting to
(17:36):
hide its denatured alcohol trade. I think they may have
just gotten lost to the sands of history here, because
we see very quickly that within a few years people
begin focusing on the more sensationalized aspects of the story,
or they begin creating the sensationalism themselves, because ordinarily Mary
(17:59):
Celest would have has been a boat that was salvaged, right,
and insurance took the loss. But that's what insurances for
boats sink somewhere every day. Except that is for a
guy named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you may recognize him
as the mastermind behind Sherlock Holmes Ino. Doyle publishes this
(18:30):
let's call it account, a narrative of the abandonment of
the Mary Celeste, and he does it under a under
a fake name, a different title j Habakuk Jepsum's statement.
So he's essentially pulling a war of the world's here right,
like he's taken back. He's taking like a thing that
is fictionalized as a real thing, like um, you know,
(18:54):
so it's not presented as a short story. It's presented
as an account. Like you said, the title was Jay
have a Cook Jeffson's statement, as though this were someone
just telling recounting a story. This is a new information
that has gone so you know, he knew it was
the work of fiction, but he probably you know, was
trying to get more readers by making people believe that
(19:15):
it was potentially real and it was actually twelve years
after the event, and like you said, Ben, it was
more or less abandoned. The idea of this being some
you know, people kind of forgot about it. But because
Arthur Conan Doyle, which I would say twelve years is
a pretty respectable amount of time, uh, for you know,
let's let's let's make something interesting out of this. Yeah,
(19:36):
he's not dancing on a great I don't know that
he expected it to to go crazy in the way
that it did, but it did. Yeah. Yeah, And once
it was published in eighteen eighty four in Cornhill Magazine,
people went nuts and began theorizing about the ship's fate.
It's kind of like for any of us in the
audience today who are on Reddit, it's kind of like
(19:58):
when something of global im portants happens on Reddit and
all the sudden, people who are uh purportedly experts in
that field come out of the woodwork. You know. There
are people are saying, well with my uh, my experience
as as a captain, I can say this definitively about
the Mary Celeste, and then someone else might be saying,
well with my experience as a medium, I can say so,
(20:20):
and so about the Mary celest And there's someone saying like, look,
I've been around d natured alcohol for ni on twenty
seven fortnights, and i know a lot about that, so
I'm an expert. Even the Attorney General Sali Flood, goes
back to the case and he writes summaries of his
interviews and his notes. But the fact that we were
(20:42):
unable to solve this mystery means that people continued to
speculate about this. They said, perhaps the crew mutined, perhaps
pirates were involved, or sea monsters, or you know, just
a big gass wave. Does one big wave that caught everybody?
Who are they're standing on deck? Uh? And then the
(21:03):
eight four story by Conan Doyle says, maybe they were
captured by a vengeful ex slave. And I think that
leads into what was the name of that Bella Leegosi
film you mentioned, Phantom Ship. Phantom Ship. Yeah, I think
it leads into Phantom Ship where he's an evil sailor.
(21:23):
So now we can turn to people like and McGregor,
who created the True Story of the Mary Celestia, a
documentary with some funding from Smithsonian to try to use
modern techniques to shed some light on these these tragic events. Yeah,
(21:43):
or even just kind of applying some critical thinking and
deductive reasoning to all this stuff, because we really do
have again we did, you know, stuff they don't want
you to know. Style laid out the facts at the
beginning of the show, and those remain the facts. There's nothing.
They don't have a ton of new information based on
this investigation. Yeah, there's not like a two other mystery
(22:04):
people who are on there. Let's start with, you know,
maybe one of the lowest hanging fruit, um, you know possibilities,
which would be the idea that the ship was boarded,
they were robbed and murdered, thrown overboard by pirates. Right. Well,
with what we do know is that the cargo was
undisturbed for the most part, aside from those empty barrels,
(22:26):
right yeah, why would you what what kind of robber
would you be if you went on board and then
you didn't take anything, Because you could say, maybe they
were maybe they didn't know what the cargo was and
they were taking a crapshoot at it and they said, uh,
this is not even alcohol. We can drinks, you know,
(22:47):
it's it's all for not But the problem with that
is they still would have taken valuable personal effects, you
know what I mean, which they didn't. One thing that
is a bit of an interesting clue is that there
were two German brothers on the crew named Volcat and
boy Lawrence En, and they were suspect as potentially having
(23:09):
you know, done some kind of dirty dealings because because
well yeah maybe I'm so sorry German audience thought the
joke was worth who knows, um. But the main thing
was that their personal effects were missing. UM. So there
was this notion that maybe they were the homicidal sailors
that were depicted by Legosi in that UM film. But
(23:34):
according to McGregor, who interviewed their descendant UM, they had
supposedly lost some of their possessions or lost all of
their possessions, their gear as as as it says in
the interview UM in a previous shipwreck. Yeah, yeah, that's correct.
Shipwreck that was earlier in eighteen seventy two. And then
(23:55):
if we say, okay, what if it wasn't pirates, what
if it was d the crew of the day Garcia.
The problem with that is that the captain of that ship,
Captain Moorehouse, was actually friends with Captain Benjamin Briggs. There
was no evidence of violence, and again, nothing really was stolen.
(24:18):
What's the motive to right? Like, I mean, well, well, okay,
never mind. We even know what the motive might have been.
It would have been to collect that insurance money. But
why this one. I mean, I guess since they knew
each other, maybe there's that connection that you know, he
would have been aware of this vessel and its cargo,
and maybe it's a lot of money. It seems like
a lot of money the time for a ship to
(24:39):
be insured for in the eighteen hundreds, um, but still
cargo ships like this went back and forth constantly. A
ship is also a huge investment. So that's an argument
against the mutiny because if there was if there were
a mutiny and Briggs and his family who are on
board with him were allowed to survive, they would have
been pushed off the life and the crew would have stayed,
(25:02):
you know what I mean, Like if you take over
uh battleship, a cruiser or something like that, something of
that size, then you're not going to immediately leave it.
We should also say that there was quite a bit
of superstition involved in stories of the Mary Celeste. That's
why we set it up in the beginning to say
(25:23):
that it was originally given the name the Amazon, and
then it was renamed because it encountered uh several different,
uh several different unfortunate events. The original one of the
captains felt ill and died. The ship under the name
(25:45):
Amazon collided with other fishing equipment, It ran into and
sank another boat in the English Channel, and this started
becoming rich fodder fertile soil for the more supernatural out
their legends of the Mary Celeste. With that being said,
(26:05):
because of the nature of this show and what the
show is, we're going to focus on two theories about
what may have happened that actually have some sand to them.
One of them is the idea of an explosion, but
not in the way you might think, right, Yeah, no,
not at all. Remember the seventeen hundred and one barrels
(26:27):
of industrial grade alcohol um. Also, remember those hatch doors
that were removed, Remember the water pump that was disassembled.
A lot of this kind of goes together and coalesces
into this notion that, uh, the leaking barrels. Remember there
were nine empty barrels um that they had leaked and
(26:48):
caused and and evaporated you know, the contents of them
and caused like alcohol, you know, very combustible alcohol vapor
to fill up the tight quarters of the hold of
the ship, and that some sort of explosion could have
happened that would have blown the doors off of the
holds right right, And so we can say that even
(27:08):
if if let's put ourselves in the position of Captain
Briggs and say that, even though we have experience, even
though we are seasoned old salts with plenty of maritime stripes,
as it were, you're going to freak out when you
hear this massive explosion below deck during you know, a
relatively calm day at sea. There's nothing to explain what
(27:32):
has happened. So it's possible that this alcohol seeping out
had created a small explosion, or maybe the crew started
to say it's a ticking time, Bob, we gotta go.
We've got it at least, And it may be further
possible that they got out of the lifeboat with the
intention to come back to the ship and they just
meant to, like, you know, like a fire drill at
(27:55):
your school when you're growing up and all the kids
have to go into the parking lot for a second,
for sure, that's right. This Captain Briggs had a reputation
as being really you know, cool headed under pressure. Um.
He was very well liked, very organized, a pretty cracker
jack sea captain and so um. Since there was no
evidence of an explosion, because that would have caused some charring,
(28:17):
or there would have been there would have been, you know,
ways to detect that that had happened, even a small one,
there would have been some evidence. Even in those days
without forensic stuff, they could have figured out that, Okay,
something happened that you know, this whole idea of blowing
the doors off, That wouldn't have just taken them off surgically,
like by the hinges like they were, um, which may
have been. They may have done that to air out
(28:38):
the cabin. Maybe like you said, they evacuated with the
idea of doing it temporarily while the fumes aired out. Right,
then they were going to come back. But something happened,
maybe their toe line was severed, or they they somehow
lost their attachment to the ship and began to drift off.
(28:59):
Um and seeing the mary celestue drifting in the other
direction or whatever. Uh, And that would have been a
pretty horrific moment. But he's the thing though, I mean,
he took the he took those those, he took those, um,
those navigational tools. So it's almost like he intended to
you wouldn't need those if you were just hanging out
by the boat, but what if you thought there was
a possibility it would explode, then you would want to
(29:22):
have He was thinking ahead. He was trying to boy
scout his way around it. But we know, you know,
we know that when the Canadian bricotine found Mary Celeste,
they also saw a strong rope leading into the ocean. Right,
So it sounds it sounds like there's a reasonable case
(29:42):
to be made arguing that they had detached the lifeboat
but kept it somehow, as you said, moored to the
larger ship, and then something happened they lost it. It
was a you know, some through some you know screw up,
they lost that that attachment. UM. And here's the interesting part.
Those barrels, those nine barrels that had leaked UM. It
(30:03):
was very specifically due to the material they were made
out of. It's really strange. Out of all of those
thousands of you know, almost two thousand barrels, nine of
them the ones that leaked were made out of red oak,
while I believe all of the rest were made out
of white oak. White oak is water tight, red oak
is porous, right, so it's much more likely to leak.
(30:31):
So typically when you see investigative shows or or research
into what actually happened that faithful day for the Mary Slest,
you will find that people conclude it was something to
do with the leaking barrels of alcohol, specifically those red
oak barrels. But there's another there's another theory out there.
(30:55):
It's it's pretty interesting, and it's this the idea that
the chronometer, the one we mentioned earlier, was faulty, and
then there was also a bum pump going on. This
comes to us from a little bit of comparison. We
look at Attorney General Sally Floods notes on this case
compared to ocean and graphic data. Researchers have found that
(31:18):
the Mary Celeste was actually way far away from where
the captain believed it to be. They were full one
and twenty miles further west than he had he had assumed,
and so he had already become disoriented. Right. They also
(31:41):
appeared to change course. Maybe the seas were rougher than
we thought, or maybe there was something wrong with his instruments. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So we have to note that Sally Floods UM Sally
Floods Research is the closest thing we have to a
primary source, because the actual log book that was found
(32:01):
aboard was lost in But yeah, you're you're right. There
was something wrong with the equipment. This theory argues, because
they had these pumps right on its previous voyage that
Mary Selest was transporting coal, and it had also been,
as we mentioned earlier, repaired and extensively renovated. And maybe,
the argument goes a pump became clogged with coal and sawdust,
(32:25):
and without the pump, and with a cargo with all
this industrial strength alcohol, some of it leaking, Briggs wouldn't
be able to tell how much seawater it actually come
into the whole. So he may have thought it was
legit sinking. That's right. And what we do know is
that they were within sight of land uh, and he
(32:47):
figured maybe let's cut our losses and abandoned ships since
we don't know how much seawater is coming in um,
and just take our chances on the lifeboat because it's
not that far to to dry land. But what we
do know is that none of these folks were ever
heard of again. And whenever you have a situation like that,
that leads to wild speculation because we can never hear
(33:09):
from a primary source, like you said, ben aside from
the person who did an investigation, Um that Attorney General
Sali Flood Um will never really hear what actually happened
because you know, they're they're just gone. Yeah. And that's
the spooky part, right, because if they were that close
to land with an expert sea captain at the helm,
(33:29):
what why what I mean, what what could have possibly happened?
Six miles There's six miles away, which doesn't seem like
that far away, right when you consider how large the
ocean is, What would a lifeboat be like in these days?
It would be like a rowboat, right, So they would
have had to row against maybe choppy waters. Well, it
would be assuming that they had ten souls aboard. Yeah,
(33:52):
we it would be. It's method of propulsion would be rowing,
would be oars, that's it would be. It would still
be too small, probably need to have a mass of
any sort, you know, the sale, so they would have
to row. But six miles rowing against choppy waters though
that would be no small task, right, especially if you're
going against like the current or whatever. I mean, that
(34:13):
would be tough. That's the question too, because then it
calls to mind, like what was the weather at during
this time, where the original accounts of calm weather just
accounts of what the weather was like the day the
boat was discovered abandoned, you know, because a storm can
come and go very quickly in the yture. So we
(34:34):
don't know what happened to Briggs and his crew and
his family, but we do have a little bit more
information about the fate of the boat itself because in
eighteen seventy four, the Mary Celeste, despite this the smirched reputation,
was sold at a loss to a partnership that wanted
(34:55):
to operate the boat in the Indian Ocean, and because
the lady's reputation preceded her, the Mary Celeste never made
a profit, lost money on every voyage in In eighteen
seventy nine, another sea captain in charge of the ship
fell ill and died, and this gave more um more
(35:16):
fuel to the rumor that the ship was cursed. Later,
she was sold to a firm in Boston. And then
I think there's there's this, you know, fairly frequents series
of handoffs and sales and resales because people don't want
to get rid of a ship again. It's such an
enormous investment, even a cursed ship. It's like, hey, well,
(35:40):
welcome to my murder mansion. You know, people die here,
uh midnight once every seven years. But it is a mansion,
and I like to emphasize that part of it. It's
very true. It's very true, ben Um. And there's even
another kind of potential insurance scam situation that happens in
eighteen eighty four when the commanding officer at the time,
(36:01):
a Gilman See Parker, tries to perpetrate insurance fraud against
the company that had ensured the ship. And they did
this by putting a bunch of useless crap into the
ship's hold. Um, and then they made a fake manifest
and uh just tried to ensure it for a value
(36:22):
of thirty thousand dollars. And then and then uh Parker
sails off for Haiti. As they approached the port, he
deliberately wrecks the ship. He steers it into a reef,
and it's a reef that everybody knows about. Ever been
on a boat in the Atlantic, if you're a sailor,
(36:44):
you know about this reef. So the collision rips the
boat apart, recks the ship, everybody abandoned ship. And then
Parker immediately goes to file his claim, right, Yeah, he does,
and doesn't doesn't go over so well. Um, it's discovered
pretty quick that he had forged this manifest that the
material inside the ship was absolutely over insured. Um. And
(37:07):
then he was put on trial, but it ended in
a mistrial, but irreparably damaged the man's reputation, and he
died three months later. Yea, So maybe in that case,
the curse of the Mary Celeste was his self fulfilling prophecy.
(37:28):
After that, the breck of the ship was never recovered,
and the natural world took over. The reef began to
grow to literally eat the timbers the bones of the
Mary Celeste. In two thousand and one, an expedition said
they discovered partial remains, but as of now that has
(37:50):
not been definitively proven. And here our story pauses, and
perhaps this will also be the end of the story.
We look at the evidence available and we see that
the mystery of the Mary Celeste probably does boil down
(38:11):
to these these relatively mundane but no less terrifying factors. Uh.
And the stories that the Mary Celeste has inspired in
fiction and film, poetry and art and so on have
taken on a life of their own. You know what
I mean. I think most people watching any fiction inspired
(38:31):
by the Mary Celeste are not swayed by it, right. No,
that's the thing I mean, And that's what we've seen
from the beginning of this is that the fiction is
probably a little more interesting and compelling than what actually happened. Uh.
And yet we still don't fully know what actually happened.
But I don't believe in cursed ships, do you, Ben? Yeah? Man? Really,
I mean for fun, Okay, that's what I'm saying. Like,
(38:52):
when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kind of blew this thing up, Um,
that's when it started being a lot of fun, because
it's great fodder for a story, because there's so any
unanswered questions. You can fill in the gaps of the
narrative of yourself with your imagination. Yeah. I have a
sci fi story that starts after actually a triptych that
starts with the Mary Celeste, so I I cannot throw
(39:15):
stones in this glasshouse. I definitely used as a jumping
off point. And there's something I don't know, you know,
the the idea of curses. We we've seen this in
multiple other historical accounts, right like the curse the so
called as you would say, the curse of King Tutt,
(39:36):
right that turned out to have some uh some explicable factors,
the curse of the Hope Diamond. I'm just thinking of curses. Now.
Let us know your favorite historical curse, or let us
know the one that you think has the most um
plausibility to it. You can find us on Instagram. You
(39:57):
can find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter.
We are some derivation of Ridiculous History. Check out our
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with our favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners.
You can also follow uh, Noel and I on our
own social needs. I am Ben Bowling and Instagram and
(40:19):
Ben Bowling hs W on Twitter, and you can find
me exclusively on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown Big
Thanks to super producer Casey Pegram as always happen to
be back in the shipping container after a most enjoyable holiday.
Thanks to Gabe, our research associate extraordinaire um. Thanks to
Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks of course to
Christopher hascy Otis who, as we said, well return very soon.
(40:43):
Thanks of course to Eve's Jeff Cote uh, the mastermind
behind this day in History class as well as apro punk.
Thanks of course to Jonathan Strickland's a k a. The
Quister who has has a cursed all of his own right.
And of course, of course no thanks to you man
Happy twenty Thanks but you two man see you next time. Folks.
(41:15):
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