Last Year's Lesson: Mary Celeste Spotted Adrift - Dec. 5, 1872

The Mary Celeste was spotted adrift on this day in 1872. You can learn more in the January 24, 2013 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. We hope it makes previous
episodes for this date easier to find in the feed.
Welcome to this day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick

(00:20):
look at what happened today in history. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December five.
The Mary Celeste was found adrift on this day in
eighteen seventy two, with no one aboard, and it was
four hundred miles or so east of the Azores, that's

(00:41):
off the coast of Portugal. The Mary Celeste had departed
from New York City on November seven. Captain Benjamin Spooner
Briggs was in command, and his wife Sarah and young
daughter were on board the vessel as well, along with
the crew. By December five, when the derelict vessel was found,
it should have already arrived in its destination of Genoa, Italy,

(01:04):
but instead there it was adrift. One of its lifeboats
was missing The last log entry was dated November, and
inside there was water in the bottom of the boat
about three and a half feet or a little more
than a meter deep. One of the pumps that would
have been used to remove this water was disassembled, but
otherwise everything seemed pretty normal. The cargo and the stores

(01:28):
seemed to be undamaged more or less. There was plenty
of food and water on board, at least six months worth,
and there was really no other clue what might have happened.
What might have prompted the people on board to have
a bandaged ship that was an experienced captain and crew.
Nothing seemed that dangerous to prompt people to get into
a lifeboat rather than staying aboard the ship. The ship

(01:51):
that spotted the mary Celeste was the day Gratia, and
they sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar. Normally, this would
have been a simple matter of just working out the
salvage rights once they got there, but the Attorney General
thoughts something seemed suspicious about all of this, and that
led to a whole investigation into whether there had been

(02:12):
some kind of foul play involved. Although that investigation didn't
uncover any evidence of foul play. The crew of the day,
Grattia didn't get nearly as much money out of their
whole salvage effort as they normally would have, so it
seems as though maybe they still had some suspicion about them.
The Mary Celestia was fixed up and re christened and

(02:34):
put back into service where it had a relatively normal
several years until it was run around on purpose with
its captain trying to commit some insurance fraud. This whole thing, though,
it was very mysterious, and because it's so mysterious, there's
just been a lot of speculation about what happened. Some
of it is very far fetched, like sea monsters. Maybe

(02:58):
sea monsters ate everyone. That didn't happen. A little more probable,
perhaps there was a mutiny, perhaps it was pirates or
some other kind of attack. The cargo aboard was industrial alcohol,
and so there's been a lot of speculation that maybe
something caused fumes from the cargo to ignite, causing an

(03:21):
explosion that was frightening enough that it caused everyone to flee.
That one was discounted for a long time because there
weren't any burn marks to suggest that an explosion had happened,
but some more recent experiments had suggested that it is
possible that there could have been an explosion that didn't
catch anything alight. It's also possible that the crew became

(03:44):
disoriented at sea, and that that, combined with the faulty pump,
led them to believe that they had a better chance
of survival in the lifeboat than in the ship. Regardless
of exactly what happened, though, the Mary Celest has become
one of history's most famous go ships. You can learn
more about this in the June episode of Stuffy Miss

(04:05):
in History Class. Thanks to Ksey P. Graham and Chandler
Maze for their audio work on the show. You can
subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple podcast,
Google Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts, including
the I Heart Radio app. You can tune in tomorrow
for another maritime tale, although this one is a lot
more tragic than mysterious.