Brian Freemantle: The Mary Celeste

The meteorological evidence also supports this theory. Surviving records of the Servico Meteorologico dos Acores, the Portuguese authority covering the islands, attest that ‘stormy conditions prevailed over the Azores on November 24 and 25’. However, those same records show that ‘calm or light winds prevailed on the forenoon of the 25th’. The improvement did not last, however. In the afternoon a storm broke of almost unnatural ferocity. During the twenty-four-hour period, at Ponta Delgada, only fifty miles from where the disaster occurred, there was recorded a rainfall of 11.4 inches. The ‘cold front’ passed between three and eight p.m. Then the wind veered from south-west to north-west, which would have carried any small vessel not towards Santa Maria, but out into the Atlantic, where the nearest coast would be that of Portugal, eight hundred miles away.

There is recorded evidence that the alcohol had seeped from the Mary Celeste’s barrels. After the ship’s eventual release from Admiralty custody in Gibraltar, she completed her voyage to Genoa, where it was discovered upon unloading that nine barrels were empty.

One person who never wavered in his belief that Captain Briggs and his family had been murdered was Gibraltar Attorney-General and Admiralty Proctor, Frederick Solly Flood. It was not until July 28, 1887 — fourteen years after he had had it made — that the analysis of the supposed blood upon the sword blade found in Captain Briggs’s cabin was released, and then only because of pressure from the American State Department in Washington.

In the letter supplying him with the findings of Dr Patron, court registrar Edward Baumgartner wrote to the U.S. Consul on that date: This analysis which was made by Dr Patron MD at the instance of Mr Solly Flood speaks for itself, it being rather remarkable, however, that the analysis or report so brought in, was brought in under seal on the 14th March, 1873, and the seal remained unbroken until I opened it for the purpose of giving you a copy.

The Mary Celeste continued to sail the oceans — although always with a crew — for twelve years after her mystery voyage.

Her ending was ignominious. The last registration entry in the records of the United States government — Number 28, issued on August 4, 1884 — is endorsed ‘lost by stranding, January 3, 1885, on reefs off Rochelais, near Miragoane, Haiti. 7 on board. None lost.’

Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, discovered that a near-worthless cargo had been insured for $30,000 and that an insurance fraud had been planned between the master, Captain Gilman Parker and the U.S. Consul in Haiti. The consul fled into the jungle interior of Haiti and escaped arrest. Parker was arraigned on a charge of conspiracy and barratry, the wilful wrecking of a vessel, the penalty for which was death. There was a failure to agree at his first trial. He died before he could be brought before a second court.

It was two years after that — in July 1887 — that Consul Sprague responded to the American government’s pressure about the blood sample and wrote in his letter to Washington: This case of the Mary Celeste is startling, since it appears to be one of those mysteries which no human ingenuity can penetrate sufficiently to account for the abandonment of this vessel and the disappearance of her master, family and crew about which nothing has ever transpired. Consul Sprague could have been mistaken. On May 16, 1873, the Liverpool Daily Albion reported: A sad story of the sea — a telegram from Madrid says ‘Some fishermen at Baudus, in Asturias, have found two rafts, the first with a corpse lashed to it and an Agrican [American?] flag flying and the second raft with five decomposed bodies. It is not known to what vessel they belonged.’

It was never established nor even investigated if they might have been those of the people who disappeared from the Mary Celeste.