The Mary Celeste left New York on 7 November 1872, bound for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol. Her captain, Benjamin Briggs, was a teetotal Massachusetts master of solid reputation. He brought his wife Sarah and their two-year-old daughter Sophia; the crew of seven included four steady German seamen. Ten people in all.
On 4 December the British brigantine Dei Gratia — which had left New York eight days after her — sighted the Mary Celeste about 400 nautical miles east of the Azores, sailing erratically under partial canvas. A boarding party found no one.
The ship in good order
The vessel was wet but seaworthy: some three and a half feet of water in the hold (not dangerous), two hatches open, the single lifeboat — a small yawl — gone, apparently launched deliberately. Six months of food and water remained. The cargo sat intact; the crew’s oilskins, pipes, and sea chests were still aboard. The last slate log entry, dated 25 November, put her off Santa Maria in the Azores — meaning the ship had sailed on, crewless, for nine days and several hundred miles.
The Dei Gratia men sailed her to Gibraltar for salvage. There the attorney-general, Frederick Solly-Flood, spent three months hunting for evidence of mutiny, piracy, or murder — a stained sword, marks on the bow — and found nothing a court would accept. The salvors got their award, at a suspiciously grudging fraction, and the mystery went unsolved into legend, hugely amplified in 1884 by an anonymous short story in the Cornhill Magazine — the young Arthur Conan Doyle’s “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” whose invented details (meals still warm on the table) contaminate accounts to this day.
The likeliest answer
When the cargo was unloaded at Genoa, nine barrels — made of leaky red oak rather than white — were empty. The soberest reconstruction runs: alcohol fumes or a rumble in the hold, perhaps a small explosion-scare or a fouled pump making the water level unreadable, convinced Briggs the ship was about to blow or founder. All ten took to the yawl, tethered by a line, to stand off in safety. The line parted — and the ship sailed away from them faster than they could row. The Atlantic did the rest.
The ship herself came to a fitting end: passed through many hands as an unlucky vessel, she was deliberately wrecked on a Haitian reef in 1885 in an insurance fraud so clumsy that her last captain was caught, tried, and ruined.