Preface

When they found her she was dead in the water ......drifting off the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean with no one at the helm.....no one on board. How strange? How could a ship sailing from New York across the Atlantic to Genoa in Italy suddenly lose all its passengers.....including a woman and a child. It didn’t make sense! And what of the state of the vessel? Was everything on board smashed to indicate a fight had taken place.....that the crew had turned to mutiny? Was everything in complete disarray to show that the passengers and crew were in a state of panic? No.....there was nothing like that at all! In fact, the ship was in apple-pie order. Well then, did the passengers and crew decide to jump ship in the middle of an ocean for some reason unbeknown to the rest of the world? Did one of the sailors lose his mind and throw the rest overboard before committing suicide himself in the same way? Were they snatched by aliens from outer space and drawn into some kind of unworldly spaceship? Did they all get very drunk and fall overboard in some kind of game? Was there foul play aboard at all? There was no evidence to support any of these assumptions. However the incident served to set fire to the imagination. People all round the world racked their brains for a solution why the Mary Celeste had become a ghost ship.....for indeed that’s exactly what she became.

Throughout the first half-century after the incident occurred, writers took the most awful liberties with the common details, stretching every strand of poetic licence to the limit. By the time they had finished distorting the facts few people could determine the truth from the whim. One single, important, example is the fact that nine out of ten people still believe the name of the derelict was the ‘Marie’ Celeste. However, the ship was named the Mary Celeste and never called ‘Marie’. Another fact relates to the Captains of the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia.....the ship which found her. Both men dined out together in New York on the night before the Mary Celeste sailed. Thirty days later, the ship was found drifting off the islands of the Azores in the Atlantic by the Dei Gratia. With such a wide ocean, a coincidence of that nature appears to be phenomenal. Yet few people ever knew about the acquaintance of the two Captains. When she was found there was no one on board.....a ghost ship which should have been on its way to Genoa. The bunks were made up, the tables were cleared, valuables were resting where they had been left, and pipes and clothing had all been neatly put away in their usual places. But there was no crew and no evidence was available to explain the abandonment of the vessel. At a later date, one of the crew of the Dei Gratia stated that he had examined the ship and she was ‘fit to go round the world’. This comment dispensed with any idea that the Mary Celeste may have been leaking, or had been in danger of sinking, or of any other default which might have caused concern to the Captain. It was sufficient evidence to prove that there was no reason for anyone to abandon ship. It wasn’t long before suspicion became aroused. Clearly it had to be some sort of insurance swindle which went wrong. They believed it in in 1872, when the event occurred, and those who know the details of the story still believe it now. For those who consider it so, there is sufficient detail to suspect connivance between the two Captains when they went out to dine together the night before the Mary Celeste sailed from New York. They believe that an arrangement took place between them in some form of conspiracy although there is no evidence available to prove it happened. In fact, the evidence indicates they were both entirely innocent in this matter. If that much is discounted, what could be the reason for an empty vessel left on the high seas in ship-shape order? The long-boat carried by the Mary Celeste had been launched at some time during the voyage but no one ever turned up on a distant shore to provide the answer. What happened to that boat and the people in it? The Dei Gratia came across a ghost ship which was drifting unmanned on a slow constant course. To add to the intrigue, the Dei Gratia, the ship that found her, was lying close by in the dock in New York. To the suspicious, there were too many coincidences in this mystery. It made good sense to realise that a conspiracy had taken place. To the rest, it made no sense at all!

For a hundred-and-twenty five years, the intrigue remained unsolved. Information concerning the event and the aftermath are specific and can be found in the annals of history. Furthermore, after numerous authors had dabbled with the subject, the legend which rose like a phoenix from the ashes became even more absorbing that the mystery itself. The people involved in the story both before and after the incident became characters in their own right in every sense of the word.....from the religious Captain Briggs to the Queen’s Advocate, Frederick Solly Flood, a man hell-bent on proving that foul play had been engineered and that an insurance fraud which went wrong had been in progress. In fact Flood spent the remainder of his life ‘making further enquiries’ and went to his grave an angry man because he had been unable to resolve the matter satisfactorily. Coincidences began to run rife. Firstly, the Captains of the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia knew each other and dined together before the former vessel sailed. Secondly, the two ships were docked close to each other in New York harbour. Thirdly, in a wide expanse of ocean.....with many routes available round the Azores.....the two vessels met head on. Not least to be considered in this mysterious affair is the legend of the Mary Celeste and how it developed.....almost as a myth by authors who, in their judgement, used and abused the tale to their own ends. One thing is certain, however, in that there will never be a satisfactory solution accepted by the public.....even if written evidence was forthcoming. Too long has passed since the strange event occurred. In any case, scepticism for any explanation now will reign supreme. The world prefers to enjoy it that way.

Does anyone know what happened to the Mary Celeste after she was found? After being sold and resold a number of times, she sailed on for a few years and was then the subject of an obvious insurance fraud when her then Captain drove her on to a reef in Haiti. He had colluded in a conspiracy with the U.S. Consul there who eventually ran off to the woods to escape capture. The ship was left to rot on the reef.

For my own part, the story of the Mary Celeste took life one evening at the bar of a hotel where fate led me to meet an American by sheer accident. He was a descendant of John McCormack who was responsible for all that happened at the abandonment of the Mary Celeste. The secret he had nursed for many years emerged that evening and started a quest for information which spanned part of Europe and the United States for the truth. It led me to become the motive force in piecing the solution together. As such, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Gibraltar Chronicle, The Daily Express, The People, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, the Reader’s Digest, the Public Record Office, the American National Archives in Washington and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and many other helpful newspapers, agencies, organisations and people who willingly supported me in this quest.