On December 5, 1872, the crew of the Dei Gratia made a bizarre discovery floating in the waters 600 miles west of Portugal. The Mary Celeste, a ship they were familiar with and that had departed New York on the same path to Italy as the Dei Gratia ten days earlier, was wandering derelict with her sails aloft and her crew entirely missing.
The men from the Dei Gratia saw no distress signal, and when they boarded the Mary Celeste found that the ship was largely intact. The personal belongings of the crew were all in their place, and despite some water sloshing about the hold the ship was seaworthy. The navigation equipment, including the compass, the chronometer (essentially a timekeeper to determine longitudinal positioning), and the sextant, had been destroyed or were missing. The captain’s logbook was on board and recorded nothing to indicate what had happened and where exactly the crew had gone. Their fate, it can assumed, is tied to the lifeboat missing from the deck of the ship.
The Mary Celeste is a troubling case. Contemporary speculation, including an official inquiry into the disappearance of the crew, attributes blame to several possible occurrences. These included piracy, which seems unlikely considering the ship was still full of cargo and there were almost no signs of struggle, and drunkenness, which stems from the later discovery that nine of the alcohol casks being transported were empty. This explanation is also unlikely given the ship’s captain was well known as a strict and experienced sailor who would never drink on the job nor let his crew get out of control. Regardless, it would be a strange sort of drunkenness that would lead everyone on board to take a lifeboat out to sea.
It’s a compelling mystery. What would make the crew of a ship abandon their craft in the middle of the ocean without taking any of their personal belongings or causing much of a stir at all? Why did those aboard the Mary Celeste decide that leaving their ship was a better option than staying aboard? The evidence strongly suggests they left of their own volition. The water in the hold, combined with the discovery that two of the three pumps aboard the ship were faulty, may have convinced the crew the ship was going under and they needed to get off. The Dei Gratia crew reported finding a tattered rope dragging behind the Mary Celeste. Perhaps the crew of the Mary Celeste had piled into the lifeboat and hitched themselves to the ship, but the rope was somehow cut and they drifted away. The ship, which was sailed to Gibraltar after being discovered, was no doubt seaworthy, meaning that if the crew did in fact abandon it in fear of sinking, they had done so in error. But still, the question remains as to what would have enticed them off the ship in the first place.
The most widely accepted, albeit still unproven theory, has to do with the missing alcohol. The barrels that were found empty had been made of a different material than the rest, one more prone to leaking alcohol vapors into the air. The theory asserts that the hold filled with these volatile vapors which were ignited with the metal bands of the barrels struck together inside the swaying ship and sparked. The hold doors would have blown open, and as recreations have shown, it would have been possible for the alcohol vapors to ignite enough to scare the crew into thinking the ship was on fire while causing very little damage in and around the cargo hold. It would have been a reasonable reaction for the crew to load into the lifeboat and hitch themselves to the ship to see if it did in fact burn down. The plan went awry when something disconnected the two and made it all but impossible to get back to the Mary Celeste. This explanation addresses much of the evidence at hand, but still leaves an open question as to why the navigational instruments had been destroyed.
There is another possibility. It is important to consider that all of this action, everything between when the Mary Celeste left New York and arrived in Gibraltar over a month later being crewed by members of the Dei Gratia, is entirely reliant on the story of the surviving ship’s men. There is a feasible scenario under which the crew of the Dei Gratia could have been responsible for the whole ordeal. The two captains were friendly with each other, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that had the Dei Gratia caught up to the Mary Celeste for some reason, her crew would be welcomed aboard. They then could have rounded up the Mary Celeste crew and forced them off the ship on the lifeboat, later cutting the mooring rope to abandon them at sea. Their motive lies in the right they held to a fee for discovering and salvaging the drifting craft. The crew of the Dei Gratia did eventually receive a salvage fee proportionate to the value of the Mary Celeste’s cargo and amounting in the hundreds of thousands in today’s money. But this scenario is just another possibility.
Whatever happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste happened to them over 140 years ago. There were no witnesses, and no physical evidence aside from what they left on the ship. The ship itself was sold to a new owner and continued to sail before eventually being lost to the sea. All we can do today to deepen our understanding of this case is read further into the accounts of the crew of the Dei Gratia as they are the closest to witnesses that we have. The rest is gross speculation, and while it’s disappointing, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever truly determine what became of the lost crew of the Mary Celeste.