The Myth of the Marie Celeste

When I first started to write a blog, I decided to talk about anything and everything. I thought that my views on politics and religion would cause people to write to me telling me just what a low-life, ignorant halfwit I am. This, of course, could be true. But it seems I’m not as radical as I thought, as people can’t care less about what I think on these subjects.

But strangely, they do get quite angry with me when I have a go at mythology (religion falls into this category for me, but not for most others, it seems.)

I have, this week, had a chat with a young man who got quite irate with me for telling him there was nothing strange about the Marie Celeste, except the ship was really called the Mary Celeste.

What is up with these people that believe in conspiracies and myths? The facts are quite easy to look up! So for the record, and for my aggressive little conspiracy theorist, here are the facts.

The Mary Celeste would have slipped away into obscurity were it not for one Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of none other than Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle was an occultist (he verified the Cottingly Fairies, another myth) and he also knew a good story when he heard one.

He changed the name of the ship to the Marie Celeste, and wrote a short story about it. The story tells of a ghost ship found floating and abandoned with tables set for dinner and no sign of any struggle; all was well, except there was no sign of any crew.

Many explanations have been put forward about this, from pirates (none of the belongings was missing) to ‘Ergot’ in the bread, but the food was found to be safe and free from contamination. Ergot, by the way, is a fungus that can cause LSD-like hallucinations.

The facts are that the Mary Celeste set off from New York with a hold full of alcohol, a cargo the captain, Benjamin Briggs wasn’t used to hauling. Also on board was Sarah Briggs his wife, and his daughter Sophia, along with ten crew.

On the 4^th December 1872 the Mary Celeste was spotted 600 miles west of Portugal by the Dei Gratia, which reported that the Celeste was ’yawing’ - its sails were flapping in the wind. John Johnson of the Dei Gratia said they followed the ship for up to four hours but the Mary Celeste made no attempt to hail them, so they decided to board the ship.

They found no sign of a struggle, and the plates were not set for dinner, but they thought that there was blood in the captain's cabin (it turned out to be rust) so they decided to tow the ship back for salvage.

The Admiralty held a full enquiry and found nothing other-worldly, no evidence of piracy, or violence. What they concluded from the evidence was that nine of the barrels of alcohol were empty; the fluid had leaked into the hold, owing to bad storage methods. The Captain and the crew could smell the overwhelming smell of the alcohol and opened the hatch to be confronted with vapours and steam rising from the hold. Thinking that the ship was about to blow up, the captain gave the order to abandon ship (the lifeboats were missing).

The captain took nothing with him except his sextant, and it is thought that with the currents the crew would have been taken miles off course and probably died of hunger and thirst. As far as the Admiralty was concerned, the case was closed, and it wasn’t that unusual, because in the age of wooden sailing ships, things like this did occur from time to time.

But as I have already said, when Conan Doyle wrote his short story, lots of people started to speculate and all sorts of ideas were put forward as to what happened to them. As with all myths, things were added to the story and facts were removed, until you now have the story of the Marie Celeste "ghost ship".

I have to say, though, he truth about the Titanic is much more interesting. The government want you to believe that it hit an iceberg, but there is startling evidence to show that it hit an alien spaceship, the facts have been covered up, and the spaceship was taken to Roswell and put in hangar 59! Some of the bodies found from the Titanic had radiation burns on them! The ship went down nearly a thousand miles away from where it was claimed to have sunk; it was found in the ‘Bermuda Triangle!’