The mystery of the Mary Celeste... solved?

ABC Radio National

Posted 25 Jun 2015, updated 26 Jun 2015

A painting of Mary Celeste as Amazon in 1861 (possibly by Honore Pellegrin (1800–c.1870)/ Slate magazine. 

Licensed under Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

More than 140 years after the crew of the Mary Celeste vanished without a trace, Aden Rolfe has recreated their fateful voyage in A Thoroughly Wet Mess, an eight-part tale of mystery, confusion and flirtation on the high seas.

Here’s what we know. On November 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste left New York, loaded with raw alcohol, bound for Genoa. There were seven crew members aboard, as well as Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and their two-year-old daughter. The ship may or may not have had a yawl—that is, a rowboat that could double as a lifeboat—lashed over the main hatch.

No matter how you look at it, though, you find yourself confounded by the contradiction at the heart of the mystery; a captain only ever abandons a ship if there’s no other option.

A month later, on December 4, the Celeste was found drifting near the Azores, an autonomous group of islands off the coast of Portugal. The sails were run down or blown away, the hatches open, the cabins full of water. There was a sword on the deck, as well as what appeared to be bloodstains. Nine of the barrels in the hold were empty. If there had been a yawl, there wasn’t one anymore. Presumably it went the way of the crew, along with the ship’s papers, instruments and logbooks—in short, anything that might have told us where they went or why.

All that was left was a slate log, which is an hourly record of bearing, speed and wind. The last entry suggested that the ship was abandoned 10 days prior, near the island of Santa Maria.

So what happened? What led a respected, experienced captain and his trusted crew to abandon a seaworthy ship?

These are the questions that underpin A Thoroughly Wet Mess. Each of the eight episodes features the (fictional) descendants of the original captain, owner and crew of the Mary Celeste positing different theories as to what happened to their ancestors. They do this while aboard a replica of the brigantine, recreating that infamous voyage. What could possibly go wrong?

Engraving by Rudolph Ruzicka of the Mary Celeste as she was found by the Dei Gratia.

The answer, of course, is everything. Not long after boarding the Mary Celeste II the protagonists, Sophie and Marc, realise that things are not what they seem. Between the mysterious page slipped through their door and whatever the captain’s hiding in the cargo hold, they find themselves at the centre of a twofold mystery. If they can solve the events of the present, will they unlock the secrets of the past? Or will they succumb to the same fate as their ancestors?

The series takes place entirely aboard the replica ship, with flashbacks to the original vessel, playing on the apparent simplicity of the Mary Celeste mystery. It’s this simplicity that still captivates amateur sleuths 140 years later; ten people disappeared, but the ship was unscathed. If the answer’s anywhere, it’s on those hallowed decks. Like a locked room puzzle or a lateral thinking question, it’s just about looking at it from the right angle.

What’s interesting is that a number of the more plausible solutions can be dismissed on evidence, while some of the more outlandish possibilities are difficult to disprove. Piracy, for instance, is typically disregarded because neither the passengers’ valuables nor the ship’s cargo were pilfered, while it’s hard to say for certain that a giant squid didn’t pluck the crew members one by one from the deck. Or that aliens didn’t do much the same thing. Or that the ship didn’t get beached on a sand bank in the middle of the Atlantic, thereby enticing the crew to disembark and explore it, only to have the temporary island recede, drowning the hapless group.

No matter how you look at it, though, you find yourself confounded by the contradiction at the heart of the mystery; a captain only ever abandons a ship if there’s no other option, if he and his charges are in grave danger. Yet whatever danger Captain Briggs thought was about to befall them, it never came to pass. After they deserted the ship, she managed to sail herself unaided for some 278 miles, over 10 days, without sinking or exploding or passing through a wormhole.

It’s these details that have helped usher the Mary Celeste from mystery into myth, inspiring writers and dramatists for a century and a half. Before he created Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle provided a possible ‘solution’ to the mystery in his short story, J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement. Detailing the hijacking of the ship by a black liberationist, Doyle’s story was intended as fiction; its anonymous publication, however, led many to take it as fact.

The uncertainty Doyle was able to create, despite spelling the name of the ship incorrectly—Marie rather than Mary—and changing dates and details to suit his storytelling, laid the groundwork for more audacious hoaxes, such as Abel Fosdyk’s Story and the accurately named Great Mary Celeste Hoax, both presented as true accounts of survivors.

More fun than these are the unashamed fictions, like The Goon Show’s take—‘The Mystery of the Mary Celeste (Solved)’— which, like A Thoroughly Wet Mess, also features a replica Mary Celeste.

So where does A Thoroughly Wet Mess fit in the lineage of Mary Celeste stories? Does it present a genuine solution to the mystery or is it just another tale fuelled by the myth? There’s only one way to find out...

Episode one begins on Radiotonic on Friday, June 26, 2015 at 11am.

First published at ABC News RN, June 25, 2015, updated June 26