Conan Doyle and the Mary Celeste

The story as it is told

It is December 1872, in the Atlantic, and a ship is sailing herself. She is under part of her sail, nobody is on deck, and nobody answers when she is hailed. When a boarding party climbs aboard the Marie Celeste, as the legend spells her, the whole crew has gone.

What they find, the tale says, is a ship that has just been left. The breakfast is half eaten on the table, the tea in the cups is still warm, and everything is in its place, as if the crew had got up from the meal and walked off the edge of the world. Afterwards a survivor came forward and told the whole story.

What we can confirm

Several details in that telling are not from the record. The ship's name was Mary Celeste; "Marie" is the spelling Doyle's 1884 story popularised, and it is printed that way in the Cornhill text. The warm breakfast belongs to fiction and later retellings, and RMG's account of the boarding describes a deserted ship with its boat gone and its papers missing. The "survivor" was J. Habakuk Jephson, a character invented by a 24-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle.

On November 7, 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste left New York for Genoa. Royal Museums Greenwich, in an account by curator Andrew Choong Han Lin, lists who was aboard: Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and a crew of seven. The cargo was about 1,700 barrels of high-grade alcohol.

On December 4, the crew of the Dei Gratia sighted her near the Azores on an erratic course. Captain Morehouse sent Oliver Deveau and John Wright across in a boat. The ship was deserted. The boat normally stowed over the main hatch was gone. The sails were partly set and damaged, the cargo hatches were off, one of the two pumps was partly taken apart, and a sounding rod lay nearby. The crew's belongings seemed intact; the ship's papers and Briggs's navigational instruments were missing. The log slate's last entry was for the morning of November 25.

Morehouse put Deveau and two sailors aboard and sailed both ships about 600 nautical miles to Gibraltar, where the Mary Celeste arrived on December 13. A salvage court convened on December 17 and sat until February 25, 1873. Gibraltar's Attorney General, Frederick Solly-Flood, believed the crew had murdered the Briggs family and fled, and held to that view as the evidence ran against it. Smithsonian magazine reports that the salvors were eventually paid one-sixth of the $46,000 value of ship and cargo, which it reads as a hint that the court suspected them.

No one aboard was ever found. Theories run from an alcohol-vapour scare to insurance fraud, and Smithsonian (Jess Blumberg, November 2007) describes the documentary investigation by Anne MacGregor, The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste,' with Woods Hole oceanographer Phil Richardson. Using the transcribed log slate and historical weather data, they concluded that Briggs was about 120 miles west of where he thought he was, probably because of an inaccurate chronometer, and that a pump clogged by debris from the ship's previous coal cargo may have left him unable to tell how much water he was taking on. The log put the ship within sight of Santa Maria in the Azores on November 25, the last land for hundreds of miles. MacGregor's view is that Briggs ordered the ship abandoned there. That's a theory, and Smithsonian says MacGregor can't prove it.

Then fiction arrived. In his memoir, Doyle remembered the thrill of having James Payn accept his story "Habakuk Jephson's Statement" for the Cornhill Magazine, which paid him £30. It was published anonymously, as the magazine's rule required, at the start of the new year (January 1884). Doyle recalled one review opening with the line that it "would have made Thackeray turn in his grave," while another thought it saw "the hand of the author of 'The New Arabian Nights'" (that is, Robert Louis Stevenson).

The story claimed to be a survivor's statement and invented much of what it described. RMG says it "caused a sensation," is "riddled with factual inaccuracies that are still sometimes taken as fact," and gave us the persistent misspelling "Marie Celeste." In other words, the most famous version of the mystery is partly a young doctor's first big story sale.

The facts

• Left New York Nov 7, 1872 for Genoa; Briggs, Sarah, Sophia (2) and seven crew (named); about 1,700 barrels of alcohol; sighted Dec 4 near the Azores by the Dei Gratia; Deveau and Wright boarded; boat missing; damage and missing papers; log slate's last entry the morning of Nov 25; Gibraltar Dec 13; salvage court Dec 17 to Feb 25; Solly-Flood's foul-play theory; "Marie Celeste" error from Doyle's story (Cornhill, 1884). Andrew Choong Han Lin, Royal Museums Greenwich, rmg.co.uk
• Salvage paid at one-sixth of the $46,000 insured value, "suggesting that the authorities were not entirely convinced of the Dei Gratia crew's innocence"; 1,701 barrels; sighted Dec 5 about 400 miles east of the Azores; MacGregor and Richardson's chronometer and pump theory; Bela Lugosi played a homicidal sailor in a 1935 film version. Jess Blumberg, Smithsonian, Nov 2007, smithsonianmag.com
• Payn accepted the story for Cornhill; £30; anonymous; the two reviews quoted. Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (1924), Project Gutenberg #66991, gutenberg.org
• Story text: "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement," in The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales, Wikisource: en.wikisource.org

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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