Forbidden History - Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship Whose Crew Vanished

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

In 1872, the Mary Celeste was discovered drifting across the Atlantic, cargo intact, but every person aboard mysteriously missing. Historian and author Dominic Selwood joins us to examine the evidence, unravel the myths and ask what really happened to history’s most famous ghost ship. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Dominic Selwood: Historian and Author Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for Calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Welcome to the Forbidden History podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. It's December the 4th, 1872, and a Canadian-built, British-flagged merchant vessel called the Dei Gratia is sailing from New York to Gibraltar, carrying a cargo of petroleum and grain. 400 miles east of the Azores, it spots something strange, a ship drifting iranically. After attempts to hail her meet with no response, they decide to board her, and when they do, they are surprised by what they find.

To the boarding party's astonishment, they were met with the completely eerie scene of a ship set up for people. food, personal possessions, living quarters, everything entirely normal as if the people had just stepped out of the room, but there was no evidence of them at all. As the Dei Gratia splits its crew and begins piloting the empty ship towards their destination, little do they know that they stumbled upon what will become one of the most enduring mysteries in maritime history, the Mary Celeste. To explore the history and the theories surrounding it, the disappearance of the crew, is historian and author Dominic Selwood.

There are inevitably many, many theories about what happened on the Mary Celeste. They inspected the captain's logbook and they were astonished to see that there had been no entry for nine days. And he was highly suspicious and thought there had been wrongdoing, suggesting that perhaps there had been a crime like mutiny or murder. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers, and this is Forbidden History. Before the Mary Celeste becomes a name that would echo through generations, it starts life under a different identity in a small shipyard in Canada.

The ship started life called the Amazon. She'd been built on Spencer's Island in Nova Scotia, and the keel was laid in late 1860, with the ship launched on May the 18th, the following year 1861. The Amazon was a brigantine, carvel built from a wooden hull with two masts and modest tonnage for an Atlantic coasting trading vessel. Her early activities were broadly conventional. She sailed around the West Indies, England and the Mediterranean. Her job is to carry timber from Nova Scotia, run West Indies routes, and haul the mixed commercial cargo of the Atlantic trade.

But while the Amazon is a typical ship of the time, it is dogged by misfortune from the very beginning. The Amazon unfortunately experienced a sequence of incidents, including the death of a captain, and was eventually partially wrecked off Cow Bay, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The wreck is bought by a New Yorker called Richard Haynes. He invests heavily in repairs and refitting, and as is traditional after an unlucky past, gives the ship a new identity, Mary Celeste. But when Haynes falls into financial trouble, he is forced to sell her at auction,

where it passes into the hands of a New York consortium. The Mary Celeste's owners were a consortium headed by a man named James H. Winchester and a group of smaller investors. One of the owners was in fact the ship's new captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, and he held a quarter of the share in the boat. Briggs was generally thought of

as an experienced, reliable, sober sailor. For the next few years, she will have an uneventful life, crossing the Atlantic between the US and Europe, carrying typical merchant cargoes like timber and grain. But in 1872, she would sail into legend. The Mary Celeste departed on her fateful voyage on November 7, 1872. She left New York and was headed for Genoa in Italy. On board were 1,701 barrels of... industrial denatured alcohol.

In terms of people, there was Captain Benjamin Briggs, there was his wife Sarah, and Sophia their two-year-old daughter. The crew on the ship was small, probably around seven people. Captain Benjamin Briggs is an American from a long-established New England seafaring family. He's known for being pious, disciplined and highly competent. He's also experienced, having sailed major Atlantic routes for years. The fact that he brings his wife and daughter on shows he expected a safe and uneventful voyage, while his share in the ship's ownership gives him a financial stake in keeping her safe.

His professional crew are equally solid. The first mate, Albert G. Richardson, is a man Briggs knows well and trusts. The second mate, Andrew Gilling, is young but capable. Edward William Head, the steward and cook, is newly married, reliable and well-liked. The remaining four sailors are German seamen, hired in New York and are experienced competent men, typical of the Atlantic trade. Life aboard the Mary Celeste is rigid and demanding. The crew works in four-hour watches, keeping the ship running day and night.

Their time is spent adjusting sails, navigating by sextant, and maintaining the vessel in the ever-changing seas. Below deck, space is tight and comfort minimal. The crew sleeps in shared bunks, while Captain Briggs and his family occupy small cabins. A crossing can take weeks, and while routine keeps order, the Atlantic remains unpredictable and unforgiving. And soon something would happen. will transform the Mary Celeste from just another merchant vessel into one of the most famous ships ever to sail. On December 4, 1872, so 27 days out of New York, the Mary Celeste was spotted

behaving oddly and erratically. This was observed by another ship called the Dei Grazie, a Canadian-registered, and the two ships at that time were between the Azores and the Portuguese coast. After the Dei Gratia called over to the Merry Celeste and got no answer, its captain, David Morehouse, dispatched a boarding party. And when these people got on board the Mary Celeste, to their astonishment, they discovered that her erratic behavior was because absolutely no one was on board. At first, aside from the missing crew and an untidy ship, They find nothing out of the ordinary. In the stores, there were still substantial food and water,

and all of the people's effects were still in their cabins and living quarters. It's only upon closer inspection that they find signs that something strange has happened. They inspected the captain's logbook, and they were astonished to see that there had been no entry for nine days, and so that would have been 18 days out of New York. The surviving log entries show nothing out of the ordinary. The Mary Celeste had been performing well. The final entry, dated November 25, 1872, records her position near the Azores, the weather fair and the wind steady, no hint of trouble, no sign of distress, and then nothing. After that date, the logbook becomes a run of blank

That is pretty extraordinary in and of itself because a captain planning on abandoning a ship probably would have written in the logbook and probably would have taken the logbook with him. The boarding party then descend into the ship's hull. The only slightly odd thing, apart from the absence of the people, was three and a half feet of water in the hold, which was a significant amount, but not the end of a world for a ship of that size and quite manageable. manageable. They also found a makeshift sounding rod, which was used to test the depth of water in the hold, and a disassembled water pump. They then noticed that a few items are missing. The only thing they found to be missing were a number of navigation instruments and papers, along with one small boat called a yawl that acted as the Mary Celeste's lifeboat. In short, a vanished crew.

Their belongings untouched. The cargo intact. The logbook abandoned mid-voyage. The lifeboat, gone. And yet the water in the hold is nowhere near enough to threaten the vessel. Nothing fits. With the inspection complete, Captain Morehouse faces a choice. Leave the Mary Celeste drifting in the mid-Atlantic, or attempt to sail her.

to port. Sailing her to port would be dangerous, but also offer a significant reward. One key feature of this mystery that needs to be borne in mind is that the rules at the time around salvage meant that the captain of the Dei Grazia could take this empty ship in to port and go through a salvage process which would result in him and if he chose to give it to the crew being given money. Under 19th century Admiralty Law, anyone who finds a ship abandoned at sea can claim salvage if they prove that the ship they found was truly deserted, that they'd preserved both the vessel and the cargo, and that they were not the cause of the abandonment.

If those conditions are met, a court awards a percentage of the ship's value to the captain and crew of the ship that salvaged it. The purpose of the law is to reward mariners for rescuing property at sea, preventing the oceans from becoming a drifting graveyard of wrecks, hazards, and lost cargoes. With the Mary Celeste still seaworthy and the cargo intact, the crew of the Dei Gratia are entitled to a salvage reward if they can take her safely to port. Captain Morehouse chooses this option, but it isn't entirely risk-free. The Dei Gratia carries a small crew, and sailing two ships across the Atlantic, the

means spreading them dangerously thin. Even so, Morehouse decides to take the gamble. We only have the Dei Gratzias' account of what happened and what they found. But the captain of the Dei Gratzia duly took it into Gibraltar, which was the nearest port, which was British, and so therefore a salvage hearing was held in Gibraltar, which was standard for derelict recovery. but it quickly expanded as a hearing because of the completely enigmatic situation in which the

day Grazer had found the Mary Celeste. A typical salvage hearing takes a few days, maybe a week for the more complex cases. But the hearing for the Mary Celeste drags on for three months. Frederick Solly Flood was the Attorney General of Gibraltar and he led the inquest and he was highly suspicious and thought there had been wrongdoing, suggesting that perhaps there had been a crime like mutiny or murder, or this was about insurance fraud. And partly because of the large financial incentives that were available in cases of salvage, he was very focused on trying to work out whether there was a crime behind this, and the Dei Gratia was trying to enrich itself.

Flood is a man known for being officious, suspicious, and for loving drama. He orders a detailed inspection of the vessel. Investigators pour over the Mary Celeste, looking for bloodstains, signs of violence, weapon marks, evidence of tampering with the cargo, and inconsistencies in the Dei Gratia crew's testimony. However, despite a lengthy inquiry, they found no solid evidence there had been any crime, and there was nothing that explained why the ship showed signs of what appeared to be mysterious but orderly abandonment. The missing alcohol is easily explained.

The barrels are made of red oak, a wood known to leak vapor. But although Flood can't prove foul play, he remains deeply unsatisfied. A derelict ship in good condition suggests something doesn't add up, even if he can't work out what? So while the court does grant salvage to the crew of the Dei Gratia, the award is noticeably small. Salvage was awarded but was reduced,

owing to a lingering suspicion, that something fishy was going on and something in what the Dei Gratia had reported was not quite. right. But still to this day, there has been no trace of any of the people who had been on board the Mary Celeste. That could have been the end of it, a strange, unresolved case destined to fade into obscurity. But the Victorian imagination had other plans. The press seized on the mystery, embellishing the gaps and enlarging the oddities, and soon one of the era's most famous authors would

transform the Mary Celeste into a story of conspiracy, wonder and legend. The Victorian press always loved a good scandal and they were thrilled with this story with its combination of intact ship and missing people and they widely sensationalized the tale so it became household knowledge. The next phase in it becoming a timeless legend was down to the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, he had been a ship surgeon and 12 years after the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He wrote one of the first of his short stories, so before the Sherlock Holmes stories, and he called it Jay Habercuck Jefferson's Statement.

And now this was a fictionalised account of the story of the Mary Celeste, and it made the tale even more famous. It also introduced differences from the real story, which created confusion in people's minds. and still does. So, for example, he called the ship not the Mary Celeste, but the Mary Celeste, which most people still think was its name. Other authors then build on Conan Doyle's work. Pulp-style magazine writers and journalists introduce far more dramatic details to the story, which add to the confusion. The motif of a blood-stained sword supposedly left behind as evidence

of a violent struggle enters popular memory, despite no such weapon ever being recorded in the official investigations. Then in 1913, the Strand magazine publishes a sensational account by a supposed survivor named Abel Fosdick, who claims to have been a steward on board. He paints a picture of chaos, murder, and panic, transforming a quiet, unexplained, abandoned ship into a tale of outright violence. But the account is entirely fictional, written to entertain the reader, not to inform them. Over time, the inaccuracies multiply, to the point that historians today have to work very hard to separate what is myth and what actually happened over a century ago. And yet, despite this, there are still modern theories as to what could have happened. There are inevitably,

many, many theories about what happened on the Mary Celeste. One of the most popular is that the ship took on water and the crew misread the severity of this water, the pump malfunctioned, and as a result they abandoned the ship. If the crew had believed the situation was worsening, and had no reliable way to measure or reduce the water, abandoning ship may have seemed like the only course of action to take, even if it ultimately sealed their fate. A similar idea is that they abandoned the ship because of alcohol vapour and fear of explosion. And the evidence for that is the nine empty barrels. And there's quite a lot of work being done on the kind of wood used for the barrels,

whether it was porous, whether it allowed for evaporation. But it is known that alcohol can evaporate from barrels made of certain types of wood. So that's a theory that they got worried about a build-up of alcohol vapour that could lead to a very large explosion that would destroy the ship. Modern experiments have attempted to recreate what such a moment might have looked like in reality. In 2006, chemist Andrea Sella at University College London simulated leaking alcohol vapors inside a replica cargo hold. When ignited, the vapors didn't produce a traditional explosion. Instead, they created a sudden pressure wave and a brief flash of flame, with almost no longer

lasting damage or scorch marks. The result points to a chilling possibility. The crew of the Mary Celeste may have witnessed what appeared to be a violent explosion, and in that moment, fearing a larger blast, Captain Briggs may have ordered an immediate evacuation. Another theory is that there was a navigation error, and that led Captain Briggs to think that he was near to rocks or near to items of danger, and that they had to about it. abandon the ship. Other theories relate to the dangers posed by being out at sea on a long Atlantic crossing.

Severe weather or rogue sea events are also cited as something that could have caused them to abandon the ship. Piracy or mutiny, of course, is one of the favourites of all of the storytellers, because piracy was rife in the period. Mutiny is less likely. Piracy probably is not a runner because pirates would have taken either the personal belongings or the ship, but they took neither. And there's no sign of any struggle or any violence. So the solid money is that there was an orderly abandonment by the crew, but the reason for that still remains a complete mystery. For the Mary Celeste herself, her life does not end with the mysterious disappearance of her crew. With the salvage case concluded, if unsatisfactorily, the ship that has already

had several unlucky lives, embarks on a new one. The bizarre incident of the abandonment of the Mary Celeste wasn't the end of the story for the ship, though. She continued in service under various owners, but retained a reputation as an unlucky ship. And finally, in 1885, Captain G.C. Parker deliberately wrecked the Mary Celeste on a reef near Haiti in an attempted insurance fraud. In that wreck, was damaged beyond repair, she was abandoned and broken up. But Parker's fraud was discovered and he didn't get away with it. It's fair to say that the Mary Celeste had a life far more eventful than a simple transatlantic cargo ship ever should. Multiple names, multiple owners, that mysterious disappearance before ending its days broken up on a reef in an attempted insurance scam,

And, helped by imaginative Victorian authors, she is destined never to be forgotten. The story remains popular, because it is really the perfect setting for a mystery. It has strong, fixed points. There's a departure, there's the last log, there's the discovery, and it has this mysterious interval between that last log and the discovery, which is a wonderful setting in which to frame a mystery, a detective story, ghost stories, and it also compellingly brings to mind the days of sea-going crime. All of those buccaneers and pirates over in America and the Caribbean, it's an extension of all of that.

And I think it endures because it's set in a period of romance as well, this Victorian period of discovery and of industry, and it offers a real-life mystery and ripe territory for any imagination. of any storyteller who wants to use it as a pretty extraordinary setting for a story. It's all too easy to get lost in theories, alcohol fumes, freak weather events, foul play. But the Mary Celeste was more than a puzzle. It was a home, a home for Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter, and seven sailors with families waiting for their safe return in New York, Denmark, and Germany. And so, while the mystery endures, the human cost endures with it, felt by the families who never learned what happened. And by anyone who looks back at the story

and remembers that behind the legend were ten real lives, quietly lost to the Atlantic. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.