5th January, 2023 in Maritime

The ongoing mystery of the Mary Celeste

By Graham Faiella

Queen’s Proctor Mr Solly-Flood heard ‘so extraordinary a picture’ of the Mary Celeste incident by the testimonies of Deveau, Wright, Lund, Anderson and Johnson, up to 22 December 1872, that he was aroused to suspect that there might have been more nefarious acts in play that caused the abandonment of the vessel. So inflamed were the suspicions of Mr Solly-Flood that, on 23 December, he ordered that an exhaustive inspection of her, inside and out, and around her hull, be conducted.

This was carried out the same day by John Austin, a marine surveyor at Gibraltar, and Ricardo Portunato, a diver. Thomas Joseph Vecchio, Marshal of the Court, boarded the Mary Celeste with them and Queen’s Proctor Solly-Flood.

The results of that survey, together with a further ‘more minute examination [of the ship] for marks of violence’, conducted on 7 January 1873, were like the strain of a virus impregnated into Mr Solly-Flood’s fevered imagination about the most likely violent cause of, and ‘solution’ to, the Mary Celeste’s derelict condition.

At around this time, on 23 December, the Dei Gratia sailed for Genoa, where she arrived on 16 January 1873 to deliver her cargo of petroleum. Capt. Morehouse had put the ship under the command of mate Deveau. Capt. Morehouse himself stayed behind in Gibraltar as the representative of the owners in the salvage hearings.

Dei Gratia, it should be remembered, had been held up at Gibraltar for eleven days, since 12 December. She was running up costs. A delay in delivering her cargo would almost certainly incur penalty charges. And she had another consignment scheduled for her to pick up at Messina. There was some urgency, therefore, to get her on her way from Gibraltar. Capt. Morehouse would still be there to help with the court’s enquiries. Oliver Deveau himself was later recalled from Genoa to be cross-examined for a third time in the court, on 4 March 1873.

Mr Solly-Flood’s Survey

The survey of the Mary Celeste on 23 December 1872 and overseen by Surveyor John Austin comprised a comprehensive examination of the ship as found in the Bay of Gibraltar. It is important to note that it was carried out two and a half weeks after the Dei Gratia had found her derelict on the high seas, after she had been made shipshape for her run to Gibraltar, and ten days after her actual arrival at Gibraltar. The Mary Celeste’s condition at the time of the survey was therefore in many ways very different from how she was found as a derelict.

Nevertheless, amongst the more notable points of the survey were the following:

THE SPLINTERED BOWS AND A BLOODY SWORD

The report of Surveyor Austin’s inspection of the Mary Celeste noted that he found on the port bow of the vessel ‘between two and three feet above the water line’, cuts to her planking which were: to the depth of about three eighths of an inch or about one inch and a quarter wide for a length of about 6 or 7 feet. This injury had been sustained very recently and could not have been effected by the weather and was apparently done by a sharp cutting instrument continuously applied thro’ the whole length of the injury.

Austin reported a similar ‘injury’ on the starboard bow. What he was stating was that some of the wood planking around both of the Mary Celeste’s bows was splintered. What he was inferring was that this was deliberate, ‘done by a sharp cutting instrument’. And what that implied, but perhaps only to Mr Solly-Flood’s flaring imagination, was some manner of foul play.

None of the Dei Gratia crew who first or even subsequently went on board the Mary Celeste found anything damaged around her bows that might arouse suspicions of ‘injury’ inflicted there. Capt. Morehouse testified that, on the day the Dei Gratia encountered the derelict, through his telescope from a distance he ‘saw the marks or spalls on the bows of the Mary Celeste’. He otherwise found nothing particularly remarkable to add to that observation.

Amongst numerous other observations Austin made in the survey was that he found, ‘on a little bracket’, or shelf, in the mate’s cabin: a small phial of oil for a sewing machine in its proper perpendicular position, a reel of cotton for such a machine, and a thimble. If they had been there in bad weather then they would have been thrown down or carried away. The phial of sewing machine oil became a small but oft-repeated icon of Mary Celeste historiography. Later narratives placed its ‘perpendicular position’ on various surfaces, such as a table in the captain’s cabin.

This supposedly suggested that the ship had not weathered stormy conditions before the Dei Gratia found her; not stormy enough, by implication, to cause her to be abandoned. But not one of the Dei Gratia men in their court testimonies mentioned this article, or a thimble, on a table or bracket or anywhere else (apart from mate Deveau’s observation of various sewing paraphernalia in a bag in the captain’s cabin). They only emerged in Austin’s survey after the Mary Celeste had arrived at Gibraltar. And, whether she might have experienced stormy weather in the open Atlantic, she certainly had in the Straits of Gibraltar.

Sailors were traditionally wont to put a vessel in good order before arriving in port. It is more than likely that the Dei Gratia salvors, in tidying up the Mary Celeste, placed these articles on some flat surface soon before or just after the Mary Celeste anchored in the Bay of Gibraltar. They were, most likely, indicative of nothing more mysterious than sailors’ habitual good housekeeping. How the ‘small phial of oil for a sewing machine’ remained ‘perpendicular’ on a shelf, even in the relative calm of the Bay of Gibraltar but still subject to the occasional unsteadying influences of winter weather thereabouts, is a bit of a conundrum in itself.

More significant, in the subsequent suppositions of violence afoot on the Mary Celeste, was a sword in Capt. Briggs’ cabin: ‘I also observed in this cabin a Sword in its scabbard which the Marshall informed me he had noticed when he came on board for the purpose of arresting the vessel. It had not [been] affected by water but on drawing out the blade it appeared to me as if it had been smeared with blood and afterwards wiped.’

And towards the end of the report: ‘I found no wine or beer or spirits on board … & did not discover the slightest trace of there having been any explosion or any fire or of anything calculated to create an alarm of an explosion or fire. … I am wholly unable to discover any reason whatever why the said Vessel should have been abandoned.’

A bloody sword and deliberately inflicted ‘injury’ to the Mary Celeste’s bows was, nevertheless, more than enough kindling to stoke Mr Solly-Flood’s suspicions. On 22 January 1873, he wrote to the Marine Department of the Board of Trade in London, to keep them abreast of the case. In that letter he informed the Board that the ‘deliberate’ cuts to the bows and the ‘bloody’ sword (which ‘appeared to me to exhibit traces of blood and to have been wiped clean’) were grounds to conduct ‘a still more minute examination for marks of violence’. That inspection had been held two weeks before, on 7 January, when Mr Solly-Flood was accompanied by five Royal Naval officers and Marshal Vecchio, ‘all of whom agreed with me in opinion that the injury to the bows had been effected intentionally by a sharp instrument’.

The very first observation made in the visit by the seven men, recorded in Mr Solly-Flood’s report, was: ‘On examining the Starboard top-gallant rail, marks were discovered apparently of blood and a mark of a blow apparently of a sharp axe.’

This letter became infamous not only for the apparent confirmation of Mr Solly-Flood’s suspicions by the discovery of apparent signs of violence, but even more for his concluding remarks: ‘My object is to move the Bd. Of Trade to take such action as they may think fit to discover if possible the fate of the Master, his wife and child, and the crew of the derelict.’

And then the conjecture which the Queen’s Proctor advanced and became a pillar of subsequent Mary Celeste narratives:

‘My own theory or guess is that the Crew got at the alcohol and in the fury of drunkenness murdered the Master whose name was Briggs and wife and Child and the Chief Mate – that they then damaged the bows of the Vessel with the view of giving it the appearance of having struck on rocks or suffered from a collision so as to induce the Master of any Vessel wh. might pick them up if they saw her at some distance to think her not worth attempting to save and that they did sometime between the 25th November and the 5th December escape on board some vessel bound for some north or South American port or the West Indies.’

Extracted from The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste by Graham Faiella