Ghost Ship: The Mary Celeste

hello everybody welcome to another episode of decoding the unknown as always i'm your host simon and this one today the ghost ship the mary celeste if you're new here if you're a new listener or watcher depending on how you consume this show it goes out as both a podcast and a youtube channel so there's that what a thrill katie writes me a script i've got it right in front of me right here did i say it's the ghost ship the mary celeste i've definitely heard of this there's that creepy painting that there's nothing creepy about the painting of the mary celeste jen for viewers if you're watching it now our video editor jen i'm sure we'll put it up on the screen there's nothing creepy about it except for the fact that you know it disappeared and it's appeared and you know all those like horror movies and stuff or you know i don't know maybe just one horror movie where you've seen where this picture comes up and it's like it's not scary but because of the context for some reason that painting of the mary celeste is super creepy anyway maybe you've never heard of it and you're wondering what on earth i'm banging on about in that case welcome good news you're about to find out an awful lot let's go [Music] abandoned places have always held an eerie fascination for those of us left behind this could be a house or even a whole town that has been left at the element slowly succumbing back to nature with a few creepy reminders of its past life remaining for those curious enough to go looking and also they do great as youtube videos i've got a channel called side projects on youtube in addition to this one and several others if you didn't know and uh anytime it's like abandoned buildings that's going to be a winner then there's the other type of abandonment the feeling that you've walked into a place and just missed someone everything is still in place but there's no one to be found what would make this creepiest still was if the abandoned place you found was a fully stocked ship sailing in the middle of the ocean with not a soul on board oh my gosh that shivers down the spine creepy isn't it welcome everybody to the mysterious case of the ghost ship the mary celeste the mystery on the 4th of december 1872 the brilliant team de gracia no idea where the ship comes from no idea what language i should even be it sounds kind of italian de gracia but i don't know under the command of captain david morehouse while he sounds decidedly less italian was on its way across the atlantic when it spotted another ship coming towards them nothing weird about that but this ship was sailing oddly and seemed out of control the de gracia tried signaling the ship but got nothing back confirming morehouse's suspicions that something was wrong as they got nearer it was clear that no one else was on deck so sailors oliver devoe and john wright rode over to check out what was going on luckily for them they didn't find dead or dying crew littered about the deck with a wild-eyed psychopath lying in wait for them behind a pile of ropes oh my god katie your imagination's running wild although definitely if i was on that little rowboat go go you're just in the middle of the ocean this is the setup to a horror movie in the middle of the ocean you're rowing over in some tiny boat with some other dude called john it's like all right ollie and john going over there you're like oh my god why is with this creepy ship we're gonna die using the 19th century maritime equivalent of hello anybody home which i estimate to be ahoy be there anybody aboard well they found nobody there was some damage to the sails and rigging and some loose ropes flapping about but the ship was seaworthy with no obvious signs of an attack months worth of food and water was still stowed neatly on board all the barrels of cargo were still in the hold but the 10-person crew not a trace the ship they had boarded was the mary celeste another brigantine which had left new york in november of that year under captain benjamin briggs davao and wright found a ship's log but there were no clues as to what might have happened the last entry was dated november 25th a full nine days earlier pretty crazy the ship like 19th century ship even a ship today it just abandoned i'd be like isn't it gonna like hit some rocks at some point and sink it's just been floating around for nine days also the fact that there's no log entry doesn't surprise me whatever happened everyone left really fast because otherwise they'd have written something that have taken something with them they left in a hurry for some reason the only things that did appear missing from the ship apart from the people of course was some navigational equipment official paperwork and the mary celeste small lifeboat all things that you'd take if you were off that boat super fast you'd be like what should we grab navigational stuff i i guess i'd grab the documents that i grabbed my passport or whatever i guess there's boat equivalents of my 19th century boat equivalents of that and uh the lifeboat because obviously you need the lifeboat so where was everybody why was the ship abandoned in the middle of the sea when it didn't seem that there was anything wrong with it morehouse and his crew weren't the only ones scratching their head nearly 150 years later we're still not sure what happened to the crew of the mary celeste there are theories of course ranging from the possible to the bizarre but it could also be that the ship was just unlucky from the start ah there's no such thing as i don't want to say there's no such thing as luck because obviously there's such a thing as luck but it's like yeah that's an unlucky it's a cursed ship that chip but bad news from the start that's just nonsense isn't it the history [Music] let's go back in time to 1861 11 years before the empty ship was discovered a newly constructed brigantine almost 100 feet long that's 30 meters was registered in plasma nova scotia as a british ship under the name amazon in case you've been wondering what a brigantine is this whole time yeah i might have been wondering that isn't it it's some sort of small transport ship right i'm probably wrong but i just didn't bring it up because i didn't want to embarrass myself but i don't really know what a brigantine is it's a two-masted ship with different types of rigging on the fore and afts although to be honest the term is not concrete and i got a bit lost in the weeds with all the gaff rigging and square masts going on so just look up a picture if you care that much good news i don't just imagine a big old sailing ship with lots of sails and that will do yeah just just i don't know that's exactly what i had in my mind some sort of pirate ship just less piratey is what i had in my mind all the time as well as also i mean i guess that picture of the mary celeste but in my mind it's not even that clear more i remember is just like why is it very two-dimensional and like it's at this blue back i just remember it being blue like the background being blue am i even thinking of the a picture of the mary celeste or is it just some other creepy ship doesn't matter let's move on what matters is just picture a big old sailing ship it's not that hard is it as well as being an internet search headache in the future amazon did not have an auspicious start in life it's like i'm looking for a 19th century ship called amazon amazon popped up amazon.com are you interested in purchasing a 19th century ship in a bottle or just a regular ship her first captain was robert mcclellan who was a part owner of the boat along with eight other people in june 1861 on amazon's maiden voyage where she was supposed to be transporting timber across the atlantic captain mckellen became ill he got progressively worse the ship turned around and they sailed back to spencer's island nova scotia after a mere nine days as captain mcclellan was dead and the amazon's legacy was on its way a new captain took over to sell the wood to london his name was john nutting parker but it feels like his middle name should be in quotation marks as a nickname or something because a pair of safe hands he was not amazon hit fishing equipment or a fishing boat almost immediately after they set out again and had to be brought back for repairs after they finally made it to london and unloaded parker seems to have taken his eyes off the ball again because amazon hit a smaller ship in the english channel causing the other ship to sink dude you go on one journey on a boat and you hit two other boats why are you a sailor what's going on parker was thankfully replaced by captain william thompson in 1863 but his bad luck wasn't over as it appears he had drowned in 1868. i mean it just surprises absolutely nobody because he seemed like a total incompetent it's like no no he can't swim and he just falls off boats up well then he's gonna die isn't he making him the second captain of the ship to die prematurely yeah but that's not the ship's fault he's just a sailor amazon seems to have behaved herself under captain thompson with nothing notable happening until october 1867 when she was caught in a storm by cape breton island in canada and driven ashore the consortium that owned amazon declared the ship a wreck as it was so badly damaged as they had no intention of reclaiming it a man called alexander mcbean claimed it under maritime derelict salvage laws which i think means that as the original owners left it abandoned he could claim ownership without having to pay anything that's pretty cool it's like yeah yeah he's like some sort of legal pirate wait there are such things as legal pirates though ah they've got a name privateers where you could be a pirate for like a crown so you could be like a british dude and you're like yeah i just want to go pirate some stuff and the british will be like if you're british they'll be like yo you could go pirate all the spanish ships and you don't just don't pirate the english ships and we'll let you get away with it and i'm like that sounds like the best type of piracy it's like sure you can't pirate all the british ships but you can legally pirate the spanish ships i mean i guess the spanish didn't see it that way and they'd probably be like well i don't know set a bull on you or something but uh what we talking about let's get back to what we're actually talking about today i'm so sorry these maritime laws are not like the laws of the land though so i wouldn't go messing around with anything until you know what you're doing katie no one was going to go do that people were listening oh that that does sound like an interesting career path no one thought that mcbean sold it on pretty quickly as rec ships aren't that useful or valuable if you're not going to do anything with them amazon was then sold on again in 1868 to the american richard w haynes after shelling out nearly 9 000 19th century dollars which equates to just over 174 000 in today's money to restore her hanes registered his new toy as an american vessel the bad luck continued however in 1869 haines bad credit caught up with him and the ship was seized and sold to another consortium of american men who could have thought that the guy that by sunken ships and restores them for an extraordinary amount of money would would uh would have a credit problem after disappearing from the records for a time the ship popped up again in 1872 where it underwent a major overhaul to enlarge it and upgrade it including a new deck so why am i talking so much about this ship you may ask well despite the renovations it was still the same old willful amazon only when bad credit haynes had it registered as an american ship in 1868 he also changed its name to mary celeste oh that's my i have to say i just got totally lost in the story of this new ship i forgot what you're talking about but so that became the mary celeste it's interesting you just keep renovating them this happens today those like huge um what do they call them like the post panamax giant shipping vessels they adjust them all the time the largest ship in the world they was it's called the noc nevis or something i'm pretty sure that's the one they extended they just cut it open make the like the two parts pull them apart fill in the middle with some more stuff and they're like now it's even bigger isn't it it's pretty crazy i always just assume they made new ships it's not like you know when your family grows you're like oh now i need them people carry you're not like well let's just get get the sedan cut it open and put a new section in there it just doesn't work like that does it now with a new name new owners and a new captain the mary celeste was ready to take to the waters once again [Music] mary celeste now that we're all caught up on the history of the ghost ship let's go back to the story of the mystery voyage the new captain of the mary celeste was a man called benjamin spooner briggs he was an experienced sea captain and for the mary celeste first outing following all the upgrades he was going to sail her to genoa italy with a large cargo of denatured alcohol well the first thing i want to feel is finally a competitive captain the guy he's probably although maybe he's the one who loses the ship or you know just abandons it but also the last guy crashed it twice so you know that was a pretty pretty bad place to start briggs came from a solid sailing background with most of his immediate family also working in the maritime sector as is usually the case with spoiler alert tragic stories briggs had intended to give up his seafaring ways and open a shop with his brother as they both had an increasing number of small children to support oh no it's like the guy in that you know every detective movies like four days from retirement uh not detective movie a buddy cop movie they decided against this in the end though and both ended up buying shares in ships instead making bricks a part owner of the mary celeste for his first forward as captain briggs was accompanied by his wife sarah and their two-year-old daughter sophia they also had a seven-year-old son arthur but luckily for him they didn't want to take him out of school so he stayed in the states with his grandparents his existence also plays a role in debunking some of the more scurrilous scurrilous my my stupidity's showing never heard of this word before uh theories that come up later in the story sometimes i'm reading these i'm like oh yeah ah yes not so bright whistle boy you is smart it is important during the refit the main cabin had been modified to accommodate his wife and daughter so it seems that the voyage was supposed to be a nice family trip while also carrying some cargo to italy that does sound really nice like i know it's going to be months long and stuff and you're like a sailor or whatever but it's so you know just going on a nice like across the atlantic trip to italy with your family and getting paid for it also you're doing denature that way denatured alcohol is the time you can't drink right that's a shame you're just like just take a little bit off the top prix wrote to his mother before they departed with some updates about two-year-old sophia a few instructions for her if she needed money and you also wrote we finished loading last night and shall leave on tuesday morning if we don't get off tomorrow night the lord willing our vessel is in beautiful trim and i hope we shall have a fine passage but i have never been in her before and can't say how she'll sail sorry about like the awkward reading of that it's like the 19th century words they're they're just always a bit more awkward to read they spell shall with one l brilliant we know that briggs had many years of sailing experience so presumably he wasn't particularly worried about the technical aspects of their trip briggs chose a small crew and mentioned his regret that he hadn't also brought his son arthur along after all quote we seem to have a very good mate and steward and i hope i shall have a pleasant voyage we both have missed arthur and i believe we should have sent for him if i could have thought of a good place to stow him away gotta find him a little locker somewhere sophia calls for him occasionally and wants to see him in the album which by the way is a favorite book of hers as well as wanting him to remain in school it appears that there just wasn't a convenient place for arthur to stay on board the ship when the mary celeste set off for genoa there were ten people on board captain briggs his wife sarah daughter sofia first mate albert richardson second mate andrew gilling stewart edward head or ed head as i like to call him and four german crewmates gottlieb gutshad or good shall aryan martens and brother volker lorenzen or and boz or boy lorenzen we have to introduce the germans anyway it's like some reading those names like boom john peter easy oh god joe no after waiting for the bad weather to clear the mary celeste left new york on november the 7th 1872 and nobody ever saw her again dramatic voice while the mary celeste was making final preparations another brigantine was also i'm just realizing i'm not even sure if i'm pronouncing brigadine correctly brigantine brigadine brigantine brigantine another brigantine also waiting to sail to genoa this was the digratia meaning by the grace of god under the commands of captain david morehouse ah this is the boat that finds them afloat it has not been definitively proven the morehouse and briggs were friends or had met for dinner the night before the mary celeste departed but they would have been aware of each other were probably acquaintances at the very least the day gracia set off eight days after the mary celeste on a parallel but more northern route heading for gibraltar on the way to genoa on the 4th of december 1872 land time which was december 5th in sea time which i had no idea was a thing but apparently the sea is living in the future yeah what is that about is that still a thing today i always assumed you were just in the time zone of well whatever time zone you're in there are those lines that you know go down the globe and tell you what time zone you're in is that still a thing wow the digratia spotted the mary celeste behaving oddly this was between the azores and gibraltar and there was no way that the de gracia could have caught up with a ship which had left over a week before it wanting to find out what was going on the sailors from the de gracia went on board now let's talk about what the mary celeste looked like when it was boarded you may have heard stories of hot meals on the table a fire still a light in the galley and the ship being in dry and pristine condition we'll talk more about this type of thing later but in actual fact this was not the case the scene to the crew of the del grey ship looked like this the ship was in a bedraggled but seaworthy condition there were ropes hanging loose and some sails were damaged the main hatch to the cargo hold was secured and no barrels were missing although nine barrels of the 1701 were later found to be empty yeah ah maybe they were drinking that that is denatured so that is that is that like methylated spirit is that one makes you blind maybe that's what they drank it then they all went blind and they just walked off the side of the ship i don't think that's what happened but i'm sure there's a conspiracy theory about that also this ship in my mind was not that big but it had 1701 barrels on board it's a big ship they could have just taken 1 700 and you know put peter at whatever the kid's name is in a barrel a disassembled pump was found on the deck one of two that mary celeste had there was over three feet one meter of water in the ship's hull the small lifeboat was not there the only things that were obviously missing were a chronometer and a sextant which were essential tools for navigation and time keeping as well as the ship's register and of course the entire crew the daily log was still there which put the most recent position of the mary celeste is near santa maria island in the azores this entry was dated november the 25th which was nine days earlier when the day gracia found it the mary celeste was around 400 nautical miles that's 740 kilometers away from where the last entry said it was with nothing to be done morehouse decided to sail the mary's celeste to gibraltar and claim it as salvage for which he could expect to get quite a chunk of change under maritime law yeah i mean this is some intense finders keepers it's like yeah i was just sailing along and discovered a massive boat full of booze and also it seems like a pretty nice boat mine now i feel like the company or whoever like wasn't there a brother who owns like half of it be like my dude you can get like a little bit of it but i want my boat back and i want my alcohol back i have no idea how this works maritime door is totally nuts if you recovered say an abandoned truck filled with stuff and notified authorities or drove to the police station yourself surely the original onus would be located and they could return to them exactly katie and i are on the same page on this one like i feel like you'd get like 10 isn't the maritime thing like you get 10 of what you find or something like if you discover treasure it belongs like the government or whatever but they'll they'll like slice a little bit off for you i mean allegedly if i found some treasure i'd be such a piece of because they'll be like yeah it's like if i found some chest of gold and it was like yeah you gotta you know you gotta declare that to like the antiquities organization and they're gonna look through it and i'll give you one percent of the gold you found i'll be like i'm just saying i wouldn't do this allegedly i mean look there are there must be plenty of gold that people find that they're like i'm not just not handing names i'm just melting that gold down and selling that so hard that's gold you got to give people more than just a little slice guys you may or may not receive a reward at their discretion if you sold all of the goods yourself it would definitely be a crime i guess things are different out there in the world of the sea anyway moore house sailed into gibraltar on the 12th of december 1872 on the day gracia with four of his crew on the 13th of december the mary celeste finally arrived he's just shouting look what i found i'm rich having been crewed by the remaining three of morehouse's men however instead of a hero's work he found himself on the wrong end of a criminal investigation under suspicion of insurance fraud at best and murder at the worst it wasn't until february 25th 1873 that mary celeste was released by the court and eventually made it to genoa to deliver those damn barrels in march of 1873. so well thoughts let's get into it series [Music] unlike my my big thing now is look nothing crazy happens it's like maybe there was a storm maybe they had to abandon the ship and then they abandoned the ship and then the ship because it's a ship managed to stay afloat i know like modern ships they're quite hard to sink um but i don't know about 19th century ships so it's like they abandoned the ship because they thought oh god shit's going down and then it turns out that it's totally fine that's my theory that's my guess insurance fraud [Music] well first off insurance fraud they all died or like i mean 10 people disappeared i'm assuming they're dead it's a pretty shitty insurance fraud racket if you die as we're here let's start with the day gracia captain moore has the possible case of abandonment for insurance fraud there are two strands to this theory the first is that morehouse and briggs were in it together with briggs purposefully stranding the mary celeste for more house to find once the booty had been collected the two would split the proceeds now if this were the case either it went horribly awry or briggs and his whole crew secretly landed somewhere and spent the rest of their lives under assumed identities as they were never seen or heard from again yeah i don't believe that at all because at some point over their entire lives there was what ten of them and a fami the family and all of the other dudes at some point at some point in the next decades that's just going to come out because it just is it's like why the moon landing can't be fake because yeah maybe at the time it's a bit more plausible because you'd be like well okay you know people could keep a secret for about 10 minutes and it's been 10 minutes since we landed on the moon but then like what 50 years go by it's like no one spills the beans on it being like this cover-up it's like just not just not happening thousands of people were involved i'm sure tens of thousands and no one talked yeah right except for that one crazy guy there's that one crazy guy right he keeps talking about it and he was like a contractor for some tiny part of it he's like no it's fake no but that guy's just crazy then he's just one dude and no one else came forward to back him up please simon this isn't a video about the moon landing get on with it fact boy why briggs would be involved in this scam is difficult to believe as he was by all accounts an upstanding figure of good character the addition of his family to the crew also makes it unlikely that he was planning anything nefarious as he would be putting them at risk he'd left his older son in america which is again not something you'd do if you were planning to start a new life somewhere else well wife his son was a dick i mean unless the kid was really really annoying or something i swear to god i don't read these ahead the other strand to the insurance theory is that the de gracia found the mary celeste in some difficulty bordered her murdered the entire crew and sailed the ship back to claim a reward holy sh so we just went from like finding a vote to be like yeah those guys are like some old school hardcore pirates i mean damn unlikely though this may seem it was the theory that the attorney general of gibraltar won mr frederick solly flood was working under when the salvage hearing came up for the mary celeste he got it into his head that the crew of the digratia broke into the alcoholic cargo that the mary celeste was carrying got homicidally drunk and proceeded to off the ten crew members there was absolutely zero evidence for this and even in the 19th century people were capable of seeing whether a huge fight had taken place and they wouldn't vote on us yeah they didn't have like elite csi teams but they also just weren't that it just this judge is like yeah yeah yeah and then they boarded the ship and then they killed him i said judge what's up you're just making the up what's wrong with you you're a judge try and base things on facts just a little bit one of the sailors who had initially boarded the mary celeste had reported seeing a sword which was immediately seized upon as a murder weapon it was quickly found out however that the sword was not covered in damning blood as per sully flood's ascertations but rather was a bit rusty cuts and other damage to the boat could also have been caused by bad weather or possibly the original crew solly flood's idea that the de gracias sailors were drunk on the alcohol in the hold was also majorly flawed as this alcohol was not yummy casks of rum or wine i've seen various descriptions of the alcohol that mary celeste was carrying as denatured industrial and american whatever that means sounds like a british way of describing it as a isn't it dirty american alcohol nonetheless this was not drinking alcohol if the sailors had broken into the barrels and tried some one mouthful would have been more than enough it was probably toxic and it's not likely that more than one person would be able to drink enough of it to then be able to go on a murderous drunken rampage they'd probably be sick go blind or die themselves so sorry solly flood but your theory is utter rubbish it's like there's no evidence for this judge flood poor old captain morehouse stayed in gibraltar throughout this damaging investigation and was finally awarded a salvage settlement in april some four months after it arrived while gibraltar's quite nice it's like on the south of spain the weather's quite good there's a big rock with monkeys on it i've been there it's also weirdly british for some reason the british own it i think i made a video about this on a geographics channel that i do is a bit weird that gibraltar's british but it's kind of nice you like crossover from spain and all the cars are like they've got british license plates i think they drive on the left at that maybe i'm not even sure about that no that would be a bit weird wouldn't it but it does feel like they could right and there's that big mountain with monkeys it's quite nice the monkeys grab from you they want food to go to gibraltar it's a pleasant place why are we talking about gibraltar simon get off with the story the settlement you can receive can vary depending on how hazardous it was to retrieve the goods and whatever else the unpredictable maritime laws deem relevant it seems like all the maritime judges are crazy as crazy as the law morris's crew had sailed the mary celeste back with only three sailors meaning it was a hard journey for both them and the de gracia who also went down to five men there was also bad weather meaning that morehouse was hoping for quite a lot of money the value of the alcohol on board was about 35 000 at the time or three quarters of a million dollars in today's money and the whole kit of caboodle was insured for over a million of today's bucks adjusted for inflation that's pretty nice although it seems quite reasonable it's like a thousand something thousand seven hundred barrels of alcohol and a boat for a million a large boat for a million dollars or million pounds whatever it was not bad ultimately after all his literal trials and tribulations morehouse received 1 700 british pounds at a rough conversion this would equal between 150 000 and 200 000 today which seems okay to me but this would be split eight ways between his crew and it was only about a fifth of the worth of the salvage yes kind of a bummer that's not so great given that possible substantial reward amount might he actually have been tempted to murder the crew after all no i mean yes it's substantial but it's also like 150 grand split between eight people so what you're talking like 20 grand each to murder like a cr 10 people including someone's family and then risk sailing their ship back and going to prison it doesn't seem worth it at all also the mary celeste had over a week's head start on the degratia so if it had continued to be fully crewed the two would have never been anywhere near each other it seems that the murder for insurance theory can be safely put to rest agreed it's a dumb theory the paranormal oh boy here we go come on let's get a little wacky the airiness of a fully stocked abandoned ship has of course given rise to many weird and wonderful theories maybe the crew was zapped up by aliens oh no eaten by the kraken or fell into the bermuda triangle never to be heard from again i think we could safely discount to the kraken or sea monster theory as there would have been some signs of damage from said monster as it tried to grab up all the humans from the ship unless it was very very dainty and why would you abandon a large ship with lots of useful hidey holes in favor of a tiny exposed lifeboat did they fall into the triangle no the bead triangle is called the bleeder triangle because it's near bermuda the mary is also not real it's not a real thing there's no more ships lost the bermuda triangle than there are anywhere else at sea it's just an urban legend maybe i'll make a video about it at some point let me know in the comments below if you want that i'm pretty sure i'm right on that though so it'd be a pretty boring video the mary celeste sail from new york which is many hundreds of miles to the north i guess we can never really totally rule out alien abduction but as the mary celeste lifeboat and ship documents were also missing it seems a tad more likely that they left on their own volition or did they or maybe those aliens really needed the documentation for the boat that's there after it's like they're going to abduct those people probe them anally and also examine the boat's documentation because yeah of course pirates if it wasn't a sea monster or the crew of the de gracia attacking the mary celeste what about a scurvy crew of pirates not to pass judgment on the alcohol consumption of a band of salty sea dogs but maybe their tolerance was higher so they could handle a bit more of the industrial strength paint stripper in the hold uh i don't think that's how it works i don't think if you're a really good drinker you know if you're really good at drinking you can't go drink methylated spirit it's still going to ruin you it's like it's it's chemistry not like how good you are at drinking i realize being good at drinking is not the right descriptor but if you're an alcoholic you can't you still can't drink poison while pirates may seem a slightly possible theory for the deserted ship the fact that nothing of value was taken puts the kibosh on it they would have to be the world's worst pirates to forget to take the booty with them after capturing the entire cargo ship and again no signs of a struggle all cargo intact etc etc mutiny and or murder oh by the way i'll also just say that it's kind of it's kind of sad that the paranormal section actually gets a bigger section than pirates pirates were way more likely even if still extremely unlikely the two german brothers volkert and boz or boy lorenzen have come under suspicion over the years when going through the stuff left on the mary celeste it was noted that none of their belongings were there could they have killed everyone thrown them overboard and escaped in the lifeboat the biggest question here would be well what the heck for all of the crew were hand-picked or personally recommended by benjamin briggs if the lorenzens did do a mass homicide there was no evidence of a fight they didn't take anything of value and why would they do it in the middle of the ocean where they couldn't couldn't be sure of making it back to land themselves it was stated by a relative of the lorenzens that the reason their belongings were not on the ship was because they didn't have any in the first place prior to landing the job on the mary celeste the brothers had been on another boat which was wrecked and they'd lost all their stuff presumably you don't need to bring much to work on a newly fitted out fully stocked boat so that seems to close that loophole yeah i mean 100 there's no motivation if there's no motivation for the crime it's really like why just why would they do it it just seems extremely dangerous and pointless other theories regarding mutiny have popped up but this seems kind of stupid as the voyage wasn't very long there was plenty of food and water all the crew were experienced and the only alcohol on board was a crapload of undrinkable stuff that was the whole point of the journey in the first place some mutiny i don't think so i totally agree this seems like a good point to add another string to the tangled web of the mary celeste story if you've been thinking i was thought it was the marie celeste or what about the hot meals on the table or the fire store burning wait i always thought it was mary celeste marie celeste doesn't ring bells but i guess there's another version of this story which has an incorrect name well i'm afraid to say that you've been diddled so to speak by future sherlock holmes dad and professional meddler sir arthur conan doyle if not for him the strange i was like for a moment that way sherlock holmes isn't a real person so he didn't have a dad but i understand if not for him the strange case the mary celeste might not be the mystery that it is today it's not the only ship that's ever been found abandoned in the middle of the sea but one of the main reasons it's at the top of the list is the influence of a short story over the official narrative in 1884 a whole 12 years after the crew disappeared and basically apropos of nothing an anonymous story was published in the cornhill magazine called j haberkook jefferson's statement i'm not sure how anyone could have believed it with a name like that but it was written in the first person as though this terribly named jay haberhook jefferson fellow was a survivor of the episode in the story the ship is called the marie celeste which actually flows a lot better the mary celeste does doesn't marie celeste mary celeste it does and after the crew is murdered by a serial killer with a hatred for white people it's left abandoned for none other than the correctly named de gracia to find the name marie celeste seemed to stick in the popular consciousness better than mary celeste as did some of the details like the pristine condition that the del gracia founded in in their first hand accounts the crew of the de geisha who boarded the mary celeste said a lot of things were wet and disorganized as though people had just dropped what they were doing and vanished the ship's interior was definitely not 100 dry yeah there was like a meter of water in the bottom of the boat conan doyle's story then goes off on a tangent about a magical stone from a stone idol but he'd done enough to muddy the historical waters that even to this was a magical stone from a stone idol alright mate even to this day his made-up events are still thought of as facts as recently as 1992 the maldives issued a stamp using the incorrect marie celeste name as part of its mysteries of the universe series mysteries of the universe sounds like could have been a name for this channel couldn't it although obviously their research is not as good government of the maldives come on now we've got the less probable stuff out of the way let's move on to some more probable theories about time a natural disaster yes now we're cooking with gas [Music] while the term seaquake might seem to belong in the realm of the paranormal theories it's actually a thing i'd have never heard of a seaquake before but it sounds exactly like what would happen if there was an earthquake under the sea and you get like a tsunami or something or like if the bottom of the sea moved like the plate was like chunk to one side it's gonna drop all that water and that's going to be pretty intense right i don't even know if that's what a seaquake is that is my speculation activity under the sea floor can cause huge waves and tsunamis and it seems that the region around the zors has experienced many significant seismic events over the years even a small submarine rumbling might be enough to jeopardize a ship or at least make you think it's in danger of sinking even if it turns out it isn't a random event like a water spout aka a sea tornado might also cause enough of a panic to force the crew into the smaller boat but due to their combined experience you'd have thought that they would ride out their chances a bit further before everyone abandoned ship altogether as proved by the de gracia the mary celeste was a bit battered but otherwise in good enough condition that three people could sail it to gibraltar so you wouldn't think that briggs and his crew would have been so easily put off by a spot of bad weather yeah but you don't know how bad the weather could be it would be like okay if suddenly a storm comes and it looks like it's absolutely not going to end and within five minutes you've got like a a meter of water in the bottom of your boat and it's just absolutely pelting it down i don't know seems very reasonable that this could have been the case alcohol explosion remember that alcohol that the mary celeste was carrying of course you do how could you forget well whether it was denatured industrial or whatever american ah it was it was not for casually sipping on captain briggs was a staunch non-drink and was apparently quite anxious about his cargo as he didn't know anything about alcohol at all so what were those empty barrels about that we mentioned earlier were they drained by the lorenzen brothers the crew of the del gracia or pirates were they decanted into other containers for some unknown reason were they perhaps knocked over on rough seas or during the previously mentioned seaquake there were 1701 bottles on in the hold 1692 of them were made of white oak the remaining nine which were also the empty ones were made of red oak red oak is more porous than white oak which meant that the liquid contents were far more likely to leak out over time this fact leads on to one of the possible reasons why the crew of the mary celeste might have thought it prudent to abandon ship if only temporarily the fumes from the industrial strength alcohol would be pretty strong and if you're a god-fearing alcohol abstainer with your young child on board you might think it a good idea to hop into the lifeboat for a while to let things air out that doesn't seem too unlikely on paper but it doesn't really explain the apparent rush to leave the ship as it would be pretty clear where the smell was coming from and what it was so let's add some more pressing events into the mix what if there was an explosion that would certainly make you shift faster if some of the barrels exploded below deck due to the alcohol papers heating up that would be an immediate trigger to drop what you're doing grab the barest of essentials and head for the lifeboat yeah if your ship is filling with a flammable gas that is absolutely capable of blowing up you'd be like guys guys we should leave now what happens then is just even more speculation but maybe the seas were rough or the tethering rope wasn't tethered enough but once out in the lifeboat the crew never made it back to the ship and instead floated out to an eventual watery grave but wouldn't an explosion have left some more obvious evidence behind well yes after any other sort of explosion you might expect to see scorch marks holes things get blown apart and there wasn't any of this on the mary celeste also it's possible like you smell that alcohol right and you're like oh my god the entire boat is now filled with like vaporized alcohol and if this burns we're all screwed let's open all the windows let's pop out to the lifeboat for a spell let it all air out and then we'll go back and get on board that doesn't necessarily need to have been an explosion that's the cargo was still closed and all the barrels were in one piece the boarding party of the de gracia didn't mention smelling any fumes or that the ship had been a drift for almost a week at this point so probably it had more than enough time to air out it is possible however to have an explosion that leaves no obvious traces behind in 2006 a chemist from university college london demonstrated that an explosion could occur but if a wave of cooler air followed it no subtle charring would be left behind for some this is the answer to why the ship was abandoned so abruptly there was more than enough leakage from the red oak barrels to be ignited by freak spark from the galley far perhaps or maybe there was just one poor idiot who dumped his pipe out into the wrong hatch the only things holding this theory back at the fact that the main hatch was fastened and not blown off its hinges and that the conditions necessary for this type of non-evidential explosion are rare still even the possibility that the ship might be about to blow up would be enough to get most people jumping into that lifeboat yeah exactly i don't think it's that it was that it blew up i think it's just like they were worried it was going to blow up so they got off the ship they got into the lifeboat and then the tether broke and they floated away and the ship floated away and it got knocked about a bit on the ocean seems like that seems by far the most likeliest thing to me captain's mistake according to anne mcgregor a documentary maker who made the true story of the mary celeste with the sims with the smithsonian network currently 6.5 on imdb if you're interested ooh this is the mother of all series it all started with a dodgy chromometer and just devolved from there using the location of the drifting mary celeste and backtracking its journey with the last recorded position in the running log mcgregor found that it was possible for the ship to have been where briggs said they were just before abandoning it it then sailed by itself a 400 odd nautical miles until the dergracia found it however further information from the log which was lost a few years after the mary celeste was recovered was copied down by frederick solly flood the zealous attorney general of gibraltar with an axe to grind against poor old captain morehouse assuming he copied down the last few entries correctly mcgregor and oceanographer phil richardson looked at historical weather and ocean current data and worked out that briggs and the mary celeste were actually off course by over 100 miles a bad storm was noted in the log the day before the last entry and if they had been on track they should have already reached santa maria three days previously more pieces of the puzzle started coming together the disassembled pump found on deck could have been clogged up with coal dust from the mary celeste's previous voyage and debris from the refit following the storm the bottom of the ship would have been filled up with water when it was found the mary celeste had about three and a half feet or just over a meter of water in the hold as proven by the fact that it was still a float this wasn't a dangerous amount of water to be carrying although it's about the same height as an average five-year-old child which seems like quite a lot to me so that's how we measure height we're unaware of three foot but the average height of a five-year-old child i don't know how tall a five-year-old child is children one of those interesting things like before i had kids of my own and someone showed me a child being like how old is this child i've been like i have absolutely no idea but now up to the age of my child so nearly two i could be i could i can accurately tell you it's interesting but in no way surprising get back to the facts fact boy the hundreds and hundreds of barrels made judging the amount of water difficult and with the pump out of action there was no way to quickly get rid of it having finally sighted land after being kind of lost for a couple of days in terrible water maybe being in fear at the boat imminently sinking or exploding the crew took their chances in the lifeboat in a gamble that ultimately didn't pay off they either tried to row to land which was still many miles away or accidentally cut a drift from the ship but either way they were never seen again aftermath after finally delivering her blooming alcohol to genoa what happened to the mary celeste who had now had another captain diana watch after being passed around a bit and wreaking financial losses wherever she went she sailed to scent helena in 1879 because the current captain edgar tuthill was ill and guess what he died too that brings her total serving captain death to three with one ex-captain who died prematurely shortly after sailing her in 18 i mean i don't believe in any of this but i'd still be like i don't want that boat thanks i don't want to be the captain of the death boat in 1885 her reign of terror finally came to an end when she was intentionally wrecked by captain gilman parker on the rosh lois bank coral reef off the island of haiti ironically this was all for an insurance gap she was packed full of worthless junk water to be valuable items but still managed to get the last laugh by not actually sinking so the fraud was quickly revealed oh no the intentional wrecking of the ship was a crime known as barrett tree and in the 19th century it was punishable by death only is like stealing horses and sinking ships death man those laws of the sea are scary just remind me never to go on a boat again in case i accidentally commit a serious crime captain parker was let off the hook however as his judge thought the death was a bit harsh and just made him pay back the people that he had defrauded instead that's it's like what you the potential punishment is death the punishment he actually got is just give the money back to the people you're going to rip off that's crazy the mary celeste had a bit of an appetite left and just three months later after having lost his reputation and all his money goldman parker was dead adding yet another captain to her tally after hitting the reef the mary celeste was damaged beyond repair and was left to rot where she lay perhaps extending her bad vibes into the sea around haiti but probably not while it will never be 100 figured out the most likely cause for the abandonment of the mary celeste was that captain briggs thought the crew was in imminent danger the abandoned ship was not in dry and pristine condition when it was found contrary to the beliefs popularized by sir arthur conan doyle but it did seem to carry a weird streak of bad luck which has earned it a place in the canon of the mysterious and the unknown and a reason why it is appearing on this show if you enjoyed this episode of the program please make sure if you're watching on youtube smash that like button below make sure you're subscribed if you're consuming this in its alternative podcast form hello there dear listener why not leave a review that would be awesome of you you legend and thank you for watching or listening if you're listening [Music] you

Channel: Decoding the Unknown

Views: 195,034

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Id: G5zfSZ2qk6A

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021