Speaker 1: Ridiculous History as a production of I Heart Radio. We
Speaker 1: were west of the Azores, five days out of New
Speaker 1: York when we spotted the Mary Celeste. She was listening
Speaker 1: to leeward, but still under sail, with no obvious sign
Speaker 1: of distress. That is the first verse from the Mary
Speaker 1: Celeste by John F. McCullough. Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for tuning in on our first
Speaker 1: episode of that we're recording. At least. My name is Ben,
Speaker 1: My name is all Ben. You know what. I'm a
Speaker 1: big fan of uh nautical terms, and that poem did
Speaker 1: a gang by ster's job of incorporating one of my
Speaker 1: other favorite things, alliteration and nautical terms, listing leeward. How
Speaker 1: about that? Yeah? Yeah. This poem is just one of
Speaker 1: the many poems you can find about the famous or
Speaker 1: infamous Mary Celeste. There's the other one, The ghost Ship
Speaker 1: Mary Selest by Leland Waldrop. I love a good Waldrop.
Speaker 1: It's a weird name, right else, I love a good
Speaker 1: ghost ship. Who doesn't like a ghost ship. It's one
Speaker 1: of the all time kind of creepy things. Is this
Speaker 1: idea of a massive vessel meant to be inhabited by
Speaker 1: humans and delivering goods and cargo and and of course
Speaker 1: humans to a destination to discover it completely abandoned, just
Speaker 1: drifting out there in the sea. Very unsettling thing. And
Speaker 1: ghost ships like ghost trains, were a common trope in
Speaker 1: the pioneering days of European naval expansion. The Flying Dutchman
Speaker 1: is another one. But the thing about the Mary Slest
Speaker 1: is that it actually was physically discovered before we started
Speaker 1: the show today. I I had asked you and our
Speaker 1: super producer, Casey Pegram. I don't think I forgot that.
Speaker 1: Casey Ben was doing a really just to give you
Speaker 1: a visual, doing a nice almost finger guns kind of
Speaker 1: point at Casey Pegram over there after the window. It's
Speaker 1: just glass. It's good to see. It's good to see
Speaker 1: you man. Don't tap on the glass though. He doesn't
Speaker 1: like that. No, no, no no, And don't feed him
Speaker 1: after midnight. So it was interesting. I was asking guys
Speaker 1: if if you had ever heard of the Mary Celeste,
Speaker 1: and Casey you said that this was somewhat unfamiliar to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever. It didn't ring a bell,
Speaker 1: It did not ring a bell. Certainly, ghost ships. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you guys ever saw that ghost ship movie.
Speaker 1: I was about to say that that's the one I
Speaker 1: think of in popular cold and I never even saw
Speaker 1: the movie. I just saw the first scene, the first
Speaker 1: pretty much have to watch. Incredible. It's it's like they're
Speaker 1: having a ball on the deck of the ship and
Speaker 1: what like a wire gets cut loose and like very
Speaker 1: sharp final destination style, slices everyone in in half. Everyone
Speaker 1: like slowly slides down in two sections. I love it.
Speaker 1: And you thought, you thought that's perfect, That's all I need.
Speaker 1: She was out at that point. I was like, what
Speaker 1: more can this movie do? This is amazing. That's one
Speaker 1: with Gabriel Burne in it, right? Is he in that? Okay?
Speaker 1: Maybe so, I don't know. He doesn't get sliced in
Speaker 1: the opening anyway. I'm assuming Casey, you might not know
Speaker 1: because you haven't seen the film, that you might have
Speaker 1: read some synopsis. Are the sliced people the ones who
Speaker 1: become the titular ghosts of the ghost ship? I would imagine,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I would imagine those people kind of come
Speaker 1: back in a ghostly form because they're doing sort of
Speaker 1: a play on the idea of a ghost ship, because
Speaker 1: a ghost ship is an abandoned ship or a ship
Speaker 1: where everyone's dead. But this one is about a spooky,
Speaker 1: haunted ship a k a. A ghost ship. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like a ghost ghost ship. The whole setup I pulled
Speaker 1: up the plot here. The whole setup is that in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, everybody dies because of this Why her
Speaker 1: final destination asked death except for one person, a girl
Speaker 1: named Katie who is short, so she survived. Sure, people
Speaker 1: got plenty of reason to live, apparently right, and then
Speaker 1: it fast forwards forty years. I'm probably most familiar with
Speaker 1: the concept of Mary Celeste because I grew up reading
Speaker 1: all those books like the Mysteries of the Unknown, the
Speaker 1: Old Time Life books. Yeah, I still have that full collection,
Speaker 1: and I had a bunch of other silly well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to say silly, but titles that were obviously knockoffs,
Speaker 1: like Paranormal unexplained an enigmatic conundrums. You know that maybe
Speaker 1: a relative would get me because they were cheaper than
Speaker 1: the Time Life totally. H you gotta look out for
Speaker 1: those relatives. Um. So here's the thing. There's another film, uh,
Speaker 1: not super famous, um, but from called Phantom Ship that
Speaker 1: actually is a dramatization of what may or may not
Speaker 1: likely definitely did not happen aboard the Mary Celeste, starring
Speaker 1: Bella Legosie in a non vampiric role. Um. But he
Speaker 1: still does that spooky thing with his hand. I think
Speaker 1: that might have been medical. Yeah, maybe, kid, who knows.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was definitely his trademarked I'm doing it
Speaker 1: right now with just the three fingers, kind of like
Speaker 1: clawing at the the abyss, I guess we could say.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he plays a crazed sailor um who is
Speaker 1: ultimately responsible for what ends up um producing the the
Speaker 1: effect of the ghost ship on the Mary Celeste. Um.
Speaker 1: So let's do the setup. What you gave us that poem, um,
Speaker 1: and that was from the perspective of another ship that
Speaker 1: discovers the the abandoned Mary Celeste. What was the name
Speaker 1: of that ship? That's right, yes, So the Mary Celeste
Speaker 1: was an American merchant Brigotine, which, in addition to being
Speaker 1: one of my favorite words, is a two masted sailing vessel. Essentially,
Speaker 1: picture any sailing vessel from from what you would think
Speaker 1: of as pirate days kind of, that's that's what a
Speaker 1: brigotine roughly looks like without making this a nautical pod
Speaker 1: cast the Mary Celeste. Construction on it first began back
Speaker 1: in late eighteen sixty and the vessel was launched on
Speaker 1: May eighteenth, eighteen sixty one. Was given the name Amazon,
Speaker 1: which we'll we'll get into later. But before we get
Speaker 1: to that, the big thing you need to know about
Speaker 1: the Mary Celeste is that was discovered adrift on December fourth,
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy two, by another brigotee, the day of Grazia. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was weird because we being our species, the
Speaker 1: survivors found a lot of interesting things, Like we we
Speaker 1: know a lot about the Mary Celeste before its disappearance, right,
Speaker 1: we know the captain Benjamin Briggs, We know the time
Speaker 1: they left New York November eighteen seventy two. We know
Speaker 1: how many people were there. We know what they were hauling, right,
Speaker 1: it was quite a few barrels of industrial grade alcohol um. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: and this will come into play stored in wooden barrels.
Speaker 1: The thing I like about this story as it combines history,
Speaker 1: sensationalized journalism, and a good old fashioned who done it?
Speaker 1: So the immediate thought when you discover an abandoned ship,
Speaker 1: like this is where'd everybody go? Why did they abandon ship?
Speaker 1: What's the evidence of a catastrophe of some kind that
Speaker 1: would cause people to have jumped ship? Um? What we
Speaker 1: did see what when the folks boarded the ship from
Speaker 1: the Dia gratia Um was the following. There were a
Speaker 1: few hatch doors that had been disassembled, been taken off
Speaker 1: their hinges. Uh. There was a water pump that had
Speaker 1: also been disassembled. UM. I think of the several thousand,
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred and one barrels of industrial strength alcohol, Uh,
Speaker 1: there were I believe six of them that had been
Speaker 1: drained completely. And the ship had one lifeboat. This lifeboat
Speaker 1: was missy, but there was still a six month supply
Speaker 1: of food and water on board. Right, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at these is almost like clues. Um. Then you
Speaker 1: also in the hold where the barrels were stowed, Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a bit of flooding. There were about three
Speaker 1: and a half feet of water um at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the ship. We also had every most of the
Speaker 1: personal effects of the individuals that have been on board. Um.
Speaker 1: How many how many people do we have in the crew?
Speaker 1: It wasn't very many, ben it's ten. Ten yeah, ten,
Speaker 1: people's personal effects pretty much intact and in their quarters,
Speaker 1: and we had the captain's um navigational instruments missing. We
Speaker 1: had a sex tent, I believe, which is what you
Speaker 1: used to gauge, you know, the direction based on the stars.
Speaker 1: Isn't that right? Yeah? I mean I've never made one,
Speaker 1: but that sounds right. Yeah. It sort of looks like
Speaker 1: it's like a combination of a U telescope and almost
Speaker 1: like remember those compass compass from from Geography Platford for
Speaker 1: doing circles chometry, right, So it allows you to measure
Speaker 1: the distance between two fixed visible objects, and that is
Speaker 1: how you can navigate. Using them, you can figure out
Speaker 1: what direction. Again, I'm not enable captain, but that is
Speaker 1: my basic understanding. But here's the point. He had enough
Speaker 1: time to grab those things. The lifeboat was missing. Um.
Speaker 1: Clearly they it would appear anyway that they abandoned ship
Speaker 1: and a pretty orderly fashion, right right right. They contained
Speaker 1: the panic or chaos, which means they must have had
Speaker 1: a heads up and a strong suspicion that things were
Speaker 1: not salvageable. They also took a chronometer, which is an
Speaker 1: instrument that's supposed to keep accurate time despite of variations
Speaker 1: in weather, temperature, air pressure, and so on. Got it.
Speaker 1: So I I think it's even too far to say
Speaker 1: they took. At this point, we know the stuff that
Speaker 1: was missing. Builds a likely case that someone or some
Speaker 1: are all of the people on the boat felt they
Speaker 1: had to leave urgently and took only what they needed
Speaker 1: to make their way in the lifeboat. And apparently they also,
Speaker 1: you know, they either felt that they didn't have time
Speaker 1: to get food or their personal effects, or they felt
Speaker 1: that they didn't need to so over the years, over
Speaker 1: the intervening centuries between then and now, in what what
Speaker 1: we see is that this story becomes a victim of
Speaker 1: the great game of telephone, and over the years, so
Speaker 1: many different theories or I don't know, complete embellishments have
Speaker 1: arisen regarding the Mary celestial. You might grow up, like
Speaker 1: like young me, hearing people say, I don't know, maybe aliads,
Speaker 1: maybe sea monsters, which makes no sense. By the way,
Speaker 1: it scares me more than anything. Sea monsters really was
Speaker 1: that because you can't see them because the other the
Speaker 1: other water so deep, and like there's no way of
Speaker 1: knowing if they're there. I'm a little perturbed by ocean
Speaker 1: open ocean, honestly. Yeah. And you know, when I say
Speaker 1: seamonster doesn't necessarily mean like cryptids or anything. I just
Speaker 1: mean like large. I consider like a giant blue whale
Speaker 1: as sea monster. Dude, what do you tell you like?
Speaker 1: Seals are the puppy dogs of the sea. But I
Speaker 1: still don't want to see one in uh, in the
Speaker 1: wild close proximity. Yeah, Jelson would probably try to have
Speaker 1: sex with you all those animals you think are cute
Speaker 1: or doing incredibly depraved things. You know, do we ever mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: do we ever mentioned the penguin the penguin tail? We
Speaker 1: must have mentioned it on air a while ago when
Speaker 1: penguins were originally spotted, the people who spotted them notice
Speaker 1: them committing acts of necrophilia and edited it out of
Speaker 1: the official report. What necrophilia defiling their falling comrades. Penguin philia?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that's terrified. This is anotherthing and totally
Speaker 1: off the off the subject. And there's another thing that
Speaker 1: I just found out. Did you know that the whole
Speaker 1: idea of lemmings committing mass suicide is totally made up
Speaker 1: for a Disney thing. Yes, they essentially forced them to
Speaker 1: do it, or they, like them, drove them off the cliff.
Speaker 1: And what a weird thing to come up with. I
Speaker 1: like to think that Walt was not directly involved, but
Speaker 1: I don't know the details. Maybe we should return to
Speaker 1: that because that might be an episode of its own, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. Yeah. And uh, misconceptions right about animals
Speaker 1: and how they came about? Oh man, yeah, we could
Speaker 1: go a number of ways with that, right in, let
Speaker 1: us know about your favorite misconceptions are historical misconceptions about animals,
Speaker 1: as we proceed to bust some myths about the Mary Celeste.
Speaker 1: So we know that the crew of the Day of
Speaker 1: Gracia sailed the Mary Celeste eight hundred miles away to Gibraltar,
Speaker 1: and then they wanted to and they did this not
Speaker 1: out the goodness of their hearts. Now, they wanted some scratch, right,
Speaker 1: This is interesting. I didn't know about this. The idea
Speaker 1: of salvage, right, or you know, if you're another ship
Speaker 1: and you find an abandoned ship floating a drift like that, um,
Speaker 1: you can essentially get paid for dismantling everything and you know,
Speaker 1: selling it off for scrap or salvage or whatever whatever.
Speaker 1: The uh you know the cargo is, which is interesting
Speaker 1: to me because I would think that there was a
Speaker 1: company at the other end of that uh situation, and
Speaker 1: those barrels of alcohol that was their property. I don't
Speaker 1: know how how does that fit in like if insurance?
Speaker 1: My friends, Ah, yes, okay, So they wanted to see
Speaker 1: the crew of the Dick Graca wanted to see if
Speaker 1: they could get paid by the ship's insurers. However, their
Speaker 1: plan went awry because the attorney in charge of the
Speaker 1: legal matters, a guy named get this, Frederick Sali Flood
Speaker 1: it s O L L. Y dash Flood, said I
Speaker 1: suspect mischief and shall investigate. We're getting some of this information,
Speaker 1: by the way, from a fantastig article via the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: called abandoned ship the Mary Celeste by Just Blumberg. And
Speaker 1: in these accounts, which is what my question was a
Speaker 1: minute ago, I haven't seen anything referencing like the holding company,
Speaker 1: like the company that the Mary Celeste represented. My point is,
Speaker 1: those barrels of alcohol would have been the property of
Speaker 1: that company. So how come a random ship can just
Speaker 1: come up and say, oh, this is ours? Now? Surely
Speaker 1: the actual company held a claim on that ship and
Speaker 1: it's you know, and it's contents and would have said
Speaker 1: we would like that return to us please. Is that
Speaker 1: why they are able to get paid? Like, I don't
Speaker 1: understand why they would get the full amount of what
Speaker 1: the ship was insured for. You'd think the owners of
Speaker 1: the ship would get that, not in the people that
Speaker 1: discovered it. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting that's an interesting
Speaker 1: question there. Did you find anything? I didn't really, because
Speaker 1: what I keep seeing is the crew and the captain
Speaker 1: of the De Gracia Um went and staked this claim
Speaker 1: that they were due something in the neighborhood of forty
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars that the ship was ensured for that
Speaker 1: they would have split between them, which is that's all
Speaker 1: I That's all I found. I found no mention of
Speaker 1: like the parent company, for lack of a better term,
Speaker 1: for this ship and its contents um. But like you said,
Speaker 1: that really wonderfully named cantankerous judge. Uh, he sensed foul
Speaker 1: play because you know, I mean, if someone has something
Speaker 1: to gain in a situation like this. There looks to
Speaker 1: have been some sort of unusual occurrence that left the
Speaker 1: ship abandoned. Uh, it's pretty clear who may have been
Speaker 1: to blame, which you know. The one theory is that
Speaker 1: these uh, these folks aboard this other vessel killed them
Speaker 1: through them overboard, staged it to make it look like
Speaker 1: they had jumped ship and then um rather than stealing
Speaker 1: the contents, which they would have had to then fence
Speaker 1: or god gotta gotta. They knew about these salvage laws,
Speaker 1: and the laws of the sea are different than the
Speaker 1: laws of man and the laws of and so they
Speaker 1: knew that they could get paid if they just returned
Speaker 1: to the ship and said, hey, we want to get
Speaker 1: you know, that insurance money. So the judge was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's a little fishy. I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: some digging. And he did do some digging, and it
Speaker 1: took how long did it take? Three months? Yeah, three
Speaker 1: months of digging um and determined that there was no
Speaker 1: foul play, but yet still did not pay out the
Speaker 1: full amount. I think each member of the crew went
Speaker 1: home with a round eight hundred bucks. Yeah. In total,
Speaker 1: they got one six of the forty six grand that
Speaker 1: the ship in its cargo had been in short for. Also,
Speaker 1: I want to go back, it would be remiss. I
Speaker 1: do remember who quote unquote owned that alcohol. H It's
Speaker 1: it's weird. It was a New York consortium headed by
Speaker 1: James H. Winchester. And the thing that makes it sticky
Speaker 1: murky is that the members of the consortium changed multiple
Speaker 1: times from eighteen sixty nine all the way to seventy two.
Speaker 1: But it was Winchester, uh, and then two other investors,
Speaker 1: and then the ship's captain, Benjamin Briggs. Where are they
Speaker 1: in all this though? Where Winchester and all this? You
Speaker 1: don't see mention of him coming and saying, hey, I
Speaker 1: want my money, I want my alcohol. Well, at the
Speaker 1: risk of uh, at the risk of sounding cynical, it's
Speaker 1: it's a lot like asking where were the banks uh
Speaker 1: in many great wars and conflicts? Right? Or who owns
Speaker 1: the banks? You know, it's a good point. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just I don't think that's a situation where there's
Speaker 1: some kind of shadowy proto hydra that's that's attempting to
Speaker 1: hide its denatured alcohol trade. I think they may have
Speaker 1: just gotten lost to the sands of history here, because
Speaker 1: we see very quickly that within a few years people
Speaker 1: begin focusing on the more sensationalized aspects of the story,
Speaker 1: or they begin creating the sensationalism themselves, because ordinarily Mary
Speaker 1: Celest would have has been a boat that was salvaged, right,
Speaker 1: and insurance took the loss. But that's what insurances for
Speaker 1: boats sink somewhere every day. Except that is for a
Speaker 1: guy named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you may recognize him
Speaker 1: as the mastermind behind Sherlock Holmes Ino. Doyle publishes this
Speaker 1: let's call it account, a narrative of the abandonment of
Speaker 1: the Mary Celeste, and he does it under a under
Speaker 1: a fake name, a different title j Habakuk Jepsum's statement.
Speaker 1: So he's essentially pulling a war of the world's here right,
Speaker 1: like he's taken back. He's taking like a thing that
Speaker 1: is fictionalized as a real thing, like um, you know,
Speaker 1: so it's not presented as a short story. It's presented
Speaker 1: as an account. Like you said, the title was Jay
Speaker 1: have a Cook Jeffson's statement, as though this were someone
Speaker 1: just telling recounting a story. This is a new information
Speaker 1: that has gone so you know, he knew it was
Speaker 1: the work of fiction, but he probably you know, was
Speaker 1: trying to get more readers by making people believe that
Speaker 1: it was potentially real and it was actually twelve years
Speaker 1: after the event, and like you said, Ben, it was
Speaker 1: more or less abandoned. The idea of this being some
Speaker 1: you know, people kind of forgot about it. But because
Speaker 1: Arthur Conan Doyle, which I would say twelve years is
Speaker 1: a pretty respectable amount of time, uh, for you know,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's make something interesting out of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not dancing on a great I don't know that
Speaker 1: he expected it to to go crazy in the way
Speaker 1: that it did, but it did. Yeah. Yeah, And once
Speaker 1: it was published in eighteen eighty four in Cornhill Magazine,
Speaker 1: people went nuts and began theorizing about the ship's fate.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like for any of us in the
Speaker 1: audience today who are on Reddit, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: when something of global im portants happens on Reddit and
Speaker 1: all the sudden, people who are uh purportedly experts in
Speaker 1: that field come out of the woodwork. You know. There
Speaker 1: are people are saying, well with my uh, my experience
Speaker 1: as as a captain, I can say this definitively about
Speaker 1: the Mary Celeste, and then someone else might be saying,
Speaker 1: well with my experience as a medium, I can say so,
Speaker 1: and so about the Mary celest And there's someone saying like, look,
Speaker 1: I've been around d natured alcohol for ni on twenty
Speaker 1: seven fortnights, and i know a lot about that, so
Speaker 1: I'm an expert. Even the Attorney General Sali Flood, goes
Speaker 1: back to the case and he writes summaries of his
Speaker 1: interviews and his notes. But the fact that we were
Speaker 1: unable to solve this mystery means that people continued to
Speaker 1: speculate about this. They said, perhaps the crew mutined, perhaps
Speaker 1: pirates were involved, or sea monsters, or you know, just
Speaker 1: a big gass wave. Does one big wave that caught everybody?
Speaker 1: Who are they're standing on deck? Uh? And then the
Speaker 1: eight four story by Conan Doyle says, maybe they were
Speaker 1: captured by a vengeful ex slave. And I think that
Speaker 1: leads into what was the name of that Bella Leegosi
Speaker 1: film you mentioned, Phantom Ship. Phantom Ship. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it leads into Phantom Ship where he's an evil sailor.
Speaker 1: So now we can turn to people like and McGregor,
Speaker 1: who created the True Story of the Mary Celestia, a
Speaker 1: documentary with some funding from Smithsonian to try to use
Speaker 1: modern techniques to shed some light on these these tragic events. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or even just kind of applying some critical thinking and
Speaker 1: deductive reasoning to all this stuff, because we really do
Speaker 1: have again we did, you know, stuff they don't want
Speaker 1: you to know. Style laid out the facts at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the show, and those remain the facts. There's nothing.
Speaker 1: They don't have a ton of new information based on
Speaker 1: this investigation. Yeah, there's not like a two other mystery
Speaker 1: people who are on there. Let's start with, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe one of the lowest hanging fruit, um, you know possibilities,
Speaker 1: which would be the idea that the ship was boarded,
Speaker 1: they were robbed and murdered, thrown overboard by pirates. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: with what we do know is that the cargo was
Speaker 1: undisturbed for the most part, aside from those empty barrels,
Speaker 1: right yeah, why would you what what kind of robber
Speaker 1: would you be if you went on board and then
Speaker 1: you didn't take anything, Because you could say, maybe they
Speaker 1: were maybe they didn't know what the cargo was and
Speaker 1: they were taking a crapshoot at it and they said, uh,
Speaker 1: this is not even alcohol. We can drinks, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's all for not But the problem with that
Speaker 1: is they still would have taken valuable personal effects, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, which they didn't. One thing that
Speaker 1: is a bit of an interesting clue is that there
Speaker 1: were two German brothers on the crew named Volcat and
Speaker 1: boy Lawrence En, and they were suspect as potentially having
Speaker 1: you know, done some kind of dirty dealings because because
Speaker 1: well yeah maybe I'm so sorry German audience thought the
Speaker 1: joke was worth who knows, um. But the main thing
Speaker 1: was that their personal effects were missing. UM. So there
Speaker 1: was this notion that maybe they were the homicidal sailors
Speaker 1: that were depicted by Legosi in that UM film. But
Speaker 1: according to McGregor, who interviewed their descendant UM, they had
Speaker 1: supposedly lost some of their possessions or lost all of
Speaker 1: their possessions, their gear as as as it says in
Speaker 1: the interview UM in a previous shipwreck. Yeah, yeah, that's correct.
Speaker 1: Shipwreck that was earlier in eighteen seventy two. And then
Speaker 1: if we say, okay, what if it wasn't pirates, what
Speaker 1: if it was d the crew of the day Garcia.
Speaker 1: The problem with that is that the captain of that ship,
Speaker 1: Captain Moorehouse, was actually friends with Captain Benjamin Briggs. There
Speaker 1: was no evidence of violence, and again, nothing really was stolen.
Speaker 1: What's the motive to right? Like, I mean, well, well, okay,
Speaker 1: never mind. We even know what the motive might have been.
Speaker 1: It would have been to collect that insurance money. But
Speaker 1: why this one. I mean, I guess since they knew
Speaker 1: each other, maybe there's that connection that you know, he
Speaker 1: would have been aware of this vessel and its cargo,
Speaker 1: and maybe it's a lot of money. It seems like
Speaker 1: a lot of money the time for a ship to
Speaker 1: be insured for in the eighteen hundreds, um, but still
Speaker 1: cargo ships like this went back and forth constantly. A
Speaker 1: ship is also a huge investment. So that's an argument
Speaker 1: against the mutiny because if there was if there were
Speaker 1: a mutiny and Briggs and his family who are on
Speaker 1: board with him were allowed to survive, they would have
Speaker 1: been pushed off the life and the crew would have stayed,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like if you take over
Speaker 1: uh battleship, a cruiser or something like that, something of
Speaker 1: that size, then you're not going to immediately leave it.
Speaker 1: We should also say that there was quite a bit
Speaker 1: of superstition involved in stories of the Mary Celeste. That's
Speaker 1: why we set it up in the beginning to say
Speaker 1: that it was originally given the name the Amazon, and
Speaker 1: then it was renamed because it encountered uh several different,
Speaker 1: uh several different unfortunate events. The original one of the
Speaker 1: captains felt ill and died. The ship under the name
Speaker 1: Amazon collided with other fishing equipment, It ran into and
Speaker 1: sank another boat in the English Channel, and this started
Speaker 1: becoming rich fodder fertile soil for the more supernatural out
Speaker 1: their legends of the Mary Celeste. With that being said,
Speaker 1: because of the nature of this show and what the
Speaker 1: show is, we're going to focus on two theories about
Speaker 1: what may have happened that actually have some sand to them.
Speaker 1: One of them is the idea of an explosion, but
Speaker 1: not in the way you might think, right, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. Remember the seventeen hundred and one barrels
Speaker 1: of industrial grade alcohol um. Also, remember those hatch doors
Speaker 1: that were removed, Remember the water pump that was disassembled.
Speaker 1: A lot of this kind of goes together and coalesces
Speaker 1: into this notion that, uh, the leaking barrels. Remember there
Speaker 1: were nine empty barrels um that they had leaked and
Speaker 1: caused and and evaporated you know, the contents of them
Speaker 1: and caused like alcohol, you know, very combustible alcohol vapor
Speaker 1: to fill up the tight quarters of the hold of
Speaker 1: the ship, and that some sort of explosion could have
Speaker 1: happened that would have blown the doors off of the
Speaker 1: holds right right, And so we can say that even
Speaker 1: if if let's put ourselves in the position of Captain
Speaker 1: Briggs and say that, even though we have experience, even
Speaker 1: though we are seasoned old salts with plenty of maritime stripes,
Speaker 1: as it were, you're going to freak out when you
Speaker 1: hear this massive explosion below deck during you know, a
Speaker 1: relatively calm day at sea. There's nothing to explain what
Speaker 1: has happened. So it's possible that this alcohol seeping out
Speaker 1: had created a small explosion, or maybe the crew started
Speaker 1: to say it's a ticking time, Bob, we gotta go.
Speaker 1: We've got it at least, And it may be further
Speaker 1: possible that they got out of the lifeboat with the
Speaker 1: intention to come back to the ship and they just
Speaker 1: meant to, like, you know, like a fire drill at
Speaker 1: your school when you're growing up and all the kids
Speaker 1: have to go into the parking lot for a second,
Speaker 1: for sure, that's right. This Captain Briggs had a reputation
Speaker 1: as being really you know, cool headed under pressure. Um.
Speaker 1: He was very well liked, very organized, a pretty cracker
Speaker 1: jack sea captain and so um. Since there was no
Speaker 1: evidence of an explosion, because that would have caused some charring,
Speaker 1: or there would have been there would have been, you know,
Speaker 1: ways to detect that that had happened, even a small one,
Speaker 1: there would have been some evidence. Even in those days
Speaker 1: without forensic stuff, they could have figured out that, Okay,
Speaker 1: something happened that you know, this whole idea of blowing
Speaker 1: the doors off, That wouldn't have just taken them off surgically,
Speaker 1: like by the hinges like they were, um, which may
Speaker 1: have been. They may have done that to air out
Speaker 1: the cabin. Maybe like you said, they evacuated with the
Speaker 1: idea of doing it temporarily while the fumes aired out. Right,
Speaker 1: then they were going to come back. But something happened,
Speaker 1: maybe their toe line was severed, or they they somehow
Speaker 1: lost their attachment to the ship and began to drift off.
Speaker 1: Um and seeing the mary celestue drifting in the other
Speaker 1: direction or whatever. Uh, And that would have been a
Speaker 1: pretty horrific moment. But he's the thing though, I mean,
Speaker 1: he took the he took those those, he took those, um,
Speaker 1: those navigational tools. So it's almost like he intended to
Speaker 1: you wouldn't need those if you were just hanging out
Speaker 1: by the boat, but what if you thought there was
Speaker 1: a possibility it would explode, then you would want to
Speaker 1: have He was thinking ahead. He was trying to boy
Speaker 1: scout his way around it. But we know, you know,
Speaker 1: we know that when the Canadian bricotine found Mary Celeste,
Speaker 1: they also saw a strong rope leading into the ocean. Right,
Speaker 1: So it sounds it sounds like there's a reasonable case
Speaker 1: to be made arguing that they had detached the lifeboat
Speaker 1: but kept it somehow, as you said, moored to the
Speaker 1: larger ship, and then something happened they lost it. It
Speaker 1: was a you know, some through some you know screw up,
Speaker 1: they lost that that attachment. UM. And here's the interesting part.
Speaker 1: Those barrels, those nine barrels that had leaked UM. It
Speaker 1: was very specifically due to the material they were made
Speaker 1: out of. It's really strange. Out of all of those
Speaker 1: thousands of you know, almost two thousand barrels, nine of
Speaker 1: them the ones that leaked were made out of red oak,
Speaker 1: while I believe all of the rest were made out
Speaker 1: of white oak. White oak is water tight, red oak
Speaker 1: is porous, right, so it's much more likely to leak.
Speaker 1: So typically when you see investigative shows or or research
Speaker 1: into what actually happened that faithful day for the Mary Slest,
Speaker 1: you will find that people conclude it was something to
Speaker 1: do with the leaking barrels of alcohol, specifically those red
Speaker 1: oak barrels. But there's another there's another theory out there.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty interesting, and it's this the idea that
Speaker 1: the chronometer, the one we mentioned earlier, was faulty, and
Speaker 1: then there was also a bum pump going on. This
Speaker 1: comes to us from a little bit of comparison. We
Speaker 1: look at Attorney General Sally Floods notes on this case
Speaker 1: compared to ocean and graphic data. Researchers have found that
Speaker 1: the Mary Celeste was actually way far away from where
Speaker 1: the captain believed it to be. They were full one
Speaker 1: and twenty miles further west than he had he had assumed,
Speaker 1: and so he had already become disoriented. Right. They also
Speaker 1: appeared to change course. Maybe the seas were rougher than
Speaker 1: we thought, or maybe there was something wrong with his instruments. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So we have to note that Sally Floods UM Sally
Speaker 1: Floods Research is the closest thing we have to a
Speaker 1: primary source, because the actual log book that was found
Speaker 1: aboard was lost in But yeah, you're you're right. There
Speaker 1: was something wrong with the equipment. This theory argues, because
Speaker 1: they had these pumps right on its previous voyage that
Speaker 1: Mary Selest was transporting coal, and it had also been,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, repaired and extensively renovated. And maybe,
Speaker 1: the argument goes a pump became clogged with coal and sawdust,
Speaker 1: and without the pump, and with a cargo with all
Speaker 1: this industrial strength alcohol, some of it leaking, Briggs wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to tell how much seawater it actually come
Speaker 1: into the whole. So he may have thought it was
Speaker 1: legit sinking. That's right. And what we do know is
Speaker 1: that they were within sight of land uh, and he
Speaker 1: figured maybe let's cut our losses and abandoned ships since
Speaker 1: we don't know how much seawater is coming in um,
Speaker 1: and just take our chances on the lifeboat because it's
Speaker 1: not that far to to dry land. But what we
Speaker 1: do know is that none of these folks were ever
Speaker 1: heard of again. And whenever you have a situation like that,
Speaker 1: that leads to wild speculation because we can never hear
Speaker 1: from a primary source, like you said, ben aside from
Speaker 1: the person who did an investigation, Um that Attorney General
Speaker 1: Sali Flood Um will never really hear what actually happened
Speaker 1: because you know, they're they're just gone. Yeah. And that's
Speaker 1: the spooky part, right, because if they were that close
Speaker 1: to land with an expert sea captain at the helm,
Speaker 1: what why what I mean, what what could have possibly happened?
Speaker 1: Six miles There's six miles away, which doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: that far away, right when you consider how large the
Speaker 1: ocean is, What would a lifeboat be like in these days?
Speaker 1: It would be like a rowboat, right, So they would
Speaker 1: have had to row against maybe choppy waters. Well, it
Speaker 1: would be assuming that they had ten souls aboard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we it would be. It's method of propulsion would be rowing,
Speaker 1: would be oars, that's it would be. It would still
Speaker 1: be too small, probably need to have a mass of
Speaker 1: any sort, you know, the sale, so they would have
Speaker 1: to row. But six miles rowing against choppy waters though
Speaker 1: that would be no small task, right, especially if you're
Speaker 1: going against like the current or whatever. I mean, that
Speaker 1: would be tough. That's the question too, because then it
Speaker 1: calls to mind, like what was the weather at during
Speaker 1: this time, where the original accounts of calm weather just
Speaker 1: accounts of what the weather was like the day the
Speaker 1: boat was discovered abandoned, you know, because a storm can
Speaker 1: come and go very quickly in the yture. So we
Speaker 1: don't know what happened to Briggs and his crew and
Speaker 1: his family, but we do have a little bit more
Speaker 1: information about the fate of the boat itself because in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy four, the Mary Celeste, despite this the smirched reputation,
Speaker 1: was sold at a loss to a partnership that wanted
Speaker 1: to operate the boat in the Indian Ocean, and because
Speaker 1: the lady's reputation preceded her, the Mary Celeste never made
Speaker 1: a profit, lost money on every voyage in In eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, another sea captain in charge of the ship
Speaker 1: fell ill and died, and this gave more um more
Speaker 1: fuel to the rumor that the ship was cursed. Later,
Speaker 1: she was sold to a firm in Boston. And then
Speaker 1: I think there's there's this, you know, fairly frequents series
Speaker 1: of handoffs and sales and resales because people don't want
Speaker 1: to get rid of a ship again. It's such an
Speaker 1: enormous investment, even a cursed ship. It's like, hey, well,
Speaker 1: welcome to my murder mansion. You know, people die here,
Speaker 1: uh midnight once every seven years. But it is a mansion,
Speaker 1: and I like to emphasize that part of it. It's
Speaker 1: very true. It's very true, ben Um. And there's even
Speaker 1: another kind of potential insurance scam situation that happens in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty four when the commanding officer at the time,
Speaker 1: a Gilman See Parker, tries to perpetrate insurance fraud against
Speaker 1: the company that had ensured the ship. And they did
Speaker 1: this by putting a bunch of useless crap into the
Speaker 1: ship's hold. Um, and then they made a fake manifest
Speaker 1: and uh just tried to ensure it for a value
Speaker 1: of thirty thousand dollars. And then and then uh Parker
Speaker 1: sails off for Haiti. As they approached the port, he
Speaker 1: deliberately wrecks the ship. He steers it into a reef,
Speaker 1: and it's a reef that everybody knows about. Ever been
Speaker 1: on a boat in the Atlantic, if you're a sailor,
Speaker 1: you know about this reef. So the collision rips the
Speaker 1: boat apart, recks the ship, everybody abandoned ship. And then
Speaker 1: Parker immediately goes to file his claim, right, Yeah, he does,
Speaker 1: and doesn't doesn't go over so well. Um, it's discovered
Speaker 1: pretty quick that he had forged this manifest that the
Speaker 1: material inside the ship was absolutely over insured. Um. And
Speaker 1: then he was put on trial, but it ended in
Speaker 1: a mistrial, but irreparably damaged the man's reputation, and he
Speaker 1: died three months later. Yea, So maybe in that case,
Speaker 1: the curse of the Mary Celeste was his self fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1: After that, the breck of the ship was never recovered,
Speaker 1: and the natural world took over. The reef began to
Speaker 1: grow to literally eat the timbers the bones of the
Speaker 1: Mary Celeste. In two thousand and one, an expedition said
Speaker 1: they discovered partial remains, but as of now that has
Speaker 1: not been definitively proven. And here our story pauses, and
Speaker 1: perhaps this will also be the end of the story.
Speaker 1: We look at the evidence available and we see that
Speaker 1: the mystery of the Mary Celeste probably does boil down
Speaker 1: to these these relatively mundane but no less terrifying factors. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the stories that the Mary Celeste has inspired in
Speaker 1: fiction and film, poetry and art and so on have
Speaker 1: taken on a life of their own. You know what
Speaker 1: I mean. I think most people watching any fiction inspired
Speaker 1: by the Mary Celeste are not swayed by it, right. No,
Speaker 1: that's the thing I mean, And that's what we've seen
Speaker 1: from the beginning of this is that the fiction is
Speaker 1: probably a little more interesting and compelling than what actually happened. Uh.
Speaker 1: And yet we still don't fully know what actually happened.
Speaker 1: But I don't believe in cursed ships, do you, Ben? Yeah? Man? Really,
Speaker 1: I mean for fun, Okay, that's what I'm saying. Like,
Speaker 1: when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kind of blew this thing up, Um,
Speaker 1: that's when it started being a lot of fun, because
Speaker 1: it's great fodder for a story, because there's so any
Speaker 1: unanswered questions. You can fill in the gaps of the
Speaker 1: narrative of yourself with your imagination. Yeah. I have a
Speaker 1: sci fi story that starts after actually a triptych that
Speaker 1: starts with the Mary Celeste, so I I cannot throw
Speaker 1: stones in this glasshouse. I definitely used as a jumping
Speaker 1: off point. And there's something I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: the the idea of curses. We we've seen this in
Speaker 1: multiple other historical accounts, right like the curse the so
Speaker 1: called as you would say, the curse of King Tutt,
Speaker 1: right that turned out to have some uh some explicable factors,
Speaker 1: the curse of the Hope Diamond. I'm just thinking of curses. Now.
Speaker 1: Let us know your favorite historical curse, or let us
Speaker 1: know the one that you think has the most um
Speaker 1: plausibility to it. You can find us on Instagram. You
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Speaker 1: You can also follow uh, Noel and I on our
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Speaker 1: Ben Bowling hs W on Twitter, and you can find
Speaker 1: me exclusively on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown Big
Speaker 1: Thanks to super producer Casey Pegram as always happen to
Speaker 1: be back in the shipping container after a most enjoyable holiday.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Gabe, our research associate extraordinaire um. Thanks to
Speaker 1: Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks of course to
Speaker 1: Christopher hascy Otis who, as we said, well return very soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks of course to Eve's Jeff Cote uh, the mastermind
Speaker 1: behind this day in History class as well as apro punk.
Speaker 1: Thanks of course to Jonathan Strickland's a k a. The
Speaker 1: Quister who has has a cursed all of his own right.
Speaker 1: And of course, of course no thanks to you man
Speaker 1: Happy twenty Thanks but you two man see you next time. Folks.
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