The Mary Celeste was cursed as soon as she was launched on theBay of Fundy in the spring of 1861. Her first captain died beforecompleting the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed andsank an English brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm droveher ashore at Cape Breton. But somehow the ship was recovered andrefitted, and in the autumn of 1872 she fell to the reluctantcommand of a seasoned mariner named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It wasBriggs who was at the helm when the Mary Celeste sailed intohistory.
On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered
drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a
sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo—and not
a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What
happened on board the ghost ship Mary Celeste has baffled and
tantalized the world for 130 years. In his stunning new book,
award-winning journalist Brian Hicks plumbs the depths of this
fabled nautical mystery and finally uncovers the truth.
The Mary Celeste was cursed as soon as she was launched on the
Bay of Fundy in the spring of 1861. Her first captain died before
completing the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed and
sank an English brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm drove
her ashore at Cape Breton. But somehow the ship was recovered and
refitted, and in the autumn of 1872 she fell to the reluctant
command of a seasoned mariner named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It was
Briggs who was at the helm when the Mary Celeste sailed into
history.
In Brian Hicks’s skilled hands, the story of the Mary Celeste
becomes the quintessential tale of men lost at sea. Hicks vividly
recreates the events leading up to the crew’s disappearance and
then unfolds the complicated and bizarre aftermath—the dark
suspicions that fell on the officers of the ship that intercepted
her; the farcical Admiralty Court salvage hearing in Gibraltar; the
wild myths that circulated after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a
thinly disguised short story sensationalizing the mystery.
Everything from a voodoo curse to an alien abduction has been
hauled out to explain the fate of the Mary Celeste. But, as Brian
Hicks reveals, the truth is actually grounded in the combined
tragedies of human error and bad luck. The story of the Mary
Celeste acquired yet another twist in 2001, when a team of divers
funded by novelist Clive Cussler located the wreck in a coral reef
off Haiti.
Written with the suspense of a thriller and the vivid accuracy of
the best popular history, Ghost Ship tells the unforgettable true
story of the most famous and most fascinating maritime mystery of
all time.
From the Hardcover edition.