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Nobody Aboard: The Mary Celeste, December 1872

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Nobody aboard

On 4 December 1872 the crew of the Dei Gratia sighted a ship sailing erratically off the Azores. It was the Mary Celeste, with no one aboard, a lifeboat missing and six months of food in the hold. Juma reads the Gibraltar hearing transcripts with a sailor's eye.

  • What the boarding party actually found and what they did not
  • The salvage court's suspicion of the Dei Gratia's crew and why it failed
  • Nine barrels of leaking industrial alcohol and the fumes theory
  • The sounding rod and the water in the hold
  • Why Arthur Conan Doyle's short story is the version most people remember

A ship, a sea state and a decision made in a hurry.

Transcript
Jambo and welcome to Dead Reckoning. My name is Juma Otieno, I spent eleven years with the Kenya Coast Guard, and this is a show about crime and mystery on the open sea. We start with the one every sailor eventually gets asked about. In December 1872, halfway between the Azores and Portugal, a British ship called the Dei Gratia came across a brigantine sailing badly with no one at the wheel. Her name was Mary Celeste. The cargo was there, the food was there, the captain's wife and daughter had been aboard, and every one of the ten people was gone. Today I want to go through the Gibraltar salvage hearing and the physical evidence the way my old instructors taught me, and tell you which theory a working sailor finds most believable. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Cast off.
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