The Wandering Ship

4.8

In the old days when ships crossed the seas and oceans under sails, every trip was an adventure. In 1872 an American ship was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Portugal. It was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when Captain Moorhouse saw another ship. He knew the ship. It was the “Marie Celeste” which he had seen some weeks before when it was leaving New York. The captain of the “Marie Celeste”, Briggs, had taken his wife and his two-year-old daughter on the trip.

Soon Captain Moorhouse saw that something was wrong on the “Marie Celeste”. He sailed his ship nearer the “Marie Celeste”. Captain Moorhouse and his sailors could see that there was nobody on the “Marie Celeste”. The captain and some of his men went to the ship in a boat. But they found nobody there. Everybody had left the ship. But why had they done so? There were no signs of a fight. Everything was in its place. Why had all the people left a good ship in the middle of the Atlantic and disappeared? That is the question which many people have tried to answer since that time. But nobody will know the answer. Not a man who had left the “Marie Celeste” was seen again.

Captain Moorhouse and his men saw no signs of panic on the ship. Captain Briggs’ watch lay on his table. There was a letter near it which somebody had just begun to write. The ship’s papers had gone, but the log was there. In some of the men’s boxes there was money. The most interesting thing was the fact that somebody had taken away a piece of planking. But why? Some people thought that the sailors had killed the captain and his family and gone away in a boat. But there were no signs of a fight. Other people thought that many of the sailors had been ill and had died. Then the others left the ship and went away in a boat. But nobody knows the true story of the “Marie Celeste”.