The Wanderer of the Wind and Waves

4.8

The mystery of the Marie Celeste is a story of the old days of the sailing fleet. Every trip in those days was an adventure and tragedies were many.

It happened in 1872. An American brig was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Portugal and was somewhere near the Azores when Captain Moorhouse saw another brig on the sky line. He recognized it as the Marie Celeste which he had seen some weeks ago leaving New York.

Captain Briggs, master of the Marie Celeste 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. She was sailing in a strange way.

When the two ships came nearer, nobody could be seen on deck. Captain Moorhouse went to the brig in a boat. But he found nobody there. All the people had left the ship for some reason.

What was the reason? There was no sign of any damage. Everything was in good order. What had happened that every man had left a good ship in the middle of the Atlantic and disappeared? That is the question many people have tried to answer since that winter of 1872.

But no one will ever know it, for not a man who had left the Marie Celeste was ever seen again.

Captain Moorhouse and his men found no signs of panic on board the Marie Celeste. In captain Brigg's cabin his watch still hung on the wall. On the table lay a letter someone 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. Clothes hung on a string. The most interesting was the fact that someone had cut out a piece of planking above the water line. But why?

One theory was that the crew had opened one of the barrels of wine and got drunk. Perhaps they had killed the officers and cut off the planks so that it looked like a catastrophe. After that the crew left the ship in one of the boats. But against this theory was the fact that there were no signs of a fight.

Others thought that there had been a terrible disease on board that had killed or sent away everybody.

And the Marie Celeste sailed away leaving the people in the ocean. The story of the brig remains a mystery to this day.