page_title: Mary Celeste
section_title: Later career and final voyage
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Celeste / Later career and final voyage
caption_attribution_description: "A Brig's Officers Believed to Have Been Murdered at Sea.", New York Times, Wednesday, February 26, 1873, page 2, citing the Boston Post of February 24, 1873. Retrieved on June 19, 2008. First sentence: "It is now believed that the fine brig Mary Celeste, of about 236 tons, commanded by Capt. Benjamin Briggs, of Marion, Mass., was seized by pirates in the latter part of November, and that, after murdering the Captain, his wife, child, and officers, the vessel was abandoned near the Western Islands, where the miscreants are supposed to have landed."
context_page_description: Mary Celeste was an American merchant brigantine discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands on December 4, 1872. The Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia found her in a dishevelled but seaworthy condition under partial sail and with her lifeboat missing. The last entry in her log was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7 and was still amply provisioned when found. Her cargo of denatured alcohol was intact, and the captain's and crew's personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board were ever heard from again.
  Mary Celeste was built in Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia, and launched under British registration as Amazon in 1861. She was transferred to American ownership and registration in 1868, when she acquired her new name. Thereafter she sailed uneventfully until her 1872 voyage. At the salvage hearings in Gibraltar following her recovery, the court's officers considered various possibilities of foul play, including mutiny by Mary Celeste's crew, piracy by the Dei Gratia crew or others, and conspiracy to carry out insurance or salvage fraud.
context_section_description: Mary Celeste left Genoa on June 26, 1873, and arrived in New York on September 19. The Gibraltar hearings, with newspaper stories of bloodshed and murder, had made her an unpopular ship; Hastings records that she "... rotted on wharves where nobody wanted her." In February 1874, the consortium sold the ship, at a considerable loss, to a partnership of New York businessmen.
  Under this new ownership, Mary Celeste sailed mainly in the West Indian and Indian Ocean routes, regularly losing money. Details of her movements occasionally appeared in the shipping news; in February 1879, she was reported at the island of St. Helena, where she had called to seek medical assistance for her captain, Edgar Tuthill, who had fallen ill. Tuthill died on the island, encouraging the idea that the ship was cursed—he was her third captain to die prematurely. In February 1880, the owners sold Mary Celeste to a partnership of Bostonians headed by Wesley Gove. A new captain, Thomas L. Fleming, remained in the post until August 1884, when he was replaced by Gilman C. Parker. During these years, the ship's port of registration changed several times, before reverting to Boston. There are no records of her voyages during this time, although Brian Hicks, in his study of the affair, asserts that Gove tried hard to make a success of her.
  In November 1884, Parker conspired with a group of Boston shippers, who filled Mary Celeste with a largely worthless cargo, misrepresented on the ship's manifest as valuable goods and insured for US$30,000 ($850,000 today). On December 16, Parker set out for Port-au-Prince, the capital and chief port of Haiti. On January 3, 1885, Mary Celeste approached the port via the channel between Gonâve Island and the mainland, in which lay a large and well-charted coral reef, the Rochelois Bank. Parker deliberately ran the ship on to this reef, ripping out her bottom and wrecking her beyond repair. He and the crew then rowed themselves ashore, where Parker sold the salvageable cargo for $500 to the American consul, and instituted insurance claims for the alleged value.
  When the consul reported that what he had bought was almost worthless, the ship's insurers began a thorough investigation, which soon revealed the truth of the over-insured cargo. In July 1885, Parker and the shippers were tried in Boston for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. Parker was additionally charged with "wilfully cast[ing] away the ship," a crime known as barratry and at the time carrying the death penalty. The conspiracy case was heard first, but on August 15, the jury announced that they could not agree on a verdict. Some jurors were unwilling to risk prejudicing Parker's forthcoming capital trial by finding him guilty on the conspiracy charge. Rather than ordering an expensive retrial, the judge negotiated an arrangement whereby the defendants withdrew their insurance claims and repaid all they had received. The barratry charge against Parker was deferred, and he was allowed to go free. Nevertheless, his professional reputation was ruined, and he died in poverty three months later. One of his co-defendants went mad, and another killed himself. Begg observes that "if the court of man could not punish these men ... the curse that had devilled the ship since her first skipper Robert McLellan had died on her maiden voyage could reach beyond the vessel's watery grave and exact its own terrible retribution."
  In August 2001, an expedition headed by the marine archaeologist and author Clive Cussler announced that they had found the remains of a ship embedded in the Rochelois reef. Only a few pieces of timber and some metal artifacts could be salvaged, the remainder of the wreckage being lost within the coral. Initial tests on the wood indicated that it was the type extensively used in New York shipyards at the time of Mary Celeste's 1872 refit, and it seemed the remains of Mary Celeste had been found. However, dendrochronological tests carried out by Scott St George of the Geological Survey of Canada showed that the wood came from trees, most probably from
caption: A Brig's Officers Believed to Have Been Murdered at Sea
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