Strangest fact
In 1872 the Mary Celeste was found adrift, seaworthy and full of supplies, with all ten people and the lifeboat gone. A few sailors then sailed her to Gibraltar.
Why it is odd: Ten people fled a ship that was not sinking, and nobody aboard was ever seen again.
The Mary Celeste was a two-masted cargo ship built in Nova Scotia in 1861 under the name Amazon. On November 7, 1872, she left New York for Genoa, Italy, carrying about 1,700 barrels of strong industrial alcohol. On board were ten people: Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven crewmen.
On December 4, 1872, the crew of another ship, the Dei Gratia, spotted the Mary Celeste moving oddly in the Atlantic near the Azores islands. When they went aboard, no one was there. Royal Museums Greenwich, which holds records of the case, lists what they found: some sails set, some rigging damaged, cargo hatches open, a little water in the hold, one pump partly taken apart with a sounding rod (a rod for measuring water in the hold) lying nearby, and the crew's belongings left in place. The lifeboat, the ship's papers and the captain's navigation instruments were gone. The last entry on the log slate was from the morning of November 25.
The Dei Gratia's crew sailed the ship to Gibraltar to claim salvage money, a reward for saving a ship. The court hearing ran from December 17, 1872 to February 25, 1873. Gibraltar's Attorney General, Frederick Solly-Flood, suspected that the salvagers or the Mary Celeste's own crew had committed murder, but no evidence of violence was found. The salvagers received about a sixth of the value of ship and cargo, which many read as a sign the court was not fully satisfied.
The story grew larger in fiction. In 1884 a young Arthur Conan Doyle, before he created Sherlock Holmes, published a made-up story called J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement about a ship he called the Marie Celeste. Details from the story are still repeated as if they were fact, and so is the wrong name.
The cargo gives one clue. When it was unloaded in Genoa, nine of the 1,701 barrels were found empty, through leaking or minor damage. A popular explanation is that Captain Briggs, worried by alcohol fumes, water in the hold or a fear that the ship was sinking, ordered everyone into the lifeboat to wait at a distance, and the boat was lost. The Mary Celeste herself sailed on for years. In 1885 her captain wrecked her on purpose off Haiti in an attempt at insurance fraud.