Mary Celeste was built at Spencers Island, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1861 as Amazon. Renamed under American ownership, she left New York for Genoa on November 7, 1872, with a cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol. On board were Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia and seven crew.
On December 4 the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia, under Captain David Morehouse, spotted her moving unsteadily between the Azores and Portugal. A boarding party found nobody on board. The ship was wet but seaworthy, with plenty of food and water, the crew's belongings in place and the cargo intact. The lifeboat was gone. The last log entry, nine days earlier, put her near Santa Maria Island in the Azores.
At the salvage hearings in Gibraltar, the court officer suspected mutiny or fraud, but no evidence supported it. Later ideas include alcohol fumes scaring the crew into the lifeboat, a faulty pump or sounding rod making them think the ship was sinking, a waterspout, and fear of running aground. Many published 'solutions', including a famous 1884 story by Arthur Conan Doyle, were fiction. Nobody from the ship was ever seen again.
