The Mary Celeste: A Ship Found Empty at Sea — Atlantic Ocean, 1872

About this episode

On December 4th, 1872, roughly four hundred miles east of the Azores, the crew of a British ship called the Dei Gratia spotted another vessel wandering an erratic course, sails up, no one visibly at the helm. It was the Mary Celeste — an American brigantine that had left New York a month earlier bound for Genoa, captained by a man the Dei Gratia's own captain knew personally. They boarded her and found her completely deserted. Not the captain, not his wife, not their two-year-old daughter, not a single one of the seven crew members. The ship was seaworthy. Her cargo of seventeen hundred barrels of industrial alcohol was almost entirely intact. The crew's money and valuables were still in their quarters. There was food and fresh water aboard. The captain's log was current only to ten days earlier — when the ship should have been near the Azores, not four hundred miles further along. The only thing missing besides the ten people was the ship's single lifeboat. No bodies were ever found. No wreckage. No trace. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the Mary Celeste remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of the sea — not for lack of theories, but because every one of t