Capt. Briggs had tired of the sea. On October 31, 1870, their daughter Sophia M. was born at Rose Cottage, both he and his brother Oliver now had growing families and wished to live at home. In 1871, they planned to buy a hardware business in New Bedford, but when it came to making a decision they were influenced by the disastrous experience of their father and did not venture. In 1872, Capt. Briggs bought an interest in the Brig Mary Celeste.

Briggs was a man of strict beliefs and religious convictions, and although he was a teetotaller he was no monomaniac on the subject. He was described by those who knew him as always bearing "the highest character as a Christian and as an intelligent and active shipmaster". He was also a share holder in the Mary Celeste.

The 1st and 2nd mate, cook and four German crew were of good character, although two of the Germans had lost all their possessions prior to joining the Mary Celeste. Also making the voyage were Captain Briggs's wife, Sarah Elizabeth and one of their two children, two-year-old Sophia Matilda. The elder child, their son Arthur Stanley, remained at home.

Late on Saturday 2nd November 1872 Mary Celeste's cargo was loaded and made secure. She carried 1701 barrels of denatured alcohol being shipped by Meissner Ackerman and Co., merchants of New York, to H. Mascerenhas and Co., of Genoa, Italy.

Early on 5 November the Sandy Hook pilot ship towed Mary Celeste from Pier 44 to the lower bay off Staten Island, New York. The Atlantic was particularly stormy for the time of year and Briggs was forced to drop anchor for two days before he dared to venture out to sea on 7th November. But although Mary Celeste herself would make many more voyages, it was the last time anyone would see this particular crew.

On 15 November 1872, eight days after Mary Celeste left New York, the British Dei Gratia set off with a cargo of petroleum bound for Gibraltar. Her skipper was a Nova Scotian named David Reed Morehouse and the first mate was Oliver Deveau. Both these men and the rest of Dei Gratia's crew were highly able sailors - as later events were to prove - and no 'dirt' has ever been attached to their characters except by sensationalists.

The story now jumps to November 24th, west of the Azores.

The first mate Albert Richardson's log slate had the Mary Celeste sailing due east with all her sails trimmed to a strong southwest breeze at 8 knots reckoning they were about 227 nautical miles directly west of Santa Maria Island, near the red X in the map above.

The wind increases all morning. At noon, Mate Richardson orders her sails shortened and by seven that evening, the wind reaches a moderate gale, increasing her speed to 9 knots. The captain and mate ensure that all hatches are secured and that all the six windows around the cabin are battened tight with canvas and boards.

At 8 PM when the first watch comes on duty, the storm is raging, making it necessary to put a reef in her foresail and double-reef her upper topsail and furl her lower topsail. Midnight passes. One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, the entry against each hour reads the same - 8 knots.

At 5 AM the Mate's log reads, "Made the Island of Saint Mary's, bearing ESE." (Santa Maria Island was know as Saint Mary's in the 1800's.) The point of land observed by the vessel's watch, using this bearing, was probably near Ponta Cabrasante, on the northwestern extremity of the Island. The Mary Celeste was located somewhere near the small black dot on the left side of the chart below.

The fact that the Mary Celeste had been pushed forcefully along by a gale blowing hard out of the southwest is supported by the course taken by Captain Briggs around Santa Maria Island. His first scheduled port, Gibraltar, lies on a latitude sixty miles south of his present position; therefore, the most direct route would be far south of Santa Maria Island, yet Captain Briggs steers the little brigantine north of the Island. Why?

The obvious reason would be to get on the lee shore, and take a break from the rough seas, for many reasons – for his family, for the crew to recover and have hotmeals, to repair damage.

At 8 AM the Eastern point of Santa Maria bore S.S.W. 6 miles distance. This means the ship had taken three hours to sail the ten-mile breath of Santa Maria Island indicating that she had likely dropped sail or dropped anchor somewhere near shore for an hour or so.

Sometime after 8 AM and, after making a few calculations on the chart and setting a new course to clear south of Dollabarat Shoal, the captain gave the orders to pump the bilges and run up the sails.

Sometime after eight on the morning of the 25th, all records ceased.

On 4 December, shortly after 1 p.m., one of the crew of the British brigantine Dei Gratia, John Johnson, who was at the wheel, sighted a vessel about 5 miles (8 kilometres) off the port bow. Attracted by the poor State of the ship's sails and her slight 'yawing' (listing), he called the second mate, John Wright, and together they summoned Captain Morehouse. After surveying the vessel through his telescope, Morehouse gave orders to offer assistance.

At 3 p.m., having come within about 400 yards (370 metres) of the little ship, Morehouse hailed her several times, but, receiving no reply from her, he decided to send some men to investigate. Oliver Deveau, with Wright and Johnson, rowed across to the distressed craft, noting as they drew closer, its name - Mary Celeste. Johnson was left in the boat as the other two hauled themselves over the ship's rails. The Mary Celeste was deserted.

What was found

Over the next hour Deveau and Wright searched Mary Celeste from stem to stern. The main staysail was found on the foreward house; all the other sails were furled. The foresail and upper foresail had been blown from the yards and lost. The jib, fore-topmast staysail and the fore lower topsail were set. The remaining sails were furled.

Some of the running rigging was fouled, some had been blown away, and parts of it were hanging over the sides. It was reported that the main peak halyard, normally about a hundred yards of stout line, was parted and most of it was missing,

The main hatch to below decks was well-battened down and secure, but certain of the hatch covers had apparently been removed and were found discarded near the hatchways. There was less than a foot (30 centimetres) of water in the galley and little of the six months' store of provisions had been spoilt. There was ample fresh water.

The lifeboat was gone, as had the whole crew. Residents of the island group near where the mystery occurred claimed, in interviews, that they’d seen nothing of any members of the crew.

The official court records state that the galley stove was lifted up from the deck, by some unknown means and for no known reason, and set back down in another spot away from the four big chocks that secure it to the deck to keep if from sliding around in heavy seas. This bouncing up and down of the stove would have loosen whatever flue system kept the burning embers away from the rigging.

They found the wheel spinning free and the ship's wooden compass stand, normally mounted in front of the wheel, knocked over and broken. The cabin windows were battened-down, storm ready. The clock hanging on the wall had flung its hour-hand off; it lay beneath the clock on the cabin floor.

The captain's bed was "unmade with bedding and clothes lying about as though he would soon step from the next cabin." Closed seaman's chests were found near the berths in the forecastle. The men's clothing had all been left behind - their oilskins, boots, razors, even their smoking pipes

Seventeen hundred barrels of commercial alcohol, poisonous if consumed, were found in the cargo hold along with thirty tons of stone ballast. It was later found that nine barrels were empty. She was provisioned for six months, and her food storage was all in its proper place.

Dr. J. Patron was commissioned to look for any stains of a suspicious nature. "After a careful and minute inspection of the deck of the said vessel some red brown spots … with a dull aspect were found on deck … The sword presented on its blade about the middle and final part some stains of a more suspicious character."

However, after analysis, he "felt himself authorized to conclude that according to our present scientifical knowledge there is no blood either in the stains observed on the deck of the Mary Celeste or on those found on the blade of the sword that I have examined."

Her hull appeared to be "nearly new", and there was no evidence of damage by fire or smoke, and nothing to suggest there had been an explosion. While tending the launch, one of the seaman from the Dei Gratia found two fresh grooves in her bow planking, three feet above the water line, mid-way between the water line and her gunnel.

John Austin, Gibraltar's Surveyor of Shipping, found one cut on the port side "for a length of about six to seven feet. This injury had been sustained recently and could not have been effected by weather or collision and was apparently done by a sharp cutting instrument continuously applied through the whole length of the injury." He found a similar cut on the other side of the boat, made by a sharp edged tool.

Captain Winchester, one of the owners of the Mary Celeste and an American naval officer, Captain Shufelt, disagreed and said it was splintering from when the boat had been built.

Missing from the ship were the chronometer, sextant, bill of lading, navigation book, and a small yawl, or boat, that had been lashed to the main hatch. A piece of railing running alongside had been removed to launch the boat.

Allowing for the fact that the ship had been sailing by itself through some fairly rough weather, the cargo was intact, it was in good order and there was plenty of food and water aboard.

The definitive book is by Charles Edey Fay, originally published in 1917. Mr. Fay travelled to Gibraltar and copied the records of the Vice Admiralty Court of Inquiry, which took place for several years after the ship was brought into the Bay of Gibraltar to be claimed as salvage by the crew of the Dei Gratia.

Charles Fay wrote to the meteorological service in the Azores in 1940 and received the following answer: "From the only two stations existing in 1872, it is concluded that stormy conditions prevailed in the Azores on the 24 and 25 November 1872. A cold front passed between 3 and 9 P.M. on the 25th, the wind shifting from SW to NW.

Calm or light wind prevailed on the forenoon of the 25th., but later, the wind became of a gale force. As usually the wind direction before the cold front was WSW to SW; after the cold front NW. Rain was collected but no record of any earthquake is kept in the registers."

Two things now elevated the tale to one of sensation, murder, piracy and ghosts.

Firstly, the Attorney General for Gibraltar and Advocate General for the Queen in Her Office of Admiralty was an excitable, arrogant and pompous bureaucrat named Frederick Solly Flood; he first accused Mary Celeste's original crew - in their absence - of having gained access to the cargo of alcohol and having murdered Captain Briggs, his wife and child, and Mate Richardson in a drunken fury, despite the denatured alcohol being virtually undrinkable.

He next suggested that Briggs and Morehouse were conspirators. Briggs killed his crew and disposed of their bodies. He then took the lifeboat to a destination prearranged with Captain Morehouse, who in the meantime would have found Mary Celeste abandoned, taken her to Gibraltar and claimed the salvage reward. The two men would then meet and split their ill-gotten gains. However, Briggs was part-owner of Mary Celeste and his cut of the salvage money would not have been more than his investment in the vessel.

His third suggestion was that Captain Morehouse and the crew of Dei Gratia had boarded Mary Celeste and savagely slaughtered all on board. The Vice- Admiralty Court denounced this, cleared Morehouse and his crew of any suspicion and granted them a salvage reward of £1700.

Secondly, a fictional tale based on the ship was published in January 1884 by the prestigious Cornhill Magazine. It was a sensational short story called J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement and was one of the first literary efforts by a young English doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle. In the story, Mary Celeste is called Marie Celeste, the name by which the ship is now most commonly known. However, Conan Doyle was not the first to make the error - this version of the name first appears in Lloyd's List of 25th March 1873.

In late 1884 an ageing Mary Celeste was bought by Gilman C. Parker and loaded with freight, which he insured for $30,000. The vessel ran aground on the razor-sharp coral reef of Rochaelais Bank in the Gulf Of Gonave, off the coast of Haiti. Parker had loaded the ship with rubbish and now unloaded the part of the cargo that he could sell, then set Mary Celeste alight. Parker got off on a technicality but Mary Celeste was no more.

Up to 50 years after the incident confessions were being made by sailors claiming to be survivors. One such tale involved the captain challenging his first mate to a swimming race around the boat. Both men were supposedly attacked by sharks, and as the crew watched in horror a wave knocked them into the water. None of the sailors' tales could be substantiated.

Part 2 [the conclusion] lists many of the theories as to what actually occurred to the Mary Celeste.