Today we are going to talk about one of the most famous mysteries in naval history.

The Mary Celeste was a 282-ton American brigantine that had left New York on November 7 with a cargo of 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol bound for the Italian city of Genova.

It was commanded by Captain Benjamin Briggs, an experienced man well known in the trade.

The ship’s crew was formed by experienced men with a long path in the nautical world, in addition to the captain’s family. A total of ten people aboard a ship that was in perfect condition, as the captain himself had expressed in a letter to his mother shortly before setting sail.

After several days of sailing, 400 miles off the Azores, it was sighted by Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia, who together with his first officer Oliver Deveau and his second officer John Wright decided to go to investigate to report what was happening to that ship that was sailing erratically.

As soon as the two officers approached the Mary Celeste, they noticed something strange: the sails were arranged in an unusual way for the wind the ship was receiving at that moment. But they only had to set foot on deck and they corroborated their suspicions: that the brigantine had no crew on board.

Both sailors searched from bow to stern of the Mary Celeste, discovering that Captain Briggs’ logbook had his last entry dated at eight o’clock in the morning of November 25, nine days earlier.

Did they attempt to head for that island that seemed so close, since there were no further entries in the logbook?

Deveau and Wright reported to their captain what they had discovered. In addition to the missing crew, their exploration had revealed that the Mary Celeste’s only dinghy was missing, as well as a yola, which is a very small craft usually stowed above the main hatch.

Several more explorations concluded that the brig was completely abandoned. Yet it did not look like a robbery as all the belongings were in place.

The captain of the Dei Gratia took the ship to Gibraltar, however, for Morehouse a long and unpleasant process opened in the British colony by the British Admiralty. This was a very strange matter and the authorities were not going to remain impassive.

Many theories have revolved around this case, even recent investigations carried out by Anne MacGregor that disprove fantastic stories like sea monsters, but it is still the most famous mystery of naval history.