The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Mystery Ship 1872

When Mary Celeste edged away from pier 50 in the East River, there was no reason to think this voyage would be any different from others she had made. Tuesday, the fifth day of November 1872, was cold and gray, but not insufferably so. Just an early-winter New York day like hundreds before and hundreds since. Coats were worn, to be sure, but it was not so cold that a person would turn away from the wind. It was a normal day, with winter fast approaching.

Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs tugged at his thick goatee, then adjusted the wheel slightly. The current in the East River was running strong and trying to push him back against the dock. He shouted to Albert Richardson of Stockton Springs, Maine, the first mate.

“Furl the main staysail,” Briggs shouted.

The wind caught in the fabric and pulled the ship farther into the river.

Briggs nodded slightly, as if he approved of Mary Celeste’s motion. Briggs was the son of a sea captain from Wareham, Massachusetts. Benjamin was the second of five sons, and all but one of his brothers would make their careers on the sea. His was a childhood of sea tales and letters from faraway ports. In Sippican Village, where the Briggs clan eventually settled, it is said that if you cut a Briggs boy, salt water would flow from the veins. Captain Briggs was as at home on the sea as he was sitting in front of a fireplace in a fine mansion. As part owner of the Mary Celeste, he was anxious to start the voyage.

He sniffed the air and twisted the wheel slightly.

Belowdecks in the captain’s quarters, Sarah Elizabeth Briggs, Benjamin’s wife, was tending to their two-year-old daughter, Sophia Matilda. After feeding her and placing her in a small wood-framed playpen in the room, Sarah played a quiet tune on her melodeon until the child fell asleep.

This was not Mrs. Briggs’s first trip with her husband — but it would be her last.

The winds were not favorable.

Mary Celeste was a mile off Staten Island when Briggs gave the order.

“Heave to,” he shouted to the sailors. “We’ll anchor and await a change in winds.”

Once his ship was stationary, Briggs went belowdecks to check his cargo. Other than a few crates full of personal items going to a New York art student studying in Italy, his hold was filled with a single cargo: barrels of alcohol bound for Genoa, 1,700 in total, being shipped by Meisser, Ackerman & Company, of 48 Beaver Street, New York City.

Befitting his Yankee upbringing, Briggs was a cautious man. And although the barrels were tightly plugged and appeared intact, he worried about the possibility of fumes. More than one ship had exploded and burned when carrying such dangerous goods. With both his wife and baby daughter aboard, he wanted to be sure he averted an accident before it happened.

Satisfied that the cargo was safe, he climbed from the hold and made his way to his cabin. Sarah sat in front of her foot-operated sewing machine, hemming a baby dress. To one side, in a folding playpen made of lathe-turned walnut, Sophia was standing quietly. When Briggs entered, she cocked her head and stared quizzically.

“Da,” she squealed.

Captain Briggs made his way over to the playpen and rubbed his daughter’s hair. Then he turned to Sarah and smiled.

“The winds are against us,” he said. “We’ll wait here until they turn.”

“Any idea how long?” Sarah asked easily.

“The barometer shows changes,” Briggs admitted, “but there is really no way to know for sure.”

Early on the morning of Thursday, November 7, the winds began to cooperate.

A pilot guided Mary Celeste from her anchorage into deeper water. Once clear of the shallows and in the Atlantic Ocean, a pilot boat came alongside to retrieve the pilot and take him back to New York City. As was the custom, when the pilot boarded his boat to shore, he carried letters from the ship to post.

The last communications from the captain and crew of Mary Celeste.

Benjamin Briggs stood behind the wheel and steered his ship east. There was an inky blackness to the sea that day, combined with an unyielding roughness. It was as if the water consisted of shards of black marble like that used to build a mausoleum. Mary Celeste was on a roller-coaster ride. In front of the bow, the waves rose in a building flood of righteous indignation; then, as the bow broke over the top, the ship headed down with such force that the captain could feel his stomach rising in protest. It was as if they were on a rocking chair that was hitting the wall.

Two thousand feet down was the bottom. Two thousand miles ahead were the Azores.

Briggs had faced harsh seas before and was not concerned. His ship was stout and strong, his crew handpicked and checked. There was First Mate Albert Richardson, twenty-eight years old, with a light complexion and brown hair. Richardson had served in the Maine Volunteers during the Civil War, so Briggs knew he was used to hardship. His pay was $50 a month. Second Mate Andrew Gilling, a twenty-five-year-old from New York City, was fair of skin and hair, a seasoned sailor from Denmark. His wages were $35 a month. The cook and steward, Edward William Head, was twenty-three and newly married. His pay was $40 a month.

And the deckhands and ordinary sailors received $30 monthly.

Brothers Boz and Volkert Lorenzen, ages twenty-five and twenty-nine, respectively. Thirty-five-year-old Arian Martens. Gottlieb Goodschaad, the youngest at twenty-three. All were from Germany — all were experienced. All of these men, along with Gilling, listed their address as 19 Thames Street, New York. The Seaman’s Hall.

Edward Head carefully made his way across the deck to Captain Briggs.

“Captain,” he shouted over the wind, “can I get you anything?”

“I’ll eat when the watch changes,” Briggs said, “in an hour and a half.”

“Coffee?” Head asked as he turned to leave.

“Hot tea with molasses,” Briggs said, “to settle my stomach.”

“I’ll bring it out shortly,” Head agreed.

At that instant, at the docks in New York City, another ship was being loaded.

Dei Gratia was a British brigantine of 295 tons that hailed from Nova Scotia. Her captain, David Reed Moorhouse, was supervising the loading of oil from the fields of Pennsylvania. His first mate, Oliver Deveau, stood alongside as the casks were lowered by ropes into the hold.

“We are scheduled to leave on the fifteenth,” Moorhouse said. “Do you have any recommendations for the rest of the crew?”

“I talked to Augustus Anderson and John Johnson about coming aboard as ordinary seamen. I’ve worked with them before.”

“What do you think about John Wright as the second mate?”

“He’s a good hand,” Deveau agreed.

“I’ll make him an offer, then,” Moorhouse said.

“The wind is turning,” Deveau noted.

“Then we should leave on time,” Moorhouse said easily.

Most great civilizations have one thing in common: seapower. The Vikings, the Spanish, the British — all could trace their power and prestige to the fact that they ruled the oceans. And in the days before corporations, a captain of a ship at sea was a powerful man. Along with being the representative of the ship owners and his country of flag, he was tasked with a fiduciary duty to the owners of the cargo that his ship carried. But his duties were insured.

The hull of Mary Celeste was insured by four companies: Maine Lloyds, in the amount of $6,000; Orient Mutual Company, for $4,000; Mercantile Mutual Company, $2,500; and New England Mutual Insurance Company, with the smallest coverage at $1,500. The total coverage was $14,000, not an insignificant sum in 1872. The cargo was insured separately through Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company for $3,400. The companies were careful about the ships they insured — they insisted that they were fit to sail and properly crewed. Mary Celeste fit all the criteria.

Halfway to the Azores, Captain Briggs was guiding Mary Celeste over the Rehoboth Seamount, an underwater plateau along the sixty-degree-longitude line. Turning the helm over to Richardson, he opened a polished cherrywood box, then carefully removed a sextant from a soft deerskin bag. Shooting a fix of the horizon, he determined their location.

Mary Celeste was on the proper course.

“Same heading,” he said to Richardson. “I’ll be below if you need me.”

“Very good, sir,” Richardson said.

The hatch leading below was halfway open, folded back on itself, and the ladder leading down was firmly secured to the bulkhead. Briggs had learned through experience to check such things, as early in his career he had descended a loose ladder and tumbled into the hold, badly wrenching his ankle. Nowadays he left nothing to chance.

Briggs was happy with his crew so far. The Lorenzen brothers spoke halting English with a thick German accent, but they seemed to understand his directions and complied quickly. Not only that, the brothers were hard workers. Every time Briggs looked around, they were tending to sails, swabbing the deck, or finding some other task to occupy their time. Good sailors.

Martens and Goodschaad seemed quiet and studious compared to the Lorenzens, but they worked hard and followed directions. Richardson was skilled enough to captain his own ship, and Gilling would be there soon. Only Edward Head worried Briggs. While he performed his duties with skill, he seemed sad.

Reaching the lower deck, Briggs headed down a companionway to the galley.

“Captain,” Head said, looking up from peeling potatoes.

“How are things, Edward?” Briggs asked.

“Salt beef, potatoes, and beets for dinner.”

“I’d say that sounds good,” Briggs said, smiling, “but I would be lying.”

“I have a barrel of dried apples,” Head offered, “and shall try to bake a pie.”

“Are you missing your wife?” Briggs asked.

“Very much so, sir,” Head offered. “After this trip, I may stay on shore.”

“The return has already been arranged,” Briggs said easily. “A load of fruit, so we should have only a short layover for loading. A month or so, and you will be back home and can decide.”

“I’m glad, sir,” Head said easily.

But in less than a month, Mary Celeste would be in Gibraltar, and the people now aboard would be gone.

Captain Moorhouse stood on the upper deck of Dei Gratia. His cargo was secured, and the last of the supplies were being loaded.

“Once the stores are secured, give the men a ration of rum,” Moorhouse said to Deveau.

“Yes, sir,” Deveau said.

The date was November 14, 1872. Dei Gratia would leave New York the following morning. Moorhouse headed below to check his charts — a large expanse of ocean lay ahead, and he needed to be prepared for anything.

Far to the north, near the Arctic Circle, a storm was building. As the sky faded to black, the wind grew in intensity. Dry snow began forming, and it grew until it was a blinding blanket. A herd of musk ox knew the signs and formed into a protective circle, their faces to the outside and the young and sick on the interior. Huddled together to conserve heat, they began to wait out the storm.

No REST FOR the weary. Mary Celeste was facing rougher seas. Briggs knew that November was always fickle, but this trip was proving to be the exception, not the rule. He had thought that once they crossed the sixty-degree mark, the seas would be calm, but in fact they were building. The temperature had risen, so cold was no longer a problem, but the increasing battering to the hull worried Briggs. One of the barrels of alcohol had already split, spilling its contents into the bilge — a few more and Briggs would have a problem “How’s the baby?” Briggs asked, entering the captain’s cabin.

“She’s fine if she’s in the crib,” Sarah answered. “It rocks with the ship and comforts her. If she’s in the playpen, she’s tossed around.”

Briggs looked at his wife. Her skin had a grayish-green tinge.

“And you?”

“I’ve been sick,” Sarah admitted.

“I’ll get a few crackers from the cook,” Briggs said. “They usually comfort the stomach.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“We’re making good time,” Briggs said. “If this continues, we will pass into the Mediterranean within the week. It’s usually calmer there.”

“I hope,” Sarah said quietly.

Captain Moorhouse was dressed in a full leather raincoat and matching hat. Under his eyes were bags from lack of sleep, and he had not eaten a full meal since the morning they left New York. From day one of the trip, they had faced ugly weather. First it was snow and wind — now rain and wind. A nor’easter was sweeping Dei Gratia toward a date with destiny. Whatever else was happening, they were making good time.

Briggs made an entry into the captain’s log. The log was a feature on every ship at sea. Notes on weather, location, ship’s condition, and unusual events were constantly recorded with date and time. The log went with the captain when he reached port; to new owners when a ship was sold. It was a record of triumph and tragedy, a visible sign of the passage of a journey.November 23, 1872. Eight evening sea time. Two more barrels split, hull leaking some, but pumps adequate. Weather still rough. Location 40 degrees 22 minutes North by 19 degrees 17 minutes West. Should see the first of the Azores tomorrow.

Handing the helm to Gilling, who had late watch, he climbed below, shook the water from his hat and coat, then made his way to his cabin to try to sleep. Astern of the captain’s cabin, divided by the storage hold, were the berths for the ordinary seamen. Boz Lorenzen whispered across the space in German to his brother Volkert.

“Volkie,” he said.

“Yes, Boz.”

“Are the fumes giving you a headache?”

“Not so much a headache,” V^olkert said, “but I was dreaming a vivid dream.”

“What was it?”

“We were home in Germany and mother was still alive.”

“A good dream.”

“Not really,” Volkert said. “It was her head, but her body was a potato.”

“Mother did love the spatzel.”

“Why don’t you crack the porthole?” Volkert asked.

“Because water comes in,” Boz said, before turning over to try to sleep.

Dei Gratia’s Second Mate, Oliver Deveau, stared up at the mainsail. The sail had been rigged six months before, on a layover in London, and while slightly weathered by time, it appeared unfrayed. The brass grommets, where the lines attached, showed no wear, and the hemmed edges had yet to unravel. That was a good thing. Since the start of the voyage from New York, Dei Gratia had faced strong winds. And while the temperature had warmed as the ship had dropped into lower latitudes, the winds had not diminished.

Twin wakes flowed from the bow as Dei Gratia made way, and the wind buffeted Deveau’s hair. To port, Deveau caught sight of a trio of bottlenose porpoises jumping the wake, and he smiled. The ship was making good time, and if it continued, there might be a bonus from the grateful owners upon completion.

Deveau did not know his bonus would come from an unexpected source.

On Mary Celeste, First Mate Albert Richardson was straining his eyes to catch a glimpse of Santa Cruz das Flores Island. The landmass and its sister island, Corvo, would be the first land to be passed since leaving New York. The date was November 24, 1872. The wind continued to blow.

Belowdecks in the captain’s cabin, Benjamin Briggs and his wife, Sarah, were enjoying the last of the fresh eggs. Captain Briggs liked his fried, Sarah poached; baby Sophia just liked them. Sarah slid an egg onto a piece of thick-sliced bread, then spoke to her husband.

“I saw a rat,” she said easily. “We should have a cat aboard.”

“I’ll have the men clean the hull when we off-load the alcohol,” Briggs said, “before the fruit is loaded.”

“Won’t the fruit have insects?” Sarah asked. “Scorpions and roaches?”

“Possibly, dear,” Briggs admitted, “but they won’t last once we reach the colder climates.”

“I think the fumes are affecting Sophia,” Sarah said.

“She seems fine,” Briggs said, reaching over and tickling Sophia, who sat in her mother’s lap.

“Well, they’re affecting me,” Sarah said. “I feel like I’ve been embalmed.”

“Two more barrels are leaking,” Briggs said. “I’m afraid since they were filled when it was cold that as we pass farther into warmer water they will expand more.”

“That wouldn’t be good,” Sarah said.

“No,” Briggs admitted, “it wouldn’t.”

Dei Gratia sailed east, and the sailors began a ritual as old as time. There was cleaning and tending to the sails. Scrubbing and soapstone on the decks. Brightwork needed to be attended to — rust had to be dealt with harshly. The weather was lifting, allowing more time on the open upper deck. The sun shone through the clouds on the faces of the sailors.

So far the voyage had been like many others, but that was about to change.

Off course from the fickle winds. This was not an unusual thing aboard a sailing ship, but one that did require an adjustment in plans. During the night, Mary Celeste had passed north of St. Mary’s Island, not south, as caution and ease would have indicated. For one thing, the Gibraltar Strait now lay south and east of their position and was more easily accessed by passing south of the Azores. For another, just twenty-one miles north of St. Mary’s, not many miles from where Mary Celeste was now passing, lay the dangerous group of rocks known as the Dollabarat Shoals. In bad weather, waves broke over the area with great force. In calm seas, they lay just below the surface, ready to rip the hull out from under unsuspecting vessels.

A good navigator could thread the needle through the danger, but most avoided the area. In the first place, there was little reason to pass to the north. St. Mary’s Island had no usable anchorages. No fresh water, towns, or help available.SHIP’S LOG — Mary CelesteNovember 25, 1872 Eight bells.At 8, Eastern Point bore SSW, 6 miles distant.

This was to be the last entry in the log under “Captain Benjamin Briggs.”

The ship.was passing the last of the Azores, and the eastern point was Ponta Castello, a high peak on the southeastern shore of the island.

Andrew Gilling wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

“Six hundred miles to Gibraltar,” he whispered to himself.

His watch was almost over, and Gilling was glad. All night he had felt a foreboding, a sense of unease without definition. It was strange. Mary Celeste was currently out of the clouds, but in the early-morning light Gilling had seen them to the south and east — a black wall that ebbed and flowed like a living organism. Twice during the night, waterspouts had sprung up near the ship but dissolved before fully forming. And squalls had come and gone quickly and mysteriously, like a knock on the door with no one there.

Albert Richardson walked along the deck unsteadily.

“Watch change,” he said when he reached Gilling.

Gilling stared at the first mate — his eyes were red and bloodshot and his words were slightly slurred. There was a palpable order of alcohol saturating his skin. If the Dane was to hazard a guess, he’d have to conclude that Richardson was drunk.

“Where’s Captain Briggs?” Gilling asked.

“Sick belowdecks,” Richardson said, “as is most of the crew. The fumes are wreaking havoc with everyone. Just before sunrise, I could hear Mrs. Briggs playing her melodeon and singing. The noise woke everyone.”

“Sir,” Gilling said slowly, “I’ve been in fresh air all night. Perhaps I should continue my watch.”

“I’ll be okay,” Richardson said, “once I air out.”

“Very good, sir,” Gilling said. “Just be careful — the area ahead is uncharted and might contain a few unrecorded shoals.”

“I will, Andrew,” Richardson said, as he assumed control of the helm.

Baby Sophia smiled at the black spot in front of her eyes. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, but the little dots remained. Benjamin Briggs was singing the Stephen Foster song “Beautiful Dreamer.” He and Sarah, who sat at the melodeon playing like a woman possessed, had slept little.

“More baritone,” she shouted.

Forward in the seaman’s cabin, the Germans were playing cards. Arian Harbens had dealt the hand nearly an hour ago — no one had yet screamed gin. Gottlieb Goodschaad tried to concentrate on the cards in his hand. The joker seemed to be talking. The nine looked like a six.

In the galley, Edward Head was trying to start the stove. Finally, after much effort, he gave up. Removing a side of preserved meat from storage, he reached for a knife to slice off chunks, but his hand refused to answer the signal from his brain. It was as if his brain were coated in molasses. But he didn’t care. A rat walked along a high shelf, and Head tried to communicate with the rodent telepathically. Strangely, he thought, he received no answer.

Volkert Lorenzen was packing tobacco in a pipe. Once filled, he handed it to his brother Boz and then packed another for himself. Maybe a smoke up on deck would clear their heads. Their heads needed clearing — Boz had just told him for the tenth time how much he loved him. Volkert knew Boz loved him — they were brothers. Even so, the two had never found the need to say it out loud.

Mary Celeste was a ship of fools under the influence of an invisible vapor.

Twelve feet below the surface of the water dead ahead was an underwater seamount, uncharted and without a name. A series of rocky plateaus with scattered pieces of volcanic rock formed hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

Mary Celeste might have barely passed over the hazard — she drew but eleven feet, seven inches — but the waves were ebbing and flowing, and the ship was pitching up and down a full four feet.

Wood was about to meet stone with disastrous result.

Albert Richardson stared to the south. The ship was passing lee of St. Mary’s, and only time and six hundred miles of water lay between them and Gibraltar. And then it happened. A lurch, a crash, a scraping along the length of the hull. Mary Celeste slowed as the keel ran along the rocks, but in seconds the forward momentum carried her free.

“Aground!” Richardson shouted.

Even in his befuddled state, Captain Benjamin Briggs knew that sound.

Racing from his cabin, he climbed the ladder on deck and ran to the helm. Staring astern, he could see that the sea in their wake was dirty from where the ship had scraped. He stared ahead and was reassured with what appeared to be deep water. Looking starboard, he could see St. Mary’s Island.

“Why are we north of the island?” he shouted to Richardson.

“The storm,” Richardson said, “carried us north in the night.”

The Lorenzen brothers, Goodschaad, and Harbens ran on deck, along with Gilling and even a slow-moving Edward Head. They all knew the sound, and they all feared the result.

“Stay at the wheel,” Briggs shouted. “Come with me,” he said to the sailors.

Water flooded into the hold between the spaces in the planking. Two feet lay inside the hull, and the depth was rising. Several more barrels of alcohol had burst, mixing with the sea mist into a toxic vapor.

Briggs surveyed the situation quickly.

“Volkie, Boz, man the pumps,” he shouted. “Arian, you and Gottlieb bring me the barrel of caulking.”

As the men ran off, he got on his knees and felt around — a steady flow of water pressure. He dipped his head under the water. The alcohol burned his eyes, but he could see through the dirty water. No broken planks, just a fast seepage through planks that had been dislodged. Pulling his head from the water, he tasted the alcohol. His head was spinning, and he was unable to restore his equilibrium. A churning grew in his stomach, and he vomited.

“Here you go, sir,” Harbens said, handing the cask filled with waxed rope to Briggs.

“Go to my cabin,” he said, taking the cask of rope. “Tell my wife to prepare to abandon ship if necessary.”

Harbens sloshed over to the ladder and climbed up a deck.

“Mrs. Briggs,” he shouted to the closed door, “the captain asks that you prepare to abandon ship.”

The door opened, and Sarah stood there, smiling. Her eyes were beet-red and her cheeks were flushed, as if she had spent the morning ice-skating on a windswept Kansas lake. Peering inside, Harbens could see baby Sophia. She was sitting listlessly in her playpen, a thin trickle of drool hanging from her chin.

“What about Sophia?” Sarah asked.

“Make her ready,” Harbens said quickly. “She’s coming with us.”

A tainted layer of vomit floated on top of the water, but Briggs did not care. He plunged his head below the surface and began to stuff the waxed rope into any crack he could feel. Pausing to take breaths of air, he went under the water time and time again.

“Pumps are going,” Boz shouted, once, when his head was above water.

“Gottlieb,” Briggs said, “tell Harbens to make sure he packs my chronometer, sextant, and navigation book, as well as the ship’s register. Then you and Arian launch the shore boat.”

Briggs looked at a mark on the side wall of the hull. The water was not receding, but neither was it quickly rising. They might have a chance. Briggs stood upright; his head was spinning, and he fought to regain control. The air at head level was thick with the fumes. He shouted down the length of the ship to the Lorenzen brothers. Just then, a sudden squall hit the boat.

“Come topside,” he said. “We’ll take to the boat and ride this out.”

At the wheel of Mary Celeste, Richardson watched in amazement as a pair of waterspouts formed to each side of the vessel. Seconds before, it had been relatively clear, a light mist, a few random gusts, a sprinkling of rain. Then, all at once, the fury had descended like a slap from an angry lover.

“Use the main peak halyard to tie to the painter,” he shouted to Harbens and Goodschaad, who were preparing to lower the boat over the side. “It’s already out.”

The line, three hundred feet in length and three inches in diameter, remained on deck at all times; to take out another line would require the men to go forward to the lazeret where the spares were stored.

“Okay,” Harbens shouted.

Goodschaad tied the line to the boat’s painter, then he and Martens hoisted the boat over the rail and into the water. They played out the line around a deck stanchion and let the boat float back to the stern.

Briggs appeared on deck, just as Sarah, who was carrying Sophia in her arms like a football, made her way to the ladder topside.

“Furl the main sails,” Briggs shouted to Harbens and Goodschaad, as Sarah stepped on deck.

“Honey, what is it?” Sarah asked.

“We scraped bottom,” Briggs said. “I think I have the flow stanched, but just to be safe, I want to take to the shore boat for a time.”

“I’m scared,” Sarah said, as Sophia began to whimper.

Just then a wall of rain washed across the deck and disappeared just as quickly. Briggs stared aft; a wooden box with the items he had ordered Harbens to secure sat on the deck awaiting loading.

“Open the main and lazeret hatches,” he shouted to Harbens, “then make your way aft to the stem.”

The Lorenzen brothers appeared on deck.

“Help Sarah and Sophia aboard the boat, then board yourself,” he told the brothers.

“Should I lash the wheel?” Richardson asked.

“Leave it free,” Briggs ordered.

In the last few minutes, Gilling had remained out of the fray — his mind was clearer than the others’, and he believed that Briggs was overreacting. Even so, he was in no place to question the captain’s decisions, so he had gone to the galley and, along with Edward Head, had prepared food and water to load on the boat. Steadying the boat alongside the stem ladder, he waited until Head loaded the stores. Next, steadied by the Lorenzen brothers on each side, Sarah and Sophia boarded.

“Go ahead and board,” he told the brothers, who entered and took a seat.

The loading was going quickly. Harbens and Goodschaad, then Head and Richardson. Briggs came alongside and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Climb on in,” Briggs told him. “I enter last.”

Ten people total, on a small boat attached to the mother by a thin line.

A whale breached near Dei Gratia and blew water from its blowhole.

“Whale a port,” Deveau shouted.

Moorhouse made a note in the ship’s log, then shot the horizon with the sextant. They were on a true course and making time. The weather had moderated, and the sun was peeking through the clouds. All in all, it was an ordinary day at sea.

He had no way to know of the drama unfolding five hundred miles distant.

Pulled like the last child in a game of crack-the-whip, Briggs stared at Mary Celeste in the distance ahead. An hour had passed, and the ship was riding the same — his caulking job must have worked. By now, with the hatches off the hold would be vented. The fresh air had cleared his head, and now he was doubting his decision. “I think it’s safe to pull in the line and board,” he said to the others on the boat.

The men nodded; their heads, too, had cleared. Although they were at home on the water, being crowded on a small boat far from land was disconcerting, to say the least. Everyone wanted to board Mary Celeste and return to their normal duties. It had been a scare and nothing more — a tale to tell their children. A lesson to be learned.

“Do you want me and Gilling to start pulling?” Richardson asked.

Right then, before Briggs could answer, another squall descended. Two hundred and seventy-five yards ahead, Mary Celeste surged forward like a greyhound leaving the starting gate. The line connecting them to their home at sea went slack, then pulled hard against the stanchion and snapped. Almost instantly, the small boat began to slow, as the brigantine loaded with alcohol continued on. Richardson raised the now-limp line and stared back at Briggs.

“Row, men, row,” he shouted.

Ten days adrift and they were dying. They lost sight of Mary Celeste the first day, and all efforts to row back to St. Mary’s Island had been in vain. There had been no food and water for a week, and now when they most needed it, there was no rain.

Baby Sophia was gone, committed to the sea with Sarah soon after.

Harbens, Gilling, and Richardson were gone as well. Goodschaad had died quietly in the night and lay in the bottom of the boat, while Head had died of a heart attack but three days adrift. A broken heart, Briggs had thought to himself as soon as he realized he would never again see his bride.

“Help me with Goodschaad,” Briggs said near 10 A.M. when some strength returned.

Boz and Volkert helped him over the side.

Briggs stared at the Germans — it gave him an idea of his own condition. The skin on both men’s faces was peeling off in sheets. Their cracked and dried lips were as plump as sausages. Dried blood was below Volkert’s nose, while greenish pus was visible at the comer of Boz’s eyes.

“Kill me,” he said to the brothers quietly.

Boz looked at his brother and nodded. They were trained not to question orders from their captain. Volkert took one stiff wooden paddle, his brother another. Then, with what little strength they had left, they complied.

Two hours passed before enough strength returned to put Briggs over the side.

They died within minutes of each other the following morning.

December 4, 1872, was a sunny day. Captain Moorhouse was at the wheel of Dei Gratia. The British brigantine had passed far north of the Azores out of sight of the islands and was now tacking southeast by south oh a course to drop down into the Gibraltar Straits. Moorhouse had just taken his position, recording it as 38 degrees 20 minutes north by 17 degrees 15 minutes west, when he spotted another ship approaching six miles distant off the port bow. The time was 1:52 P.M.

“Hand me the spyglass,” Moorhouse said to Second Officer Wright.

Wright reached into a drawer and handed Moorhouse the telescoping spyglass.

With a flick of the wrist, Moorhouse opened the telescope and stared at the vessel. The main sails were furled, and no one was visible on deck. Strange, but not overly so.

“She seems to be laden, but just plodding along,” Moorhouse noted.

“Our course will converge with her shortly,” Wright noted. “Should I signal her and find out the sea conditions?”

“All right,” Moorhouse said easily.

But the first and all subsequent signals went unanswered.

A few hundred yards ahead, the ghost ship continued west at a speed of one and a half to two knots. Moorhouse had yet to see anyone come on deck, and he was beginning to worry that the entire crew of the vessel had taken ill.

He stared at the vessel through the spyglass, then made a decision.

“Down with the mainsails,” he shouted to Seamen Anderson and Johnson.

Dei Gratia slowed until she was barely bobbing on the water.

“What should we do?” Deveau, who had now come on deck, asked.

“Ready the boat,” Moorhouse ordered. “I want you and Wright to board. Take Johnson with you to man the boat.”

“Ahoy,” he shouted over a megaphone to Mary Celeste.

There was no answer.

Once in the shore boat with Johnson at the oars, the trio of men watched the hull of the ship as they rowed closer. Not a single sailor was on deck; not a single sound could be heard save the slap of water against the hull. The men felt an eerie gloom, a sense of foreboding. They read the name on the stem as they approached: Mary Celeste.

“Stay here,” Deveau said to Johnson, as the shore boat came alongside. “Mr. Wright and I will investigate.”

Tossing a hooked ladder over the gunwale, Deveau and Wright climbed aboard.

“Ahoy,” Deveau shouted once he was on the main deck.

No answer.

He and Wright walked forward. The main and lazeret hatches were lying on deck, the forward one upside down — a bad sign. Sailors are superstitious, and an upside-down hatch spelled trouble. The main staysail lay across the forward hatch across the chimney for the galley cookstove. No sailor in his right mind would allow that. The jib and the fore topmast staysail were set on a starboard tack, while the foresail and upper foretopsail had been blown away. The lower foretopsail was hanging by threads at four comers. No shore boat was visible on deck.

“Let’s go below,” Deveau said.

Climbing down the ladder, Deveau reached the lower deck. He began to open the cabin doors but found not a single soul. He and Wright searched through the cabins. In the captain’s cabin, Deveau noted that the chronometer, sextant, ship’s register, and navigation book were missing. In the mate’s cabin, Wright found the logbook and log slate. In the galley, where both men converged, there was no prepared food nor was there any food or drink on the crew’s table.

“I’ll check the stores,” Wright said.

“I’m going to check the hold,” Deveau said.

Wright found a six-month supply of food and water; Deveau a strong odor of alcohol and almost four feet of water in the hold. He began to pump the hold dry, and that was where Wright found him a few moments later.

“No one aboard,” Deveau said, “but no major problems, save this water.”

“I don’t know if you noticed it earlier when we were on deck,” Wright said, “but the binnacle was knocked loose and the compass destroyed.”

“That is most odd,” Deveau agreed. “Let’s pump out the hold, then report back to Mr. Moorhouse.”

After lowering the remaining sails and tossing out the sea anchor, they did.

“Sir,” Deveau reported, “she’s a ghost ship.”

He and Wright had just explained what they had found, and now Moorhouse was puffing on his pipe and thinking. Less than a hundred yards away, Mary Celeste, the ship without a crew, sat awaiting a decision.

“My first duty is to my ship and cargo,” Moorhouse said slowly.

“I understand,” Deveau said, “and the choice is yours. However, if you give me two seamen and some food, I think we can make Gibraltar and claim salvage rights.”

“Do you have your own navigation tools?”

Deveau had been a commanding captain in the past.

“Yes, sir,” Deveau said. “If you could spare a barometer, watch, another compass, and some food, I think we can make port.”

Sparing three men from Dei Gratia would leave Moorhouse seriously shorthanded.

“Let’s try it,” Moorhouse said at last, “but if we run into trouble we cast Mary Celeste adrift, transfer your men back, and report the loss upon reaching port.”

“Thank you, sir,” Deveau said.

“Take Lund and Anderson,” Moorhouse said. “We’ll wait here until you have the ship seaworthy.”

At 8:26 that evening, the hold was pumped and the spare sails set in place. They set off for the six-hundred-mile journey to Gibraltar just as the moon rose over the horizon. A fool’s moon lit the ghostly journey.

The weather stayed fair until the Straits of Gibraltar. Then, for the first time since taking command of Mary Celeste, Deveau lost sight of Dei Gratia in the rough seas. On Friday the thirteenth, nine days since the ghost ship had first been spotted, Deveau entered the port of Gibraltar. Dei Gratia was already there.

“Here’s your change,” the telegraph clerk said to Captain Moorhouse.

On Saturday the fourteenth of December, the disaster clerk at the New York offices of Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company received the following cablegram from Gibraltar:

The cable was the first notice in the United States that something had gone terribly wrong on Mary Celeste.

Of its crew and passengers, nothing would ever be found. The Mary Celeste itself would be put back into service, but a little over twelve years later, on January 3, 1885, the ship would be wrecked on the Reefs of the Rochelais near Miragoane, Haiti.

And while the ship was gone, the legend continued to grow.

II Paradise Gone 2001

The tale of the Mary Celeste makes the hair rise on the nape of the neck. She is enshrined as the most famous ghost ship in the history of the sea. There are other accounts of ships being found abandoned, their crews having vanished, but none has the fascination and the intrigue that fire the imagination like Mary Celeste. She still wears the crown of haunted ships.

I was drawn into her web at least twenty years ago when I asked Bob Fleming, NUMA’s researcher in Washington, D.C., to probe the archives for her ultimate end. Had she sunk during a storm while on a voyage, or had she simply outlived her usefulness and ended up a derelict in the mudflats of some port’s backwater, along with so many of her sister ships? Only a few records, and fewer yet of more than a hundred books written since her tragedy, held the answer.

Mary Celeste was sailed for another twelve years and two months after being abandoned in the Azores in 1872. During this time, she went through a number of different owners. She set sail on her final passage from New York to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December of 1884, under the command of Captain Gilman Parker of Wmthrop, Massachusetts. On January 3, 1885, she was sailing on a southeasterly course through a narrow channel between the Haitian southern peninsula and Gonâve Island. The sky was empty of clouds, and the seas no higher than a man’s knee.

Rising ominously in the middle of the channel was Rochelais Reef, a small rocky mountain rising from the seafloor, its peak capped with thick coral. The reef was plainly marked on the chart and sharply visible to the helmsman. He set a new course around the reef and was beginning to turn the spokes of the wheel when Captain Parker gripped him roughly by the arm.

“Belay that! Stay on course.”

“But, sir, we’ll run onto the reef for sure,” protested the helmsman.

“Damn you!” Parker snapped. “Do as you’re ordered.”

Knowing the ship was headed for certain disaster, the helmsman, out of fear of punishment, steered for the reef dead ahead. At high tide, the menacing Rochelais Reef barely rose above the surface of the water, as the once-beautiful ship came closer to what would be her grave. The helmsman gave the captain one last desperate look, but Parker remained resolute and nodded straight ahead where the waves were rolling over the reef.

Mary Celeste struck dead center of Rochelais Reef. Her keel and hull planking cut a gouge through the coral, but the sharp spines cut through her copper-sheathed bottom and ripped into her bowels, sending tons of water inside her lower decks. Her bow drove up onto the reef as her stern settled beneath the water. In her death throes, Mary Celeste groaned horribly, as her hull and timbers were crushed by her momentum into the unyielding coral. At last, the agonized sounds died across the water and the ship became silent.

Calmly, Captain Parker sent his crew into the boats and ordered them to row to the nearby port of Miragoane, Haiti, not more than twelve miles to the south. Unfortunately for Captain Parker, Mary Celeste did not immediately sink. It would not be long before an inspection of the wrecked hulk and its cargo revealed that it carried little more than fish and rubber shoes, which were not the expensive cargo listed in the manifest. The vessel, as it turned out, was exorbitantly insured to the tune of $25,000, far above the value of the ship and its cargo. Today, we call it an insurance scam. Back then, it was referred to as barratry, and was an offense punishable under U.S. law and carried the death penalty.

It seemed that Parker’s bad luck had no end. Kingman Putnam, a New York surveyor, happened to be in Haiti at the time and was hired by the insurance underwriters to conduct an examination. His examination of the waterlogged cargo was instrumental in Parker’s arrest when he returned to New York. Parker was tried in court, but the jury hung, and another trial was immediately ordered by the court. True to form, Parker died before a new trial could be held.

Mary Celeste soon disappeared into the coral that grew over her timbers and buried her decks. Despite her previous notoriety, she died neglected and forgotten, her drama played out on a barren reef in Haiti, perhaps in revenge by the ghosts of her vanished crew.

Armed with enough research data to give it a good shot, I began making plans to charter a boat and sail to Rochelais Reef. I contacted Mr. Mark Sheldon, who had purchased my favorite old search boat, Arvor III. This was the vessel I had sailed on when searching for the Bonhomme Richard in 1980. I chartered her again in 1984, when my team and I encountered all sorts of wild adventures in the North Sea, finding sixteen shipwrecks while losing a war of words with the French navy in Cherbourg, France, who refused to allow us to search for the Confederate raider Alabama.

I had planned to meet the boat in Kingston, Jamaica, and then run across the Jamaica Channel and around Cape Dame Marie to Rochelais Reef, about a two-day trip. Unfortunately, Sheldon became ill and was not available for charter until the following year.

John Davis of ECO-NOVA Productions then stepped in and offered to set up an expedition to conduct the search. Since John and his team are from Nova Scotia and Mary Celeste was built in Nova Scotia, they had a strong incentive to find the wreck. They were also enthusiastic about making a Sea Hunters documentary about the ship.

In April of 2001, John set up the logistics, chartered a boat, and sent me round-trip airline tickets to Haiti. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the evening and was mildly surprised to see no one there to meet me. I hailed a shuttle van and headed for the Sheraton Hotel, then walked alone into the lobby, to the surprise of Davis. He had sent a friend to meet me, who had somehow missed picking me out of the deplaning crowd.

With a face like mine, I wondered how I could be lost in the crowd. I began to wonder if this was the start of an ordeal. I was sure my guardian angel had gone on vacation and an evil demon taken his place, especially when I found I’d forgotten my passport. How’s that for dementia?

John didn’t give it a thought. “You’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. “The Haitians won’t care.”

Images of being thrown into a Haitian jail streamed through my mind. I called my wife, Barbara, and asked her to send the passport through the airline’s courier service. Just to play it safe, she faxed the pertinent pages to the hotel, at least so I had some kind of identification for Haitian immigration if for some reason the passport did not arrive.

Naturally, the airplane with my passport was late, which wasn’t too disastrous. I still had almost an hour before our scheduled departure. Exotic Lynx Airlines, our air carrier to Haiti, had other plans. Unexpectedly, the clerk at the counter announced that because all passengers were present, the plane would be taking off an hour early. I do believe Lynx belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records. When I bemoaned my lack of passport, the clerk laughed it off and said, “They won’t care.”

Where had I heard that before?

Somehow I didn’t relish the idea of entering into a third world country that had revolutionaries stalking the hills, without proper credentials. Left with no choice, I arranged with Craig Dirgo, who was living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, to pick up my passport when it finally arrived.

The flight was on a nineteen-passenger DeHavilland prop plane. It was uneventful except for a huge black man who resembled Mike Tyson seated in back of me. He was terrified of flying and clutched the back of my seat every time we hit turbulence. As I looked down on the islands surrounded by turquoise waters, I had dreams of arriving at a sun-drenched tropical paradise with local natives playing marimbas and steel drums while passing around piña coladas. The bubble was burst as the plane touched down at a weed-infested airstrip and I was jolted back to reality. There was no terminal, only a bunch of dilapidated shacks strung around a dusty parking lot filled with battered old French and Japanese autos.

We disembarked and headed for the immigration shack. Thankfully, my perceptive eye noted that my suitcase and John’s bag had been stowed in the nose section of the plane when we left Fort Lauderdale. I turned and saw that the Haitian baggage handler, after removing the passengers’ luggage from the rear of the plane, was pushing his load, minus our bags, on a cart across the field. With John following, I returned to the airplane, unlatched the locks on the nose section, lifted it up, and removed our bags. No one interfered. If we hadn’t snagged our luggage from the plane’s nose, they’d have been on their way back to Fort Lauderdale in another twenty minutes.

I smiled my best smile, and the immigration official graciously stamped my fax copy passport and waved me through.

“See,” said Davis, “didn’t I tell you? A piece of cake.”

“Now the trick is to get out,” I muttered, wondering what I was getting myself into.

Davis had arranged for us to stay at the Cormier Plage Hotel, a tropical paradise in a cove farther up the coast not far from the border with the Dominican Republic. The resort is owned by Jean Claude and Kathy Dicquemare, who had lived in Haiti over twenty-five years. The plan was for Davis and me to stay overnight until the boat containing the rest of the team arrived from Fort Lauderdale by sea. After clearing customs, we were met by Jean Claude’s nephew, whose name unfortunately escapes me. We came out into a mob scene stomping up a cloud of dust. There were hundreds of Haitians milling about the airport — doing what, I have no idea.

We were stormed by little boys demanding a dollar. Considering the poverty of the nation, these kids don’t mess around. In most countries I’ve visited, the little beggar boys and girls usually ask for coins.

After throwing our bags in the back of a little Honda SUV, we drove through the port city of Cape Haitian. I’ve seen squalor before, but nothing I’ve ever seen compared to this. The worst slums in the hills above Rio de Janeiro looked like Beverly Hills compared to this place. The streets were in total disrepair, with battered old cars, some moving, some parked and stripped, cluttering the landscape. Buildings were crumbling like they were rotting from within. Any place else, they would have been condemned years before. Mobs of people wandered the streets and sidewalks, as if searching for something that didn’t exist. We passed a huge ten-acre dump, where hordes of people were shoveling garbage and trash into plastic bags and carting it home in wheelbarrows. It was not a pretty sight.

We finally left the self-destructing town and traveled over the mountain on a road that had not been graded in ten years — no, make that twenty. We passed shanties with scrawny chickens pecking barren ground, long lines of people at a single water faucet, waiting to fill their plastic jugs, staring at us as if we’d just flown down from the moon. At seeing their thin bodies, I began to feel self-conscious about being twenty pounds overweight.

The potholes looked like the size of meteor craters, and the ruts were as deep as the trenches in World War I. Yet the landscape was scenic and quite beautiful. The few areas on the mountain where the trees had not been cut down were quite picturesque. I have found it easy to imagine Haiti as a beautiful nation in the years that have passed.

We finally dropped down into a delightful cove with hundreds of palm trees. Village shacks lined one side of the road, and the children were playing happily while their mothers washed clothes in a stream flowing down from the mountains. Jean Claude’s nephew turned the truck through the gate of the resort and we met Jean Claude and Kathy, a quiet lady who obviously ran the show behind the scenes. Jean Claude is a genuine character — someone that everyone should have as a friend. Though we were both pushing seventy, he was twice as active as I was. He dove at least once every day, and often two or three times. He kept a record that revealed he had already slipped beneath the waves 165 times. The term half manlhalf fish applied to Jean Claude.

The hotel was very charming, with neatly cut lawns, a long sandy beach, and white buildings with a restaurant and a bar under a beautifully crafted thatched roof of palm fronds. The only drawback is that the coral comes up to within a few feet of the beach, and though it makes for great snorkeling, you’d scrape your chest off if you tried to swim in it. The food was gourmet quality. Seven different lobster dishes cooked in different ways and tinged in exotic sauces were only a small part of the menu. Then on to the bar for after-dinner drinks and hours of telling tales of shipwrecks and the people who search for them.

The boat showed up the next day. Owned by Allan Gardner of Highland Beach, Florida, Ella Warley II is a fifty-four-foot steel-hulled vessel specially designed by Allan for underwater research. She carries the latest dive and detection gear with state-of-the-art electronics. Allan is a very successful businessman who owns a large computer technology company. When not directing his corporate empire, he spends his time searching for shipwrecks in the Caribbean. My kind of guy.

Allan is a truly nice guy with the patience of Job who smiles constantly and, after a few shots of scotch, laughs continuously. Joining him on the voyage from Fort Lauderdale was the team from ECO-NOVA, including Mike Fletcher, master diver, and underwater photographers Robert Guertin and Lawrence Taylor — all friendly and good-hearted guys with enough esprit de corps to turn a grueling expedition into a proud moment of achievement and success.

John and I boarded a boat from a dock in a lagoon used by Carnival Cruise Lines ships to send their passengers to a tropical cove to enjoy a day of sun and surf. Like Allan, Jean Claude generously gave his time to come along, because he knew Haiti and could converse with the natives in Creole — a handy arrangement, as it turned out.

The voyage to Rochelais Reef began early the next morning. The seas were very rough, but I fortified myself with a bottle of Porfido tequila I had brought along for just such an occasion. Though a fairly stable boat, Ella Warley II rolled with the punches. With her flat bottom, she makes the perfect dive platform for underwater survey, but she’s not exactly what you’d call a luxury yacht. She was built for a purpose without the niceties of plush furnishings, a deep keel, or stabilizers. Plus she suffered from heads that always clogged when you flushed them.

Sleeping accommodations were austere. Allan, as owner, had the only stateroom. Two of the team slept in bunks in the wheelhouse. Two slept on the deck outside. Jean Claude and I shared the main cabin, me on a small foldout couch, he on the bench of the dining table.

We were both outcasts from the others because we snored. Jean Claude began from ten to two, while I took up the trumpet calls from two to six. Now I know what my poor wife goes through.

But our seven-man crew was tough. No one ever suffered seasickness or complained, except me.

We anchored for the night on the northwest tip of Haiti. The next morning, we sailed around Gonâve Island and reached Rochelais Reef by midmorning. As we approached, I was peering through binoculars into the distance where the reef was supposed to rise. An image materialized, and I adjusted the focus.

I turned to Allan and John and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there is a village with huts sitting on the reef.”

Forty-five minutes later, we reached Rochelais Reef and anchored a hundred yards offshore. This place was an anthropologist’s dream. The story is that about eighty years ago, two brothers decided to take up residence on the reef to hunt conch. Over the decades, more native Haitians moved onto the reef, until now it is an island four feet above the water, built from more than a million conch shells. There are about fifty shacks erected from every scrap of flotsam you can imagine. We estimated the population at about two hundred. There wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen. The sun beat down unmercifully on the conch-shell landscape. The nearest land was twelve miles away, and all the food and water had to be brought in by dugout canoes. We could not believe human beings could survive in such harsh conditions, much less spend their entire lives there.

John and his film crew, along with Jean Claude, took the thirteen-foot Boston Whaler over to the man-made island sitting atop the shallow reef. Naturally, the natives were curious about our presence. Jean Claude did not tell them we were looking for a shipwreck. They might have mistaken our intent and thought we were after treasure, which could have caused problems. He simply told them we were making a movie and pacified them about our intrusion by giving them ten gallons of gas for their outboard motors and a case of Coca-Cola.

We had studied the oldest accurate chart of the reef dating to 1910 and laid it over a modem chart. The reef had not changed. According to both charts, there was a pinnacle labeled “Vandalia Rock” on the southern end of the reef, but the natives assured us that no such rock existed. This would cause extra time in research later, exploring the possibility that a ship named Vandalia had also grounded on the reef.

The wind picked up, and Allan took the boat into a small bay on Gonâve Island, where we settled in for the night. With an early start the next morning, Allan dropped his cesium marine magnetometer over the side and began circling the reef for any magnetic anomalies. From fifty yards offshore, only one ten-gamma reading showed on his computer monitor. It came from the dead center of Rochelais Reef, where Mary Celeste was reported to have crushed her hull on the coral. The site also perfectly matched the direction a ship sailing from the southwest would have met the reef.

My demon must have taken a break.

Mike Fletcher suited up and dropped over the side, followed by Robert Guertin with his underwater video camera. The rest of us sat on the stem of the boat, soaking up the tropical breeze, wondering if Mike had found anything. Half an hour later, he returned to the boat and threw some copper sheathing, ballast rocks, and old wood with brass spikes driven through them onto the deck.

We had a shipwreck right where Mary Celeste was supposed to lie. But without finding the bell, which was no doubt salvaged, with the ship’s name in raised letters in bronze or inscribed ceramics, or some other artifact to identify her, we could only speculate. Everyone dove and retrieved what pitifully few artifacts we could find. The coral was some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in fifty years of diving, but I wished I weren’t there. What remained of the ship’s timbers was deeply buried in the calcareous growth that had rapidly buried the ship. After 116 years, the ship was entombed in an impenetrable burial shroud.

We found part of the anchor chain and an anchor. I tried to remove a bar from the coral, but it was stuck fast. Jean Claude and Mike brought up enough wood to fill a fair-sized bucket. And we removed some loose artifacts that were embedded in the sand. Every item was videotaped in position, tagged, and catalogued. Once the team returned home, the wood would be sent to laboratories to determine a date and source. It’s incredible how science and technology can tell you how old the wood is within years, as well as what part of the world it originally came from.

The ballast stones would also show characteristic mineralogy and texture that can identify the location from which they were extracted. They had to come from either the Palisades above the Hudson River, where Mary Celeste was rebuilt during the summer of 1872 in New York, or the mountains or shores of Nova Scotia, where she was originally constructed and then launched under the name Amazon. The brass spikes might give only an approximate age, but a clue might come from the copper sheathing. Whatever the case, it would take time to find the answers we sought.

Satisfied we could do no more, the anchor was pulled, and we bid a fond farewell to Rochelais Reef, now affectionately known as Conch Island, then set a course back to the Cormier Plage Hotel. We had a few rough hours battling choppy seas, but it actually became relaxing after a while. I was transfixed, staring at the color of the water in this part of the Caribbean. It was not the blue-green turquoise of shallow water around the reefs and islands. This was deep water, the fathometer showing three thousand feet to the bottom, and the color was a deep violet, almost purple.

Two days later, we docked near the hotel, amused at having the land seeming to sway around us after seven days without stepping foot off the boat. Everyone relaxed on the beach and in the hotel bar and talked long into the night about what we had found. The following morning, the whole team departed for Fort Lauderdale by boat while I made arrangements to fly out later that afternoon. We said our good-byes and I took a shower, packed my bags, and breathed a sigh of relief that I was escaping Haiti without being bitten by a ring-necked fuzz-wort or infected with Haitian jungle fever.

I sallied forth, expecting a car to carry me to the airport, but the local police thought Jean Claude had failed to pay his license fee and confiscated his Land Rover. I was pointed to a battered, dust-laden little Nissan pickup.

Any port in a storm.

One of the workers at Jean Claude’s hotel drove me over the obstacle course road to Cape Haitian, picking up hitchhikers along the way and then throwing them all around the bed of the truck before they would pound on the roof to be let out. Once we reached the city, I noticed it was the same filthy mess, with nonexistent pavement, traffic surging nowhere, and pollution that would have sent an environmentalist into cardiac arrest. My only apprehension now was whether my fax passport would get me passed through immigration.

We arrived at the Lynx Airlines boarding shack. If I’ve ever made a wise move in my life, it was when I told the driver to wait just in case the flight was canceled. I entered the shack, counting the minutes until I would be in the wild blue yonder to the U.S. of A.

“You’re too late,” said the attendant behind a counter I didn’t dare lean on or touch with my bare hands.

“What do you mean I’m late?” I replied indignantly, naively thinking she was kidding me. I pointed at the time printed on my ticket. “This says departure time is twelve-thirty. It is now only eleven-twenty. I have an hour and ten minutes.”

She glanced at the ticket and shrugged. “That’s Miami time.”

“You don’t print your tickets with local arrival or departure time?” I was beginning to panic.

“No, you should have been here an hour ago. Now it’s too late. The plane is taking off in five minutes.”

“Let me talk to the pilots,” I pleaded in desperation.

She nodded and accompanied me out through a weed-covered field to the airplane, where the pilots were standing with hands in their pockets. I pleaded my case to no avail.

The chief pilot shrugged. “You’ll never get through immigration in time.”

“Let me try?” I begged.

Then the pilot and copilot grinned like the Artful Dodger and Oliver, after having adroitly picked a pocket. “Not a chance. We’re about to take off.”

There I stood, like a kid who’d had his bicycle stolen. My only salvation came from the airline attendant, who promised me a seat on the next day’s flight. “You get here two hours early” she admonished me. “You hear?”

I heard.

Never in my life have I felt so miserable. Thank God I had the foresight to ask the driver to wait for me. If he had driven off and left me stranded in the mob at the airport, I’d probably have been torn limb from limb for my Nike sneakers.

Now it was time for another ride through the wretchedness and over the road to hell. I felt like Roy Scheider transporting nitroglycerin through the jungles in the movie Wages of Fear. Distress turned into rage at having been abandoned in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. If I had known that while I was in Haiti an American businessman had been shot and killed and two others taken hostage, I would have really been depressed.

Back to my room, where I lay in bed that afternoon, staring at the whirling blades of the overhead fans. A lonely meal, and then I headed for the bar, where I was lucky enough to join the company of some young Americans who worked for Carnival Cruise Lines over in the cove where the big ships docked. I enjoyed the conversation and several beers before retiring for the night with visions of my own bed dancing in my head.

No fooling around this time. I hauled the driver, who spoke almost no English, to the truck and gestured at the steering wheel. He got the drift from the devil expression on my face. By now you know the routine to reach the airport. This time, however, there was no stopping and picking up hitchhikers. If the driver even thought about stopping, I stomped my foot on his foot and mashed the gas pedal to the floor. We jolted over the road like a race car in an endurance rally.

By now, with lots of practice, I was immune to the misery and poverty. Watching people taking home garbage no longer offended me. That was simply their life and the way they had to live it. Perhaps someday, when their internal struggles are over, the country will return to the lovely paradise it once was.

I burst into the Lynx shack two hours early. The attendant smiled and gave me a boarding pass. One hurdle down, immigration to go. There I sat in an unventilated shack in the middle of the day with eighteen Haitians, mostly women and children. They do like perfume and cologne. I passed the time reading a book on the battle of Gettysburg and realized I didn’t have it so bad after all.

The scary part was coming up. I had been told the night before that if you didn’t have a valid passport, the airline pilots would not allow you to board. It seems they’re none too happy if American immigration officials won’t let you into the country. Not only were they liable for a hefty fine, but they had to transport you back to Haiti at their expense. I began to hope that being a hotshot author might carry an ounce of weight.

At twelve noon on the dot, the plane’s engines could be heard through the cracks in the walls as it landed and taxied toward the shack. After a few minutes, a blond-haired pilot opened the door and stepped into the waiting room. He walked right up to me and handed me an envelope.

“I hope to enjoy your book,” he said, smiling.

I stared at the envelope and looked up questioningly. “Book?”

“Yes, your friend gave me one of your books in Fort Lauderdale. He figured I’d know you by the author’s photo on the book jacket.”

Craig Dirgo, bless his heart, had driven to the airport and given my passport to the pilot to give to me. The sun burst through the clouds. Then came the sound of trumpets, a drum-roll, and harp music. Home was just over the horizon at last.

Haitian immigration whisked me through, and I ran, not walked, out to the airplane. Then there was a wait, while an official riffled through every passenger’s luggage. I’m sure he wished he had a different job when it came to my bag. It was filled with two-week-old laundry. We guys are like that. Why do laundry when you have someone waiting to do it at home?

I don’t know if I was ever happier than when the wheels left the ground. For the next hour, I listened to the beat of the engines, making sure they were hitting on all cylinders. I couldn’t conceive of a mechanical problem that would force us to return to the bedlam of Cape Haitian.

After a short hop, we landed on Caicos Island to refuel and were asked to leave the airplane and wait in the terminal as a safety precaution. Simple Simon Cussler, of course, walks through the wrong door into the heart of the terminal, finds the bar, and has a cold beer. Figuring it’s time to go back, I walked toward the exit door and was promptly stopped by a security guard the size of a redwood tree.

“Can’t go out there,” he said sternly.

“I have to get back to my airplane.”

“You’ll have to go through immigration and customs.”

The bile rose in my throat. Things just couldn’t go wrong now. Not after I’d been over the streets and roads of hell. My demon was a stubborn rascal. I was considering making a break for it, when the blond pilot walked by. A few words and he talked the guard into letting me accompany him to the plane. I wondered if my ordeal would ever end.

I feel sorry for the people who never know the feeling of joy and bliss that comes from returning to the United States. You truly have to travel outside our borders to appreciate the advantages we all too often take for granted. We landed, and I smiled.

Slapping my passport down with glee at the immigration booth, I was given a green light. “Welcome back to the United States, Mr. Cussler,” said the agent, with a friendly smile. “I read all your books.”

It sure was nice to be home.

Upon reaching the lobby of the terminal, I was surprised to see no Craig. A German like me, he prides himself on following schedules. I was sure he was supposed to meet me. I was looking around for a telephone when he strolled by, sipping a cup of coffee. He looked at me queerly.

“You’re an hour early,” he said, taking a sip.

I actually hugged him, I was so glad to see someone I knew.

“Lynx Air has a fetish for departing and arriving early,” I explained.

Craig stared at me. “Good God, boss,” he said slowly, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What in the hell did they do to you?”

“I’ll explain it to you someday,” I said. “Right now, why don’t you take me to the hotel?”

Craig grabbed my bags and started walking to his car. “We’ll go get you checked in,” he said slyly, “then there’s a Haitian restaurant I’ve been wanting to try — they say the jerked goat is tasty.”

After checking into the hotel, we went to a good old American steak house. Craig had a sirloin, I had a chopped steak. Chopped steak just like my mother used to make.

In a parting shot, before my guardian angel returned, the demon took away my first-class seat on the flight to Phoenix because I was a day late. I couldn’t have cared less. I was finally going home to my lovely wife and adobe home. That was all that mattered. Besides, coach was only partially full, and I had three seats to myself.

We may never be able to prove 100 percent that the shipwreck we found was Mary Celeste. In a court of law, our evidence would be labeled circumstantial. Still, we are confident the shipwreck found in the coral is she, for a number of reasons.

Alan Guffman of Geomarine Associates in Nova Scotia coordinated the scientific testing of the wood and ballast stones. The process of rock geochemistry and radiometric dating is complicated, but the results proved that the ballast showed the characteristic mineralogy and texture of the North Mountains basalt of Nova Scotia.

The wood was identified as southern pine, often used in shipbuilding in New York, where Mary Celeste was rebuilt and enlarged. Some was white pine, which comes from the northeast United States and Canada. One piece of wood made everyone happy. It was yellow birch, which comes from the maritime provinces, including Nova Scotia.

It was all coming together.

James Delgado, noted marine archaeologist and director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, identified the copper sheathing as Muntz metal, a yellow alloy of three parts copper, two parts zinc, a substance that came into general use as hull protection against shipworms after 1860.

We were getting closer.

While the artifacts were being analyzed, I tackled the job of researching other potential wrecks that might have run onto the coral of Rochelais Reef. We had to prove we hadn’t found the wrong wreck. I hired researchers here and in Europe to scour the archives. Insurance companies cooperated, particularly Lloyd’s of London. No stone was left unturned. No records of shipwrecks were ignored. The results came back positive.

A ship named Vandalia had indeed met her end in Haiti a hundred years ago. But she had run aground at Port-de-Paix, a bay sixty miles from Rochelais Reef, and she was later pulled off and scrapped. The only other wreck that was recorded in the same time zone was a steamship that burned in the port of Miragoane twelve miles away. The extensive research project proved conclusively that Mary Celeste was the only ship known to have run aground on Rochelais Reef and stayed there.

Allan Gardner, John Davis and his ECO-NOVA team, and I could now say with a great measure of confidence that the grave of Mary Celeste had been found. The ghost ship’s story has been drawn to a fitting end.