“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.

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.