An expedition has discovered the final resting place of the ship at the heart of one of the world's most puzzling and enduring mysteries, the Mary Celeste. A group headed by the author Clive Cussler and film producer John Davis said it had discovered the ghost ship's remains lying on the Rochelais reef, off the coast of Haiti. The ship was found sailing off the Azores in 1872 with no-one aboard. The captain, his wife and two-year-old daughter were inexplicably missing. The team are expected to announce further details of their discovery and display artefacts recovered from the wreck by divers on Thursday. The wooden vessel is almost completely covered by coral, which made tracking it down all the more difficult. "After her eerie abandonment, the ship sailed under different owners for 12 years, until her last captain loaded her with a cargo of cheap rubber boots and cat food before deliberately sinking her," Mr Davis said. Insurance fraud Mr Davis said the captain had tried to scuttle the ship by running her into the Rochelais reef off the coast of Haiti, but failed when the ship grounded on the coral and refused to sink. The skipper then attempted to file "an exorbitant insurance claim for an exotic cargo that never existed," Mr Davis said. After insurance inspectors investigated and discovered the ship's actual cargo, the captain and his first mate were convicted on charges of what was then known as "barratry". Dr Cussler said the fate of the original crew of the Mary Celeste looks likely to remain a mystery. The best-selling author has helped to lead expeditions which have located nearly 70 historic shipwrecks, including the US Confederate submarine Hunley and the Carpathia, the ship that rescued survivors from the Titanic. Chequered history The Mary Celeste was built in Nova Scotia in 1860 and originally named the Amazon. She was 103ft (31.3 metres) long, displaced 280 tons and registered as a half-brig. Over the next decade she was involved in a series of accidents and mishaps at sea, and had a number of owners. | | Mary Celeste Eventually she was bought, refitted and re-registered in America. Her new captain was Benjamin Briggs, aged 37, a master with three previous commands. On 7 November 1872 the ship sailed from New York with Captain Briggs, his wife, young daughter and a crew of eight on board bound for Genoa in Italy, with a cargo of raw alcohol. None of the people on board were ever seen again. A little over a month after she left port the deserted ship was discovered drifting off the Azores by the British cargo ship Dei Gratia, and towed to Gibraltar. Mystery There, a British board of inquiry ruled out piracy or foul play due to the lack of signs of any violence, but investigators were unable to determine what had happened to the people on board. The mystery did not come to the public's attention until 1884 when Arthur Conan Doyle writing under a pseudonym published a story about a derelict ship called the "Marie Celeste". His account retold the factual events of the Mary Celeste, but added fictional and provocative detail to enhance the mystery and appeal capture the public's imagination. Since then and to this day however, no two accounts of the story are the same. Explanations for the mystery have ranged from a mutiny, piracy or insurance fraud, to underwater seismic disturbances and even alien abduction. Many people believe the crew perished after taking to a lifeboat fearing the ship's cargo may have been about to explode. |
