Mary Celeste (1873): Ship returns to trade — Section 1063: Ship returns to trade

Mary Celeste is the type derelict: a boarded brigantine, a missing boat, a suspicious law officer and a century of stories that added pirates Conan Doyle never found in the Gibraltar paper. Deveau’s boarding notes, later read in court, described a ship that could still be pumped and sailed. Sails were set in a disordered way. The main peak halyard was parted. There was water in the hold, not enough in the salvage testimony to explain a panic by itself. The chronometer, sextant and some papers were missing; the logbook remained. Nine of the alcohol barrels were later reported empty or leaking.

The people were gone. Food and belongings suggested they had not packed for a long departure. The missing boat is the central physical fact. Whatever they feared, they left a vessel that reached Gibraltar under a prize crew. That mismatch — a livable ship and an empty deck — is the mystery the court could not close.

Frederick Solly-Flood, Attorney-General at Gibraltar, treated the derelict as possible crime: mutiny, murder, or a staged wreck for insurance. He had the hull examined, including cuts on the bow that surveyors later judged to be old or ordinary. He suspected Dei Gratia’s men. The court, sitting in early 1873, did not adopt a murder theory. It awarded salvage — a reduced sum that still recognised Morehouse’s risk — and left the disappearance unexplained.