Logbook and slate
Document
The last slate entry of 25 November 1872 near Santa Maria is the final writing from Briggs’s company. It records weather and position, not alarm.
Evidence quality is moderate for a nineteenth-century salvage and poor for a cause-of-loss.
What survives is good enough to reject several fictions and not good enough to name a reason the boat was launched.
Exhibits
Deveau’s boarding notes
Testimony
The first-mate account of sails, water, missing boat and remaining stores. It is the primary scene description.
Cargo survey
Inquiry
Most alcohol barrels intact; a few empty or leaking. Enough to feed a vapour-fear theory, not enough to prove one.
Gibraltar salvage record
Archive
Solly-Flood’s questions, surveyors’ replies and a reduced award. The docket is the legal heart of the case.
Hull examination
Physical
Bow marks that the attorney-general hoped were violence and that later survey reading treated as ordinary wear or old damage.
Conan Doyle’s 1884 text
Literary
A source about English myth, not about 1872. It renamed the ship and added events the court never heard.
How strong is the record?
Cause of abandonment15
No finding. Vapour, weather and a lost boat remain hypotheses.
Salvage-court paper70
Depositions and surveys survive in published and archival form.
Fate of the ten people5
No verified boat landing, wreckage of the yawl or remains.
Fiction versus file40
Historians can separate Doyle from Deveau; popular English often cannot.
The strongest evidence is evidence of an empty, still-sailable ship. It is not evidence of a crime that a court would take.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.