Benjamin Spooner Briggs
Master, Mary Celeste
A Massachusetts captain with a temperate reputation. He sailed with his wife and child. No evidence in the salvage file shows he planned to leave the ship for fraud.
The missing were a captain’s family and seven seamen. The living file is the boarding crew and a colonial law officer.
Pirate names from later fiction are not in the 1873 docket.
People
Sarah and Sophia Briggs
Captain’s family
Sarah Elizabeth Briggs and two-year-old Sophia were on the passenger roll. Their presence is one reason later writers rejected a casual mutiny story.
David Morehouse
Master, Dei Gratia
Sighted the derelict and sent a boarding party. Solly-Flood suspected him; the court still paid salvage. He is a finder, not a proven plotter.
Oliver Deveau
First mate, Dei Gratia
Wrote the boarding description the hearing relied on and helped sail Mary Celeste to Gibraltar. His notes are the core eyewitness paper.
Frederick Solly-Flood
Attorney-General, Gibraltar
Pursued crime theories — cuts on the bow, possible foul play — that surveyors and the court did not convert into a finding.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Author of the 1884 story
Not a witness. His Marie Celeste fiction became, for English readers, more vivid than Deveau’s deposition.
Boarders and a law officer left paper. The ten people left a missing boat.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.