On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting
through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of
struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo--and not a trace of
the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What happened on board
the ghost ship Mary Celeste has baffled and tantalized the world for
130 years. In his stunning new book, award-winning journalist Brian
Hicks plumbs the depths of this fabled nautical mystery and finally
uncovers the truth.
The Mary Celeste was cursed as soon as she was launched on the Bay of
Fundy in the spring of 1861. Her first captain died before completing
the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed and sank an English
brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm drove her ashore at Cape
Breton. But somehow the ship was recovered and refitted, and in the
autumn of 1872 she fell to the reluctant command of a seasoned mariner
named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It was Briggs who was at the helm when
the Mary Celeste sailed into history.
In Brian Hicks's skilled hands, the story of the Mary Celeste becomes
the quintessential tale of men lost at sea. Hicks vividly recreates the
events leading up to the crew's disappearance and then unfolds the
complicated and bizarre aftermath--the dark suspicions that fell on the
officers of the ship that intercepted her; the farcical Admiralty Court
salvage hearing in Gibraltar; the wild myths that circulated after Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle published a thinly disguised short story
sensationalizing the mystery. Everything from a voodoo curse to an alien
abduction has been hauled out to explain the fate of the Mary Celeste.
But, as Brian Hicks reveals, the truth is actually grounded in the
combined tragedies of human error and bad luck. The story of the Mary
Celeste acquired yet another twist in 2001, when a team of divers
funded by novelist Clive Cussler located the wreck in a coral reef off
Haiti.
Written with the suspense of a thriller and the vivid accuracy of the
best popular history, Ghost Ship tells the unforgettable true story of
the most famous and most fascinating maritime mystery of all time.
