The Mary Celeste: Sea-riously What Happened?

**Discussion begins at 4:50**

Picture a ship drifting silently across the Atlantic Ocean.  Its sails are raised.  It's cargo is untouched.  There are no signs of violence, no evidence of a struggle, and yet every single person on board has vanished without a trace.  In December of 1872, the merchant brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered adrift between the Azores and Portugal.  The ship itself appeared remarkably seaworthy.  Food and water were still stocked.  Personal belongings remained behind.  Even the crew's valuables were untouched.  But Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his young daughter, and the rest of the crew were nowhere to be found.  For more than 150 years, the mystery of the Mary Celeste has captivated sailors, historians, and conspiracy theorists alike.  Was it piracy?  Mutiny?  A sea monster?  Alien abduction?  Or was the truth something even more unsettling?

Transcript

Hey, guys. Hey, guys. Hey.
Kait is back from her sea excursion. Helping to map the seafloor. Yeah.
Did you see anything wild? I saw some blue whales.
They're very mysterious.
Are you gonna tell us about them soon? I am. I think about that story where they put like a tracker on a whale.
Yeah. And then all of a sudden, it like dropped to the bottom of the sea, but the temperature didn't drop. You know what?
This might actually have just been a real gothney. But for some reason, I have the story in my mind that they were like, what it came down to was that something had eaten the whale.
And so it's like the fact that there is a creature, a creature in the ocean large enough to prey on a whale. So is it time for our drink check?
Drink check.
In honor of the summer. Yes. How's the weather, Kait?
Yes, I'm reporting live from the Virginia. The weather has been very nice. 80s, mid-humidity, I would say.
Anyway, summer is here. We're at the pool. We're loving it.
Yes. So Mark's today. Colleen's got a little tahini on her rim.
I got some sea salt on my rim. Kait went naked, rimless.
But cheers, guys.
No rimming for me. I only like tequila and a drink like this. Yes.
I'm not a tequila person, and I love margaritas. I feel like tequilas are pretty sweet, and I don't love sweet drinks. Margarita is the sweetest I will get, I think, in a drink.
My worst drinking experiences were all tequila. My worst drinking experience was with Bud Light Lime. I drank six Bud Light Limes in an hour.
Oh my God. Playing Circle of Death, then got into a car, smoked a cigarette, and then threw up on the side of the street. The cigarette did me in, but I could never drink Bud Light Lime again.
Bud Light Lime in bulk is such a weird, like a Bud Light Lime binge. You have like beer-pota AO. That was the party I went to.
It was there. We played Circle of Death. I drank it.
Apology.
Yeah.
Well, I would say, guys, don't go out into the woods for a month and then come back and do tequila shots. That's not going to end well.
I would say, don't go on a deployment and come back having not had any alcohol and drink cheap warm tequila shots from Wet Willy's. Oh yeah, Wet Willy's. That's a blast from a pass.
Yeah. And I would say, don't celebrate a graduation with warm tequila shots because your friends are all dumping in the corner plants. Yeah, and you're taking because no one talked to you.
So as a result, tequila to Marg only, please. But Bourbon Boy does not do tequila for the same reasons as Megan, which is why I always say, I'm married of someone who is exactly Megan and Colleen put together. All right.
Well, shall we get into it?
Yes.
I'm covering for Kate here. We were going to alternate, rotate in Kate, but Kate has been in survival mode with the end of the school year.
Yes.
Beginning of summer child activities, right? It's just been. What's like the intersection of the summer activity?
Yes.
But the end of the year parties?
And the end of the spring activities. It was like everything aligned in two weeks of craziness. But we're almost there.
I have a end of the year party for Joey tomorrow. We're almost there. Friday is a half day.
Then we're in to summer. So we're going to let Kait get through the end of the school year. And then you're going to hit us with some whale facts.
Whales.
4:40
Mary Celeste Mystery
So in the meantime, this is kind of giving the vibes of my lighthouse story. So I have like another weird disappearance maritime mystery for you. Today, we're talking about the Mary Celeste, the most famous ghost ship.
Oh, have you guys heard of her?
Ever heard of her?
I also learned a lot about boats. Shout out to Drupal. Drupal loves all forms of transportation.
Thought we were going to shout out Jeff, because he's our Navy man. He's our seaman. Shout out to Jeff also.
Okay, picture a ship drifting silently across the Atlantic Ocean. Its sails are raised, its cargo is untouched. There are no signs of violence, no evidence of a struggle, and yet every single person on board has vanished without a trace.
In December of 1872, the merchant Brigantine, Mary Celeste, was discovered adrift between the Azores and Portugal. This is like the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean. The ship itself appeared remarkably seaworthy.
Food and water were still stocked. What? Personal belongings remained behind.
Even the crew's valuables were untouched. But Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his young daughter, and the rest of the crew were nowhere to be found.
For more than 150 years, the mystery of The Mary Celeste has captivated sailors, historians, and conspiracy theorists alike. Was it piracy, mutiny, a sea monster, alien abduction?
Or was the truth something far more ordinary and perhaps even more unsettling?
Oh, immediately I'm thinking piracy.
However, it would be weird that all their valuables and food was left on board.
Also, I'm thinking......portal.
I'm not surprised.
What I want to know ahead of time is where they were going, what was their planet trip.
Well, it's like 1800s, so like really it's like the only way to travel is by boat, right?
Were they?
Was this her work? Okay, great questions. I'm going to answer them.
6:38
Ship History
So let me tell you about the ship, The Mary Celeste. She was built in Nova Scotia in 1861, and she was registered initially as the Amazon, that's what the ship was called. Amazon, the deliveries.
Well, the term Amazon actually refers to fierce female warriors and grief pathology. She was a merchant brigantine. Is that why they call it a brig?
In Pirates of the Caribbean, he calls it my brig.
But isn't the brig the heart of the ship?
It's the prison or jail, specifically within a military or naval setting. Like on the ship, you put them in a brig? Yes.
But it also refers to a two-masted sailing ship, which is, yes, the abbreviation we're going to talk about. Oh, okay. Okay.
I'm so happy you guys asked me what a brigantine was because I went down the rabbit hole. A brigantine is a hybrid sailing vessel, so it contains two masts.
I think that when you think about Pirates of the Caribbean, the foremost mast, because it has two masts, the foremost is square rigged with rectangular sails. These sails hang across the ship on horizontal yards and like large rectangles.
So these work for when the wind is coming from behind and it'll push the ship, right? They also have a main or rear mast, which runs parallel to the ship's center line, so it's kind of more perpendicular.
It is more triangular or trapezoidal in shape, and can be angled to more easily catch the wind from the side so the ship can sail in a more similar direction to the wind.
So the combination of the sail styles allowed for a balance of speed, control, and flexibility.
Okay, brigandines were valuable because they could sail efficiently in different wind conditions and could be used for trade and cargo transport as well as naval patrol and escort or pirates.
The initial registration documents report that the ship was 99.3 feet long, 25.5 feet broad, and 11.7 feet deep, and it weighed almost 200 tons.
The fact that ships are so heavy but float, and the fact that airplanes are so heavy but fly also blows my mind. I can't think about it too much. So when the ship was first built, it already was maybe cursed.
The first captain after the first voyage died. He was a newlywed, died of illness, and then over the next six years, she had a couple of minor incidents.
So at some point, the ship collided with fishing equipment near Maine, and then it went on to travel up to the English Channel, where it collided and sunk a brig. Oh, for the most part, she lived a quiet life.
Traveling to the West, Indies, England, and the Mediterranean. In October of 1867, back in Nova Scotia, a storm washed the ship ashore, causing severe damage, and so they ended up selling the ship off as derelict in October of 1867.
The Canadian ship was transferred to American ownership in 1868 and was renamed The Mary Celeste. The new owner paid $1,700.50 for it. The new owners paid $8,825 to restore it.
After all that money was invested, the ship was seized by creditors and passed around for a number of years.
Another $10,000 was put into the ship to enlarge it to 103 feet by 25.7 feet by 16.2 feet, with the second deck being added and the poop deck extending, as well as much of the lumber being replaced. So this added nearly 100 tons to her weight.
It passed a lot of different hands. But I think what people did is they like, including the final guy, people bought into shares of the ship, and then they would get the profits from the merchant.
Evan, I want to go back to when Colleen said, it's bad luck to rename a ship.
Apparently, it is bad luck to rename a ship because sailors once believed that the sea god Poseidon kept a record of every vessel's name and changing a ship's name without proper ceremony was thought to confuse or anger the gods, putting the vessel
and crew at risk. In order to rename a ship, they needed to perform a renaming ceremony. That's when they break the champagne?
The old name is ceremonially removed from logs and plaques and the new name is formally introduced often with the champagne christening. The ceremony is meant to erase the old name and avoid any bad luck associated with the change.
11:02
Final Voyage
Again, lots of different captains, lots of different owners, but then in 1872, Benjamin Briggs, a well-respected captain, invested his savings in a share of the Mary Celeste, and he took command for the first voyage since her refitting.
He by all accounts was very well-respected. People are like, this guy could have retired. He came from a maritime family full of sailors, sailors.
Yes, Briggs drove the brigadine. Oh, I didn't even catch that. Okay.
So he had like a seven-year-old son that he left behind with his grandmother as he was in school.
Okay.
But he took his wife and his infant daughter to accompany him on this maiden voyage.
Okay.
Well, maybe the infant daughter wasn't weaned, Colleen. Well, she was too, but also how long were they breastfeeding then because maybe they had no, you know.
Right.
They were probably, it took a while to wean back in the day.
The interesting thing you mentioned that, because when we talk about what could have happened, a lot of theories are that he maybe behaved differently because his wife and daughter were there. Did he respond to things differently?
Maybe they got scurvy. Okay. I actually did think of that, but then again, again, it's like when we talked about the lighthouse.
If all these people got ill, why are there not bodies?
Well, they all jumped off the boat.
They said we're sick, and so we're just going to jump into the water. Well, delusions, all of them have a shared delusion. Wow.
Okay. Captain Briggs hand-selected seven experience for his crew, and again, people who comment on the crew, letters that he and his wife wrote to family, all talk about how this was like a really strong crew. Yeah.
No issues. On November 5th, The Mary Celeste left Pier 50 on the East River in New York City, carrying 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol and 10 souls on board. What's denatured alcohol?
I'm so happy you asked. Okay. I wrote the alcohol was being shipped to fortify wine, but then I also read it could be used as fuel.
So let's just see. Denatured alcohol.
I just can't get over that.
Well, maybe she was like, I want to see the world. Yeah. Don't just leave me locked in.
She was his cousin. I think that was very common in the 1800s. How, like first cousin?
Yeah. So denatured alcohol is ethanol that has been mixed with chemicals to make it unsafe or unpleasant to drink. It was valuable.
I'm going to tell you about the value of it. Oh, was it used to like clean wounds? It was valued at $35,000, just the cargo.
Oh, my.
Yeah.
His ship was delayed for two days due to weather, so he remained anchored in the New York Harbor before finally setting sail for Genoa, Italy on November 7th, 1872.
Now, before he took off, the captain spent several weeks supervising the loading and prep of the ship before its departure. At the same time, another ship was preparing to sail from New York City to Genoa. Genoa.
The Canadian Brigantine, the Dei Gratia, it was preparing to sail with a cargo of petroleum. Okay. So there's different-
That's fuel. There's different stories. There's stories that the captain of the Dei Gratia and the captain of the Mary Celeste were friends.
There's rumors that they were not friends. They just sort of knew each other. Okay.
The widow of the captain of the Dei Gratia, like 50 years later said, oh yeah, they had dinner together the night before he left. But everyone's like, is that real? Or is that like just-
She's an old person who's- Conjecture, objection, conjecture. But either way, important to know the Dei Gratia because they are an important part of our story.
Oh, okay. This ship left New York for Genoa on November 15th and it was taking the same route as the Mary Celeste.
On December 5th, 1872, the Dei Gratia was midway between the Azores and Portugal when they spotted a ship about six miles away heading toward them.
They went to assist and as they approached, they saw that Mary Celeste sign on the outside of the boat and realized they knew the ship. Oh, hello, sir.
The ship had left New York City eight days before them and should have already reached its destination. When they approached, nobody came to greet them or responded to their signals.
Captain Morehouse, the captain of the Dei Gratia, sent a boarding party to scope things out. What they found was eerie, awry, the ship was completely deserted. Nobody was on board, but personal items were left behind and the cargo was untouched.
Furthermore, there were provisions for the next six months left behind. Giant squid. That is also a theory.
Yep. The final log entry was dated November 25th, nine days earlier and indicated that at that time, the location was in the Azores, about 400 miles away from where the day Gratia intercepted this abandoned Mary Celeste.
The previous entries all discussed routine maintenance and navigation, but there was no evidence that anything was awry. In the captain's room, there was a sheath sword under the bed. Whoa.
As well as personal items including boots and oil skins. We know what oil skins are now. Yes.
Should they put on it so they don't get wet? It's what the guy wears and I know what you did last. It's like blubber.
Okay. The ship's papers and navigation instruments were gone. Oh, that's weird.
Do you know what else was gone? The compass. The dinghy.
The ship's lifeboat was gone, but the ship remained intact. No signs of flooding or horrible damage beyond it having just been bobbing around for nine days without a crew. Do you think it was someone on the board?
There's a serial killer?
Or everybody else died and he couldn't sail the ship alone. I shook that size, so maybe he took what he needed, got on the dinghy and went to shore.
Okay. And just didn't make it to shore? But they were like, they could allegedly see shore from their last recording.
Do we think it just got loose? Got loose? No, like they went to the shore and then it was like anchored somewhere and it just got loose.
Well, then shouldn't somebody have been like, yo, I came from the Mary Celeste.
Somebody was looking.
The person made it to shore.
Yeah.
We should know. Someone should be alive to tell the tale.
I think the dingy not being there is why there's not a last body, and that person just never reported it.
Okay.
I think it was a murder.
17:31
Disappearance Theories
Now, I've had lots of theories.
All right. Well, there are a lot of theories. So let me.
Do we think somebody murdered? Somebody murdered everybody. Hold on.
Was the denatured alcohol still on the boat?
Yes.
All of the denatured alcohol was still on the boat. Except of the 1,701 barrels, nine were found empty.
Okay. They burned all the dead bodies.
That's what I was thinking. Are there signs of burning? Yeah.
They put them all on the dingy.
And did like a- Nine days of-
Viking funeral? Yeah. Okay.
Well, the theory about these nine empty barrels, before I get into the general theory, is that the 1,700 barrels were made of watertight white oak. Okay.
But there were a handful of barrels made of red oak, which is naturally porous, not a good way to store alcohol, likely caused the ethanol to seep out and evaporate in the cargo hold, which comes in to an additional theory.
Okay.
But before we get to that, they suffocated. So theory one, insurance fraud. I thought that too.
That was one of the things I thought. They took the boat and they ran and they were like, we're just going to collect the money. But then where did they go?
Well, see, when you start talking about there's no one there to collect it, that's when my theory fell apart. Well, okay, guys.
So the crew of the Dei Gratia sailed the ship 800 miles to Gibraltar, where a salvage hearing was convened to determine whether the salvagers were entitled to a payment from the ship's insurers.
Because the way this works is if you find a ship, you get a finder's fee because that ship was insured. The attorney general was suspicious of the Dei Gratia and spent three months investigating before finding no evidence of foul play.
Still, only one sixth of the $46,000 insurance payment was paid out indicating that there may have still been some suspicion. Whoa. So one of the theories is that this ship killed everybody, towed the boat in, and we're like, look what we found.
Give us the finder's fee. Oh, okay. I kind of like this theory.
That's a murder theory. Seems a little clean. Now, there's a Smithsonian article that talks about a documentarian who took information from the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Dataset.
So this stores marine information from 784 to 2007 and they look at it to study climate change.
So using that information and the logbook information, they looked at like water temperatures, wind speeds, wind directions, and they were able to conclude that the unmanned ship that was last recorded in the log six miles off the coast of the
Azores, would have ended up at the point that the day Gratia claimed to have found it nine days later. So that's the story checks out. Like the actual story that the day Gratia just came across this boat, checks out.
Also, day Gratia was a slower ship. It left after the Mary Celeste. So how would they have caught up to the Mary Celeste?
Yeah. But it is interesting because I'm kind of jumping ahead to a little resolution of the ship, what happened to it. Because after all this happened, the ship went back out into service again and it exchanged hands again and it remained cursed.
But the way the Mary Celeste finally came to an end is that it was involved in a confirmed insurance scheme. The ship was largely unprofitable after this disappearance. So in November of 1884, a group of Boston shippers conspired with the owner.
They filled the ship with worthless cargo, but manifested it as worth $30,000, which would be over a million dollars today. Then on January 3rd, 1885, the crew deliberately ran into a coral reef off the coast of Haiti, sinking the ship.
They rode themselves to shore and they instituted insurance claims and they would have gotten away with it, except they took a couple of items from the cargo and tried to sell it on land.
Those idiots.
So someone, they wanted to make an extra $500, you know. So someone bought those Bostonians and they were like, this is cheap. This is not what I paid those tea partiers.
And so they didn't get away with it. It ended up actually, the people, they were charged with conspiracy. One of them went crazy.
One of them re-hailed himself and one of them was murdered. So the curse continued until the end. So it was a haunted ship.
It was a haunted ship. I also, I'm gonna talk about that. Theory two, was this an act of piracy or mutiny?
Some think that the sailors might have gotten into the alcohol, got a little drunk and caused a mutiny. There's only like 10 of them.
But, and also they're like, usually when there was a mutiny, it was like, because you have no confidence in your captain. But everyone was like, this guy was like a really legit captain. And he was well-respected and he had a well-respected crew.
And so everyone thinks that's sort of out of character for these people. Did they come across pirates? Because there were pirates in the area.
But again, as you guys mentioned, we have no signs of theft, no signs of violence, no signs of conflict. That sword was still sheathed.
Yeah.
Nearly all the provisions remained, as did the barrels of alcohol. There were two crew members, the Lorenzen brothers, who I think were German. They did not have any possessions found on the ship.
So there was a theory that maybe they had killed everybody and fled with their belongings because everyone else's belongings were still there. Also, I don't know if this is just the ship these people are cursed, and this is out of the ordinary.
It sounds like sailing was very dangerous. Yeah. Earlier in the year, these two brothers had been in a shipwreck on a different boat, had lost everything they had, so they had no belongings to begin with.
So when they were like, where are the belongings of these two people? They just have no belongings. Yeah.
I often think about how unsafe ship travel would have been back in the day. You often think about that? I do often think about how crazy the ocean is, storms, food.
Megan, everything always comes back to food for me. The food, the water, like what's the water situation? No wonder they're all drunk all the time.
You're out there, it's hot.
You drink your Navy Grug, it's alcohol and like fruit.
Oh, okay.
So you drink it to prevent scurvy, but also, yeah.
Yeah. It's like when they used to drink beer to hydrate. Yeah.
Okay.
Other theories, was there some kind of weird oceanic natural disaster, which would include a water spout, which Kait told us about a couple of weeks ago, a rogue wave, which we definitely talked about a little while ago, a seaquake, which I guess is
like an earthquake on the sea floor, or some kind of underwater hazard. But again, the thought is like this ship looked like, everyone left in a very controlled manner, it didn't look like there was panic, and people thought if this was like a water
spout, or a seaquake or something, there would have been more of a hurried evacuation, a little bit chaotic. And the seas were calm by all accounts.
There wasn't documentation in their log that it had been rough seas, we had these other ships around, no one said it was rough water. The ship remained intact nine days later without a crew.
Right, I feel like if there had been any storms or any sort of weather issues, there would have been like signs, you know? Yeah. I added because I was so sure Colleen was going to talk about MNTB.
Well, I was thinking scurrying, mental breakdown.
There was some theory that maybe the food, because you know there's this whole thing about like mold on bread that can cause like an LSD like trip.
Yeah. But when the rescue ship found them, they sailed this boat back and the crew ate the provisions. So if there was something wrong with the food on board that made people crazy or sick, they also would have found great-
Exactly. It was this some kind of haunting? Because people who sailed the ship on later voyages after the salvage, talked about feelings of unease and multiple sailors reported ghostly figures.
Yeah. In 1884, William Flood, a sailor, who may or may not be real, because then some sources were like, no one can confirm that this person is a real person.
But the story that circulates is that William Flood claimed he had been sailing near the Azores and saw a small lifeboat drifting nearby with eerie figures. As he approached the lifeboat, it just disappeared. Oh, creepy.
You know what I'm also thinking?
What was a big illness then, like smallpox?
The 1870s? I'm going to maintain, as I maintained in the lighthouse, I am anti an illness for this one. I'll be honest.
They're locked in. I didn't think smallpox. Smallpox was like later, 1940s.
1870s. I mean, I don't, to me, if somebody's ill, I mean, there would have been people on board, right? Like dead.
Yes, I'm with you. I don't, I absolutely feel like illness did not happen in the lighthouse and illness is not happening here. For that reason, for that reason, why did the bodies disappear?
I'm still thinking about that, Canary. Okay. In 1889, a British ship was passing through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Why do you keep saying it like that? It's saying it weird. The Strait of Gibraltar?
There you go. When they saw the Mary Celeste, he and his crew claimed that the sails seemed to be glowing. Oh.
As they approached the ship, it just vanished into thin air. Then I'm like, okay, there's this crew of people who saw this ship vanish, so I feel like we should have more than one source. Right.
That should be easily verified. Right. Then in 885, I told you about the shipwreck off the coast of Haiti, ending its turbulent life, and I told you that three of the captains of the ship all died under mysterious circumstance.
Yeah. So was this ship just cursed and haunted?
Yeah.
So do you guys think there was- I mean, all these hauntings really sound like they came after. Right.
I mean, if there was something haunting the ship before that was responsible, like again, you know what I mean? Yeah. If you believe in ghosts and hauntings, then it's like, okay, the ship of people died.
And if you believe any of these stories, which I don't, they were haunting, like the 10 people were on the ship after their death. But what caused them to die? There was no haunting before they died.
Right. I don't know. This is a weird story.
Does there any-
do they have a-
Yeah.
So to wrap it up, I'm going to tell you the actual theory.
28:05
Probable Causes
No, this is not confirmed, most people believe it was one or the other of these two scenarios I'm about to tell you about. Which I- Murder.
Sadly, inclined, no. Well, the murder was like the mutiny theory. Yeah.
I was thinking just one person was like a secret serial killer. And then they just like- Well, it would be a serial killer.
It would be a mass- Mass murderer. Yeah.
Just a one. Well, Jack the Ripper. Single incidents.
Is there a Jack the Ripper?
Serial killer. When was Jack the Ripper on?
Maybe 200s? Hold on.
Jack.
Maybe he caught a boat.
1888.
Hold on.
When do we think it really-
The theory is that there may have been one of two things happened which caused some confusion and caused them to leave the boat. And what you would do in these instances is tie your dinghy to the back of the boat so that you don't lose the boat.
You won't get in the dinghy for safety. And that's probably what they did. And then somehow they got detached from their ship.
Hey, I kind of said something that early. You did, sort of. So what would have caused them to leave this seaworthy functioning ship?
Right. There are two theories. One of them is that when that rescue group boarded the ship, they found a disassembled pump.
For the pump's purpose, there are two pumps on a ship, and the purpose of it is to remove any water that might be coming on board, right? It may be leaking out of the ship, whether that's from rain or seawater, or just leaking between planks.
Because apparently, I didn't realize this, but it makes sense because these boats probably weren't perfectly water-sensitive. It goes back into your, how do these boats stay afloat? Right.
But it's pretty normal to have water in the bottom of your boat.
The thing is that the purpose of this pump was not just to remove the water, but when the crew members removed the water, they would calculate how much water is being removed, so they could calculate if there was water accumulating to address level.
If there was a leak, if there was a flood, because they can't get down into Banffo to see that. They're just using the pump to calculate, okay, we had a normal amount of water. Right.
The ship had previously transported coal. There's a theory that maybe there was coal dust that had caused this pump to clog up. But regardless, something happened to the pump.
They disassembled it as though they were trying to clean it, trying to fix it. And again, I'm not sure why you don't use the second pump, which is what the Dei Gratia used to get the boat back to shore. They used the second pump.
But apparently if a pump is down, you use sounding methods to estimate water levels in the hold. So obviously, that is probably going to be less sensitive. Right.
Than the pump. So less specific. I think sensitivity and specificity is the problem.
Yes. I agree.
I agree.
So when the ship was discovered by the Dei Gratia. Do you just want to say Degrassi? Is that what you want to say?
They discovered there were just over three feet of water in the hold, which I guess is sort of a normal level. Oh yeah. Concerning.
Again, the fact that ships would just have water in the bottom is crazy. That is so crazy to me. So we know that this boat bopped around for nine days.
It obviously wasn't flooding, wasn't sinking, but maybe the crew didn't know that. They used their sounding technique. They got bad information from the sounding rod.
Maybe they feared the ship was taking on more water than it actually was, and Captain Briggs ordered them to evacuate, and that they got in the lifeboat that was tied to the ship, but then that was eventually cut or snapped.
So again, they probably just wanted to tether themselves, see what happened, and then go from there. Right. Just got separated.
That was it. Again, going back to the theory that his daughter was on board. So maybe he was like more conservative than he usually would have been, right?
Maybe.
Oh, yeah. But if they all boarded the dinghy, then where are they?
They capsized. The dinghy got separated from the boat. Now they're in a dinghy with no provisions, and then they washed out to sea and died.
But you said they were close to shore.
Yeah.
That's the, yeah. Well, that's the other thing too, they're saying that when you do something like this, when you get the dinghy and watch, that usually captains are more likely to do this when they feel like, oh, I see land.
Like we're within sight of land. We're not going to maybe do this when you're out in the middle of nowhere. So he might have felt comfortable doing this.
Well, they're obviously not close enough to land. It doesn't think he probably could see it with his little monocular. But if they were closer up to land, then I feel like he would have just tried to make it.
Because again, the boat was not actually sinking. This is all based on data they were getting from. So that's theory one.
The other theory is the same thing, that they did this, they got in the boat. But the reason they might have done that was because of an alcohol fumes explosion. So one of the hatches was open when the rescue boat came on.
That was like, were they venting or had it blown open? The Azores heat could have caused the alcohol fumes to expand, blowing off the hatch and causing those on board to fear an explosion.
Again, going back to the fact that there were these empty barrels that people think just leaked because of the bad oak. Were they smelling these fumes and getting panicked?
But the rescue party, the boarding party, did not smell fumes when they got on. They did not report the smell of fumes. In 2006, we've had two experiments here.
2006 University College of London scientists built a replica of the ship, and they used butane gas to stimulate leaking alcohol fumes. When ignited, it produced a brief intense blue pressure wave explosion, but left zero scorch or soot marks.
So again, this is a theory that maybe there was like this brief like explosion. They panicked and they got off the boat. In 2026, University of Manchester tested the theory again.
They did a 1 to 18 scale wooden replica of the ship.
And again, they confirmed that a spark in warmed ethanol vapor caused a rapid invisible blast, which would be terrifying enough to make a captain and crew immediately abandon ship in fear of the cargo. Yes.
Generally, people think it was one or the other or a combination of those two things that caused them to get on the boat, and then something tragic just happened.
Yeah.
They capsized or something. They started to panic. Yeah.
It was like Titanic 2.0, everyone elbowing each other, rescue boat. Yeah. And especially in those days, there's like, who's going to find them?
Did anyone ever find a capsized dinghy? Is that what we think? The less interesting option?
Yeah. No, I don't think those are less interesting. Well, it's just less awry.
Yeah.
Less awry.
Less eerie.
Yeah. It's the one that makes the most sound.
I think, actually, I think of those two, I like the explosion. Yeah. Especially because of all that alcohol that was gone.
Yeah.
How did only those amount of cans explode and not all of them?
The red oak, because they were in the red oak, which is more porous. Porous. They leaked out through those.
All it takes is somebody trying to light a cigarette. Their pipes were still on board, but people were smoking. Yeah.
Yeah. I think you're probably right, honestly, because I feel like if they were like, are we taking on water? But they're looking and they don't appear.
I feel like there would be less urgency. Right. Have a minute to figure it out.
But if it was like we just had an explosion and your two-year-old is on the boat, you might be like, hustle, hustle, hustle, and get in this boat. Right. Then suddenly, and then the person who had one job trying to tide the nuts, just messed up.
I literally had this thought when I was researching this.
I couldn't dock my parents' boat, and Bourbon Boy kept saying, I'll just drag us in, and I was like, you can't drag this boat full of people in, and he just jumped in the water and threw a rope over his shoulder and dragged us in like a real man.
I was thinking about this, why didn't as they separated, why didn't the strongest swimmer just be like, also, I'll take it? I got us.
I don't understand why they didn't have oars on the dinghy. So, throw it.
Yeah, you would think they should have oars on a dinghy. Again, I think it was probably like they got separated and there was straight panic. And because there was panic, no one was like thinking logically and then probably something happened.
All right, another weird ocean mystery. Another weird ocean mystery. Guys, just a reminder, don't forget to check out our Facebook and Instagram pages at 3SchemeQueens.
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As always, if you choose not to financially support us, we appreciate the follows, the downloads, the listens, the likes. Kait, what should the people do?
Yeah.
I would love for you guys to take out your phone right now and text three people that enjoy a sale and then scroll on down, leave us a five-star review, leave us a comment, share us on your social media platforms, interact with us on our social media
platforms, send us an e-mail, and yeah, Maggie. Yeah. I think we've had like three back-to-back mysteries, and I think that as we get into the second half of our season, we're going to talk more about some weird ocean life. Yeah.
The marine biology. The jellyfish who never die, the whales, the blue whales, not just the whales, the blue whales. When you investigate the blue whales, will you fact-check that story that something ate a whale?
Yeah, I will.
Otherwise, we'll see you next Tuesday.
See you next Tuesday.