TRUTH OF MARY CELESTE

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1929, Page 9

TRUTH OF MARY CELESTE

LEGEND OF SjuA EXPLAINED. What became of the crew of the Mary Celeste? Well, it appears that 1- one of them, John Pemberton, who •* was the cook, is living near his native f Liverpool, at the age of eighty; while e the boatswain and carpenter, Jack t -Dossell, was known in Shrewsbury uns j til his death, in 1917, as- Chippy Rusr sell, or the man with the green hands, t because of his habit of staining his & hands with the green ointments which j he peddled. 5 Here, then, at our doors, were men I of the mystery crew, who were . thought to have disappeared in a body 3 from the vision of mankind in No- 1 . vember, 1872, leaving their craft in t full rig ploughing its own way un- , manned through the seas. I At the end of fifty-six years the sea . has yielded up its mystery, and the greatest sea legend of all time proves ' to be a tale only fit for the marines. ’ Mr Laurence, J. Keating, the author of “The Great Mary Celeste Hoax.” (Heath Cranton, 10/6), has been collecting his details from all over the world, from log books, shipping courts from a library of Mary Celeste-ana, and from old sailors in institutions with the result that he has “swabbed” the decks” witfi. all our longshore anthology of the Mary Celeste. The old sea legend has been hackneyed to a time-logged hulk, how the white-winged wanderer and stately' vessel had been found off the Adorer under full rig and with everything in order and “workaway”; there were ; the boats in their davits, the seamen’; j chests, the ship’s cat, the table spread for a meal, *but there was not a soul on board, os if captain and crew had been spirited away at the

sound of an enchanted watch to ' a sailors’ Hy-Brasil. Everything has been said about that vessel of romance except what she was, a “scamper” or cheap one. built of soft timber at a little lumber port in Nova Scotia, who on the evr of making history was scrounging ■ precarious living on coastwise cargoes DEAL BETWEEN CAPTAINS. After various changes of ownership

and name, she was held in partnership by a small New York shipowner, James Winchester, and her. captain, Benjamin Briggs. Sho had become the Mary Sellars, after the captain’s wife, until in final transition., owing to the ingenious scholarship of a deckhand painter, she appeared under the name that has passed into sea his-; tory. J

At New York, where she was load-: ing a cargo of whale oil, spirits, and j rum for Gibraltar, the Mary Celeste | 'ay near the Dei Gratia. The latter Hen.’gnant name concealed one of; “mnucherp” of rhe sea that 1 -'■’sred stores and wharfage, and ad-. their willingness to carry. anything anywhere. Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste '•hort of crew. He fell foul of ’hmcan Finlay, the boarding-house ’•ops. who supplied sailors on a per- J contage. Tn his extremity, Briggs j apfdied to Captain Moorhouse, of the Dei Gratia. Moorhouse agreed to loan three of his crew to Briggs, until their ships should meet at the island of San Michael in the Azores. In return Moorhouse was to be given freight of the excess portion of the Mary Celeste’s cargo. Was there a still bolder deal between the cap tains as to what should happen wher the ships spoke in the Azores?

However that he. Puncan Pin’s-.• eventually sent some hand‘d ta Mary Celeste, a tough lot an r ’ ~ r - <• much as a ferocious shangha’rd her, Carl Venholdt. who was f’u aboard the boat very drunk. When the Mary Celeste sailed from NoYork, on November 7, 1872, she e ried the captain and his wife, th mate and seven hands. (In some a counts of the Mary Celeste the num ber on board is put at the obviou' thirteen; in others as high as forty) The captain, Hullock, the mate; an 1 Pemberton, the cook, had made pro vious voyages on the Mary Celeste. The captain’s wife had brought aboard a piano, what the sailors called a parlour Poll, and irritated the mate by playing hymn tunes when he came below fagged from his watch.

When Carl Venholdt, the shanghaied lubber, had slept off his drunken stupor, he demanded that the ship be turned round. The mate —who was known as the Baltimore Bully—pointed to the ropes and ordered him to get on with the job. Whereupon he rushed at the mate, and both men “hit the deck.” The captain came to the mate’s rescue, and Venholdt, temporarily blinded and stunned, was beaten off. The Baltimore Bully chased him to the forecastle. On the following day, Carl, though kept without food, renewed the combat with a jack-knife. But the mate hurled him over the forward edge to the deck below, following this up with a merciless drubbing, and finally lashed him to the peak-head capstan, where he was half drowned by the plunging of the waves. At midnight, when the Baltimore Bully himself released him, Carl was a good sailor.

SATURNALIA ABOARD.

After that, Hullock ran the ship. He was continually at cross-purposes with the captdin and the captain’s wife. But one day, as Mrs Briggs was playing the piano, a hurricane squall struck the Mary Celeste, knocked over the piano, and poor Mrs Briggs was killed. The captain swore vengeance against the mate,, declared he would bury his wife at Gibraltar, and proceeded to embalm the body in alcohol. During these obsequies he drank heavily. Hullock and . the crew, regarding the corpse as unlucky, stitched it up in canvas and buried it at sea.

The master’s actions now betrayed that his mind had given way. He attacked the mate, who tumbled him into the cabin and brought up several bottles of “forty-rod,” or rye whisky, for the men. An orgy followed, in the midst of which the captain again attacked the mate. The altercation marked the last occasion on which Briggs was seen or heard. Hullock said he had left the captain on the quarter deck at midnight, having failed to induce him to go to bed. The saturnalia ' continued, Hullock 1 and Carl renewing old feuds. The crew sought to separate the savage pair, locked in deadly grapple near the wheel. In the general rough and tumble., there was a loud splash of somebody pushed over the side. It was Carl Venholdt, and he was never seen again.

Captain missing, . captain’s ; wife dead, • Carl Venholdt drowned —what reception would. await the Mary Celeste in Gibraltar?. While she hung about off Santa Maria, awaiting the Def Gratia, the crew were solicited by native “bumboat#,” carrying piles of fruit and fancy fripperies. The

mate and two of the crew boarded one of the “bumboats” and were rowed to the mainland. Their comrades waited, but they did not return. The mate took away the log, in which the captain had written complaints. When the Dei Gratia came up with the Mary Celeste, she found on board the three loaned members of her own crew, as well as the English cook, Pemberton, true to his old ship. Everything was found as Moorhouse described it at the subsequent inquiry. The only detail suppressed was that four men were aboard the Mary Celeste. Silence for them seemed a matter of life. Queer things had happened aboard the Mary Celeste. Moorhouse’s three men passed for members of the Dei Gratia crew. Pemberton induced to become a “passenger,” and on arrival at Gibraltar was given a passage to Southampton, in time to arrive at his home in Liverpool for Christmas. Moorhouse was awarded £1,700 as prize money, but only after a most sinister complexion had been put upon his story by the Attorney-General of Gibraltar, who suspected him of murder. But this was pooh-poohed by the surviving owner of the Mary Celeste, and the mystery was left to rack the brains of the Edgar Wallaces of future generations. Behind all was the plot of two shady captains to arrange for prize money by scuttling a craft that had too often come home when unexpected and unwanted by its owners. But when the ships crossed at the Azores a sensational drama had been played out on one of them by a crew that in its toughness of humanity equalled the worst that marine studies on the

movies have shown. At that time sailors, owners, in a sense governments, didn’t care. Moorhouse’s trick was played by many contemporary captains. Why the AttorneyGeneral of Gibraltar bothered was that he suspected that the crew of the Mary Celeste had been murdered ,or marooned. He did not swallow the story of a deserted ship ploughing the waves. It was not until 1885, when an American journalist, reading the court proceedings of the Mary Celeste, retold the old story in a most fanciful way that the sea legend was really born to perplex the brains of future generations and serve the purposes of Writers of sea mysteries retold.—(Con. O’Leary, in “T.P.’s Weekly.’’)