RIDDLE OF THE SEA

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 13 February 1926, Page 11

RIDDLE OF THE SEA

Abandonment of the Marie Celeste

J'T is sixteen years since the Waratali, voyaging between Durban and Capetown, disappeared so mysteriously. The fate that befel the vessel, and the hundreds of persons making up the passengers and crew aboard, has never been fathomed. But references to this ocean enigma. • still made in the Press from time to time, recall another strange story of the sea. Off Gibraltar on December 4, 1573, the British schooner Dei Gratia, sighted a ship apparently drifting hither and thither without guidance. Captain Boyce, of the British craft, hailed the aimless voyager. But no reply was forthcoming; so a boat was lowered, and the captain and some of his seamen reached and boarded the strangelybehaving vessel—the Marie Celeste. I Add those sailors then stood face to j

face with one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of navigation.

The galley fire of the Marie Celeste was alight. There were plentiful supplies of food and water aboard the vessel. A medicine bottle stood upright on one of the tallies —an indisputable witness to a smooth sea, at any rate for some time immediately preceding Cai>tnin Boyce’s boarding of the vessel. 'The captain of the Marie Celeste had lukon his wife voyaging with him, and her needlework lay about in her cabin as though suddenly, flung down, while on the pillow was the distinct impression of a baby's head. The seamen's chests, containing clothing and considerable money savings were undisturbed, and no boat was missing from the deserted vessel.

Yet something was very much amiss —not a single human being belonging to the craft was on board. An explanation could not be found either in piracy or mutiny, as the cargo was intact and there was nothing in the nature of disorder, while no bloodsLons were existent to suggest a theory.

The Marie Celeste had sailed from New York, and none of the entries in her log, barring the four final words, held any hint of trouble. But under the heading December 4, was an unfinished sentence, in the captain’s hand writing, which read: “Fanny, my dear wife." The final letter of the fourth word was little more than a scratch, suggesting that the captain had been -interrupted abruptly in his writing. No doubt had the message boon completed the riddle of the ship’s abandonment in midocean would have been solved, since any reference which the captain sought to make to his wife in the ship’s log book must have been of grave importance, as no seafaring man would chronicle an ordinary domestic item in that diarv.

But, as we have seen, the captain’s message was left unfinished. And so the happening has gone unsolved through the half century intervening, and is likely to continue so until the end of time.