When Oliver Deveau sailed the abandoned Mary Celeste into Gibraltar in December 1872, he and Captain Morehouse were expecting a reward. Maritime salvage law entitled them to real payment for safely bringing an intact, valuable ship into port. What they got instead was one of the strangest, most aggressively mishandled official inquiries in nineteenth-century maritime history and months of suspicion that neither man had actually done anything wrong.
The Man in Charge
The inquiry fell to Frederick Solly-Flood, Gibraltar's Attorney General, and almost everything about how he ran it would go on to shape the Mary Celeste legend for the next 150 years. Solly-Flood hadn't taken the Gibraltar post by career design, he'd been a working London lawyer who lost his practice to gambling debts and accepted the colonial appointment in 1866 largely out of financial necessity. One historian who later studied the case described him bluntly: his arrogance, apparently, was matched only by how far it outran his actual judgment.
That combination turned out to be a serious problem for everyone involved. The salvage hearings opened on December 17, 1872, under Chief Justice Sir James Cochrane, and Solly-Flood approached the case less like a neutral investigator and more like a prosecutor already convinced of the crime. He suspected foul play almost immediately, and once he'd settled on that instinct, he spent the following months bending nearly every piece of evidence to fit it.
Building a Case on Very Little
On December 23, Solly-Flood ordered a formal survey of the Mary Celeste, carried out by John Austin, the colony's Surveyor of Shipping, assisted by a diver named Ricardo Portunato. Their report gave Solly-Flood exactly what he was looking for: cut marks on both sides of the ship's bow that appeared to have been made by a sharp instrument, and reddish stains on Captain Briggs's sword, found sheathed in his cabin. A further, more detailed examination on January 7 turned up additional stains on one of the ship's rails, also presumed to be blood.
To Solly-Flood, this was more than enough to build an entire theory of violent crime. His leading suspicion fell on Morehouse and the Dei Gratia's own crew, he theorized they may have deliberately tracked the Mary Celeste at sea, boarded her, murdered everyone aboard, and staged the scene afterward specifically to claim the salvage reward for themselves. When that theory ran into an obvious problem - Morehouse and Briggs were personal friends who'd dined together days before both ships departed, Solly-Flood simply added a second layer to it: perhaps the two captains had conspired together from the start, planning to split an insurance payout, with Morehouse's "discovery" of the abandoned ship staged from the beginning.
He didn't stop there. Solly-Flood also floated the idea that a member of Briggs's own crew had gotten into the ship's cargo of alcohol, flown into a drunken rage, murdered the captain's family and the rest of the crew, and fled in the missing lifeboat. He even extended suspicion to James Winchester, one of the Mary Celeste's principal owners, entertaining the idea that Winchester himself might have orchestrated the entire disappearance from New York as an insurance scheme. When Winchester traveled to Gibraltar in mid-January to check on the ship and vouch personally for Briggs's character, Solly-Flood responded by demanding a $15,000 surety before he'd release the vessel, an enormous sum Winchester simply didn't have on hand.
By almost any reasonable standard, Solly-Flood wasn't investigating a mystery so much as searching for whichever theory let him charge someone, anyone, with a crime.
The Evidence Falls Apart
It didn't hold up. Scientific analysis of the "blood" on both the sword and the ship's rail found nothing of the kind, the stains were consistent with rust and other natural discoloration, not human blood at all. The cut marks on the bow, examined further by a panel of Royal Naval captains, were ultimately attributed to ordinary stress and movement of the ship's timbers at sea rather than any deliberate weapon damage. Every physical detail Solly-Flood had built his violent theory around turned out, under closer examination, to have a completely mundane explanation.
He wasn't the only person with a stake in figuring out what had actually happened, though. Horatio Sprague, the American consul stationed in Gibraltar, took a considerably more measured view of Briggs's character and pushed back against Solly-Flood's insinuations from early on. Sprague arranged for a U.S. Navy captain, R.W. Shufeldt, to independently examine the Mary Celeste and offer his own professional opinion. Shufeldt's conclusion was almost the exact opposite of Solly-Flood's: in his assessment, the ship had most likely been abandoned by her captain and crew in a sudden moment of panic, for reasons that, on reflection, probably hadn't been sufficient to justify it.
A Verdict, of Sorts
The inquiry finally concluded months later, and on the central question of criminal wrongdoing, the court sided with Sprague and Shufeldt over Solly-Flood. Morehouse and his crew were formally cleared of any involvement in whatever had happened to the Mary Celeste's original occupants.
But the court's lingering unease showed up anyway, in the only place it really could: the money. Salvage payments were finally awarded on April 8, 1873, a full four months after the Dei Gratia first towed the derelict ship into Gibraltar. The Mary Celeste and her cargo were valued at roughly $42,643 combined. Morehouse and his crew received just $1,700, worth roughly $46,000 in today's money, only about one-fifth of what a fully vindicated, entirely innocent salvage crew would typically expect to be paid. It wasn't a guilty verdict. It also wasn't the reward of a court that felt completely comfortable with everyone involved.
Solly-Flood, for his part, never really let the case go, continuing to air his suspicions in correspondence with London's Board of Trade well after the formal hearings ended. By the time the ordeal was finally behind him, Morehouse had spent months in Gibraltar defending himself against accusations that were, in the end, built on rust stains and warped timber.
The court had answered the one question it was actually equipped to answer: no, Morehouse and his crew hadn't murdered anyone. It never came close to answering the far bigger question everyone actually wanted resolved, what had happened to Benjamin Briggs, his wife and daughter, and the seven men who'd sailed with him, all of whom had vanished from a ship that showed no sign of struggle, no sign of disaster, and no clear reason to have been abandoned at all.
That question would go on to outlive Solly-Flood, Morehouse, and everyone else directly involved in the case and it's the one this series turns to next.
Read the Full Mary Celeste Investigation Series
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