Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship Whose Crew Vanished

September 8, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

On December 4, 1872, a Canadian brigantine called the De Gratia spotted a ship drifting erratically 400 miles east of the Azores. When a boarding party climbed aboard, they found a vessel fully provisioned: food on the table, personal belongings in the cabins, the crew’s quarters undisturbed. But no people. The ship was the Mary Celeste, and her crew of ten—including Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, and their two-year-old daughter Sophia—had vanished without a trace. The only things missing were the ship’s lifeboat and some navigation instruments. The cargo of industrial alcohol was intact. The captain’s logbook stopped abruptly nine days earlier. Nothing fit. The mystery has haunted the maritime imagination ever since.

The Ship Before the Legend

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What you'll learn

1 Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship Whose Crew Vanished
2 Timestamped Outline
3 (01:20) **The Discovery** - The De Gratia spots a drifting ship 400 miles east of the Azores and boards it to find a fully provisioned vessel with no one aboard
4 (03:20) **The Ship's Early Life as the Amazon** - The Mary Celeste began as a different vessel called the Amazon, built in Nova Scotia in 1861
5 (05:40) **The Fateful Voyage Begins** - On November 7th, 1872, the Mary Celeste departs New York for Genoa, Italy, carrying 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol
6 (07:55) **The Discovery of the Abandoned Ship** - On December 4th, 1872, 27 days out of New York, the De Gratia finds the Mary Celeste drifting erratically
7 (09:20) **The Mysterious Blank Logbook** - The final log entry from November 25th shows fair weather and no hint of trouble, then nine days of blank pages

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

In 1872, the Mary Celeste was discovered drifting across the Atlantic, cargo intact, but every person aboard mysteriously missing. Historian and author Dominic Selwood joins us to examine the evidence, unravel the myths and ask what really happened to history’s most famous ghost ship.

Cast List:

Eric Meyers: Narrator

Dominic Selwood: Historian and Author

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