The Mary Celeste

Picture from the Thomas Berry Library, in the Examiner

I remember it as the Marie Celeste, because of a story written about this mysterious vessel. The images from tale have stayed with me: the hot food half-eaten on the table and the crew mysteriously vanished.

The short story was published in 1884 and it earned the handsome sum of forty pounds for its author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps the publication of this tale gave a leg up to the struggling writer; it would be 1892  before he published the first stories of Sherlock Holmes.

The Mary Celeste was a real ship. En route from New York to Genoa, it was found abandoned off Portugal -- nobody could imagine why.

However, David Williams, a sea captain, has developed a theory. He believes that severe jerking of the ship as the result of the column of water driven up by a seaquake was the reason the occupants of the ship fled onto a small boat.

Seaquakes can cause violent movement of water; some believe they can even account for whale beachings.