At the very top of the list of the most famous mysteries of the sea is the legend of the

Mary Celeste, a ship found cruising along under sail in 1872. Its cargo intact but was

not a single living soul aboard. How could this be? Well, it turns out that the reason

it's a mystery to us today is that authors wrote stuff about it, but at the time there

was hardly any mystery to be solved. The truth behind the Mary Celeste is today on Skeptoid.

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com, the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

In 1872, a ship was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in near perfect condition but for one

problem. There was nobody aboard. In time, the story of the Mary Celeste became one of the most

famous riddles of the sea. Over the years, many have offered solutions for what happened to the

crew. But are any of them correct? As is the case with so many of the mysteries we examine here on

Skeptoid, the story of the Mary Celeste was an actual event that was largely forgotten until an

imaginative author revived and exaggerated it for popular audiences. This time, the author was a

young man who would later be knighted as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his Sherlock Holmes books.

Is a short story written under the pseudonym W. Small for the January 1884 issue of Cornhill

magazine entitled J. Habakkuk-Jeffson's Statement. Conan Doyle dramatized the Mary Celeste's story,

adding such touches as meals laid out on the table, tea boiling on the stove, and the ship

sailing boldly into the harbor at Gibraltar with nobody at the helm. Today, most people who have

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