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1. What I learned that most surprised me about this topic is how various people have allegedly proven the mystery, yet to this day most people believe it's still a mystery. I also find it interesting how many people are fascinated by this story when it doesn't seem that "crazy/mysterious" to me.

2. I've always been interested in the unexplained but in all honesty I'm not that interested in the topic, it was just one of the only topics that weren't taken already. I find unexplained topics most interesting though, something that genuinely interests me that is unexplained in my opinion are aliens/UFOs.

3. I found the theory of pirates being the reason for the abandonment of the ship most interesting, the idea of pirates taking the people of the ship is a compelling story that may not be that far out there.

4. That alcohol barrels on a boat could rub together so much that strong fumes could come from them and cause people to feel sick. I find it interesting how many ships must have had the same thing happen back then and how terrible conditions on a boat for so long at sea must have been, yet it continued for many years as the main source of long distance travel.

5. Anything involving other people forcing beliefs on you in my opinion is the most harmful, Appeal to Authority or Suppressed by Authorities, as you think you should be able to believe certain reputable people but sometimes they can have their own agenda. I think All Natural is least harmful, in my opinion most people should have common sense about things being labelled a certain way today and we should be able to see past a simple marketing scheme.

6. The thing I would pass on is to just look into things/think before you believe in something right away. That goes for almost anything today whether it be something you see on social media or simply the belief in something like Bigfoot, it's never usually worth it to just take someone's word for something, even if you're not well versed or knowledgeable on something it never hurts to fact check or just have your own opinion on something today.

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Description: A video with 270,000 views talking about the mystery from a smaller YouTuber who is just talking about the event.

Connection: The video talks about possible theories including the alcohol fumes/explosion, pirates, mutiny and murder. The video and other videos like this are simply here to talk about the event and provide theories and the story for the public giving people the choice to decide what they believe and making the story continue to be a mystery.

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Made by Bryor Atchison working individually

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Description: This article goes into detail about the various reasons behind the mystery of the Mary Celeste including mutiny on the ship, sea monsters, weather conditions, the condition of the ship and more. This event is largely still considered an unsolved case and shows how many people are still interested in this day, continuing to write articles, books and even make movies about the event.

Connection: This article explains that there is still no concrete reason to this day to solve the mystery of the ships abandonment. This can be connected to the reason of belief, unexplained as the case has yet to be resolved.

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The British brig Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores on December 5, 1872, when crew members spotted a ship adrift in the choppy seas. Capt. David Morehouse was taken aback to discover that the unguided vessel was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York City eight days before him and should have already arrived in Genoa, Italy. He changed course to offer help.

Morehouse sent a boarding party to the ship. Belowdecks, the ship's charts had been tossed about, and the crewmen's belongings were still in their quarters. The ship's only lifeboat was missing, and one of its two pumps had been disassembled. Three and a half feet of water was sloshing in the ship's bottom, though the cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol was largely intact. There was a six-month supply of food and water-but not a soul to consume it.

Thus was born one of the most durable mysteries in nautical history: What happened to the ten people who had sailed aboard the Mary Celeste? Through the decades, a lack of hard facts has only spurred speculation as to what might have taken place. Theories have ranged from mutiny to pirates to sea monsters to killer waterspouts. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1884 short story based on the case posited a capture by a vengeful ex-slave, a 1935 movie featured Bela Lugosi as a homicidal sailor. Now, a new investigation, drawing on modern maritime technology and newly discovered documents, has pieced together the most likely scenario.

"I love the idea of mysteries, but you should always revisit these things using knowledge that has since come to light," says Anne MacGregor, the documentarian who launched the investigation and wrote, directed and produced The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste,' partly with funding from Smithsonian Networks.

The ship began its fateful voyage on November 7, 1872, sailing with seven crewmen and Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Sophia. The 282-ton brigantine battled heavy weather for two weeks to reach the Azores, where the ship log's last entry was recorded at 5 a.m. on November 25.

After spotting the Mary Celeste ten days later, the Dei Gratia crewmen sailed the ship some 800 miles to Gibraltar, where a British vice admiralty court convened a salvage hearing, which was usually limited to determining whether the salvagers-in this case, the Dei Gratia crewmen-were entitled to payment from the ship's insurers. But the attorney general in charge of the inquiry, Frederick Solly-Flood, suspected mischief and investigated accordingly. After more than three months, the court found no evidence of foul play. Eventually, the salvagers received a payment, but only one-sixth of the $46,000 for which the ship and its cargo had been insured, suggesting that the authorities were not entirely convinced of the Dei Gratia crew's innocence.

The story of the Mary Celeste might have drifted into history if Conan Doyle hadn't published "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" in 1884; his sensationalistic account, printed in Cornhill Magazine, set off waves of theorizing about the ship's fate. Even Attorney General Solly-Flood revisited the case, writing summaries of his interviews and notes. But the mystery remained unsolved. MacGregor picked up the trail in 2002. "There's so much nonsense written about this legend," she said. "I felt compelled to find the truth."

MacGregor's four previous investigative documentaries, including The Hindenburg Disaster: Probable Cause (2001), applied modern forensic techniques to historical questions. "There are obvious limitations for historic cases," she says. "But using the latest technology, you can come to a different conclusion."

For her Mary Celeste film, MacGregor began by asking what didn't happen. Speculation concerning sea monsters was easy to dismiss. The ship's condition-intact and with full cargo-seemed to rule out pirates. One theory bandied about in the 19th century held that crew members drank the alcohol onboard and mutinied; after interviewing crewmen's descendants, MacGregor deemed that scenario unlikely. Another theory assumed that alcohol vapors expanded in the Azores heat and blew off the main hatch, prompting those aboard to fear an imminent explosion. But MacGregor notes that the boarding party found the main hatch secured and did not report smelling any fumes. True, she says, nine of the 1,701 barrels in the hold were empty, but the empty nine had been recorded as being made of red oak, not white oak like the others. Red oak is known to be a more porous wood and therefore more likely to leak.

As for that homicidal sailor played by Lugosi in The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, he may have been drawn from two German crewmen, brothers Volkert and Boye Lorenzen, who fell under suspicion because none of their personal possessions were found on the abandoned ship. But a Lorenzen descendant told MacGregor that the pair had lost their gear in a shipwreck earlier in 1872. "They had no motive," MacGregor says.

After ruling out what didn't happen, MacGregor confronted the question of what might have.

Abandoning a ship in the open sea is the last thing a captain would order and a sailor would do. But is that what Captain Briggs ordered? If so, why?

His ship was seaworthy. "It wasn't flooded or horribly damaged," says Phil Richardson, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and an expert in derelict vessels, whom MacGregor enlisted in her investigation. "The discovery crew sailed it, so it was in really good shape."

Briggs' life before the Mary Celeste offered no clues, says MacGregor, who visited the captain's hometown of Marion, Massachusetts, and interviewed descendants of Arthur Briggs, the 7-year-old son the Briggses had left behind so he could attend school. MacGregor learned that the captain was experienced and respected in shipping circles. "There was never a question that he would do something irrational," she says.

Did Briggs, then, have a rational reason to abandon ship? MacGregor figured that if she could determine the precise spot from which Briggs, his family and crew abandoned ship, she might be able to shed light on why. She knew from the transcriptions of the Mary Celeste's log slate-where notations were made before they were transcribed into the log-that the ship was six miles from, and within sight of, the Azores island of Santa Maria on November 25; she knew from the testimony of the Dei Gratia crew that ten days later, the ship was some 400 miles east of the island. MacGregor asked Richardson "to work backward and create a path between these two points."

Richardson said he would need water temperatures, wind speeds and wind directions at the time, data that MacGregor found in the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), a database that stores global marine information from 1784 to 2007 and is used to study climate change. She, her yachtsman husband, Scott, and Richardson drew on the data to determine whether the Mary Celeste could have drifted from its recorded location on November 25 to where the Dei Gratia crew reported finding it on December 5. Their conclusion: yes, it could have, even without a crew to sail it. "We found out it basically just sailed itself," Richardson says.

At that point, MacGregor considered the fact that a captain would most likely order a ship abandoned within sight of land. Since Santa Maria was the last land for hundreds of miles, it seemed safe to assume that the Mary Celeste had been abandoned the morning of November 25, after the last log entry was written.

But why?

On this point, MacGregor says, Attorney General Solly-Flood's notes are crucial. He wrote that he saw nothing unusual about the voyage until the last five days, which is why he transcribed the ship's log starting five days from the end. The ship's log is believed to have been lost in 1885, so those transcriptions provided the only means for MacGregor and Richardson to plot the course and positions logged for the ship. The two then reconsidered those positions in light of ICOADS data and other information on sea conditions at the time. Their conclusion: Briggs was actually 120 miles west of where he thought he was, probably because of an inaccurate chronometer. By the captain's calculations, he should have sighted land three days earlier than he did.

Solly-Flood's notes yielded one other piece of information that MacGregor and Richardson consider significant: the day before he reached the Azores, Briggs changed course and headed north of Santa Maria Island, perhaps seeking haven.

The night before the last entry in the ship's log, the Mary Celeste again faced rough seas and winds of more than 35 knots. Still, MacGregor reasons, rough seas and a faulty chronometer wouldn't, by themselves, prompt an experienced captain to abandon ship. Was there something else?

MacGregor learned that on its previous voyage, the Mary Celeste had carried coal and that the ship had recently been extensively refitted. Coal dust and construction debris could have fouled the ship's pumps, which would explain the disassembled pump found on the Mary Celeste. With the pump inoperative, Briggs would not have known how much seawater was in his ship's hull, which was too fully packed for him to measure visually.

At that point, says MacGregor, Briggs-having come through rough weather, having finally and belatedly sighted land and having no way of determining whether his ship would sink-might well have issued an order to abandon ship.

But, like Attorney General Solly-Flood, MacGregor can't leave the story of the Mary Celeste alone; she is continuing her investigation for a book. "The research goes on," she says. "Because I have been touched by the story, as I hope other people will be."

Jess Blumberg is an intern at Smithsonian.

The True Story of the 'Mary Celeste' will première November 4 on the Smithsonian Channel on high-definition DirecTV.

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The British brig Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores on December 5, 1872, when crew members spotted a ship adrift in the choppy seas. Capt. David Morehouse was taken aback to discover that the unguided vessel was the Mary Celeste, which had left New York City eight days before him and should have already arrived in Genoa, Italy.

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Description: In this article a scientist claims to know the reason behind the mystery of the Mary Celeste, Dr. Andrea Sella built a replica of the Mary Celeste in an attempt to prove the abandonment of the ship. They used butane gas to simulate an explosion caused by leaking alcohol in the ship's cargo, creating a pressure-wave explosion which would result in no burning or scorching. This experiment made the scientist conclude that the ship's passengers would've been scared of the alleged explosion and abandoned ship. This would've had to mean that someone on the ship had a pipe in their mouth or something and sparked alcohol in barrels on the ship and there was record of 300 gallons of alcohol leaking on the ship.

Connection: I believe this connection has a red flag of proof by verbosity, given that it is simply a bunch of research conducted by one person that gives the appearance that there is evidence. For a reason for belief I think this would fall under perception and observation given that it is just someone's specific viewpoint on what could have happened.

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Attention ... focused on the highly volatile cargo. It seemed highly possible that the leaking alcohol caught light, sending Captain Briggs into a panic and prompting the dreaded cry: 'Abandon ship!' It was a plausible explanation but has always been discounted because there was no sign of fire, or explosion. A blast of sufficient magnitude to persuade an experienced captain to take the last resort of abandoning ship would surely have left at least a few scorch marks on the wooden barrels, or in the hold.

Now, however, 21st century scientific techniques have been used to finally solve the 19th century mystery. An experiment, conducted by a scientist at UCL for a Channel 5 documentary which will be screened next week, shows that an explosion may indeed be the key to the fate of Captain Briggs, his family and crew.

Dr Andrea Sella [UCL Chemistry] built a replica of the hold of the Mary Celeste.

Using butane gas, he simulated an explosion caused by alcohol leaking from the ship's cargo.

Instead of wooden barrels, he used cubes of paper. Setting light to the gas caused a huge blast, which sent a ball of flame upwards. Surely the paper cubes would be burned or blackened or the replica hold damaged.

Remarkably, neither happened.

"What we created was a pressure-wave type of explosion," says Dr Sella. "There was a spectacular wave of flame but, behind it, was relatively cool air. No soot was left behind and there was no burning or scorching.

"Given all the facts we have, this replicates conditions on board the Mary Celeste. The explosion would have been enough to blow open the hatches and would have been completely terrifying for everyone on board.

Such a massive explosion could have been triggered by a spark caused when two loose barrels rubbed together, or when a careless crew man, pipe in mouth, opened a hatch to ventilate the hold during the long crossing from New York to Italy. Records show that 300 gallons of alcohol had leaked - more than enough to create a terrifying explosion.

"It is the most compelling explanation," says Dr Sella. "Of all those suggested, it fits the facts best and explains why they were so keen to get off the ship." ...

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Attention ... focused on the highly volatile cargo. It seemed highly possible that the leaking alcohol caught light, sending Captain Briggs into a panic and prompting the dreaded cry: 'Abandon ship!' It was a plausible explanation but has always been discounted because there was no sign of fire, or explosion.

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Description: This article has a different theory about what apparently happened to the Mary Celeste, claiming that the captain was an insurance scammer and crashed the boat into a reef just off the coast of Haiti, even dating it to November 1884.
"In November 1884, her commanding officer, Gilman C. Parker, along with several crooked shippers tried to scam the insurance company that insured the Mary Celeste. Filling the ship with worthless cargo, they forged the manifest, claiming a value of $30,000 ($800,000 in 2017 dollars). A month later, Parker set sail for Haiti. As the Mary Celeste approached the port, Parker deliberately steered the ship into a well-known reef. The collision ripped the keel apart, wrecking the ship. The crew abandoned ship and Parker proceeded to file a claim for the doctored value of the cargo." (Jason Ponic, 2017)

Connection: Similar to Post #2 I believe the same red flag and reason for belief are exhibited here, (I'm not sure if that's okay but there's really not a lot of weird explanations or extreme reasons for belief with this case...). This "mysterious" case seems to not be all that mysterious as several websites claim to have solved the case, however with it being so long ago obviously it's hard to have exact answers. From a Discovery website article (https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/what-really-happened-to-the-mary-celeste/) it states that "there may never be a final answer to the Mary Celeste mystery) but it does state the same reason for the abandonment of the ship possibly being the captain's purposeful crash. However, in the Discovery article it says the ship continued to sail until 1885 not 1884 like this post's article states. It's interesting how such a big topic can have so many different explanations that don't match up.

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Description: A picture from a 1943 paper (Arizona Republic), showing that the mystery was relevant to the world for long after the fact and even to this day.

Connection: The newspaper article simply addressing the incident and making it a big title calling it "Sea's Greatest Mystery" which at the time it may have been, but it seems a bit dramatic. This is another example of unexplained as a reason to believe.

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Description: The picture is from the same newspaper article as my last post, the Arizona Republic newspaper from 1943. The article states as addressed in a previous post that there was a lot of alcohol on the ship which could lead to a flammable explosion/fire but as the article states there was no sign of fire.

Connection: It's hard to establish many other connections besides unexplained or simple perception and observation as many articles, pictures and more push the idea of this being an unexplained mystery to this day. This article adds to the mystery by stating that the ship had no evidence of fire damage or other disasters making it confusing why people would just abandon the ship.

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Description: The wreckage of the Mary Celeste can be seen in this photo and is located in a reef in Haiti.

Connection: The wreckage is said to be one of the only ships to have wrecked in this specific area, making the mystery even more intriguing.

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Description: A video by Buzzfeed with over 4 million views addressing the mystery of the ship. The video addressing multiple theories including sea monsters, the alcohol theory and more.

Connection: This video is more or less a video discussing the unsolved mystery and making it an unexplained connection, being more about talking about the story than addressing any serious evidence.

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The Maritime Mystery Of The Mary Celeste

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Description: An almost hour long video about the mystery of the Mary Celeste, with almost a million views (855,696). The video is made by a YouTuber that presents the story and a possible reason for the ship's abandonment.

Connection: Another example of someone believing that the alcohol being the reason for the people leaving the ship. This person thinks that the barrels on the ship were rubbing together from the ship's movement and created strong alcohol fumes and worried the people of the ship. An example of proof by verbosity.

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Ghost Ship Mary Celeste: The 150 Year Mystery