A team of British chemists says they have unraveled what happened aboard the Mary Celeste, the “ghost ship” that was found in 1872, off the Azores, without any trace of the crew. But of the crew, there is still no trace.
On December 5, 1872, the British ship Dei Gratia was about 400 miles east of the Azores when it came across another ship, without a soul on board. It was the Mary Celestewhich would become the most famous “ghost ship” from the history of maritime navigation.
The ship had been abandoned, but the crew’s belongings remained on board. Inside, there were still food and water for six monthsas well as 1,701 gallons of industrial alcohol, but the crew had abandoned shiptaking the lifeboat and risking the high seas rather than staying on board.
Theories quickly began to circulate about what might have happened, including piracy, natural disasters, diseases and even a supernatural attack, but no clues were ever found — and the fact that the crew never appeared again made the Mary Celeste a mystery — until our days.
In a new experiment, British chemists Jack Rowbotham e Frank Mairfrom the University of Manchester, may now have managed to convincingly show what happened on board the ship.
According to the two researchers, a rapid explosion of ethanol vaporswhich would not have left any traces of damagecould be the reason why sailors found the famous ghost ship.
Rowbotham and Mair demonstrated this idea using a mockup of the ship during a documentary recently shown on the British channel Channel 5 (which, unfortunately, ), in which they present what they claim to be «a quite convincing theory about what could have happened».
“The Mary Celeste was a merchant ship that sailed from New York to Genoa, Italy, carrying a cargo of industrial grade ethanol,” recalls Rowbotham. The ship had on board around 1700 barrels of ethanol, often used by wine producers to strengthen their wines.
A subsequent investigation revealed that nine of the barrels were emptyprobably due to the greater porosity of wood with which they were manufactured, which would have allowed the ethanol to flow out.
The crew’s logbooks also revealed that the ship experienced bad weather during the voyage, which led the sailors to batten down the hatchesinadvertently raising that ethanol vapors were trapped.
As the ship progressed into warmer waters, these vapors would have heated above the flash point of ethanolwhich is 13°C, say the two researchers.
Rowbotham explains that a spark, perhaps caused by a loose embera lit pipe or friction between metal parts, – could then have triggered a sudden explosion.
Such an event could have led the crew to abandon ship in panicor even being physically thrown into the sea, leaving the ship adrift and with no one on board.
What is decisive, Rowbotham emphasizes, is that after the incident they would not have been any signs of combustion on the ship, despite the ethanol flames reaching up to 2000°C, as the explosion “was resolved in a second”.
«When you have a crew that probably wouldn’t be very educated, the idea that, in the middle of the darkness, suddenly a blue flash appears and a heat wave, and all the doors open – that’s truly terrifying,” he says. Andrea Sellaresearcher at University College London, at .
In 2006, Sella had already held an event now conducted by Rowbotham and Mair.
«We went further than Professor Sella’s experiencebecause he used butane and paper, whereas we used wood and ethanol», explains Rowbotham, who adds that these conditions more accurately represent the situation on board the Mary Celeste.
«We don’t know for sure what happened after the explosion.but we are quite convinced that the set of factors that combined constitute a hypothesis very convincing», concludes Rowbotham.
Now, the mystery of what happened to the infamous ship has been solved. But then, and what happened to the crew?
