Benjamin Briggs

Benjamin Briggs

Benjamin Spooner Briggs (April 24, 1835 – probably November 1872) was an experienced United States seaman and master mariner. He is famous today for being the Captain of the merchant ship Mary Celeste when she was discovered unmanned and drifting in the Atlantic Ocean near the Straits of Gibraltar, on December 4, 1872. The lifeboat was missing, yet the Mary Celeste herself was still under sail and there were signs of a sudden and unexplained abandonment. Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah and two-year-old daughter Sophia Matilda, along with the crew of the Mary Celeste, and the lifeboat, were never found and presumed lost.

Read more about Benjamin Briggs:  Maritime Career, Family, Mary Celeste, Legacy

Famous quotes containing the words benjamin and/or briggs:

    The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.
    —Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

    The opposite of love is not hate, as many believe, but rather indifference. Nothing communicates disinterest more clearly than distancing. A child cannot feel valued by parents who are forever absorbed in their own affairs.
    —Dorothy Corkville Briggs (20th century)