Mary Celeste - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

In popular culture, the mystery of the Mary Celeste has been used frequently as an icon by writers of fiction. This can take the form of either direct adaptations of the story, or stories based on the idea of an abandoned ship, inspired by the Mary Celeste incident.

A fictional depiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is credited as popularising the Mary Celeste mystery. In "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", a story in his 1884 book The Captain of the Polestar, Conan Doyle presented his theory on what had happened. Doyle drew very heavily on fact, but included a considerable amount of fiction, calling the ship the Marie Céleste, and claiming that no lifeboats were missing ("The boats were intact and slung upon the davits"). Much of this story's fictional content, and the incorrect name, have come to dominate popular accounts of the incident, and were even published as fact by several newspapers.

In 1913 a purported explanation of the mystery appeared in the monthly fiction magazine, The Strand Magazine, under the title Abel Fosdyk's Story. The account was ostensibly the true story of Abel Fosdyk, sole survivor of the Mary Celeste. It differs in certain respects from the known facts of the case, and is generally accepted to be a literary hoax.

The first film version of the account was the now rare 1935 British film entitled The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (also known as The Phantom Ship). This film presented a non-supernatural explanation of the event. The 16 November 1954 episode of The Goon Show was titled "The Mystery of the Mary Celeste". It explained that the crew had abandoned the ship because they "knew that one day someone would offer a reward for the solution of the mystery".

The Doctor Who serial The Chase (1965) suggested that the arrival of time-travelling Daleks caused the terrified crew of the ship to jump overboard.

The 1964 science fiction novel The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer explains the mystery as the crew embarking on a "nude swimming party" while becalmed off the Azores.

The 1973 science fiction novel by Philip José Farmer The Other Log of Phileas Fogg features Phileas Fogg (Around the World in Eighty Days) matching wits on the ghost ship Mary Celeste with an alien known as James Moriarty. In 1990, the Gibraltarian author Sam Benady published Sherlock Holmes in Gibraltar, a set of two short stories set in the pre-Doctor Watson days. In the first one, The Abandoned Brigantine, Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

The 1989 Discworld novel Pyramids by Terry Pratchett features a footnote "Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the /Marie Celeste/, and the chuck keys for electric drills."

In 1996, Hanna-Barbera's The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest features the episode "In The Wake of the Mary Celeste", in which the Quest team discovers the wreckage and learns that its disappearance was caused by strange glowing lights from the depths of the sea dragging it down after the ship was taken over by its crew in a mutiny.

In the 2002 movie Ghost Ship, the captain tells an abbreviated story of the Mary Celeste (though he says she left Charleston and made it past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, to be boarded by fishermen).

In the third season finale of Warehouse 13, "Stand", on the desk of Kataranga there is a a piece of the ship with artifact properties, part of the rigging that binds whomever touches it in a constrictor-like hold.

In Search Of..., a late 1970s show narrated by Leonard Nimoy, dedicated a season 4 episode to the mystery of the Mary Celeste. The episode was titled "The Ghost Ship".