Mary Celeste - Later History and Fate

Later History and Fate

Of all the unlucky vessels I ever heard of, she was the most unlucky.

James Winchester considered selling the Mary Celeste after the mysterious events for which she was now notable. His mind was made up when the vessel claimed the life of his father, Henry Winchester-Vinters, who drowned in an accident in Boston, Massachusetts when she was brought back to America. Winchester sold the Mary Celeste at an enormous loss. Over the next 13 years, the ship changed hands 17 times. By then, the Mary Celeste was in very poor condition.

Her last captain and owner, identified as G. C. Parker, made no profit whatsoever and deliberately wrecked the Mary Celeste in an insurance fraud in the Caribbean Sea on January 3, 1885. She was loaded with an over-insured cargo of scrap, including boots and cat food. The plan did not work, as the ship failed to sink after being run on to Rochelais reef off the western coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti and south of Gonâve Island. Parker then tried to burn the wreck, but even after the fire the vessel remained intact, although the ship's log was destroyed along with Benjamin Briggs' prior entries in it.

Parker then filed an exorbitant insurance claim for a cargo that never existed; a subsequent insurance investigation revealed the fraud. Parker sold the salvage rights for $500, claiming that there were 125 casks of Bass ale on board, 975 barrels of herring and $1000 in cutlery among other items. None of these items were actually on board. The ship and its cargo was insured by five companies for a total of $34,000.

Captain Parker was arrested, and put on trial for barratry, or the intentional destruction of a vessel. At the time, the sentence for doing so was death, so despite the clear evidence of the fraud and of Parker's guilt, the jury deadlocked, with five of the twelve jurors refusing to send him to death. Jurors routinely refused to convict people of this crime due to the death penalty, and three years later, the law was revised so that it was no longer a capital offense.

Despite Parker's acquittal, nearly everyone indicted for actions related to the shipwreck went bust, and Captain Parker himself died three months later.

The partially burnt hulk of the Mary Celeste was deemed beyond repair and she was left to eventually slip off the shoal and sink.

On August 9, 2001, an expedition headed by author Clive Cussler (representing the National Underwater and Marine Agency) and Canadian film producer John Davis along with divers from the Nova Scotian company EcoNova announced that they had found the remains of the brigantine where Parker had wrecked her. A detailed magnetometer survey of the bay, off the Isle de Gonâve, revealed that only one shipwreck was present - and that it had run onto Rochelois Reef with great force. The damaged coral from its impact delineated a battered channel with the wreck firmly set onto the reef. Maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado identified the wreck as Mary Celeste based on the location, the fact that no other wreck was present in the bay and by analyzing vessel fastenings, ballast, timber, and evidence of the fire. All of the evidence, including a mix of Nova Scotian and New England and Southern U.S. timbers matched the wreck with historical accounts of Mary Celeste.

One researcher has disputed Cussler's claim. Scott St. George of the University of Minnesota and formerly of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona analyzed samples from pine wood fragments recovered from the site in order to reconstruct the year the timber in question was harvested using Dendrochronology. Based on this, St. George found that the wood was cut from trees still living at least a decade after the Mary Celeste sank, putting the authenticity and identification of this shipwreck in question.