The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (14 page)

“J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” like the abolitionist pamphlet touted by its narrator, attracted considerable attention at the time of its publication. The
New York Times
reviewer derided the absurdity of its plot and pronounced it a story that “would make Thackeray
turn in his grave,” but
The Illustrated London News
praised it as “an exceedingly powerful story,” which might have come from the pen of Robert Louis Stevenson, though the American theme and the elements of mystery and madness suggested, at least as inspiration,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
by Edgar Allan Poe.

Though most of its critics recognized Jephson’s “Statement” as fiction and placed it in the long and honorable tradition of elaborate flights of imagination inspired by real events, there were, there always are, readers who believed the article to be a true account.

Immediately upon publication, five copies of the
Cornhill
left London bound for Gibraltar, where two important gentlemen took immediate and vocal offense. One of these was Horatio James Sprague, the American consul, who had been instrumental in freeing the
Mary Celeste
from the clutches of the other, Frederick Solly Flood, the queen’s proctor at Gibraltar. Flood had impounded the derelict vessel and waylaid the captain and crew of the
Dei Gratia
for a salvage hearing that more resembled a criminal trial. Within two weeks of the journal’s publication, Consul Sprague redirected a copy of the
Cornhill
to the attention of the Honorable John Davis, assistant secretary of state in Washington, D.C., referring to the “full particulars” of the salvage hearing that had, eleven years earlier, been “duly transmitted to the department.”

Frederick Solly Flood, equally appalled by the inaccuracies of the article, issued a public statement, which appeared in the British press, denouncing “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” as “a complete fraud from start to finish.” It was still his conviction, he reminded the public, that the officers had been murdered by the crew, who had then abandoned the vessel in the ship’s boat and were probably still alive. The
Cornhill
article, in his considered view, might well have been concocted by one of the survivors to throw off the investigation, which had never been closed in the mind of the queen’s proctor these eleven years.

On January 8, fifty copies of the
Cornhill
set sail from Liverpool in the deep hold of the brig
Claudius
, which after a smooth crossing encountered severe weather off the Nantucket coast and limped into Boston harbor partially dismasted, the rigging in a tangle, and the crew bedraggled from lack of sleep and double shifts at the pumps. Once unloaded, the copies were quickly dispersed along the Eastern seaboard.

On February 3, Prosper Hayes, an aspiring poet and literary critic for the
Boston Herald
, was pleased to find the familiar journal in the stack of transatlantic mail on his desk. He had been closely following a serial,
The Giant’s Robe
, and was eager to read the next installment, which promised an important revelation. There was always something of interest in the
Cornhill
, unlike
Blackwood’s
, which had, in his opinion, rather fallen down in recent times. James Payn at the
Cornhill
was ambitious for his journal and ever on the watch for the coming men of letters, though it was hard to tell, sometimes, exactly who was coming, as the stories and articles were all unsigned. Prosper opened the cover to the contents page. Here was a writer who had found a way around this problem of attribution; he’d put his name in the title of his piece, and what an almighty biblical moniker it was: J. Habakuk Jephson. When Hayes turned to Jephson’s contribution, he found that it commenced with a description of the famous ghost ship, the
Marie Celeste
, being towed into Gibraltar harbor.

Prosper Hayes raised his eyes from the page and gazed out the window alongside his desk, which gave onto the chilly confusion and noise of Beacon Street. He noticed little about the scene, as his thoughts strayed to the unsolved mystery of the abandoned ship, a tale he had not thought of in many years. He’d been at Harvard College when the goings-on at Gibraltar were first reported in the press. Early versions suggested that the crew had murdered the officers in a drunken fury, then, when sobriety set in, thrown the bodies overboard and escaped on the ship’s boat. As the captain hailed from Marion, that lovely but cantankerous village on Buzzards Bay run entirely by retired sea captains, the fate of the ship had been of considerable local interest. Hayes had a classmate from Marion who knew the family. The captain of the ghost ship was survived by his mother, who didn’t believe the mutiny story. It was rumored that she was convinced her son and his family, for he had his wife and daughter aboard, had been picked up by a passing vessel and would, in due course, arrive at some destination where they might announce their survival to the world.

But they never had. The trial had ended unsatisfactorily, with only a small award to the salvagers, because the judge believed they might have had a hand in the murder of the captain. Others maintained that the captain of the salvage ship and the captain of the derelict ship were friends, and that the whole abandonment and recovery of the vessel was some species of insurance fraud. Whatever happened, it was a sad and strange business, and one that Prosper Hayes had followed for a bit and then forgotten. Was the family still waiting for some word from their lost ones after all these years? And what might this new article by Dr. Jephson add to the sum of available knowledge about the case?

A rattle and fizz from the stove jolted the reviewer from his reverie. He laid the journal on the desk, scooped up a shovel of coal from the scuttle, opened the grate, and dumped in the fuel. As he settled into his reading chair, pulling his blanket around his shoulders, he noticed the first flakes of snow drifting past the window.
A sea yarn on a snowy day, safe in his cozy office—what better employment could a young man find?

The mysterious passenger, Septimus Goring, was bending over the dead captain Tibbs, who held in his rigid hand the pistol with which he had taken his own life, when Hayes looked up from the page and observed that the snow was falling thickly, clotting in the hollows of the maple stripling across the road and forming neat white caps on the light posts. He returned to his reading. At long last, here was the truth about the infamous ghost ship, the crew of which had suffered a fate more diabolical than anyone could have guessed.

Those light flakes gathering silently upon the throbbing metropolis of Boston constituted the western edge of a blizzard that would pack the East Coast from Maine to New York City in ten feet of heavy, wet snow, leaving the streets impassible and travelers trapped far from home. By morning the beach at Truro would be littered with rubble from the clipper
Miltonia
. Thanks to the sure command of Captain Reginald Berry, the crew and passengers, sixteen in number, took to the small boats from which, after ten hours in storm-tossed waters, they were picked up by the passing steamer
Endor
. All landed safely at Philadelphia the following morning, with much praise for the courage and courtesy of the rescuing vessel’s captain and crew.

When the streets were cleared of snow, five copies of the
Cornhill
left Boston in a mailbag on the ferry
Bernadette
, bound for New Bedford. The following morning one copy was delivered to Mr. David Hamley, the librarian at the New Bedford Public Library, which had a subscription to the journal. A week later, in the drafty reading room of this stately edifice, Dr. Samuel Moody of Marion took up the journal, and settled himself in a comfortable chair near the tall west-facing window, content to pass a few hours in perusal of the current literary scene in Britain. He had not been long absorbed in his reading before a soft huff of surprise escaped his lips. He had come to a description of an event with which he was well acquainted.
For the next hour, punctuated by the occasional grunt, and a general increase in the intensity of his interest, Dr. Moody read what was, he assumed, a fantastical tale. Though the author had changed many of the names, presumably to protect himself from accusations of libel, there was too much resemblance to the facts of the famous incident for any reader to doubt his true intention, which was to raise the specter of the long unsolved mystery of the derelict brigantine the
Mary Celeste
.

At length Dr. Moody returned the
Cornhill
to the shelf and strode out into the freezing afternoon, directing his steps toward the home of his friend James Briggs, the youngest brother of the ill-fated Briggs family of Marion, who had lost seven of his closest family members to the sea. Three of that number—his brother Benjamin, his sister-in-law Sarah, and an infant niece Sophia Matilda—had disappeared from the
Mary Celeste
. James lived with his wife, two daughters, and widowed mother in a new section of town, a mile’s walk from the center. The house was of solid construction, spacious, yet cozy. There was a kitchen garden on one side, and an arbor over the walk that led to the front door.

At the specific request of its owner the house was so situated that, unlike its neighbors, it offered no view of the sea.

A second copy of the
Cornhill
was delivered to the Italianate mansion of the widowed New Bedford socialite Mrs. Amanda McClinton Pink, who was not at home to receive it. The January editions of
Blackwood’s
and
Longman’s Magazine
arrived in the same mail. Mrs. Pink was an anglophile—how she regretted the revolution. She traced her own descent to a British viscount and a Scottish bard. There was an Irish strain as well, indistinguishable in her name as well as in her conversation, yet evident in her temper and her psychology. Like her Irish ancestors, Mrs. Pink possessed the “sight” and communicated with spirits of all kinds on a regular basis.

The housemaid arranged the journals on the hall table, alongside the tray laden with letters and cards from tradesmen. When Mrs. Pink returned from her round of social calls, she snatched the
British magazines and carried them to her own bedroom. It was her habit to lie abed in the mornings, drinking her tea and reading. She placed the
Cornhill
atop the stack on the rosewood table next to her bed. She was following
The Giant’s Robe
and looked forward to the next installment.

That night, before she turned out her light, Mrs. Pink couldn’t resist having a look at
The Giant’s Robe
to reassure herself that the new installment concerned the difficulties of the somewhat dubious character named Mark. As she opened the journal, her eyes fell upon the title of an article by someone named J. Habakuk Jephson, but neither the style nor the subject appealed to her, and she flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. To her delight, Mark was mentioned in the first sentence and he was clearly in interesting difficulties.

The perils of Mark kept Mrs. Pink up to a late hour. In the morning when the maid arrived with her tea, she found her mistress in a petulant mood. She’d devoured the treat she’d meant to save for morning and now, like a child who has gorged herself on a box of chocolates and wakes to find the empty papers scattered about her bed, she had the unpleasant sense of having done something shameful. When the maid went out, Mrs. Pink pushed the
Cornhill
from the stack and muttered to herself as it slipped off the table edge to the carpet. Nothing for it but
Blackwood’s
, she thought, without enthusiasm. But a glance at
Blackwood’s
table of contents lifted her spirits to a giddy height; here was a new work by Mrs. Oliphant, who never failed to please.

Two hours later a jubilant reader closed the journal decisively. The story was so exactly to her taste it had caused her to pause in her reading, savoring the details of the characters and the plot. It concerned a wealthy widow, like herself, who, unlike Mrs. Pink, has failed to make a will and dies intestate. But how beautifully she dies, passing from her bedroom to another place where, for some time, though time means nothing there, she can’t comprehend that she is no longer alive. When she does, against the advice of her new and old friends, she determines that she must go back among the living
and right the wrong done to her goddaughter, the rightful heir to her grand estate. And—this was the exciting part—she is allowed to return to her house. Children, in their innocence, can see her, but no one else does, no one else can, or perhaps it’s that no one else will.

Mrs. Pink rose from her downy pillows and luxurious bed linens in a state of exaltation. She would go straight to her friend Mrs. Drover, and bring her the welcome news that the divine Oliphant was clearly in sympathy with their own enlightened Spiritualist company.

The
Cornhill
lay facedown on the carpet until the afternoon, when the maid set it back on the nightstand. Mrs. Pink didn’t open it again; other matters claimed her attention. Mrs. Drover had invited her to a séance with a distinguished medium from England, and she had no doubt that her beloved Captain Pink would have some message for her. It had been ten years since his ship had gone down in a hurricane off the coast of Mauritius with all hands lost, but she had never lost faith, as she had never lost it when he was alive, that he would find a way to return to her.