The Mary Celeste was both a real sailing ship and the subject of an 1884 short story by Arthur Conan Doyle (although he spelled it Marie Celeste). The fictional story soon overshadowed the historical event it was based on. In 1872, Captain Benjamin Briggs set sail on the Mary Celeste from New York headed to Italy. He had with him his wife, his young daughter, and seven hand-picked crew members, plus 1701 barrels of alcohol in the cargo hold. A month later, the ship was spotted off the coast of the Azores. There was no one aboard. The ship’s one lifeboat and some navigational tools were missing, but the crew’s personal effects, the cargo, and the ship’s provisions were still aboard. The last entry in the ship’s log, from nine days earlier, gave no clues. No trace of the ten people were ever found. While there are several theories about what happened, no conclusion has ever been determined.
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The fate of the Mary Celeste’s crew is just one of 15 unsolved mysteries you can read about at Mental Floss.
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Source: neatorama