‘Ghost Ship’ a tale with substance

  I don’t know about you, but while I sometimes know which book I’ll be reading in the next week or next month (usually because of early release reviews in other publications), most of the time the choice is pure serendipity.
  Such was the case with “Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew.” A while back I was listening to a Clive Cussler audio book (one of his NUMA series) and heard a reference to the Mary Celeste, which was found empty and adrift in the North Atlantic in 1972. I did a little online research as to what probably is the best book about the ship, and found this one by Brian Hicks (co-author of “Raising the Hunley”), which was published in 2004.
  What makes the case of the Mary Celeste such an enduring mystery is that the ship was completely seaworthy, and indeed was boarded by crewmen from a passing ship and sailed to Gibraltar, where they hoped to claim salvage rights in a maritime court.
  There also were no clues as to what had caused the Mary Celeste’s crew — and the captain’s wife and 2-year-old daughter, who were aboard as passengers — to abandon ship, apparently suddenly, consigning their fates to a small open lifeboat. The ship’s wheel hadn’t been tied down, and the crew had left behind foul-weather gear, their pipes and personal belongings.
  Over the decades, as you can imagine, quite a number of theories sprang up as to what had led to the Mary Celeste’s fate as a ghost ship. A giant squid sucked the crew off the ship, one by one, and devoured them. A UFO appeared in the sky and spirited them to its home planet. They were victims of the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, even though they were miles away. One of the most plausible, believe it or not, was that shifting tides caused islands to rise up out of the sea in the area where the ship was found, and that it may have run aground, only to float free again.
  The prosecutor in the maritime court in Gibraltar was convinced of foul play for personal gain on the part of the crew of the Dei Gratia, who brought in the ship. He was unsuccessful, but the trial was long and arduous and in the end the salvage benefits negligible.
  In “Ghost Ship,” journalist Hicks puts together all of the tiny bits that are known about the demise of the humans aboard the Mary Celeste and comes up with what seems to be a plausible explanation of the tragedy.
  He also recounts the discovery of the remains of the ship — intentionally run aground off Haiti in 1885 — by a team from NUMA, which initially had been a Cussler fiction but became a Cussler-funded marine-studies organization.
   It’s a nice bit of resolution — which is more than can be said for the Mary Celeste.