The Mary Celeste

A brigantine found drifting in the Atlantic off the Azores on 4 December 1872 with nobody aboard. None of the ten who sailed on her, the captain's wife and two-year-old daughter among them, was seen or heard of again.

Wikipedia describes the Mary Celeste as a Canadian-built brigantine under American registry, found drifting with no one on board in the Atlantic off the Azores on 4 December 1872. Smithsonian Magazine says she had set out on 7 November with ten people: the captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, with Sarah, his wife, their daughter aged two, and seven crewmen. Two weeks of heavy weather brought her to the Azores, and her log's final entry is timed 5 a.m. on 25 November.

According to Wikipedia, the crew of the Dei Gratia, another Canadian brigantine, came upon her under partial sail, untidy but still seaworthy, with her lifeboat gone. She was bound from New York City to Genoa and still carried plenty of food. Her alcohol cargo was untouched, as were the belongings of the captain and crew. None of the ten people aboard was seen or heard of again. Smithsonian says that with so few hard facts, guesses over the decades have run from mutiny and pirates to sea monsters and waterspouts, and that a 1935 film cast Bela Lugosi as a murderous sailor.

Smithsonian reports that the Dei Gratia's crewmen sailed the Mary Celeste about 800 miles to Gibraltar. In his 1944 book In the Wake of the Mary Celeste, James Franklin Briggs writes that the Vice Admiralty Court's Marshal seized her when she reached port, and that the court met five days later to hear the Dei Gratia's claim for salvage. Wikipedia dates the start of the hearing to 17 December 1872, before Sir James Cochrane, chief justice of Gibraltar, with Frederick Solly-Flood, Gibraltar's Attorney General, running it. Smithsonian says a hearing of this kind normally only settled whether the insurers owed the salvagers anything, but Solly-Flood suspected wrongdoing and looked into it. The court sat for over three months and turned up nothing to show a crime.

The story's second life came from fiction. In January 1884 the Cornhill Magazine printed Arthur Conan Doyle's "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" without his name. It spelled the ship "Marie Celeste" and framed the tale with quotes from an invented newspaper whose writer claims to have boarded the derelict and questioned the Dei Gratia's officers. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid says the real event had been largely forgotten until Doyle, then a young writer, revived it and exaggerated it for a popular readership.