Would an experienced mariner, even in a nervous state, have gone swimming hundreds of miles from land, leaving his vessel with sail set and expecting, even in a calm, to keep pace with her? Would the helmsman have left his post under such circumstances to stand on the baby’s quarterdeck and gape? Would the captain and mate have got up without finishing their breakfast to engage in such folly? Finally, why did this Abel Fosdyk not immediately report the story on his return to Algiers or at least at Marseilles, when there was a great hue and cry still in the air and sure information would have been rewarded? Or why did he not tell the story in the succeeding years, when the newspapers again and again revived the mystery and sought to solve it? Why did he leave papers to be published by another after his death?
My answer is that the mystery of the Marie Celeste is no nearer solution since the so-called Fosdyk papers were published. Moreover, I cannot find that worthy’s name on the list of the mystery ship’s crew.
A more credible explanation has recently been put forth by a writer in the New York Times, who says that the whole case rested upon a conspiracy. The captain and crew of the Marie Celeste had agreed with the personnel of another ship, that the brigantine be deserted in the region where she was found, her men to put off in a longboat which had previously been supplied by the conspirators in order that none of the Marie Celeste’s boats should be missing. The other vessel was to come along presently, pick up the derelict and collect the prize money, while the owners were to profit by the insurance. The deserting crew was to get its share of the proceeds and then disappear.
There are objections to this explanation also. Would a set of sailors and a captain, the latter with his wife and little girl, venture upon the sea in an open boat some hundreds of miles from land? Would the captain have taken his wife and child on the voyage with him if such a trick had been planned? And why was no member of the crew ever discovered in the course of the feverish search or through the persistent curiosity that followed? On the other hand, such tricks have been worked by mariners, and men who set out to commit crimes often attempt and accomplish the perilous and seemingly impossible. The doubts are by no means dispelled by this theory but here is at least a rational version of the affair.
The World War added two mysteries of the sea to the long roster that stand out with a special and tormenting character. The war had hardly opened when the British navy set out to destroy a small number of German cruisers that lay at various stations in the Atlantic and Pacific. There was von Spee’s squadron which sent Admiral Cradock and his ships to the bottom at the battle of Coronel and was subsequently destroyed by a force of British off the Falkland Islands. There was the Emden, that made the Pacific and Indian oceans a torment for Allied shipping for month after month, until she was overtaken, beaten and beached. Finally, there was the Karlsruhe.
This modern light cruiser, completed only the year before the war began, did exactly what she was designed for—commerce raiding. With her light armament of twelve 4.1 inch guns and her great speed (25.5 knots official, 27.6 according to the British reckoning) she was a scout vessel and destroyer of merchantmen. Since there was no considerable German fleet at sea to scout for, she became, within a few hot weeks, the terror of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. One vessel after another fell to her hunting pouch, while crews taken off the captured or sunken merchantmen began to arrive at American, West Indian and South American ports.
These refugees told, one and all, the same story. There would be a smudge of smoke on the horizon and within minutes the long slender German cruiser would come churning up out of the distance with the speed of an express train, firing a shot across the bows and signalling for the surrender of the trader. The prize crew came aboard, always acting with the most punctilious politeness and treating crew and passengers with apologetic kindness. If the vessel was old and slow, her coal was taken, the useful parts of her cargo transferred, her crew and passengers removed to safety and the craft sent to the bottom with bombs or by opening the sea cocks. If, on the other hand, the captured ship was modern and swift, she was manned from the cruiser, loaded with coal and other needed supplies, crowded with the captives and made to form an escort. At one time the cruiser is said to have had six such vessels in her train, at another four. When there got to be too many passengers and other captives, the least worthy of the vessels was detached and ordered to steam to a given port, being allowed just enough coal to get there.
As early as October 4, 1914, two months after the opening of hostilities, it was announced that the Karlsruhe had captured thirteen British merchantmen in the Atlantic, including four hundred prisoners. She did much better than that before she was through and the chances are she had then already put about twenty ships out of business, for this was a conservative announcement from the British Admiralty, which let it be known soon afterwards that all of seventy British war vessels were hunting the Karlsruhe and her sister raider, the Emden.
Shipping in the Atlantic was in a perilous way and excitement was high among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event. Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October 27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German raider and British men-of-war. On November 3 came the report that the Karlsruhe had captured a big Lamport and Holt liner off the coast of Brazil as late as October 26. On November 10 an officer of a British freighter captured by the raider reached Edinburgh and told the story that the Karlsruhe was using Bocas Reef, off the north Brazilian coast, as a base.