The Mary Celeste: The Ship Found Sailing With No One Aboard | Calm History for Sleep

In December 1872, sailors found a ship sailing by herself in the middle of the Atlantic. Her sails were set, there was food for six months, and the cargo was almost untouched. But the ten people who had left New York aboard her, including the captain's wife and their two-year-old daughter, were gone, along with the little lifeboat. Tonight we go slowly through what the boarding party actually saw and swore to in court, how a young Arthur Conan Doyle turned the case into a ghost story (and invented some of its most famous details), and what modern investigators think may really have happened. That includes a London laboratory experiment that made a model ship's hold explode without leaving a single scorch mark. A calm history story for falling asleep. About 21 minutes, with soft ambient sound throughout. Captions are available (CC). Chapters 0:00 A ship with no one aboard 2:05 A Ship With Two Names 4:28 The Captain and His Family 6:44 Eight Days Behind 8:34 What Deveau Found 11:17 The Hearing at Gibraltar 12:49 How a Ship Became a Legend 14:31 What Might Have Happened 18:25 The Ship Without Her People 19:56 A calm sea Sources • Charles Edey Fay, Mary Celeste: The Odyssey of an Abandoned Ship (1942) • Paul Begg, Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea (2007) • Brian Hicks, Ghost Ship (2004) • Testimony of Oliver Deveau and others, Vice Admiralty Court, Gibraltar, December 1872 – March 1873 (as reprinted in Fay) • Andrea Sella, University College London: alcohol-vapour ignition model, 2006 (UCL News) • "The True Story of the Mary Celeste", Smithsonian Networks, 2007 (Anne MacGregor) • Arthur Conan Doyle, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", The Cornhill Magazine, January 1884 The warm tea, the breakfast table and the cat are later legend, and are presented as such. Theories are presented as theories. Illustrations are interpretive drawings, not reconstructions. Narration: text-to-speech (Chatterbox, MIT licence). Illustrations, animation and ambient sound made in code for this channel. Fonts: Cormorant Garamond (SIL Open Font License). The Dozing Oracle · Strange history, softly told. #maryceleste #history #sleepstories