Thinking Sideways: The Mary Celeste

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking Sideways. I don't think you never know stories of
things since he don't know the answer too. Hello and
welcome to another hard hitting episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm

(00:24):
joined tonight by Steve Alright, what's your name? Oh yeah,
I'm Joe. Sorry, okay, a little important. So tonight we're
gonna solve in another mystery. Uh. This is the one
that probably just about everybody in our audience has hurt about. Hey, Steve,
do you ever notice that we always solve Joe's mysteries

(00:46):
most of the time? Yet do you feel like maybe
he's stacking the deck. I'm picking easy ones that have
been solved already. Well, he says he solves them. That
doesn't mean he actually solved I guess that's fair. Yeah,
he also has claimed to solve some of our mystery.
That's true, and it's almost always preposterous. Not not so

(01:08):
at all. Now, these are these are by their very
nature unfortunately kind of unsolvable. Sense. Yeah, but you know
you can advance some good theories anyway. Well, there you go.
That's that's always It's always fun. I'll turn up with
some new piece of evidence or was a little theory
or another. So anyway, This is a mystery that everybody
has heard about when we're talking about the ghost ship

(01:28):
Mary Celeste, I know. So anyway, let quick intro here
a little information about the Mary Celeste. She was a brigantine.
Brigantine is like a partially square rig partially gaff rig ship.
You guys all know what that means. So hundred seven
feet long tons and on December five, eighteen seventy two,

(01:51):
she was found between the Azores and the coast of Portugal,
unmanned and abandoned. She was under sale, she was part
stal inder sale. Not all the sales were up. The
lifeboat was gone, the entire crew was gone. And that
is the mystery, is what the hell happened to those people? Yeah?
How did they get how did they get vomino stuff?

(02:13):
That ship? Yeah? I mean I guess what was it
like damaged? It was just like hanging. It was just
a hank. The ship was just hanging out in the
middle of the ocean. Yeah, just just drifting along under sail.
Apparently it was being the According to the last log entry,
which was November twenty four, they were at Santa Maria
Islands in the Azores, also called St. Mary's and that

(02:34):
was their last known entry, and they were found about
seven dred miles north of there. And it's really cool.
I found this out because I found out the longitude
and latitude of where the ship was found, and then
I found out the longitude and latitude of St. Mary's
Island or Santa Maria, and and of course I go
out and I googled it. And of course there's a

(02:54):
web page out there where you can plug in the
coordinates of two points and I'll tell you how far
apart they are. Join the Internet. I know, it's even
popping up on Google Maps. You. So that was really cool.
So using that handy utility, they've traveled about seven hundred
miles since. Yeah. So yeah, And of course you never know,

(03:15):
and maybe maybe he was just bored with making ship
log entries and he just didn't write in the log
for like seven or eight days. It seems unlikely. Yeah,
I think I thought you were kind of required to
make log entries like all the time. Yeah, that's what
they do on Star Trek all the time, exactly. I
figured that was the historic record of Star Trek. And
that's yeah. And besides, what you know, you're at sea,

(03:36):
there's not a hell of a lot else to do,
so yeah, I will spend a lot of time doodling
in your log. Okay, So anyway, that's the start from
the beginning. The Mary so lest left New York City
in November fifth, eighteen seventy two, loaded with a cargo
one thousand seven one barrels of alcohol, which were intended
for fortifying wine in Italy, so that the destination was

(03:57):
general Italy. Um. And an interesting coincidence is that the
night before they sailed, the captain, whose name was Benjamin Briggs,
had dinner with his friend David Moorehouse. David Moorehouse was
captain of the del Gracia, was the ship that discovered
the Mary Celeste adrift and abandoned in Atlantic. I feel
like I already have a theory about this. Think no,

(04:19):
not murder, but like quote discovered, like, oh we found
this ship. It was weird. I don't know if there
was enough. Missay, We'll just have to continue. Let's let's
let's let's keep going. But before we go too far
now he said, it's and I remember this in the reading.
It's something I always had to have clarified. So it's
not drinking alcohol like whiskey. It's denuded alcohol? Is that

(04:42):
the correct term? You know? I've heard very I've heard
two different variants on that. One is that it was like,
I'm totally undrinkable alcohol that will poison you, like basically
like rubbing alcohol. Yeah, and the natured alcohol that's yeah. Yeah,
And but I've also heard that they were going to
use for fortifying wine, So presumably it would have had

(05:02):
to be drinkable, right if if you're gonna fortify wine
with it, I don't know, Yeah, I have no idea
how that problems. I guess maybe it was undrinkable in
its form, but one diluted, maybe it was matured alcohol
is totally just like rubbing alcohol, right, and that like
it's alcohol, it will kill you. But ostensibly I think

(05:23):
if you water it down to like crazy low amounts,
you could consume it. Maybe I don't know that it
would be delicious, but yeah, probably not. Well yeah, and
this stuff if some people have referred to it as undrinkable,
but that they might mean not poisonous but just so
so strong, so harsh. But at the same time, especially

(05:44):
back in those days, when people wanted to get wasted, hey,
they would we would find a way to do it.
You know, if you think of like you know that
like the strongest moonshiniest moonshine you've ever had, Right, there's
really no flavor. All it is is just like alcohol,
and yes you can drink it, but and they'll get
your wasted. Okay. So anyway, so that the del Garashia

(06:07):
discovered the Mary Celeste sailing without benefit of crew a
month later. So she was about six hundred miles west
of Portugal, sailing apparently towards Gibraltar. She was spotted by
the helmsman of the Delgarashia from about five miles out.
She appeared to be sailing erratically, basically kind of weaving
side to side. And uh so they got closer and

(06:28):
as they got as they got closer, they recognized it
as being the Mary Celeste. And they got to a
distance of about four yards and just sat there for
a couple of hours observing through the telescope, and they
saw no one on deck, no one at the helm,
and they were mighty puzzled. So you can imagine. So
the first mate all over de Vaux went over in
the boat and boarded the Mary Celeste and went all

(06:49):
to it found it to be completely empty. A that
was kind of water logged and they were about three
and a half feet of water in the hold. And
by the way, that must have been a really creepy
thing going on board that ship. Huh. I can only
imagine it be like, Yeah, it's like finding an abandoned
cars somewhere. You know that somebody's should have been in
it recently, but now there's nobody. Abandoned houses, you are

(07:13):
stupid because you know, you walk through and you're like, boy,
there should definitely, like, you know, there's signs of people
having been here, but there's just to no one here.
Just speaking of abandoned cars. I was with a friend
and we were out in the hills looking for a
good shooting spot. So we pulled into this one spot
off the road and there's a pickup truck there and

(07:35):
we're started wondering that it appears to be unoccupied, and
so we come walking up to it slowly and the
driver at the driver's side door was a jar and
there were a pair of feet sticking out somebody what
you're making this up? No pair of feet sticking out shoes? Uh?
Some person laying face down and not moving at all,

(07:57):
and we were kind of like, wow, have we just
found a body. We got a little closer, and then
a little closer and then starts to move. We look
in there and it's just some some freaking redneck who
just like you know, passed out probably the night before. Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, there's that. Yeah, Yeah, that was creepy.

(08:20):
All right, Okay, So on board they found the ship's log,
and of course that's where they got that entry about
Santa Maria Island. Surprisingly, they keep saying. The word is
that the ship's papers were missing. And I've read that,
and that's why I was a little surprised when you
said the ship's log, because I thought by the papers,
I thought that they meant that the log book had

(08:43):
been was not there. It's what I thought too, But
you would think, but no, apparently the log was there,
but papers whatever those papers are, I'm not official documents
of owners of ownership maybe yeah, oh, shipping manifest Yeah,
that would make sense. Yeah, And they had also taken
the sextant in the current chronometer they were missing. Um,

(09:05):
the ship's life boat was missing. Said There were some
sensationalized accounts of this. One of the first ones by
Arthur Conan, and the entire crew was missing. Oh yeah,
the crew was missing. Yeah yeah. And was it just
the crew or what? Oh yeah, I should probably say
who was on the boat? There was. There was a
seven man crew plus the captain, so that's eight. And

(09:26):
then he brought along his wife and his two year
old daughter for this voyage too, so a total of
ten people were on this ship. So anyway, the sensationalized
accounts of the by Arthur Conan, Doyle said that when
they boarded it, they were like there were warm plates
of food and still warm cups of tea sitting on
the table, and yeah, and there was a sword that

(09:48):
had blood on it. And and in real life there
was a sword, but it had rust on it, not blood.
That's completely bogus. I mean, I mean, you know, they
spent two hours just observing this boat. That's plenty of
time for the tea to cool off, you know. Yeah. Yeah,
well they they chased it for a while. So yeah,
and then the whole the blood on the sword thing there,
Like you said, there was a sword, did you ever
come across why they why the account say it was

(10:11):
a bloody sword. It's because it's it was covered in
red material that didn't obviously look like rust. But it
turns out that and it's I'm assuming that it wasn't
obviously rust based on the way that I've read it,
but it was the fact that somebody had used lemon
juice to clean it, which caused some kind of weird

(10:32):
oxidization to happen, and that's why it had these odd
blotches of red on it. That's a weird that's a
little like that makes it a little weirder. Though to
me that somebody was like, oh, I know, I'll use
lemon juice to clean my sword off. It might have
been a you know, the equivalent of an old wives tale,
Dad said, always use a lemon when you're at seed

(10:53):
to clean your sword, to keep it clean and keep
the salt off of it. I don't know it would
be a good stringent. Mean, maybe they just didn't have
a sharp knife in hand and they wanted to cut
a lemon, so they cut it with that sword. Or
perhaps then this leads to another theory, is that perhaps
it was a lemon pledge. Lady, Yeah, alright, but what

(11:16):
was not missing. There was a lot of food and
water on board, plenty of food and water. The crew
that had everybody had left their possessions behind, including valuables
thanks what you expect they would take with them, So
that leads to the suspicion that they left in a
big hurry. The peak halliard, which is used to voice
of the mainsail, because the mainsail has got that big
that big piece of timber up on top of it

(11:37):
to stretch it out, and so that you have to
have a fairly stout rope to haul that heavy and
that heavy piece of wood and all that cloth with it.
So that was missing, apparently, and they found it. They
found a rope probably the peak halliard, tied to the
stern of the boat, trailing in the water. The other
end was frayed. There was no sign of violence on
the ship, so that kind of rules out piracy. We'll

(11:58):
talk a little bit about that, But then those signs
of a struggle or anything like that. So they pondered
what to do, and they finally decided to the captain
of the del Grasia sent to a small number of
men over there to the Mary Celeste to take her
the rest of the way to Gibraltar. So they sailed
the two ships sailed together to Gibraltar, and then months
later it's sent some time in Gibraltar while they puzzled
over it and held courts of inquiry and stuff like that,

(12:20):
and then eventually the ship got to Genoa it's original
and they unloaded the cargo. They found that nine barrels
of alcohol were empty out of that whole thing, and
there was what five hundred barrels barrels seventeen seven one? Yeah,
I don't know, it's yeah, that's again. And this is

(12:41):
one of the hard parts with a story like this
that has been retold to make it spookier and spookier.
Is I have seen accounts that said it was four hundred,
five hundred, seven hundred barrels. So that's one of the
things that's always in question for me, is how much
cargo was this thing really hauling. Yeah, it's a good
quite And I'm assuming these were not huge barrels either.

(13:02):
You know, when you think barrel, you think fifty gallon drum,
so these might have been kind of kind of small barrels. Yeah,
it could have been. I'm not but again, there's there's
a few a few things I was trying to find
out in the course of this whole thing, like the
size of the barrels, the size of the lifeboat. That's
that's something I was really curious about. And that's kind
of difficult, Yeah, I kind of hard to find out

(13:24):
as far as the captain and the crew goes. They
were never heard from again ever ever, Yeah, exactly, they
just disappeared, Okay, joining everybody obvious. Yeah, So obviously they
either were forced from the ship or they left voluntarily.
Since there was no sign of a struggle, they must

(13:45):
have gotten off the ship voluntarily. So the question is why,
and that's something that people have been puzzling over for
a long long time. Okay, so here are some theories. Uh.
Number one theory pirates. What's the answer? Exact me? Wrong? Yeah,
no signs of violence, and that doubt that they would
have left left a bunch of valuable stuff behind. If

(14:08):
nothing else. The pirates are gonna take the food and
the cargo. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the alcohol cargo. You know. Actually,
if I were a pirate to find enough men, I
would take the entire ship. There's I know would of course,
maybe that's what happened. Maybe that's why the iron barrels
were empty. So the pirates did take murder everybody. They
did take the ship, and they drank a lot of

(14:29):
booze one that and Gal got so drunk they fell overboard. Yeah.
This this, this is not part of the pun holding water. Yeah.
And then one of them had the last one to
fall overboard, and I actually got tangled up with the
lines for their lifeboat and if you want to went
over he pulled it over with him. That's where the
lifeboats gone. Ye. Yeah, and I'm hearing the Benny Hill music. Yeah,

(14:51):
al right, Next they're a mutiny. The crew mutinied. They
killed the captain his family and threw them overboard, and
then took off in a lifeboat. And this makes really
no sound whatsoever again, right, signs of struggle. Yeah, he
to of seven mutiny against a captain of one and
kill him and his family and behind It wouldn't be

(15:13):
a big struggle though. But yeah, I mean, even if
even if that had happened, why would they immediately jump
into lifeboat, you know, miles from anywhere and take off,
you know, when the ship is more valuable and the
ship is actually gonna be a lot safer to be
in that a little lifeboat. Yeah, So that makes no sense.
Next one drunk in this uh in this stay of
the crew got wasted on alcohol from those nine barrels.

(15:34):
They killed the captain and his family again and took
off in a lifeboat again. So it was just another
variant of the same theory as the mute yeah, tries
to explain why they might have me right, Yeah, Well,
and and the captain was a very religious man. I know,
he had reservations about even taking the cargo until somebody

(15:58):
told him this is something you can't actually rinker. You're
not supposed to drink. So it might have been that
somebody was testing the sauce and he got upset, and
then that's where everything went downhill. Seven super wasted guys
and one angry captain. We know who wins. I guess
on the filt side of that, though, you kind of
assumed that he's a captain of a ship. And I

(16:20):
don't really know how this worked, obviously, but in my
like fantasy world, you're captain of a ship, and especially
if you have a small crew, you've got your crew
that's with you like fairly frequently. Right, That's kind of
how it works back there. It wasn't like you just
had like, oh, I guess just random dudes the way. Yeah,
so I think you know that for me, the mutiny

(16:41):
thing doesn't really make sense that, like you kind of
I assume at least that these people had been working
together for a number of years and that they would
have formed close bonds. And and also there's the whole
question of why I suddenly mutiny, you know, because the
boys wasn't It wasn't like it was taking six months
longer than it needed too. It's not like they were
on food and water. There's no no particular reason of eating.

(17:04):
So yeah, I don't really get unless maybe there's some
sort of love triangle, you know, maybe somebody was fell
in love with the captain's wife and decided to murder
the captain and the daughter and and then had to
murder the other crewmen, and then he fell overboard himself
because he was drunk. So again, this stuff now it
really doesn't So another another theory is said they abandoned

(17:25):
the ship prematurely, believing that it was sinking or south
otherwise it's some sort of some sort of deadly condition.
And he said it had three and a half foot
of water in the hold. Yeah, the question is at
the time that they left the ship didn't have that
much water in it, or because they left that they
left a couple of large hatches top side open and
they were open for ten days. Yeah, yeah, about to

(17:47):
have about ten days. And yeah, and so if they
had left those up, and I mean a fair amount
of water could have come in from rain also and
and also you know ship's life that tend to take
on a little bit of water naturally anyhow, And that's
why they have builge pumps so you can pump them
out regularly. If they hadn't been on board for ten days,

(18:08):
and it could have just been you know, seepage. Well
and I read somewhere and I don't know if if
you were able to verify this at all, that the
ship supposedly had two pumps and one of the pumps
wasn't working correctly, so they couldn't siphon the water out
at the rate that they should normally be able to.

(18:28):
But but still not a good reason to abandoned ship. Yeah. No,
that's like saying, my airplane that has four engines on it,
one of them has gone out. Quick, Everybody get your parachute.
It's kind of that safe thing is still gonna go.
I think it's it's almost worse than that. I mean,
you it's a parachute, a parachute down, you have a

(18:49):
fairly high rate of you know, at least making it
safe down. The thing of abandoning a ship that you know,
I say this a lot. I'm obviously an expert course
maritime anything. That's why you should actually be handling all
of our maritime should be. You're right, but I do know,
having lived on a ship for a while, that the
very it did, the last thing you do was abandoned

(19:10):
ship because you're I mean even you know, on the
where we were with a lot of people and you
have your radios and everything, your rate of survival in
a lifeboat is just so much lower. I mean it's
maybe ten of what you get on a ship. There's
no reason to abandon a ship because one of your

(19:33):
pumps might be broken to do something that you can
do with buckets and manual labor. Absolutely yeah. And you know,
if they truly were at abandon the ship ten days before,
and that means nobody on board that thing was was
doing any pumping whatsoever, and it still didn't have a
critical amount of water in the build. Ye then seriously,
obviously it wasn't the ship wasn't going now I just

(19:54):
remember that being an odd fact. Yeah and and but
but anyway, this this abandonment thing, they thought that the
ship was sink king and so they they abandoned ship.
They were still pretty close to Santa Maria Island, and
so they decided to get in the lifeboat and the
head and sail to Santa Maria. But that again makes
no sense because the ship is nowhere near thinking even
if you think it's taken on more water than should,

(20:15):
I would turn the ship around first and don't. And
by the way, I didn't mention this, but Benjamin, the captain,
Benjamin Briggs, owned a partial interest in the ship, so
it's not like he would have just abanded. So he
partially owned it. So he's gonna lose his investment if
he just lets her go down. Oh yeah, So so he's, uh,
you know, he's got an interest in keeping a ship afloat.
And also I think, you know, when you're a sea captain,

(20:36):
you just you don't want to develop a reputation as
somebody who loses ships career, and I think it only
takes one loss of a ship, right, it really kind
of queer the deal. Yeah. I think you lose one
ship and people are like, no, you lose ships. Yeah,
I mean they're there. There are people out there in
history who have gotten second chances and then they lost
another ship and then that was about it for him. Yeah.

(21:00):
Nobody trusts you, now, Okay, So that's so much for
that theory. So the premature thing is like, you know,
I mean not not just because they thought maybe it
was taking on water. Another another theory that's been put
out is food contamination because apparently there is a mold
that was just sometimes found on rye bread, which apparently
they had in their ship's stores. And this mold, particular

(21:22):
moldest kind of poisonous consullucinations. So they're all tripping on
rye bread. Yeah, they cannot wait to see that as
the next pandemic on TV next week on Dateline. Is
your child eating rye bread? What do you do with Yeah?

(21:42):
So so, But anyway, the uh, that's kind of disproven
because the crew of the del Garacia, the skeleton crew
that sailed or the rest of the way to Gibraltar,
we were eating the same food and none of them. Yea,
none of them tripped out, so so that seems kind
of unlikely. Another theory, and this is an interesting one,
is that it was Dalex from the Future. Yeah, I

(22:03):
don't know, Steve, this is a valid like the most
valid one I've heard. Yes, I know, I love it,
but yeah, okay, let's have it. Yeah. So in episode
Doctor Who, they suggested that Dalex from the Future terrified
the crew and causing them to jump overboard. There's actually
another it's not the Mary Celeste I don't think episode,

(22:26):
but there's another episode where like an alien ship has
accidentally merged with it, and they take all of the
season and they take everybody onto this alien ship, and
then the aliens leave and they manned the ship because
they were all dying for whatever reason, and so the
ship is left totally normal, doesn't look like there's anything

(22:47):
wrong with it. The alien ship goes away, So maybe
it was that. We're gonna get to that. Actually next,
that's another theory is aliens and UFOs look at that. Yeah,
so they're they're just sailing along and suddenly the UFOs
beamed them up and abduct them and they're off touring
the galaxy, presumably right now that they were dissected one

(23:08):
of the other. So, you know, I don't know this
is this is a very credible theory, but this it's
kind of hard to prove, you know what. And and
aliens get blamed for everything. They get the short into
this stick and every story because it's these terrible things happened.
Must have been the aliens. Absolutely, I got audited, must
have been the aliens. They just they get the shortened

(23:30):
to stick for everything. Not that I'm saying there isn't aliens,
but come on, why do we have to say that
because something weird happened and we don't know what it is,
it must be being from another planet. I just think
if you know, if the aliens would just reveal themselves
to us, we would stop blaming them for things that
they would just come down and be like, listen, guys,
have us a good explanation. Dude, listen, it wasn't us

(23:53):
or like we got a couple of them, yeah, but
like the rest of them are crazy. I just feel
like we would stop blaming them as much. Yeah, and
you know, it might be that they're responsible for a
lot of this stuff, but they have a good, solid reason,
you know, it's like your cat. I mean, you take
your cat to the vat. You know, he gets an
unpleasant ride in the car and then he gets stabbed
with needles and you know, I guess that their mometer
stuffed up is all kinds of stuff. And he he's wondering,

(24:15):
why are you torturing me? What do you hate me?
And it's like you but there's a good reason for it,
so you just don't have a way to explain it
to your cat. So what you're saying is that aliens
are veterinarians for the human race and we're all getting
worm and we just don't It's okay, alright, alright for that.

(24:36):
So next up in our list of theories sea monsters.
All this is always fun. Yeah, So anyway, and this
theory of visit from our friend Mr Kracken resulted in
the crew being plucked from the ship like tasty chocolates
from a box. People below decks, hearing the horrifying screams
of their dying comrades, immediately rushed up to the deck
to see just what the heck was going on and

(24:57):
they got eaten too. So anyway, that's my favorite expl nation. Yeah,
but there there is one. There is one one thing
that sort of argues against this, and that is, what's
the first thing you do? An enormous sea monster comes
popping up out of the sea. Uh, scream, No, wet yourself,
you're you're warm yourself. Yes, that's it, you poop yourself.

(25:19):
No feces were found. The rain washed it off all right. Well,
according to Pirates of the Caribbean, because I saw that
again recently where the crack had attacked the ship. Crackings
do a lot of damage, and if this ship is
in perfectly good shape, I don't think the cracking just
reached up and grabbed one timber and then used it

(25:41):
to flick everybody off. Oh. I just can't see that happening.
Imagine it probably, I imagine would have torn it into
just shaking all the people out into his mouth. Yeah,
what you do with the the end of the tube
of pringles. Yeah, so I think we can cross this
one off the list. Next one Bermuda Triangle. Of course,

(26:01):
they didn't go anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle, so I
think we can cross that one off the list. Yes.
So that now we're gonna get into some more um uh,
some slightly more serious ones here, uh, underwater earthquakes. There
was a guy named David Williams who wrote a book
called Seaquake. I wrote the name, and he wrote he
had a section in there about about the Mary Celeste. Apparently,

(26:24):
and apparently it's it's actually true. He's not just making
this up. Shock Waves from an underwater earthquake, if there's
a ship right above can actually do quite a bit
of damage, he referenced, and I checked up on it.
It's true. There's a ton ship called the Ida Knudson
which was was very severely damage to the to the
point where it couldn't be salvaged. That was back in

(26:44):
nine by one of these sequakes. It doesn't really entirely
make sense to me. And well, you mean the science
of it or not. The well, his theory, his particular theory,
and I think his series sort of like departs from
the facts in one key areas, and that is the barrels. Okay,
so I'm gonna I'm just gonna have a few things. Yeah,

(27:06):
just then, the sea floor near Mary Celeste was ripped
apart by a shallow focused There's quick a relatively common
occurrence in the Azores whenever the hard bottom shift vertically
a relatively fast pace. To see, bed acts like a
giant piston, pushing and pulling the water, sending powerful ways
of alternating pressure towards the surface. So at this point
he conjectures that they had been cooking in the galley,
and that and that the most of the ship bouncing

(27:27):
up and down violently in the air caused the stove
to bounce out of its holder and come down an angle.
And it's true that the mary Celest when they found
that the stove was kind of like a jar. It
was not it was not exactly where it was supposed
to be. So this theory is that it came down
settled in an off kilter position, and some stuff like

(27:49):
m flying embers came out of it. They had also
loosened the stays around, according to him, nine barrels of
grain of grain alcohol in the hold, causing them to
fall over, burst open and dumping tons of alcohol into
the hold. But of course, and this is where this
is where it sort of goes south, because when they
when they found the ship and they looked in the hold,

(28:12):
the cargo was intact and undisturbed. So that's that's kind
of where he departs from the evidence of the case. Anyway,
back to his story. Here, choking in the smell of
alcohol from the leaking barrels, hearing the crashing sounds all
around them, and seeing embers flying about from the fire
and the cooking still was all it took to send
the crew into panic and cause them to quickly launch
a small y'all and try to get away from the

(28:32):
penny explosion in certain death. The crew, now in the
small y'all floating behind the Mary Celeste FELTI later, when
embers died down without causing the alcohol fumes to explode,
it was now safe for them to go back aboard
and sort out the damage. But the elations soon vanished,
replaced by the horrifying discovery that they were no longer
tied to the Mary Celeste. In the Russian fear of
the moment, the crew had forgotten to properly secure a

(28:52):
line from the lifeboat to the mother's ship. They Washton
hiss may as the Mary Celestue now a ghost ship
sailed slowly away from the all with her have a
two other small sales set so he makes a lot
of assumptions set of course, I, like I said, it
departs from the evidence with the barrels, and I just
I just love it. I just love it they suddenly
realized they'd forgotten to tie the rope off. Okay, well,

(29:14):
I can I can see some credence in if and
evidently this area is known for heaven seaquakes, that a
quake could literally toss the ship around and freak everybody
out on board and potentially throw one or two people overboard.
But I can't see the seaquake or this supposed string

(29:37):
of events that he conjectures happens happening, right. You know,
for me, they were they were experienced crew, right, and
one could assume that they had done run similar to
this before and likely encountered phenomenal like this before, or
at least heard about it. I knew it was a
thing that could happen. Yeah, just to be that panicked,

(29:58):
I just don't think. I I think I think also
that uh, there wasn't enough damage to the ship. I mean,
if it had been that cataclysmic of of an event,
there should have been more damage. There should and the
ship was unscathed. Yeah. And number two, when you have
these huge, crashing, cataclysmic forces around you and you're terrified
getting off the ship and into your lifeboat. It's kind

(30:20):
of like getting out of your car and onto a
tricycle in the middle of its lightning storm. That's a
great analogy. That's a really great analogy. And I think,
you know, I think I think it's totally accurate. You
know that not only is it like a pain to
get actually physically like perform that act, especially if you've
got a woman and a two year old child trying

(30:41):
to do that. Getting from a ship to a lifeboat
not an easy task. But on top of that, it's
true right that you're like, wow, it's a mess out there.
Better get into something small and something like small and
fragile yet idea. Well, and you know, and that's something
that I you know, I think people don't who haven't

(31:02):
been out on a boat in the ocean in you know,
decent swells, You think, oh, well, it's just you know,
the waves are a couple of feet high. Nope, you
get on a boat that, I mean, on a decent size.
I've been on it was a thirty foot fishing boat
and they were ten foot swells. And you think, well,
I'm on a thirty foot fishing boat, no big deal.

(31:22):
But when you're in the bottom of the swell, you
can't see even just so huge and that's just a
ten foot swell, which is not that big of a
wave out the middle. Even on big ships, you've got
those swells there. You know, you can look down on
them from a deck, but they're so big, and it's
not so much that like you can't see over them

(31:44):
or anything like that, but that you can see the difference,
and you can you feel the way that your ship
is moving, even as a giant ship, right with stabilizers
and modern technology, you feel that and you think, thank God,
I'm not on a boat that's smaller than this, because
this would be the worst. Yeah, there's no way you

(32:04):
would survive in this. Well you might, but not likely,
but it's way better to just stick it out on
the ship. And I think anybody who's experienced at all
as I you know, as I am with sea travel,
knows that you stay on your ship in weather like that,
in whatever like that, you stay on your ship. Yeah. Yeah,
so you have water earthquakes, Yeah, that doesn't sound all

(32:26):
that plausible because we're trying to figure out why they
left the ship, um, and that just doesn't sound like
that would be something that would cause him to leave
the ship. Well, and if the waves are just going insane,
like you said, it's gonna be hard to get on
the like boat, let alone, to run into the cabin,
grab your papers for the ship, and then get out,

(32:47):
because I don't imagine those things are just handily kept
in a bag hanging on a hook. I would agree
with that. Yeah, okay, I know what the next theory
water spouts. There are such phenomena and the water spout
is like when you get it's kind of like a tornado.
You got apparently with chemulus like tall keemulus clouds, and

(33:09):
then you'll get this sort of like tornado like effect
where water droplets. It's like it's not over the ocean
kind yeah, and it's kind of like and it's not
solid water. It's just droplets, like very tiny droplets, and
so it's not like a total water spout being sucked up.
So if they hit a water spout, one forms over them.

(33:30):
Somebody has speculated that could be the reason they had
so much water in the hold of the ship or
in the builders, I should say, was that they hit
a water spout. Was it really that it was? You
said it was three and a half feet. Yeah, I
just feel like that's not that much water. I mean,
it's not no water, but I feel that, you know,
for a ship like that, right, it's long with three

(33:54):
and a half feet of water in the hold or
in the bottom, but that's a fair amount of water.
But you know what she's I don't know, you know
how tall the Celeste was by chance from the top
of your head from the photos I've seen, I mean,
I would say she was probably the top to the
tip of the mast. I don't know. Hunding two. What

(34:15):
about the What about the body of the ship? I
guess is where I'm getting at. If the ship is
a hundred and seven feet long, I'm gonna guess she'st
high from from the bottom to the deck, from the
water line to the deck, well for the bottom from yeah,
I guess. I guess three and a half feet is
not a lot of water. It's not that much, particularly

(34:37):
if we can I think we can safely assume that
if the ship was left unattended, without being build shout
or anything like that for ten days, most of that
wasn't there when the crew left, precisely, so the water
they get in the waterspout. If it was, I mean,
apparently these are dangerous. Uh, it could have caused damage
to the ship, and there was no observed damage. So therefore, well,

(35:00):
you know, when I hate to, I hate to take
a step back, but I got to ask. It was
approximately it was ten days from the last entry to
when the ship was found, and I can't remember exactly
what it was that I saw in the reading that
I did on this about who was the captain that
found it? Again, his name was Divid Moorehouse. Okay, when

(35:21):
more House founded, didn't he say that the weather for
the last couple of days had been kind of foul.
In some accounts I have heard, it said that the
del Garasha experienced pretty much good weather the entire way down,
But that doesn't mean anything because they were a week
behind the Celeste. Because I swear I saw something that
said that the water the weather at that time wasn't

(35:42):
that good for when when the Celeste was coming through,
which would explain why if somebody was off the ship
and they left the hatches open, was she took on water?
It was rain for a couple of days straight as
a yeah, all those all those possibilities there, rain just
seabeds that kind of thing. Yeah, wooden ship, right, I
mean they tend to sleep, so alright, So anyway, the

(36:02):
water is about today, you know, and it doesn't do
much for me. So I said, we throw that one
of the bus alright. Last of all, Uh, this is
everybody's favorite alcohol fumes. It's my favorite too. You like
that one? Yeah, okay, So as I said it right,
there are there are a few things that make me
kind of kind of wonder about it. Um. So, nine

(36:24):
nine barrels out of the entire hold were amit of
red oak, which apparently is porous and unsuitable for holding liquids,
and so the in this theory, the alcohol would have
seeped through the pores and would have filled the hold
with alcohol fumes, which of course would be flammable and explosive. Yeah.
So the rest of the rest of the barrels were

(36:45):
white oak, right exactly. And so these nine red oak barrels,
which were the ones that were found to be empty
when they finally unloaded the boat in Genoa, so as
the alcohol leaked out, filled the hold of fumes at
random spark and people of theorize that that could have
happened by barrels shifting and the metal bands on the
barrels scraping against each other, touching off just a little

(37:06):
bit spark, just enough to make an explosion, which and
the explosion would have would have blown off the hatches,
I would explain, to open hatches, and of course it
would have panted the crew somebody. And by the way,
somebody didn't experiment with this. They built like a miniature
model of the whole of the hold of the ship
with the hatches and everything, and little little paper things
to represent the barrels, and then filled it up with

(37:27):
butchane touched it off and it did make an explosive
sort of thing, but it didn't burn anything because its
cool and it burns off really fast. Yeah, and that
was really interesting. That was the thing that really piqued
my interest in this theory was that it was like
a cold burn, and it was more of like an
energy blast than it was like a heat It was,

(37:47):
which I think is very interesting. I also think it
has the potential to explain that it wasn't necessarily that
the crew abandoned it, but perhaps they were thrown from
it or burned up in the cold brew. I it
I don't. I didn't totally understand if it could have
killed a person or not, but I thought that was
kind of a nice way to explain. It wouldn't have

(38:09):
been an abandonment at that point. It would have been
the crew suffering catastrophic failure, being thrown from the ship
or whatever. That could have been the of course, that
we'd find. You know, at least some of the people
would have been below decks and we would have found
some bodies or not. Not we, but somebody would have
found something unless they were pushed out with the explosion.
I don't know if that's possible to it. But then

(38:30):
a lot of a lot of stuff like furniture and gear,
and that's true. I didn't even think about it. Yeah,
And then another thing I thought about it again, it
doesn't they would have found bodies. Was that the fire
consumed all the oxygen and a bunch of them were
asphixiated if you're below decks, and there wasn't much of
the way of ventilation, and it couldn't have just burned
just the bodies. It would have and it wouldn't have. Yeah, yeah,

(38:51):
it didn't. So it didn't burn anything. So well, there
was no signs of a fire, right, But so that
was the thing they were saying, is that like this
could have burned a bunch of fuels and cosmics blosion
that would have left like almost no trace. It probably would.
It could have explained why perhaps the stove was a
little wonky when they found it, but it wouldn't it

(39:11):
wouldn't have left any kind of burn explosion damage. Really yeah,
in that vein, I mean, if you could imagine the
situation where that explosion happened, and say it was foul
weather and there's only like one or two guys up
top side, maybe maybe just the helmsman was that was
top side. Maybe it was nighttime or something like that,
and this explosion happens, it's fhyxiates everybody below decks. So
when he first gets a calm moment, you can you

(39:32):
can take a break from steering. He goes down and
finds everybody dead, and so he then has to dispose
of the bodies. He's got a waste to go. He
can't have rotting corpses on the ship, so he gives
he hauls him on top side, gives him a burial
at sea, and that tries to take the ship single handedly,
or maybe there's two guys trying to take it all
the way to civilization by himself, and then eventually reaches

(39:53):
the point where he realizes he just can't do it,
and so he gets the lifeboat out, which I don't
I and again, I don't know how easy that is
for one guy to get the lifeboat overboard maybe two
guys an abandoned ship. So there is that I don't know.
I do not know. So again, but so so there's
also not there's an alternative for that, which is that
they popped up, and they popped up in one of

(40:14):
the hatches to the whole, and suddenly all these alcohol
fumes come rushing out because these things have been leaking
and they have been sealed up, and so they all
somebody says, hey, you know what that does flammable, And
they all get in the panic, and they decided the capite,
especially he's got his wife and his daughter aboard, so
he's really concerned about their safety. They decided to get
in the lifeboat, attaching a stout rope to the lifeboat

(40:34):
and to the ship, and then just get all ways
away from the boat and see if it's going to
blow up. And see if perhaps the wind will just
sort of ventilate out the hole and get some of
those fumes out of there and make it safer. So
I'm always the naysayer, and I admit it, but my
thought on this is that, Okay, if if you open
up two hatches because you're trying to ventilate all the

(40:56):
fumes that are in there, and you don't have a
guy with a pipe in his mouth sticking his head
in there to see how how stinky it is, well
that's a bad idea, that's it. How do you know
what the ventilation is complete? Well, but if if if
there's any kind of breeze and you've got two hatches open,
and this is me just you know, making a presumption,

(41:16):
I would presume that they would open hatches that were
on opposite ends of the ship from each other to
allow a breeze to come through and pull the fumes out.
Common sense would say, I'm going to stand up wind
of all of this and everybody just hang out on
this one area of the ship and wait for it
all to come out before we do anything, rather than

(41:39):
let's get onto the boat and and hang out and
wait at a distance. That's my thought process too, at
least for some of the people. Like Okay, I understand
maybe like oh yeah, let's tell this lifeboat along with
like my wife and daughter, so that and like maybe
like a couple of first mate or something, you know,

(42:00):
something were to happen. Sure, but you know, he owns
such a big stake of this thing and there. Yeah,
I guess I just don't see why everybody would abandon
ship just to ventilate out. Yeah that's in. Maybe not
everybody did. Maybe the captain stayed behind and uh and
then after the life broke away and they went all
off to their to their hideous fate, he decided to
commit suicide. Yeah. Well okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's

(42:22):
let's back up on that. If there's one person left
on the ship and they lose the lifeboat, is it
or is it not possible for one guy at the
helm to turn that chip around? Yeah? This is true. Okay,
all right, all right, I just I want to I
want I want to try and keep this one left,

(42:42):
the two year old daughter on the ship. Right, All
of these things don't explain then, like there's plenty of food,
there's a lot of water, assuming that the seas were
even like remotely calm. So you're just you're the only
person on a ship. Yeah, that like stinks, right, But
you've got food, you've got and you've got shelter. You're
just gonna stay put and assume that somebody's going to

(43:04):
see you. Because somebody's going to see you. Somebody will
come along. Yeah. Yeah. And then the whole thing is
if you even if you're the sole survivor on the ship,
you stay on the ship. You stay in the ship,
because I would anyway, because I mean just the way
it was going on, just randomly by itself. It was
headed towards the coast of Europe, so it's headed towards Portugal.

(43:25):
It would have it would have hit Portugal or Spain
or something eventually, and so you know, what's what's the
hurry to get off the ship? You know? The other
thing about leavings while it ventilates is the main hatch
to the hold was secured. It was closed. So if
you want to ventilate that out, would you want to
open the big hatch up, especially oh to the alcohol

(43:45):
where yeah yeah, yeah, so the main hatch because the
other hatches were open, right that they were, they would
you would open all of the hatches, right, I would
think you would. All right, well, I'm gonna go with
Okham's razer here though, is that I'm going to guess
that those hatches are using metal hinges, and so you're

(44:05):
thinking spark, so you're worried about sparks, so you only
you do the fewest number possible to get ventilation through this,
So let's just open to. Let's not take the chance
of open the others really quick and causing a spark
and setting this off. I guess I don't hold that
this is the way it happened, but I'm just looking like, well, no,

(44:25):
I can see why you would only open to. Yeah, yeah,
so especially if if you pop those open for ventilation
purposes anyway, they're already open and that's when you notice
the alcohol. So it's like, you know, so let's not
do anything. I could imagine that what I would do
is I would probably pick the down wind hatch and
I would grab a piece of canvas, like maybe even
one of the sales and rig up sort of us

(44:48):
sort of cover around it to catch the wind and
shove it down into the into below decks and sort
of push all that stuff, which is what probably your
sensible sailor would do. Yeah, I mean this whole thing
makes me think about I mean, we've all done it.
We've all had gas barbecues that were on but not lit,
and you realize that, oops, I left the gas on
when I turned cigarette. I'm just gonna go walk away

(45:11):
and hang out for a while. Everybody knows you just
don't mess with that stuff and you just let it disperse.
So the other problems with the alcohol theory is that
the crew of that they'll go out Gracio, they want
below decks, and none of them reported smelling any alcohol
when they got to Gibraltar. Lots of people want out
of that ship and looked and poked around, and nobody
smelled any alcohol. Nobody did in genuate either. Well, but

(45:33):
that would evaporate yea ten days later, don't you think
it would have kind of dissipated. Well, here's the thing
that is that those barrels is like they they had
a pretty considerable amount of alcohol in each of those
nine barrels, and so I don't know how quickly all
that alcohol would seep out of those barrels. So if
they didn't smell it, so if say they loaded in
New York and immediately starts seeping and then sometime let's

(45:56):
let's say it's going to take at least a couple
of days to evaporate, So that would be less than
a month, and less than a month than the entire
contents of a barrel of alcohol somehow seep out completely.
That seems like a really short amount of time. Well,
and the other problem is when we read the accounts
that say that the barrel is empty, does that mean

(46:17):
bone dry empty or it's got a little bit left
in the bottom. But yeah, that's again that's that's one
of those things where I don't know. And of course
when they found is that was after the whole quart
of you know, they had a big enquiry Gibraltar, Gibraltar
about that, and so when they found him empty at Genoa,
I don't know if they reported back to the authorities
in Gibraltar. I mean, obviously somebody made a note of

(46:39):
it and told somebody else. But well, and how long
was it between when they were found and that cargo
was offloaded? Another week or so months? Okay? Well, and
there's another problem with how fast does the alcohol come
out of the barrel? Is that if it's slowly leaking,
but people are coming in and out of this ship
constantly checking stuff out and looking at it, and no

(47:02):
wonder it's ventilating and nobody's smelling it. I wonder also
if the problem, one of the problems came from the
fact that the captain was so anti alcohol. So you
can think like if he was like, all right, I'm
a little if he that we're even transporting this, We're
just gonna lock it up and keep it under long
and key while we're transporting it gets so it never

(47:22):
gets ventilated while he's the boss, and then they think, oh,
I guess we should just check on it or something.
So they check on it and they're like, oh crap,
we ought to ventilate this out. But once the other
people are taking over, they don't really care so much,
or it's nicer weather or whatever, so it's getting better ventilated.
So things are kind of ventilating out as it's I

(47:43):
don't know. I mean, I would like to advance another
another theory, which is is possible that there was never
any alcohol in those barrels to begin with, because because
red oak is so unsuitable for that kind of a use,
it seems unlikely the manufacturer of the ahol would have
used red oak barrels to put alcohol, especially for just
nine of them, untlus, they were just filling, they were

(48:07):
ran out, and hey, Billy, quick, go go get us
nine more barrels and fill them. And that is possible
because red oak is used for grains and dry stuff
things like that, because it's okay there, it's just not
with liquids, right, Yeah, as far as I know, and
so well, I think it's entirely possible. It's some longshoreman
in New York who were loading in charge of loading
the boat probably just said, hey, we need to pill

(48:30):
for some of these and and how many how many
barrels can you round up in short order? Nine? Okay,
stick them in there, and we're gonna we're just gonna
spirit these things off and sell them or drink to
disappear in port on a regular basis. So much today
with barcodes. But yeah, and again, like I said, no,
nobody was smelling any alcohol. That's saw again that that

(48:51):
that casts a little bit of down on the alcohol.
That the alcohol theory is still the strongest one. But
even so, their behavior was a little bit explicit. Yeah,
there's there's definitely some poles in that, so I wonder
if there's like a mix of theories that could kind
of explain this, right, Yeah, no, I mean, you know,

(49:13):
the sort of idea that maybe it was a specific
loaf of bread was that kind of horrible hallucinogenic mold
and they ate it. And that's the reason that the
crew that took over didn't have that problem is because
you know, these other loaves of bread, she didn't have it.
It was just the water of the couple. So they're hallucinating,

(49:34):
or maybe they're they've got cabin fever, or maybe there's
some kind of unrest happening. And on top of that,
this alcohol thing happens, so everybody kind of thinks it's
best to just like leave. Yeah, they kind of have
a sort of an impaired judgment for one reason or another.
They decide, all right, we're gonna get on this life boat.

(49:56):
The best idea is to just get on this life boat.
And that rope looks pretty strong, so we'll just drag
ourselves behind it and surely we'll be able to get
back on. That's not a problem, and we won't bother
with tying it to the boat. I can just hang on,
don't worry about it. I'm strong, or I didn't they
wasn't the rope. They found the rope, so like, okay,

(50:19):
so maybe it just like broke, like there was a
big swell and it broke its snapped in half, or
maybe the kragg and cut it there. Yeah, you know,
I think there's the potential for merging of a couple
of these things. But it's let's let's go completely off
track for a second. I saw, and I don't. I

(50:40):
don't know if you came across, if either of you
came across this, but I saw something. Somebody was reporting
that one of their theories was correct. And that's why
everybody got on the lifeboat and was citing something that
I couldn't I couldn't track it down anywhere else. That
a month later, a lifeboat was found owned south of

(51:00):
that area with two skeletons on it, one of whom
was wrapped in an American flag. Yeah, and well, you know,
actually in uh, there's a little variant on the in
David Williams book called Seaquick Sequick. Is that where that
came from? He said that five months after after their disappearance,
that's the one. Five highly decomposed buyers were found tied

(51:22):
to two rafts off the coast of Spain. One body
was wrapped in an American flag, so tied to two rafts.
I I'm not really sure, because because they were they
took off on a lifeboat and maybe somewhere in their
journeys in the lifeboat they came across a couple of
rafts and tied themselves to it. I don't know, but
you know, so it could have been anybody's body. Yeah, yeah,
and it's too bad that. I mean, they had just

(51:44):
parted right recently. I don't Yeah, well they have the
in the log it said they they said they made
Santa Maria, but didn't didn't say whether or not they
actually want to shore. I want, you know, I kind
of wonder maybe there was like some kind of sickness, right,
maybe somebody had like the measles or Spanish flu something something,

(52:05):
you know, where they didn't want to catch it. So
so some of them abandoned ship and some of them
killed themselves overboard. This is another one of those ones
where the possibilities are literally endless. And actually I like
that because sickness is something that I have not come
across in any of the reading, and it may have
been that they just I mean, this is not unheard of.

(52:27):
As somebody says, this boat is cursed. It's making us sick,
and we have to get out of here. And we've
just put you know, Jimmy and Sammy overboard to a burial.
Let's see, let's get on the boat and get away
from this ship before it makes us sick. Not understanding
how diseases work, and it's too late. They're the couple
that are already infected, that infect the rest of them. Well,

(52:49):
I guess that's the thing. It's even with that description
right of like one of them was wrapped in an
American flag. That speaks very deeply to me of like
that person was dead, that was a corpse when they departed, Right,
that wasn't somebody who wrapped themselves in an American flag.
They didn't take the American flag with them, That that

(53:09):
was a corpse, and that they were going to do
something with it and something went wrong, and maybe that
or just maybe they on the way overboard, they grabbed
the ship's flag to use as a blanket or a sail,
and the guy was just sleeping in. You know, it's
hard to say. And speaking of the lifeboat, this is
another thing that's inexplicable, is the size of the lifeboat.

(53:29):
Putting ten people in the in the lifeboat. Do you
know the size of the life you know, I couldn't.
I couldn't find out anything definitive. But I found a
picture of a scale model from some maritime museum, and
the lifeboat is mounted transversely in the in the middle
of the boat, across the cargo hatch. Transversely means sideways, side, sideways.

(53:52):
In other words, yeah, it's it's it's right, not front
to back, so that you can slide it one way
or another off the ship. Yes, yeah, I got it. Yeah.
And so it's always mounted right side up. And the
beam of the ship is twenty six and a half feet,
and so in order to have room to get around
And again, looking closely at this photograph, it looks like

(54:12):
there must be at least three feet on either side
of that thing to get around it. So that makes
it at most twenty ft long. Maybe it makes it
at most long, So I don't know. Well, you know
what what I think of is if did if you
ever read Moby Dick or you've ever seen any of
the Hollywood reenactments of it. They cram I think it's

(54:35):
about eight guys into a little boat to go out
and chase a whale, and it's tight quarters, But they do.
I mean, you can do it on necessity. Necessity is
the mother of all inventions. Yeah, but but it just
seems to me that again, it makes getting into the
lifeboat that's small of a boat with ten people, it

(54:56):
just makes it seem like that much more unpalatable of
an option. Oh no, I'm I'm not saying. I'm just
saying I can see it being possible. If you gotta
get out, you gotta get out, do what you gotta
left behind. Yeah, you gotta get off. But it's still
it's still a kind of a head scratcher. Why would
you leave? So yeah, the alcohol fumes, the explosion, it's
all possible, but it doesn't really make sense. Really. I

(55:19):
kind of think we might be out of theories on
this one. Yeah, there's no, there's no you know, even
though the alcohol fields theory is that seems to be
the strongest one out there. Everybody seems to like it,
even even it's got his holes, you know, it doesn't
really entirely make sense. Again, Like you were saying, why
would everybody leave the boat? Yeah, you know, because even
with the danger of explosion or whatever, leaving the boat

(55:41):
is pretty danger pretty damn everybody leaving the boat, right,
especially everybody leaving Yeah. Yeah, Well, in the end, I mean,
it's it's was. It was a bit of a tragedy
obviously because the crew died, and it really kind of
sang the end of the Mary Celeste because she didn't
last much longer after that. Did she through about another
thirteen years I believe, Yeah, But and then somebody scuttled her. Yeah,

(56:04):
somebody like ran her, ran her aground some shoals and
haiti as a part of an insurance scam. Yeah, he
was trying to collect insurance. She was not a good
luck Maybe that's what this was. This was an attempt,
a really ill fated attempt to collect insurance. Man, I
don't think that somebody would say, Hey, I've got my
wife and kid on board, but you know what, I'm

(56:26):
just gonna I'm just gonna sink this thing. That'll be fine. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I mean things like disease outbreaks, things like that,
I mean those are kind of compelling, except there'd be
entries in the log, so that's you would think. So,
you know, and like that, I'm compelled to think, like,
you know, say, their cruising along and they find another

(56:47):
ghost ship, and so they stopped. They put the lifeboat
out so they can paddle over to check this this
empty ship out, and that for some reason, they never
never make it back to their own ship. Now this,
you know, this makes no sense either, because I mean,
obviously they all just go hop on another ship, you know,
I mean there must have been one hell of a
nice ship, but that everybody leaves. Yeah, So so I'm

(57:10):
always liking the double the double sort of ghost ship idea.
That's kind of cool, the double double double ghost One
ghost ship met another ghost ship. So yeah, there was
there was one that I was I was reading about
and I was doing some research. This is months ago,
and there was like some ghost ship where and this
might have been entirely affectional. I didn't have enough time
to research it. But so that a ship comes upon this,

(57:34):
this abandoned empty sailing ship and some of them and
so they go aboard. Nobody's nobody is there. It's just
sailing sitting there empty. They put some crew on board
this ship because it's a nice ship. They want to
salvage and claim salvage title. And so they had a
sort of in tandem to wherever they're going I don't know,
I don't remember where. And then and there's a there's

(57:55):
a little bit of foul weather, they kind of lose
track of each other, and then eventually the first ship
finds the ghost shipped again, but it's the crew was
gone again. Yes, I do remember that story was in
the research that that was up when we were doing
the houring mcdan one of those little probably stories that

(58:17):
was probably one that came across and that if that
Roy told us that one. Yeah, I don't know. And
then but then at that point, it's a really tricky part,
which is persuading still more members of your crew to
go up. Yeah, yeah, alright, alright, So anyway, um, so

(58:37):
out of all the possible ones, let's see what we
got here. But I'm gonna go with dlex What are
you guys gonna go with? And if I like it,
it's kind of like, yeah, I God, if I have
to choose one, do I have to choose one? Because
I don't really, I don't. None of these just seem

(58:59):
applauseable enough to me, not cohesive. And yeah, there's and
I understand that this is a hundred and fifty years
ago or dang near under forty years ago, and so
the pieces have fallen apart in the retelling. But it
just I know, I just I can't. I can't see
anyven be incredible enough. There's got to be something that

(59:23):
we haven't thought of that swept all of those people
off in a hurry. I mean, who knows. Maybe they
changed over and hopped onto a carnival cruise. I don't know,
but that was a mistake because the carnival cruise built down.
Well obviously we know now that was their mistake, but
at the time they didn't know who was I don't know,

(59:43):
I really did. I can, and I can speculate that perhaps, um,
perhaps that broken that broken rope was actually an anchor rope,
and maybe they found some deserted cool island and they
decided to, like, I'll go ashore. They anchored, but have
a little holl Yeah, I have a little holiday. But
you know why they would have left several sales set

(01:00:04):
as opposed to furlier on their sales that that kind
of shoots the hell out of that. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's possible. I mean, if they only wanted to
set one anchor, they could just put a few sales
up and imagine the wind is really really light. I guess, yeah,
you go shore, you're you're you're partying down on shore.
You know. But you know what, captain would leave his

(01:00:25):
ship completely empty circumstances. That's the thing that always just
gets me. Yeah, and so yeah, so once again there's
always some little hitch in all these different theories there.
It's just nothing that can explain, you know. And that's
where you know, the food contamination one. In a sense,
it's almost compelling because because it's just insane, it's stupid
enough to do what they did, that would that would

(01:00:46):
kind of make you think that maybe you know, and
you know, it's i mean, it's not uncommon. Are their
stories such it's not a coming, but there are stories
of people who are stuck at sea and they get
things that are tainted or worse off, they drink sea
water and they start to hallucinate and then they go, oh, hey,

(01:01:06):
there's my car, and they just walk off the boat
and go swimming away and there's nothing you can do
to stop him. Yeah, I know, it's it's hard to
it's hard to imagine that all ten people would have
been equally looney and equally motivated to just walk off
the boat. And so again that kind of shoots that
one to hell. But that that might explain maybe the
way the lifeboat was gone, because if somebody was I

(01:01:28):
wanted two people walked off the boat and the rest
of them sort of like launched the boat not realizing.
Maybe they were just addled enough to not realize, hey,
you know, we can just turn the boat around. So
they loaunched the life or they don't it, or well,
think about this, if it's a couple of the seamen
to go over, and then it's the wife and the
child and one guy who's the lowest mate on the

(01:01:51):
wrong that doesn't know what's going on. He's the the greenhorn.
He said, I don't know how to steer this thing. Okay, well,
let's let's take the boat out there. We'll get him.
We'll come. Can't be going that fast. I feel like
we could literally do this for hours. Yea, we have
definitely gone on, gone on too long. I think as
it is so anyway, folks, I guess this is the
first we haven't solved the mystery. Yeah, yeah, all right,

(01:02:18):
Well anyway, Uh, we're gonna have some cool links on
our website that's Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And if
you want to look us up on iTunes, you'll find
us out there. Download all the episodes that you want
to be sure to leave us a rating and comments
are always welcome, of course, to find us on Facebook.
You can also find us on Stitcher. I send us

(01:02:38):
an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com.
And actually, the one the people I'd really like to
hear from it, I'd like at least one of you
to buy a red oak barrel, fill it full of
alcohol and just see how long it takes for all
the alcohol to see entirely away like a project. Oh

(01:03:00):
that's a bad idea. In his basements. We have many eager,
helpful readers or listeners, and I'm sure some of them,
at least one of them, is going to want to
do this for us. And also, of course, if you
have any thoughts yourselves, any any possible new theories that
we haven't talked about and you'd like to bring to
our attention. We'd love to hear about it. So again,
that email addressing you, Saide was podcast at gmail dot com. Ah,
so it concludes another um, what's the word, I'm thinking

(01:03:23):
hard hitting? You say you use hard hitting before at
the beginning. I can oh no, not at all. It
was very climatic. So concludes another scintilating episode of yes, yes,
be using theories again. Yeah I obviously haven't because I
can't say yeah. So anyway, episode of thinking sideways, so

(01:03:46):
folks until next week. By everybody, I think he meant scintillating.
It was scintillating. Yeah, you're right. W