The Mary Celeste, an American half-brig of 282 tons, became a maritime legend a little past three o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5, 1872.

Her precise location was latitude 38.20 N., by longitude 17.15 W., due east of the Azores and 591 miles from Gibraltar.

At that point, she passed a British brigantine, the Dei Gratia. By a coincidence — later to occur to many people as just too incredible — its master, Captain David Reed Morehouse, had been the dinner guest of the master of the Mary Celeste, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, the night before the American vessel had sailed from New York with a cargo of 1,700 barrels of commercial alcohol, bound for Genoa.

Morehouse therefore knew the destination of the Mary Celeste. And recognised her to be on course, although sailing in the wrong direction. What he had first thought to be a fluttering distress signal was a ripped, tattered sail. The wheel, unmanned and unsecured, spun with every fresh thrust of wind.

Across the narrow gap separating them, Morehouse hailed his friend’s ship. There was no response.

‘What in God’s name can have happened?’ Morehouse asked first mate Oliver Deveau. The question has been posed repeatedly over the past hundred years in an attempt to solve the mystery of the world’s most famous ghost ship.

Mutiny and murder was the attempted answer of Mr Frederick Solly Flood, Attorney-General and Admiralty Proctor of Gibraltar, the port to which a salvage crew from the Dei Gratia sailed the derelict. So convinced was the Attorney-General of crime — and that a chemical analyst had bungled an examination — that he suppressed for fourteen years a forensic report that stains on deck and upon a sword blade were not blood.