Captain Winchester wrote that although the supposition was ridiculous, ‘From what you and everybody else in Gibraltar had told me about the Attorney-General, I did not know but he might do it as they seem to do just as they like’.

In such a fertile atmosphere of fear, suspicion and preconception — where innuendo became evidence and facts that didn’t fit were blatantly concealed — the conjecture blossomed.

Four years before creating the legendary Sherlock Holmes, a Portsmouth doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle earned 30 for a short story purporting to be the account of a surviving passenger, J. Habakuk Jephson. Conan Doyle misnamed the derelict Marie Celeste and had J. Habakuk Jephson, ‘the well known Brooklyn specialist on consumption’, tell of another passenger, a half-caste from New Orleans named Septimus Goring, infiltrating the crew with henchmen, having the captain and officers killed and then sailing to Africa to establish a black empire there. Only a black stone shaped like a human ear, a talisman venerated by Negroes, saved J. Habakuk Jephson from death.

U.S. Consul Sprague sent the account — printed in the magazine Cornhill — to the State Department in Washington with the somewhat conservative verdict that it was ‘replete with romance of a very unlikely or exaggerated nature’.

Amazingly, Attorney-General Flood seized it as an eye-witness account and informed the American authorities he was in contact with officials in Germany, believing that some of the Mary Celeste’s German crew were hiding there after joining Septimus Goring in the mutiny.

Mrs Fannie Richardson, wife of the Mary Celeste’s first mate Albert Richardson, told newspaper reporters on March 9, 1902, that she believed that her husband, the captain and the captain’s wife and child had been murdered by the crew. Albert Richardson’s sister, Mrs Priscilla Richardson Shelton, thought the same, while his brother, Captain Lyman Richardson, was convinced they had been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia.