British author J. L. Hornibrook wrote in Chamber’s Journal in 1904 that the crew were plucked from the ship, one by one, by ‘a huge octopus or devil fish’, recalling evidence at the enquiry of an axe-slash upon a deck-rail and suggested it had been caused in a futile attempt to fight the monster off.

The Nautical Magazine published an account by another alleged survivor of the vessel, in which Barbary pirates had boarded and slaughtered everyone aboard, and in the British Journal of Astrology in 1926 author Adam Bushey had the crew being ‘dematerialised’ because they had sailed at a psychically vital moment over the very spot where the lost city of Atlantis had sunk beneath the waves. Professor M. K. Jessup, instructor in Astronomy at Michigan University, wrote in a book, UFO, in 1955 that the people aboard the Mary Celeste didn’t go downwards but upwards — snatched off the vessel by the crew of a hovering flying saucer.

As the theories became wilder, so did the ‘facts’ surrounding the finding of the Mary Celeste by the Dei Gratia.

Within half a century, it was unquestioningly believed that, when Captain Morehouse had come upon the vessel, there had been a half-eaten breakfast upon a cabin table, together with three cups of warm tea, a bottle of cough mixture open but unspilled upon another table, a phial of oil and a thimble beside a sewing machine upon which a child’s dress was being repaired, the captain’s watch still ticking, the stove in the galley warm to the touch, the galley fire burning, a cat peacefully asleep on a locker, sailors’ pipes half-smoked, their washing hanging out to dry, the ship’s boats still at their davits and no sign of damage or violence.