Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderHistory fact

In 1872 the American merchant ship Mary Celeste was found drifting in the Atlantic in good order, with its cargo intact, food in the galley and the crew's belongings untouched. The ten people aboard were never seen again.

Off the Azores, 1872

OceanHistory

The story behind the card

The Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia came upon the ship off the Azores on 4 December 1872, a month after it had left New York for Genoa with 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol. Its only lifeboat was gone and the last log entry was ten days old, which suggests the people aboard left in a hurry but in order. Captain Benjamin Briggs had his wife and two-year-old daughter with him. A makeshift sounding rod, used to measure water in the hold, lay on deck, and one early theory is that a false reading made Briggs think the ship was sinking fast. Another is fear of fumes from the alcohol. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1884 short story, which invented many details, did much to turn the case into a legend.

Türkçe oku
Amerikan ticaret gemisi Mary Celeste, 1872'de Atlas Okyanusu'nda sağlam ama bomboş hâlde sürüklenirken bulundu. Yükü yerindeydi, mutfakta yiyecek vardı, mürettebatın eşyalarına dokunulmamıştı. Gemideki on kişiden bir daha haber alınamadı.
Azor Adaları açıkları, 1872

Kanada bandıralı Dei Gratia, gemiye 4 Aralık 1872'de Azor Adaları açıklarında rastladı. Mary Celeste bir ay önce, 1.701 varil sanayi alkolüyle New York'tan Cenova'ya doğru yola çıkmıştı. Tek filikası yoktu ve seyir defterindeki son kayıt on gün önceye aitti; bu da gemidekilerin aceleyle ama düzen içinde ayrıldığını düşündürüyor. Kaptan Benjamin Briggs'in yanında karısı ve iki yaşındaki kızı da vardı. Güvertede, ambardaki suyu ölçmeye yarayan derme çatma bir iskandil çubuğu bulundu. İlk kuramlardan birine göre yanlış bir ölçüm, Briggs'e geminin hızla su aldığını düşündürmüş olabilir. Bir başka olasılık da alkol buharından korkmuş olmaları. Arthur Conan Doyle'un pek çok ayrıntıyı kendisi uydurduğu 1884 tarihli öyküsü, olayın bir efsaneye dönüşmesinde büyük rol oynadı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Mary Celeste
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArchaeology

Nan Madol, off the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia, is a ruined city of basalt walls, tombs and ceremonial buildings on roughly a hundred artificial islets divided by tidal channels.

Islet-building began by the 8th or 9th century, and the great basalt walls went up from about 1180–1200. The site became the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled a united Pohnpei until about 1628; rival chiefs were made to live there, where they could be watched. The builders used long, naturally many-sided columns of basalt, quarried elsewhere on Pohnpei and brought to the site, stacking them in alternating crosswise and lengthwise courses around platforms filled with coral rubble. How they moved and raised such heavy stone is not recorded. The mortuary sector, Madol Powe, includes the walled royal tomb islet of Nandauwas. UNESCO listed Nan Madol in 2016 and placed it at once on its List of World Heritage in Danger, as silt and mangroves were choking the channels.

Nan MadolRead card
WonderHistory

Navigators of the Marshall Islands made stick charts that show how ocean swells bend around islands. Curved sticks stand for the swell patterns, and shells or the points where sticks cross mark the islands.

The charts were made from the midribs of coconut palm leaves tied with coconut fibre. Marshallese navigators used three main kinds: a mattang taught the general principle of how swells bend and meet around an island; a meddo showed a few real islands and their swell patterns; a rebbelib covered a whole chain of islands. The knowledge was guarded and passed on within families of navigators. Charts were studied and memorised on land, not carried at sea. Out on the ocean a navigator felt the crossing swells through the motion of the canoe, sometimes lying down in the hull to sense them better, and so could tell where an island lay long before it came into view. Western visitors first described the charts in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Marshall Islands stick chartRead card
WonderMigration

Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific without compass, charts or instruments. They steered by rising and setting stars, the sun, ocean swells and seabirds, and kept track of speed and direction in their heads.

By the 1970s the old skills had almost disappeared, and some scholars argued that the Pacific islands had been settled by canoes drifting there by chance. The Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to test this with the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the small island of Satawal in Micronesia, where a closely related tradition survived. In 1976 he guided the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa about 4,000 kilometres from Hawaii to Tahiti without any instruments. The voyage showed that deliberate long-distance navigation was possible. Piailug went on to teach Hawaiian navigators, among them Nainoa Thompson, and traditional wayfinding has since been revived across the Pacific.

Polynesian wayfindingRead card
WonderCulture

The haenyeo of Jeju, an island off South Korea's southern coast, are women who dive without breathing equipment, holding their breath for one to three minutes to gather abalone, sea urchins, octopus and seaweed from as deep as 20 metres.

Haenyeo means 'sea women' in Korean. Girls traditionally learned the work from older divers in their village, and the women run local diving associations that set rules on when and what may be harvested and look after one another's safety. UNESCO recognised this way of caring for the sea when it added the culture of Jeju haenyeo to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016. Their numbers have fallen sharply, from 23,081 in 1965 to 14,143 by 1970 and a few thousand today. Most are now over 60, and some of the oldest, past 80, still dive.

Jeju haenyeoRead card
WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

Indian Ocean tradeRead card
Next card in the archiveIn 1939, self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown uncovered a 27-metre Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. The wood had rotted away, but its imprint in the soil and rows of iron rivets still showed the shape of the hull.Read next →