Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Hicks, Brian, PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books, On December 4th, , a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo--and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What happened on board the ghost ong>shipong> "ong>Maryong> Celeste" has baffled and tantalized the world for 130 years. In his stunning new book, award-winning journalist Brian Hicks plumbs the depths of this fabled nautical mystery and finally uncovers the truth. The "ong>Maryong> Celeste" was cursed as soon as she was launched on the Bay of Fundy in the spring of . Her first captain died before completing the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed and sank an English brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm drove her ashore at Cape Breton. But somehow the ong>shipong> was recovered and refitted, and in the autumn of she fell to the reluctant command of a seasoned mariner named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It was Briggs who was at the helm when the "ong>Maryong> Celeste" sailed into history. In Brian Hicks's skilled hands, the story of the "ong>Maryong> Celeste" becomes the quintessential tale of men lost at sea. Hicks vividly recreates the events leading up to the crew's disappearance and then unfolds the complicated and bizarre aftermath--the dark suspicions that fell on the officers of the ong>shipong> that intercepted her; the farcical Admiralty Court salvage hearing in Gibraltar; the wild myths that circulated after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a thinly disguised short story sensationalizing the mystery. Everything from a voodoo curse to an alien abduction has been hauled out to explain the fate of the "ong>Maryong> Celeste." But, as Brian Hicks reveals, the truth is actually grounded in the combined tragedies of human error and bad luck. The story of the "ong>Maryong> Celeste" acquired yet another twist in , when a team of divers funded by novelist Clive Cussler located the wreck in a coral reef off Haiti. Written with the suspense of a thriller and the vivid accuracy of the best popular history, "Ghost ong>Shipong>" tells the unforgettable true story of the most famous and most fascinating maritime mystery of all time. "From the Hardcover edition."