Raising Lazarus

Dear Harry -

I have desired for some time to share more with you regarding my investigation into the disappearance of all hands aboard the Mary Celeste. I have over the course of many years chased the sea's greatest mystery by interviewing every fabulist, swindler and lunatic who ever claimed to know what happened to its lost crew.

It began as something of a lark after I wrote a fictional account of the story for Cornhill magazine in '84. The reading public accepted J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement as if I alone had discovered the truth, making the Mary Celeste affair even more notorious than it already was as well as putting me firmly on a path to establishing myself as a successful writer.

But as the years passed and the public remembered my salacious invention and the characters I had created rather than Cap't Briggs and the lost crew of the Mary Celeste, I began to feel the weight of my deception, wondering if I might use my fame and fortune to set it to rights.

What started as a sense of moral obligation turned slowly to an obsession as I spent more and more time exploring the many theories born of the original salvage hearings in Gibraltar in December of '72. All signs seemed to suggest that the Mary Celeste, with its hold filled with a valuable cargo of liquor, was the victim of greed and foul play.

But investigating every possible theory, from the covetousness of crew members, insurance fraud and piracy, all were eliminated in the end by the simple reality that nothing was stolen, no fraud was perpetrated and no evidence of violence shipboard was ever proved. After almost thirty years of chasing down witnesses and reading accounts from other investigators I knew no more about what had happened on that ship than I did as a sailor at the tender age of twenty-five when I wrote my original fabrication.

On December 4th, 1922, exactly fifty years after the discovery at sea of the abandoned Mary Celeste midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal, I arrived at New Bedford to interview my first decent lead in more than a decade. One Lazarus Gillings claimed to know the truth about the disappearance of the Mary Celeste's captain, family and crew and I was finally going to meet him.

His letter of introduction led me to a rather impoverished section of town where a gabled wreck purporting to be the Spouter-Inn listed like a ship taking water in heavy seas. Beneath the inn's name on the creaking sign was written Proprietor Habakuk Jephson in ink worn almost to extinction. As you can well imagine, I laughed heartily at it before pulling open the inn's ancient door and stepping inside.

Darkly lit within, a sprinkling of patrons, mostly graybeards, sat drinking or eating fare of dubious quality. In a corner, my quarry sat hunched over a tankard gripping it with both hands as if his life depended upon it.

Sitting down across from him, I passed my card across the rough timbers atop the table which he gripped and peered at briefly before tossing it contemptuously back.

Crossing my arms, I said, "Lazarus Gillings, I have read the Mary Celeste's logs, the salvage court hearing summation and interviewed a dozen men who claimed they knew what happened on that ship. I will know within a few minutes of conversing with you if you're a mountebank and a liar."

"Will ye now?" he replied coldly. "Then I won't waste thy time. Good day to thee!"

He took a long pull from his tankard to finish his jealously guarded ale and wiped his sleeve across his mouth with a sneer of satisfaction. His wispy hair and matted beard glowed whitely in the gloom, his bulbous and pitted nose red and oily as salmon spawning in late summer.

The inn keeper coming to the table for my order, I asked him for a tankard of ale and a refill for Lazarus who grinned happily at my unexpected generosity.

When the inn keeper returned with the ale, Lazarus greedily drank and then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of a grimy and weathered hand.

"Did ye ever behold the Mary Celeste afore she was a scupper'd?" he abruptly asked.

"I did. Saw her after her second refit in Boston Harbor in '84 while I was on shore leave."

"She was pretty and trim as you please, good Mary. And a right fine sailor, too. Know ye her history?"

"From her original christening as the Amazon to her watery grave between Gonave island and Haiti on January 3rd, '85," I replied amiably.

"Then ye know that poor Mary was accursed. She took the lives of three Captains and bankrupted all the rest."

"I know all of that and more," I answered with a sigh, " tell me something I don't know."

"Did you know I sailed her?" he replied with a sly grin. "Thy face answers for thee!" he said in triumph. "Shipped with Ole Thunder, her hold crowded with casks of rum, her heading set for Genoa in the Italian lands."

"Who the devil is Ole Thunder," I interrupted.

"Why Cap't Briggs that was," he somberly replied.

Mouth agape, I gulped air for a moment or two like a fish out of water. "You were a crew member on the Mary Celeste in November of '72 and not some later year?"

"Just said I was, didn't I?"

Drawing the list of the original passengers and crew that I kept in my pocket, I coldly asked him if he remembered who he sailed with on that unfortunate voyage.

"Capt Briggs, his wife Sarah and wee daughter Sophie, first mate Albert Richardson, steward Edward Head, and crewmen Volkert, Boz, Arian and Gottlieb; all Germans. Never learned their proper names."

"You forgot the second mate."

"Did I?" He grinned so widely that I could see that most of his teeth had long ago rotted away. "Andrew Lazarus Gillings at thy service!"

"Yes, but, but," I stuttered, "but they all were lost. How in thunder did you live and they all died!"

"Have ye not read that in the latter days the sea will give up her dead? I am not the first Lazarus raised from the great beyond!”

"I believe you may have damaged your head, sir," I replied, but a quaver in my voice gave lie to my words.

"Let me finish my tale and then we'll see who's cracked, thee or me," he said with a wink and a finger across his nose.

Lazarus rhapsodized about the ships trim and the fair following winds for an hour before the Mary Celeste's luck came to a sudden end when the sails finally hung limp, and the seas barely stirred at all.

Turning somber, he said quietly, "We had victuals and water a plenty in the hold, but that night when we were becalmed, I stood in revery as the moon rose in a cloudless and star-spangled sky."

"But my revery ended when I heard a splash, and then a second and a third, and suddenly I sees rats scurrying across the deck and jumping into the ocean," he continued, his eyes now wide with remembered terror.

I felt his testimony's truth in that moment as if I stood with him watching those rodents choose drowning rather than staying on that doom'd craft. A land lubber would never have invent'd a detail like that.

Taking another pull from his ale, he wiped his lips with a sigh. "The next morning, I reported the rat's desertion to Ole Thunder and he laughed. 'The wisdom of rats is greatly overrated,' he answered. Can ye imagine? When I pressed the point, he accused me of drinking on duty. I needed a drink after that night, too, but had touched nary a drop. Since there was no arguing with him, I clamped my mouth shut and went about my business.

"There was a fierce coating of coal dust in the hold with all that alcohol, and my nose had long since warned me that a lot of that rum had liberated itself from those casks. I ask ye, what damn fool loads alcohol in a ship after hauling coal? One without the sense that the Lord God gave those rats!

"There is only one thing a sailor fears more than a bad storm in a winter sea and that's a fire in the hold."

I nodded sagely, a lump forming in my throat, and my stomach now too queasy to finish my ale.

"Late that afternoon, a pod of Killer whales was spotted off the port bow. Mrs. Briggs went to the railing to watch with Sophie asleep in her arms. But when one of them whales swam up and butted us, the good Mary pitched and Mrs. Briggs and her daughter almost flipped over the side. The First Mate rushed to save her when he comprehended the whale's intent.

“A moment later, an explosion rocked the ship like the last days, the fore and the lazarette hatches blowing sky-high into the air before crashing thunderously down, rum falling from the heavens as heavy as a summer squall. The whales approached the ship curiously, their black dorsal fins gleefully breaching the waves like playful dolphins as they swam.

"Those brutes somehow knew we were in for it, and began to circle in for the kill. After the commotion, the Cap't rushed to comfort his wife before yelling at me to investigate the hold. Once I was down there, I could see that we were taking on water, but even though several casks had burst neither flames nor scorching did I see.

"I crossed myself before returning to the deck to report to the Cap't. He bellow'd, 'The devil take your blind eyes, Lazarus,' and rushed down into the hold to see the truth for himself. But when he returned, his face ashen with fear, he yelled to the crew to start the bilge and told the First Mate to measure the water in the hold. While they ran to it, he flailed his arms in the air like a lunatic, shouting, ‘The devil has taken good Mary, by thunder.’

"When the First Mate returned, he told the Cap't we had two meters of water in the hold and rising. Then the Germans ran up holding the bilge pump damaged beyond easy repair by the explosion. The Cap't examined it and then yelled, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, deviltry is to blame! Good Mary is scupper'd, abandon ship, all hands!' Sofie, awakened by her father's bellowing, began to squall in her mother's arms.

"We boarded the small yawl that we had kept stowed across the main hatch and lowered it into ocean where them Killer Whales waited. When the First Mate began to cut the line attaching us to Mary, the Cap't yelled 'Belay that!' But as he returned his knife to his belt one of the whales butted the yawl and I grabbed his hand to keep him from pitching into the sea, the force of the blow breaking the rope, and we began to drift away from the ship.

"The Cap't lifted an oar to strike the next whale as it tried to ram the little boat, but he lost his balance and fell overboard. Both Gottlieb and I grabbed at his extended arms, but he slipped through our fingers and disappeared into the dark sea as though yanked hard from below.

"Air bubbles breaching the surface was the last we ever saw of Ole Thunder," he said with tears welling in his eyes.

Of course, an explosion without scorching or flames with all that rum in the hold was impossible, and yet as he sat before me and wept, I believed him, every word.

He did not speak again for nearly hour, his eyes staring wetly at his ale as it slowly turned flat. Mrs. Brigg's, little Sofie and the rest of the crew survived the repeated attacks of the whales but died of exposure anyway in the sea's winter air, while Lazarus impossibly lived.

Eventually Riffian pirates rescued the nearly comatose Lazarus from the yawl and returned with him to Morocco where he slowly recovered and lived as a servant for the next thirty-years. When he finally returned to the states not even his own brother believed or recognized him. Sadly, that night after our interview, Lazarus died in his sleep but this time will have to wait till the latter days to be raised.

For me, this is the end of the mystery of the Mary Celeste, but not for my readers, for I do not intend to publish the results of my investigation. For them, a mystery it will remain.

As my most famous character once said "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But this, nobody will believe.

Jean sends her love. I hope this letter finds both you and Bess well.

– Yours sincerely, A.C.D.

Clifton House, Aston Road, Birmingham