Anyone who knows any good sea stories knows this one. On 4 December 1872, a one-hundred-foot brigantine was found drifting in the North Atlantic, some distance from the Azores, completely deserted by officers and crew. The boarding party of the ship that spotted it, the Deo Gratia, observed that it seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry—the sailors, for one thing, had left their pipes behind, something unimaginable except in an emergency—and that a lifeboat was missing. Despite these signs of panicked evacuation, there was no evidence of foul play, and the ship itself was thoroughly seaworthy. The log, up to its last entry, showed nothing out of the ordinary. Its name was the Mary Celeste, bound from New York to Genoa with a cargo of alcohol. None of the ten persons who embarked on the trip was ever heard from again. After a dutiful, futile search for survivors, the captain of the Deo Gratia, hoping to claim salvage money from Her Majesty’s government, had the ship towed into Gibraltar.