Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways. I don't think you never know stories of
Speaker 1: things since he don't know the answer too. Hello and
Speaker 1: welcome to another hard hitting episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm
Speaker 1: joined tonight by Steve Alright, what's your name? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm Joe. Sorry, okay, a little important. So tonight we're
Speaker 1: gonna solve in another mystery. Uh. This is the one
Speaker 1: that probably just about everybody in our audience has hurt about. Hey, Steve,
Speaker 1: do you ever notice that we always solve Joe's mysteries
Speaker 1: most of the time? Yet do you feel like maybe
Speaker 1: he's stacking the deck. I'm picking easy ones that have
Speaker 1: been solved already. Well, he says he solves them. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean he actually solved I guess that's fair. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he also has claimed to solve some of our mystery.
Speaker 1: That's true, and it's almost always preposterous. Not not so
Speaker 1: at all. Now, these are these are by their very
Speaker 1: nature unfortunately kind of unsolvable. Sense. Yeah, but you know
Speaker 1: you can advance some good theories anyway. Well, there you go.
Speaker 1: That's that's always It's always fun. I'll turn up with
Speaker 1: some new piece of evidence or was a little theory
Speaker 1: or another. So anyway, This is a mystery that everybody
Speaker 1: has heard about when we're talking about the ghost ship
Speaker 1: Mary Celeste, I know. So anyway, let quick intro here
Speaker 1: a little information about the Mary Celeste. She was a brigantine.
Speaker 1: Brigantine is like a partially square rig partially gaff rig ship.
Speaker 1: You guys all know what that means. So hundred seven
Speaker 1: feet long tons and on December five, eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: she was found between the Azores and the coast of Portugal,
Speaker 1: unmanned and abandoned. She was under sale, she was part
Speaker 1: stal inder sale. Not all the sales were up. The
Speaker 1: lifeboat was gone, the entire crew was gone. And that
Speaker 1: is the mystery, is what the hell happened to those people? Yeah?
Speaker 1: How did they get how did they get vomino stuff?
Speaker 1: That ship? Yeah? I mean I guess what was it
Speaker 1: like damaged? It was just like hanging. It was just
Speaker 1: a hank. The ship was just hanging out in the
Speaker 1: middle of the ocean. Yeah, just just drifting along under sail.
Speaker 1: Apparently it was being the According to the last log entry,
Speaker 1: which was November twenty four, they were at Santa Maria
Speaker 1: Islands in the Azores, also called St. Mary's and that
Speaker 1: was their last known entry, and they were found about
Speaker 1: seven dred miles north of there. And it's really cool.
Speaker 1: I found this out because I found out the longitude
Speaker 1: and latitude of where the ship was found, and then
Speaker 1: I found out the longitude and latitude of St. Mary's
Speaker 1: Island or Santa Maria, and and of course I go
Speaker 1: out and I googled it. And of course there's a
Speaker 1: web page out there where you can plug in the
Speaker 1: coordinates of two points and I'll tell you how far
Speaker 1: apart they are. Join the Internet. I know, it's even
Speaker 1: popping up on Google Maps. You. So that was really cool.
Speaker 1: So using that handy utility, they've traveled about seven hundred
Speaker 1: miles since. Yeah. So yeah, And of course you never know,
Speaker 1: and maybe maybe he was just bored with making ship
Speaker 1: log entries and he just didn't write in the log
Speaker 1: for like seven or eight days. It seems unlikely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I thought you were kind of required to
Speaker 1: make log entries like all the time. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: they do on Star Trek all the time, exactly. I
Speaker 1: figured that was the historic record of Star Trek. And
Speaker 1: that's yeah. And besides, what you know, you're at sea,
Speaker 1: there's not a hell of a lot else to do,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I will spend a lot of time doodling
Speaker 1: in your log. Okay, So anyway, that's the start from
Speaker 1: the beginning. The Mary so lest left New York City
Speaker 1: in November fifth, eighteen seventy two, loaded with a cargo
Speaker 1: one thousand seven one barrels of alcohol, which were intended
Speaker 1: for fortifying wine in Italy, so that the destination was
Speaker 1: general Italy. Um. And an interesting coincidence is that the
Speaker 1: night before they sailed, the captain, whose name was Benjamin Briggs,
Speaker 1: had dinner with his friend David Moorehouse. David Moorehouse was
Speaker 1: captain of the del Gracia, was the ship that discovered
Speaker 1: the Mary Celeste adrift and abandoned in Atlantic. I feel
Speaker 1: like I already have a theory about this. Think no,
Speaker 1: not murder, but like quote discovered, like, oh we found
Speaker 1: this ship. It was weird. I don't know if there
Speaker 1: was enough. Missay, We'll just have to continue. Let's let's
Speaker 1: let's let's keep going. But before we go too far
Speaker 1: now he said, it's and I remember this in the reading.
Speaker 1: It's something I always had to have clarified. So it's
Speaker 1: not drinking alcohol like whiskey. It's denuded alcohol? Is that
Speaker 1: the correct term? You know? I've heard very I've heard
Speaker 1: two different variants on that. One is that it was like,
Speaker 1: I'm totally undrinkable alcohol that will poison you, like basically
Speaker 1: like rubbing alcohol. Yeah, and the natured alcohol that's yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And but I've also heard that they were going to
Speaker 1: use for fortifying wine, So presumably it would have had
Speaker 1: to be drinkable, right if if you're gonna fortify wine
Speaker 1: with it, I don't know, Yeah, I have no idea
Speaker 1: how that problems. I guess maybe it was undrinkable in
Speaker 1: its form, but one diluted, maybe it was matured alcohol
Speaker 1: is totally just like rubbing alcohol, right, and that like
Speaker 1: it's alcohol, it will kill you. But ostensibly I think
Speaker 1: if you water it down to like crazy low amounts,
Speaker 1: you could consume it. Maybe I don't know that it
Speaker 1: would be delicious, but yeah, probably not. Well yeah, and
Speaker 1: this stuff if some people have referred to it as undrinkable,
Speaker 1: but that they might mean not poisonous but just so
Speaker 1: so strong, so harsh. But at the same time, especially
Speaker 1: back in those days, when people wanted to get wasted, hey,
Speaker 1: they would we would find a way to do it.
Speaker 1: You know, if you think of like you know that
Speaker 1: like the strongest moonshiniest moonshine you've ever had, Right, there's
Speaker 1: really no flavor. All it is is just like alcohol,
Speaker 1: and yes you can drink it, but and they'll get
Speaker 1: your wasted. Okay. So anyway, so that the del Garashia
Speaker 1: discovered the Mary Celeste sailing without benefit of crew a
Speaker 1: month later. So she was about six hundred miles west
Speaker 1: of Portugal, sailing apparently towards Gibraltar. She was spotted by
Speaker 1: the helmsman of the Delgarashia from about five miles out.
Speaker 1: She appeared to be sailing erratically, basically kind of weaving
Speaker 1: side to side. And uh so they got closer and
Speaker 1: as they got as they got closer, they recognized it
Speaker 1: as being the Mary Celeste. And they got to a
Speaker 1: distance of about four yards and just sat there for
Speaker 1: a couple of hours observing through the telescope, and they
Speaker 1: saw no one on deck, no one at the helm,
Speaker 1: and they were mighty puzzled. So you can imagine. So
Speaker 1: the first mate all over de Vaux went over in
Speaker 1: the boat and boarded the Mary Celeste and went all
Speaker 1: to it found it to be completely empty. A that
Speaker 1: was kind of water logged and they were about three
Speaker 1: and a half feet of water in the hold. And
Speaker 1: by the way, that must have been a really creepy
Speaker 1: thing going on board that ship. Huh. I can only
Speaker 1: imagine it be like, Yeah, it's like finding an abandoned
Speaker 1: cars somewhere. You know that somebody's should have been in
Speaker 1: it recently, but now there's nobody. Abandoned houses, you are
Speaker 1: stupid because you know, you walk through and you're like, boy,
Speaker 1: there should definitely, like, you know, there's signs of people
Speaker 1: having been here, but there's just to no one here.
Speaker 1: Just speaking of abandoned cars. I was with a friend
Speaker 1: and we were out in the hills looking for a
Speaker 1: good shooting spot. So we pulled into this one spot
Speaker 1: off the road and there's a pickup truck there and
Speaker 1: we're started wondering that it appears to be unoccupied, and
Speaker 1: so we come walking up to it slowly and the
Speaker 1: driver at the driver's side door was a jar and
Speaker 1: there were a pair of feet sticking out somebody what
Speaker 1: you're making this up? No pair of feet sticking out shoes? Uh?
Speaker 1: Some person laying face down and not moving at all,
Speaker 1: and we were kind of like, wow, have we just
Speaker 1: found a body. We got a little closer, and then
Speaker 1: a little closer and then starts to move. We look
Speaker 1: in there and it's just some some freaking redneck who
Speaker 1: just like you know, passed out probably the night before. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, yeah, there's that. Yeah, Yeah, that was creepy.
Speaker 1: All right, Okay, So on board they found the ship's log,
Speaker 1: and of course that's where they got that entry about
Speaker 1: Santa Maria Island. Surprisingly, they keep saying. The word is
Speaker 1: that the ship's papers were missing. And I've read that,
Speaker 1: and that's why I was a little surprised when you
Speaker 1: said the ship's log, because I thought by the papers,
Speaker 1: I thought that they meant that the log book had
Speaker 1: been was not there. It's what I thought too, But
Speaker 1: you would think, but no, apparently the log was there,
Speaker 1: but papers whatever those papers are, I'm not official documents
Speaker 1: of owners of ownership maybe yeah, oh, shipping manifest Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would make sense. Yeah, And they had also taken
Speaker 1: the sextant in the current chronometer they were missing. Um,
Speaker 1: the ship's life boat was missing. Said There were some
Speaker 1: sensationalized accounts of this. One of the first ones by
Speaker 1: Arthur Conan, and the entire crew was missing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the crew was missing. Yeah yeah. And was it just
Speaker 1: the crew or what? Oh yeah, I should probably say
Speaker 1: who was on the boat? There was. There was a
Speaker 1: seven man crew plus the captain, so that's eight. And
Speaker 1: then he brought along his wife and his two year
Speaker 1: old daughter for this voyage too, so a total of
Speaker 1: ten people were on this ship. So anyway, the sensationalized
Speaker 1: accounts of the by Arthur Conan, Doyle said that when
Speaker 1: they boarded it, they were like there were warm plates
Speaker 1: of food and still warm cups of tea sitting on
Speaker 1: the table, and yeah, and there was a sword that
Speaker 1: had blood on it. And and in real life there
Speaker 1: was a sword, but it had rust on it, not blood.
Speaker 1: That's completely bogus. I mean, I mean, you know, they
Speaker 1: spent two hours just observing this boat. That's plenty of
Speaker 1: time for the tea to cool off, you know. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they they chased it for a while. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the whole the blood on the sword thing there,
Speaker 1: Like you said, there was a sword, did you ever
Speaker 1: come across why they why the account say it was
Speaker 1: a bloody sword. It's because it's it was covered in
Speaker 1: red material that didn't obviously look like rust. But it
Speaker 1: turns out that and it's I'm assuming that it wasn't
Speaker 1: obviously rust based on the way that I've read it,
Speaker 1: but it was the fact that somebody had used lemon
Speaker 1: juice to clean it, which caused some kind of weird
Speaker 1: oxidization to happen, and that's why it had these odd
Speaker 1: blotches of red on it. That's a weird that's a
Speaker 1: little like that makes it a little weirder. Though to
Speaker 1: me that somebody was like, oh, I know, I'll use
Speaker 1: lemon juice to clean my sword off. It might have
Speaker 1: been a you know, the equivalent of an old wives tale,
Speaker 1: Dad said, always use a lemon when you're at seed
Speaker 1: to clean your sword, to keep it clean and keep
Speaker 1: the salt off of it. I don't know it would
Speaker 1: be a good stringent. Mean, maybe they just didn't have
Speaker 1: a sharp knife in hand and they wanted to cut
Speaker 1: a lemon, so they cut it with that sword. Or
Speaker 1: perhaps then this leads to another theory, is that perhaps
Speaker 1: it was a lemon pledge. Lady, Yeah, alright, but what
Speaker 1: was not missing. There was a lot of food and
Speaker 1: water on board, plenty of food and water. The crew
Speaker 1: that had everybody had left their possessions behind, including valuables
Speaker 1: thanks what you expect they would take with them, So
Speaker 1: that leads to the suspicion that they left in a
Speaker 1: big hurry. The peak halliard, which is used to voice
Speaker 1: of the mainsail, because the mainsail has got that big
Speaker 1: that big piece of timber up on top of it
Speaker 1: to stretch it out, and so that you have to
Speaker 1: have a fairly stout rope to haul that heavy and
Speaker 1: that heavy piece of wood and all that cloth with it.
Speaker 1: So that was missing, apparently, and they found it. They
Speaker 1: found a rope probably the peak halliard, tied to the
Speaker 1: stern of the boat, trailing in the water. The other
Speaker 1: end was frayed. There was no sign of violence on
Speaker 1: the ship, so that kind of rules out piracy. We'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that, But then those signs
Speaker 1: of a struggle or anything like that. So they pondered
Speaker 1: what to do, and they finally decided to the captain
Speaker 1: of the del Grasia sent to a small number of
Speaker 1: men over there to the Mary Celeste to take her
Speaker 1: the rest of the way to Gibraltar. So they sailed
Speaker 1: the two ships sailed together to Gibraltar, and then months
Speaker 1: later it's sent some time in Gibraltar while they puzzled
Speaker 1: over it and held courts of inquiry and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and then eventually the ship got to Genoa it's original
Speaker 1: and they unloaded the cargo. They found that nine barrels
Speaker 1: of alcohol were empty out of that whole thing, and
Speaker 1: there was what five hundred barrels barrels seventeen seven one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's yeah, that's again. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the hard parts with a story like this
Speaker 1: that has been retold to make it spookier and spookier.
Speaker 1: Is I have seen accounts that said it was four hundred,
Speaker 1: five hundred, seven hundred barrels. So that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's always in question for me, is how much
Speaker 1: cargo was this thing really hauling. Yeah, it's a good
Speaker 1: quite And I'm assuming these were not huge barrels either.
Speaker 1: You know, when you think barrel, you think fifty gallon drum,
Speaker 1: so these might have been kind of kind of small barrels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could have been. I'm not but again, there's there's
Speaker 1: a few a few things I was trying to find
Speaker 1: out in the course of this whole thing, like the
Speaker 1: size of the barrels, the size of the lifeboat. That's
Speaker 1: that's something I was really curious about. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of difficult, Yeah, I kind of hard to find out
Speaker 1: as far as the captain and the crew goes. They
Speaker 1: were never heard from again ever ever, Yeah, exactly, they
Speaker 1: just disappeared, Okay, joining everybody obvious. Yeah, So obviously they
Speaker 1: either were forced from the ship or they left voluntarily.
Speaker 1: Since there was no sign of a struggle, they must
Speaker 1: have gotten off the ship voluntarily. So the question is why,
Speaker 1: and that's something that people have been puzzling over for
Speaker 1: a long long time. Okay, so here are some theories. Uh.
Speaker 1: Number one theory pirates. What's the answer? Exact me? Wrong? Yeah,
Speaker 1: no signs of violence, and that doubt that they would
Speaker 1: have left left a bunch of valuable stuff behind. If
Speaker 1: nothing else. The pirates are gonna take the food and
Speaker 1: the cargo. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the alcohol cargo. You know. Actually,
Speaker 1: if I were a pirate to find enough men, I
Speaker 1: would take the entire ship. There's I know would of course,
Speaker 1: maybe that's what happened. Maybe that's why the iron barrels
Speaker 1: were empty. So the pirates did take murder everybody. They
Speaker 1: did take the ship, and they drank a lot of
Speaker 1: booze one that and Gal got so drunk they fell overboard. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This this, this is not part of the pun holding water. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then one of them had the last one to
Speaker 1: fall overboard, and I actually got tangled up with the
Speaker 1: lines for their lifeboat and if you want to went
Speaker 1: over he pulled it over with him. That's where the
Speaker 1: lifeboats gone. Ye. Yeah, and I'm hearing the Benny Hill music. Yeah,
Speaker 1: al right, Next they're a mutiny. The crew mutinied. They
Speaker 1: killed the captain his family and threw them overboard, and
Speaker 1: then took off in a lifeboat. And this makes really
Speaker 1: no sound whatsoever again, right, signs of struggle. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: to of seven mutiny against a captain of one and
Speaker 1: kill him and his family and behind It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: a big struggle though. But yeah, I mean, even if
Speaker 1: even if that had happened, why would they immediately jump
Speaker 1: into lifeboat, you know, miles from anywhere and take off,
Speaker 1: you know, when the ship is more valuable and the
Speaker 1: ship is actually gonna be a lot safer to be
Speaker 1: in that a little lifeboat. Yeah, So that makes no sense.
Speaker 1: Next one drunk in this uh in this stay of
Speaker 1: the crew got wasted on alcohol from those nine barrels.
Speaker 1: They killed the captain and his family again and took
Speaker 1: off in a lifeboat again. So it was just another
Speaker 1: variant of the same theory as the mute yeah, tries
Speaker 1: to explain why they might have me right, Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: and and the captain was a very religious man. I know,
Speaker 1: he had reservations about even taking the cargo until somebody
Speaker 1: told him this is something you can't actually rinker. You're
Speaker 1: not supposed to drink. So it might have been that
Speaker 1: somebody was testing the sauce and he got upset, and
Speaker 1: then that's where everything went downhill. Seven super wasted guys
Speaker 1: and one angry captain. We know who wins. I guess
Speaker 1: on the filt side of that, though, you kind of
Speaker 1: assumed that he's a captain of a ship. And I
Speaker 1: don't really know how this worked, obviously, but in my
Speaker 1: like fantasy world, you're captain of a ship, and especially
Speaker 1: if you have a small crew, you've got your crew
Speaker 1: that's with you like fairly frequently. Right, That's kind of
Speaker 1: how it works back there. It wasn't like you just
Speaker 1: had like, oh, I guess just random dudes the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think you know that for me, the mutiny
Speaker 1: thing doesn't really make sense that, like you kind of
Speaker 1: I assume at least that these people had been working
Speaker 1: together for a number of years and that they would
Speaker 1: have formed close bonds. And and also there's the whole
Speaker 1: question of why I suddenly mutiny, you know, because the
Speaker 1: boys wasn't It wasn't like it was taking six months
Speaker 1: longer than it needed too. It's not like they were
Speaker 1: on food and water. There's no no particular reason of eating.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't really get unless maybe there's some
Speaker 1: sort of love triangle, you know, maybe somebody was fell
Speaker 1: in love with the captain's wife and decided to murder
Speaker 1: the captain and the daughter and and then had to
Speaker 1: murder the other crewmen, and then he fell overboard himself
Speaker 1: because he was drunk. So again, this stuff now it
Speaker 1: really doesn't So another another theory is said they abandoned
Speaker 1: the ship prematurely, believing that it was sinking or south
Speaker 1: otherwise it's some sort of some sort of deadly condition.
Speaker 1: And he said it had three and a half foot
Speaker 1: of water in the hold. Yeah, the question is at
Speaker 1: the time that they left the ship didn't have that
Speaker 1: much water in it, or because they left that they
Speaker 1: left a couple of large hatches top side open and
Speaker 1: they were open for ten days. Yeah, yeah, about to
Speaker 1: have about ten days. And yeah, and so if they
Speaker 1: had left those up, and I mean a fair amount
Speaker 1: of water could have come in from rain also and
Speaker 1: and also you know ship's life that tend to take
Speaker 1: on a little bit of water naturally anyhow, And that's
Speaker 1: why they have builge pumps so you can pump them
Speaker 1: out regularly. If they hadn't been on board for ten days,
Speaker 1: and it could have just been you know, seepage. Well
Speaker 1: and I read somewhere and I don't know if if
Speaker 1: you were able to verify this at all, that the
Speaker 1: ship supposedly had two pumps and one of the pumps
Speaker 1: wasn't working correctly, so they couldn't siphon the water out
Speaker 1: at the rate that they should normally be able to.
Speaker 1: But but still not a good reason to abandoned ship. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: that's like saying, my airplane that has four engines on it,
Speaker 1: one of them has gone out. Quick, Everybody get your parachute.
Speaker 1: It's kind of that safe thing is still gonna go.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's almost worse than that. I mean,
Speaker 1: you it's a parachute, a parachute down, you have a
Speaker 1: fairly high rate of you know, at least making it
Speaker 1: safe down. The thing of abandoning a ship that you know,
Speaker 1: I say this a lot. I'm obviously an expert course
Speaker 1: maritime anything. That's why you should actually be handling all
Speaker 1: of our maritime should be. You're right, but I do know,
Speaker 1: having lived on a ship for a while, that the
Speaker 1: very it did, the last thing you do was abandoned
Speaker 1: ship because you're I mean even you know, on the
Speaker 1: where we were with a lot of people and you
Speaker 1: have your radios and everything, your rate of survival in
Speaker 1: a lifeboat is just so much lower. I mean it's
Speaker 1: maybe ten of what you get on a ship. There's
Speaker 1: no reason to abandon a ship because one of your
Speaker 1: pumps might be broken to do something that you can
Speaker 1: do with buckets and manual labor. Absolutely yeah. And you know,
Speaker 1: if they truly were at abandon the ship ten days before,
Speaker 1: and that means nobody on board that thing was was
Speaker 1: doing any pumping whatsoever, and it still didn't have a
Speaker 1: critical amount of water in the build. Ye then seriously,
Speaker 1: obviously it wasn't the ship wasn't going now I just
Speaker 1: remember that being an odd fact. Yeah and and but
Speaker 1: but anyway, this this abandonment thing, they thought that the
Speaker 1: ship was sink king and so they they abandoned ship.
Speaker 1: They were still pretty close to Santa Maria Island, and
Speaker 1: so they decided to get in the lifeboat and the
Speaker 1: head and sail to Santa Maria. But that again makes
Speaker 1: no sense because the ship is nowhere near thinking even
Speaker 1: if you think it's taken on more water than should,
Speaker 1: I would turn the ship around first and don't. And
Speaker 1: by the way, I didn't mention this, but Benjamin, the captain,
Speaker 1: Benjamin Briggs, owned a partial interest in the ship, so
Speaker 1: it's not like he would have just abanded. So he
Speaker 1: partially owned it. So he's gonna lose his investment if
Speaker 1: he just lets her go down. Oh yeah, So so he's, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he's got an interest in keeping a ship afloat.
Speaker 1: And also I think, you know, when you're a sea captain,
Speaker 1: you just you don't want to develop a reputation as
Speaker 1: somebody who loses ships career, and I think it only
Speaker 1: takes one loss of a ship, right, it really kind
Speaker 1: of queer the deal. Yeah. I think you lose one
Speaker 1: ship and people are like, no, you lose ships. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're there. There are people out there in
Speaker 1: history who have gotten second chances and then they lost
Speaker 1: another ship and then that was about it for him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Nobody trusts you, now, Okay, So that's so much for
Speaker 1: that theory. So the premature thing is like, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean not not just because they thought maybe it
Speaker 1: was taking on water. Another another theory that's been put
Speaker 1: out is food contamination because apparently there is a mold
Speaker 1: that was just sometimes found on rye bread, which apparently
Speaker 1: they had in their ship's stores. And this mold, particular
Speaker 1: moldest kind of poisonous consullucinations. So they're all tripping on
Speaker 1: rye bread. Yeah, they cannot wait to see that as
Speaker 1: the next pandemic on TV next week on Dateline. Is
Speaker 1: your child eating rye bread? What do you do with Yeah?
Speaker 1: So so, But anyway, the uh, that's kind of disproven
Speaker 1: because the crew of the del Garacia, the skeleton crew
Speaker 1: that sailed or the rest of the way to Gibraltar,
Speaker 1: we were eating the same food and none of them. Yea,
Speaker 1: none of them tripped out, so so that seems kind
Speaker 1: of unlikely. Another theory, and this is an interesting one,
Speaker 1: is that it was Dalex from the Future. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, Steve, this is a valid like the most
Speaker 1: valid one I've heard. Yes, I know, I love it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, okay, let's have it. Yeah. So in episode
Speaker 1: Doctor Who, they suggested that Dalex from the Future terrified
Speaker 1: the crew and causing them to jump overboard. There's actually
Speaker 1: another it's not the Mary Celeste I don't think episode,
Speaker 1: but there's another episode where like an alien ship has
Speaker 1: accidentally merged with it, and they take all of the
Speaker 1: season and they take everybody onto this alien ship, and
Speaker 1: then the aliens leave and they manned the ship because
Speaker 1: they were all dying for whatever reason, and so the
Speaker 1: ship is left totally normal, doesn't look like there's anything
Speaker 1: wrong with it. The alien ship goes away, So maybe
Speaker 1: it was that. We're gonna get to that. Actually next,
Speaker 1: that's another theory is aliens and UFOs look at that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're they're just sailing along and suddenly the UFOs
Speaker 1: beamed them up and abduct them and they're off touring
Speaker 1: the galaxy, presumably right now that they were dissected one
Speaker 1: of the other. So, you know, I don't know this
Speaker 1: is this is a very credible theory, but this it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to prove, you know what. And and
Speaker 1: aliens get blamed for everything. They get the short into
Speaker 1: this stick and every story because it's these terrible things happened.
Speaker 1: Must have been the aliens. Absolutely, I got audited, must
Speaker 1: have been the aliens. They just they get the shortened
Speaker 1: to stick for everything. Not that I'm saying there isn't aliens,
Speaker 1: but come on, why do we have to say that
Speaker 1: because something weird happened and we don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: it must be being from another planet. I just think
Speaker 1: if you know, if the aliens would just reveal themselves
Speaker 1: to us, we would stop blaming them for things that
Speaker 1: they would just come down and be like, listen, guys,
Speaker 1: have us a good explanation. Dude, listen, it wasn't us
Speaker 1: or like we got a couple of them, yeah, but
Speaker 1: like the rest of them are crazy. I just feel
Speaker 1: like we would stop blaming them as much. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, it might be that they're responsible for a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff, but they have a good, solid reason,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like your cat. I mean, you take
Speaker 1: your cat to the vat. You know, he gets an
Speaker 1: unpleasant ride in the car and then he gets stabbed
Speaker 1: with needles and you know, I guess that their mometer
Speaker 1: stuffed up is all kinds of stuff. And he he's wondering,
Speaker 1: why are you torturing me? What do you hate me?
Speaker 1: And it's like you but there's a good reason for it,
Speaker 1: so you just don't have a way to explain it
Speaker 1: to your cat. So what you're saying is that aliens
Speaker 1: are veterinarians for the human race and we're all getting
Speaker 1: worm and we just don't It's okay, alright, alright for that.
Speaker 1: So next up in our list of theories sea monsters.
Speaker 1: All this is always fun. Yeah, So anyway, and this
Speaker 1: theory of visit from our friend Mr Kracken resulted in
Speaker 1: the crew being plucked from the ship like tasty chocolates
Speaker 1: from a box. People below decks, hearing the horrifying screams
Speaker 1: of their dying comrades, immediately rushed up to the deck
Speaker 1: to see just what the heck was going on and
Speaker 1: they got eaten too. So anyway, that's my favorite expl nation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there there is one. There is one one thing
Speaker 1: that sort of argues against this, and that is, what's
Speaker 1: the first thing you do? An enormous sea monster comes
Speaker 1: popping up out of the sea. Uh, scream, No, wet yourself,
Speaker 1: you're you're warm yourself. Yes, that's it, you poop yourself.
Speaker 1: No feces were found. The rain washed it off all right. Well,
Speaker 1: according to Pirates of the Caribbean, because I saw that
Speaker 1: again recently where the crack had attacked the ship. Crackings
Speaker 1: do a lot of damage, and if this ship is
Speaker 1: in perfectly good shape, I don't think the cracking just
Speaker 1: reached up and grabbed one timber and then used it
Speaker 1: to flick everybody off. Oh. I just can't see that happening.
Speaker 1: Imagine it probably, I imagine would have torn it into
Speaker 1: just shaking all the people out into his mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what you do with the the end of the tube
Speaker 1: of pringles. Yeah, so I think we can cross this
Speaker 1: one off the list. Next one Bermuda Triangle. Of course,
Speaker 1: they didn't go anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle, so I
Speaker 1: think we can cross that one off the list. Yes.
Speaker 1: So that now we're gonna get into some more um uh,
Speaker 1: some slightly more serious ones here, uh, underwater earthquakes. There
Speaker 1: was a guy named David Williams who wrote a book
Speaker 1: called Seaquake. I wrote the name, and he wrote he
Speaker 1: had a section in there about about the Mary Celeste. Apparently,
Speaker 1: and apparently it's it's actually true. He's not just making
Speaker 1: this up. Shock Waves from an underwater earthquake, if there's
Speaker 1: a ship right above can actually do quite a bit
Speaker 1: of damage, he referenced, and I checked up on it.
Speaker 1: It's true. There's a ton ship called the Ida Knudson
Speaker 1: which was was very severely damage to the to the
Speaker 1: point where it couldn't be salvaged. That was back in
Speaker 1: nine by one of these sequakes. It doesn't really entirely
Speaker 1: make sense to me. And well, you mean the science
Speaker 1: of it or not. The well, his theory, his particular theory,
Speaker 1: and I think his series sort of like departs from
Speaker 1: the facts in one key areas, and that is the barrels. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna I'm just gonna have a few things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just then, the sea floor near Mary Celeste was ripped
Speaker 1: apart by a shallow focused There's quick a relatively common
Speaker 1: occurrence in the Azores whenever the hard bottom shift vertically
Speaker 1: a relatively fast pace. To see, bed acts like a
Speaker 1: giant piston, pushing and pulling the water, sending powerful ways
Speaker 1: of alternating pressure towards the surface. So at this point
Speaker 1: he conjectures that they had been cooking in the galley,
Speaker 1: and that and that the most of the ship bouncing
Speaker 1: up and down violently in the air caused the stove
Speaker 1: to bounce out of its holder and come down an angle.
Speaker 1: And it's true that the mary Celest when they found
Speaker 1: that the stove was kind of like a jar. It
Speaker 1: was not it was not exactly where it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be. So this theory is that it came down
Speaker 1: settled in an off kilter position, and some stuff like
Speaker 1: m flying embers came out of it. They had also
Speaker 1: loosened the stays around, according to him, nine barrels of
Speaker 1: grain of grain alcohol in the hold, causing them to
Speaker 1: fall over, burst open and dumping tons of alcohol into
Speaker 1: the hold. But of course, and this is where this
Speaker 1: is where it sort of goes south, because when they
Speaker 1: when they found the ship and they looked in the hold,
Speaker 1: the cargo was intact and undisturbed. So that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of where he departs from the evidence of the case. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to his story. Here, choking in the smell of
Speaker 1: alcohol from the leaking barrels, hearing the crashing sounds all
Speaker 1: around them, and seeing embers flying about from the fire
Speaker 1: and the cooking still was all it took to send
Speaker 1: the crew into panic and cause them to quickly launch
Speaker 1: a small y'all and try to get away from the
Speaker 1: penny explosion in certain death. The crew, now in the
Speaker 1: small y'all floating behind the Mary Celeste FELTI later, when
Speaker 1: embers died down without causing the alcohol fumes to explode,
Speaker 1: it was now safe for them to go back aboard
Speaker 1: and sort out the damage. But the elations soon vanished,
Speaker 1: replaced by the horrifying discovery that they were no longer
Speaker 1: tied to the Mary Celeste. In the Russian fear of
Speaker 1: the moment, the crew had forgotten to properly secure a
Speaker 1: line from the lifeboat to the mother's ship. They Washton
Speaker 1: hiss may as the Mary Celestue now a ghost ship
Speaker 1: sailed slowly away from the all with her have a
Speaker 1: two other small sales set so he makes a lot
Speaker 1: of assumptions set of course, I, like I said, it
Speaker 1: departs from the evidence with the barrels, and I just
Speaker 1: I just love it. I just love it they suddenly
Speaker 1: realized they'd forgotten to tie the rope off. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I can I can see some credence in if and
Speaker 1: evidently this area is known for heaven seaquakes, that a
Speaker 1: quake could literally toss the ship around and freak everybody
Speaker 1: out on board and potentially throw one or two people overboard.
Speaker 1: But I can't see the seaquake or this supposed string
Speaker 1: of events that he conjectures happens happening, right. You know,
Speaker 1: for me, they were they were experienced crew, right, and
Speaker 1: one could assume that they had done run similar to
Speaker 1: this before and likely encountered phenomenal like this before, or
Speaker 1: at least heard about it. I knew it was a
Speaker 1: thing that could happen. Yeah, just to be that panicked,
Speaker 1: I just don't think. I I think I think also
Speaker 1: that uh, there wasn't enough damage to the ship. I mean,
Speaker 1: if it had been that cataclysmic of of an event,
Speaker 1: there should have been more damage. There should and the
Speaker 1: ship was unscathed. Yeah. And number two, when you have
Speaker 1: these huge, crashing, cataclysmic forces around you and you're terrified
Speaker 1: getting off the ship and into your lifeboat. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like getting out of your car and onto a
Speaker 1: tricycle in the middle of its lightning storm. That's a
Speaker 1: great analogy. That's a really great analogy. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I think it's totally accurate. You
Speaker 1: know that not only is it like a pain to
Speaker 1: get actually physically like perform that act, especially if you've
Speaker 1: got a woman and a two year old child trying
Speaker 1: to do that. Getting from a ship to a lifeboat
Speaker 1: not an easy task. But on top of that, it's
Speaker 1: true right that you're like, wow, it's a mess out there.
Speaker 1: Better get into something small and something like small and
Speaker 1: fragile yet idea. Well, and you know, and that's something
Speaker 1: that I you know, I think people don't who haven't
Speaker 1: been out on a boat in the ocean in you know,
Speaker 1: decent swells, You think, oh, well, it's just you know,
Speaker 1: the waves are a couple of feet high. Nope, you
Speaker 1: get on a boat that, I mean, on a decent size.
Speaker 1: I've been on it was a thirty foot fishing boat
Speaker 1: and they were ten foot swells. And you think, well,
Speaker 1: I'm on a thirty foot fishing boat, no big deal.
Speaker 1: But when you're in the bottom of the swell, you
Speaker 1: can't see even just so huge and that's just a
Speaker 1: ten foot swell, which is not that big of a
Speaker 1: wave out the middle. Even on big ships, you've got
Speaker 1: those swells there. You know, you can look down on
Speaker 1: them from a deck, but they're so big, and it's
Speaker 1: not so much that like you can't see over them
Speaker 1: or anything like that, but that you can see the difference,
Speaker 1: and you can you feel the way that your ship
Speaker 1: is moving, even as a giant ship, right with stabilizers
Speaker 1: and modern technology, you feel that and you think, thank God,
Speaker 1: I'm not on a boat that's smaller than this, because
Speaker 1: this would be the worst. Yeah, there's no way you
Speaker 1: would survive in this. Well you might, but not likely,
Speaker 1: but it's way better to just stick it out on
Speaker 1: the ship. And I think anybody who's experienced at all
Speaker 1: as I you know, as I am with sea travel,
Speaker 1: knows that you stay on your ship in weather like that,
Speaker 1: in whatever like that, you stay on your ship. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you have water earthquakes, Yeah, that doesn't sound all
Speaker 1: that plausible because we're trying to figure out why they
Speaker 1: left the ship, um, and that just doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: that would be something that would cause him to leave
Speaker 1: the ship. Well, and if the waves are just going insane,
Speaker 1: like you said, it's gonna be hard to get on
Speaker 1: the like boat, let alone, to run into the cabin,
Speaker 1: grab your papers for the ship, and then get out,
Speaker 1: because I don't imagine those things are just handily kept
Speaker 1: in a bag hanging on a hook. I would agree
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah, okay, I know what the next theory
Speaker 1: water spouts. There are such phenomena and the water spout
Speaker 1: is like when you get it's kind of like a tornado.
Speaker 1: You got apparently with chemulus like tall keemulus clouds, and
Speaker 1: then you'll get this sort of like tornado like effect
Speaker 1: where water droplets. It's like it's not over the ocean
Speaker 1: kind yeah, and it's kind of like and it's not
Speaker 1: solid water. It's just droplets, like very tiny droplets, and
Speaker 1: so it's not like a total water spout being sucked up.
Speaker 1: So if they hit a water spout, one forms over them.
Speaker 1: Somebody has speculated that could be the reason they had
Speaker 1: so much water in the hold of the ship or
Speaker 1: in the builders, I should say, was that they hit
Speaker 1: a water spout. Was it really that it was? You
Speaker 1: said it was three and a half feet. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just feel like that's not that much water. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not no water, but I feel that, you know,
Speaker 1: for a ship like that, right, it's long with three
Speaker 1: and a half feet of water in the hold or
Speaker 1: in the bottom, but that's a fair amount of water.
Speaker 1: But you know what she's I don't know, you know
Speaker 1: how tall the Celeste was by chance from the top
Speaker 1: of your head from the photos I've seen, I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say she was probably the top to the
Speaker 1: tip of the mast. I don't know. Hunding two. What
Speaker 1: about the What about the body of the ship? I
Speaker 1: guess is where I'm getting at. If the ship is
Speaker 1: a hundred and seven feet long, I'm gonna guess she'st
Speaker 1: high from from the bottom to the deck, from the
Speaker 1: water line to the deck, well for the bottom from yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess. I guess three and a half feet is
Speaker 1: not a lot of water. It's not that much, particularly
Speaker 1: if we can I think we can safely assume that
Speaker 1: if the ship was left unattended, without being build shout
Speaker 1: or anything like that for ten days, most of that
Speaker 1: wasn't there when the crew left, precisely, so the water
Speaker 1: they get in the waterspout. If it was, I mean,
Speaker 1: apparently these are dangerous. Uh, it could have caused damage
Speaker 1: to the ship, and there was no observed damage. So therefore, well,
Speaker 1: you know, when I hate to, I hate to take
Speaker 1: a step back, but I got to ask. It was
Speaker 1: approximately it was ten days from the last entry to
Speaker 1: when the ship was found, and I can't remember exactly
Speaker 1: what it was that I saw in the reading that
Speaker 1: I did on this about who was the captain that
Speaker 1: found it? Again, his name was Divid Moorehouse. Okay, when
Speaker 1: more House founded, didn't he say that the weather for
Speaker 1: the last couple of days had been kind of foul.
Speaker 1: In some accounts I have heard, it said that the
Speaker 1: del Garasha experienced pretty much good weather the entire way down,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean anything because they were a week
Speaker 1: behind the Celeste. Because I swear I saw something that
Speaker 1: said that the water the weather at that time wasn't
Speaker 1: that good for when when the Celeste was coming through,
Speaker 1: which would explain why if somebody was off the ship
Speaker 1: and they left the hatches open, was she took on water?
Speaker 1: It was rain for a couple of days straight as
Speaker 1: a yeah, all those all those possibilities there, rain just
Speaker 1: seabeds that kind of thing. Yeah, wooden ship, right, I
Speaker 1: mean they tend to sleep, so alright, So anyway, the
Speaker 1: water is about today, you know, and it doesn't do
Speaker 1: much for me. So I said, we throw that one
Speaker 1: of the bus alright. Last of all, Uh, this is
Speaker 1: everybody's favorite alcohol fumes. It's my favorite too. You like
Speaker 1: that one? Yeah, okay, So as I said it right,
Speaker 1: there are there are a few things that make me
Speaker 1: kind of kind of wonder about it. Um. So, nine
Speaker 1: nine barrels out of the entire hold were amit of
Speaker 1: red oak, which apparently is porous and unsuitable for holding liquids,
Speaker 1: and so the in this theory, the alcohol would have
Speaker 1: seeped through the pores and would have filled the hold
Speaker 1: with alcohol fumes, which of course would be flammable and explosive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the rest of the rest of the barrels were
Speaker 1: white oak, right exactly. And so these nine red oak barrels,
Speaker 1: which were the ones that were found to be empty
Speaker 1: when they finally unloaded the boat in Genoa, so as
Speaker 1: the alcohol leaked out, filled the hold of fumes at
Speaker 1: random spark and people of theorize that that could have
Speaker 1: happened by barrels shifting and the metal bands on the
Speaker 1: barrels scraping against each other, touching off just a little
Speaker 1: bit spark, just enough to make an explosion, which and
Speaker 1: the explosion would have would have blown off the hatches,
Speaker 1: I would explain, to open hatches, and of course it
Speaker 1: would have panted the crew somebody. And by the way,
Speaker 1: somebody didn't experiment with this. They built like a miniature
Speaker 1: model of the whole of the hold of the ship
Speaker 1: with the hatches and everything, and little little paper things
Speaker 1: to represent the barrels, and then filled it up with
Speaker 1: butchane touched it off and it did make an explosive
Speaker 1: sort of thing, but it didn't burn anything because its
Speaker 1: cool and it burns off really fast. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: was really interesting. That was the thing that really piqued
Speaker 1: my interest in this theory was that it was like
Speaker 1: a cold burn, and it was more of like an
Speaker 1: energy blast than it was like a heat It was,
Speaker 1: which I think is very interesting. I also think it
Speaker 1: has the potential to explain that it wasn't necessarily that
Speaker 1: the crew abandoned it, but perhaps they were thrown from
Speaker 1: it or burned up in the cold brew. I it
Speaker 1: I don't. I didn't totally understand if it could have
Speaker 1: killed a person or not, but I thought that was
Speaker 1: kind of a nice way to explain. It wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been an abandonment at that point. It would have been
Speaker 1: the crew suffering catastrophic failure, being thrown from the ship
Speaker 1: or whatever. That could have been the of course, that
Speaker 1: we'd find. You know, at least some of the people
Speaker 1: would have been below decks and we would have found
Speaker 1: some bodies or not. Not we, but somebody would have
Speaker 1: found something unless they were pushed out with the explosion.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's possible to it. But then
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of stuff like furniture and gear,
Speaker 1: and that's true. I didn't even think about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then another thing I thought about it again, it
Speaker 1: doesn't they would have found bodies. Was that the fire
Speaker 1: consumed all the oxygen and a bunch of them were
Speaker 1: asphixiated if you're below decks, and there wasn't much of
Speaker 1: the way of ventilation, and it couldn't have just burned
Speaker 1: just the bodies. It would have and it wouldn't have. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't. So it didn't burn anything. So well, there
Speaker 1: was no signs of a fire, right, But so that
Speaker 1: was the thing they were saying, is that like this
Speaker 1: could have burned a bunch of fuels and cosmics blosion
Speaker 1: that would have left like almost no trace. It probably would.
Speaker 1: It could have explained why perhaps the stove was a
Speaker 1: little wonky when they found it, but it wouldn't it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have left any kind of burn explosion damage. Really yeah,
Speaker 1: in that vein, I mean, if you could imagine the
Speaker 1: situation where that explosion happened, and say it was foul
Speaker 1: weather and there's only like one or two guys up
Speaker 1: top side, maybe maybe just the helmsman was that was
Speaker 1: top side. Maybe it was nighttime or something like that,
Speaker 1: and this explosion happens, it's fhyxiates everybody below decks. So
Speaker 1: when he first gets a calm moment, you can you
Speaker 1: can take a break from steering. He goes down and
Speaker 1: finds everybody dead, and so he then has to dispose
Speaker 1: of the bodies. He's got a waste to go. He
Speaker 1: can't have rotting corpses on the ship, so he gives
Speaker 1: he hauls him on top side, gives him a burial
Speaker 1: at sea, and that tries to take the ship single handedly,
Speaker 1: or maybe there's two guys trying to take it all
Speaker 1: the way to civilization by himself, and then eventually reaches
Speaker 1: the point where he realizes he just can't do it,
Speaker 1: and so he gets the lifeboat out, which I don't
Speaker 1: I and again, I don't know how easy that is
Speaker 1: for one guy to get the lifeboat overboard maybe two
Speaker 1: guys an abandoned ship. So there is that I don't know.
Speaker 1: I do not know. So again, but so so there's
Speaker 1: also not there's an alternative for that, which is that
Speaker 1: they popped up, and they popped up in one of
Speaker 1: the hatches to the whole, and suddenly all these alcohol
Speaker 1: fumes come rushing out because these things have been leaking
Speaker 1: and they have been sealed up, and so they all
Speaker 1: somebody says, hey, you know what that does flammable, And
Speaker 1: they all get in the panic, and they decided the capite,
Speaker 1: especially he's got his wife and his daughter aboard, so
Speaker 1: he's really concerned about their safety. They decided to get
Speaker 1: in the lifeboat, attaching a stout rope to the lifeboat
Speaker 1: and to the ship, and then just get all ways
Speaker 1: away from the boat and see if it's going to
Speaker 1: blow up. And see if perhaps the wind will just
Speaker 1: sort of ventilate out the hole and get some of
Speaker 1: those fumes out of there and make it safer. So
Speaker 1: I'm always the naysayer, and I admit it, but my
Speaker 1: thought on this is that, Okay, if if you open
Speaker 1: up two hatches because you're trying to ventilate all the
Speaker 1: fumes that are in there, and you don't have a
Speaker 1: guy with a pipe in his mouth sticking his head
Speaker 1: in there to see how how stinky it is, well
Speaker 1: that's a bad idea, that's it. How do you know
Speaker 1: what the ventilation is complete? Well, but if if if
Speaker 1: there's any kind of breeze and you've got two hatches open,
Speaker 1: and this is me just you know, making a presumption,
Speaker 1: I would presume that they would open hatches that were
Speaker 1: on opposite ends of the ship from each other to
Speaker 1: allow a breeze to come through and pull the fumes out.
Speaker 1: Common sense would say, I'm going to stand up wind
Speaker 1: of all of this and everybody just hang out on
Speaker 1: this one area of the ship and wait for it
Speaker 1: all to come out before we do anything, rather than
Speaker 1: let's get onto the boat and and hang out and
Speaker 1: wait at a distance. That's my thought process too, at
Speaker 1: least for some of the people. Like Okay, I understand
Speaker 1: maybe like oh yeah, let's tell this lifeboat along with
Speaker 1: like my wife and daughter, so that and like maybe
Speaker 1: like a couple of first mate or something, you know,
Speaker 1: something were to happen. Sure, but you know, he owns
Speaker 1: such a big stake of this thing and there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I just don't see why everybody would abandon
Speaker 1: ship just to ventilate out. Yeah that's in. Maybe not
Speaker 1: everybody did. Maybe the captain stayed behind and uh and
Speaker 1: then after the life broke away and they went all
Speaker 1: off to their to their hideous fate, he decided to
Speaker 1: commit suicide. Yeah. Well okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's
Speaker 1: let's back up on that. If there's one person left
Speaker 1: on the ship and they lose the lifeboat, is it
Speaker 1: or is it not possible for one guy at the
Speaker 1: helm to turn that chip around? Yeah? This is true. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, all right, I just I want to I
Speaker 1: want I want to try and keep this one left,
Speaker 1: the two year old daughter on the ship. Right, All
Speaker 1: of these things don't explain then, like there's plenty of food,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of water, assuming that the seas were
Speaker 1: even like remotely calm. So you're just you're the only
Speaker 1: person on a ship. Yeah, that like stinks, right, But
Speaker 1: you've got food, you've got and you've got shelter. You're
Speaker 1: just gonna stay put and assume that somebody's going to
Speaker 1: see you. Because somebody's going to see you. Somebody will
Speaker 1: come along. Yeah. Yeah. And then the whole thing is
Speaker 1: if you even if you're the sole survivor on the ship,
Speaker 1: you stay on the ship. You stay in the ship,
Speaker 1: because I would anyway, because I mean just the way
Speaker 1: it was going on, just randomly by itself. It was
Speaker 1: headed towards the coast of Europe, so it's headed towards Portugal.
Speaker 1: It would have it would have hit Portugal or Spain
Speaker 1: or something eventually, and so you know, what's what's the
Speaker 1: hurry to get off the ship? You know? The other
Speaker 1: thing about leavings while it ventilates is the main hatch
Speaker 1: to the hold was secured. It was closed. So if
Speaker 1: you want to ventilate that out, would you want to
Speaker 1: open the big hatch up, especially oh to the alcohol
Speaker 1: where yeah yeah, yeah, so the main hatch because the
Speaker 1: other hatches were open, right that they were, they would
Speaker 1: you would open all of the hatches, right, I would
Speaker 1: think you would. All right, well, I'm gonna go with
Speaker 1: Okham's razer here though, is that I'm going to guess
Speaker 1: that those hatches are using metal hinges, and so you're
Speaker 1: thinking spark, so you're worried about sparks, so you only
Speaker 1: you do the fewest number possible to get ventilation through this,
Speaker 1: So let's just open to. Let's not take the chance
Speaker 1: of open the others really quick and causing a spark
Speaker 1: and setting this off. I guess I don't hold that
Speaker 1: this is the way it happened, but I'm just looking like, well, no,
Speaker 1: I can see why you would only open to. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so especially if if you pop those open for ventilation
Speaker 1: purposes anyway, they're already open and that's when you notice
Speaker 1: the alcohol. So it's like, you know, so let's not
Speaker 1: do anything. I could imagine that what I would do
Speaker 1: is I would probably pick the down wind hatch and
Speaker 1: I would grab a piece of canvas, like maybe even
Speaker 1: one of the sales and rig up sort of us
Speaker 1: sort of cover around it to catch the wind and
Speaker 1: shove it down into the into below decks and sort
Speaker 1: of push all that stuff, which is what probably your
Speaker 1: sensible sailor would do. Yeah, I mean this whole thing
Speaker 1: makes me think about I mean, we've all done it.
Speaker 1: We've all had gas barbecues that were on but not lit,
Speaker 1: and you realize that, oops, I left the gas on
Speaker 1: when I turned cigarette. I'm just gonna go walk away
Speaker 1: and hang out for a while. Everybody knows you just
Speaker 1: don't mess with that stuff and you just let it disperse.
Speaker 1: So the other problems with the alcohol theory is that
Speaker 1: the crew of that they'll go out Gracio, they want
Speaker 1: below decks, and none of them reported smelling any alcohol
Speaker 1: when they got to Gibraltar. Lots of people want out
Speaker 1: of that ship and looked and poked around, and nobody
Speaker 1: smelled any alcohol. Nobody did in genuate either. Well, but
Speaker 1: that would evaporate yea ten days later, don't you think
Speaker 1: it would have kind of dissipated. Well, here's the thing
Speaker 1: that is that those barrels is like they they had
Speaker 1: a pretty considerable amount of alcohol in each of those
Speaker 1: nine barrels, and so I don't know how quickly all
Speaker 1: that alcohol would seep out of those barrels. So if
Speaker 1: they didn't smell it, so if say they loaded in
Speaker 1: New York and immediately starts seeping and then sometime let's
Speaker 1: let's say it's going to take at least a couple
Speaker 1: of days to evaporate, So that would be less than
Speaker 1: a month, and less than a month than the entire
Speaker 1: contents of a barrel of alcohol somehow seep out completely.
Speaker 1: That seems like a really short amount of time. Well,
Speaker 1: and the other problem is when we read the accounts
Speaker 1: that say that the barrel is empty, does that mean
Speaker 1: bone dry empty or it's got a little bit left
Speaker 1: in the bottom. But yeah, that's again that's that's one
Speaker 1: of those things where I don't know. And of course
Speaker 1: when they found is that was after the whole quart
Speaker 1: of you know, they had a big enquiry Gibraltar, Gibraltar
Speaker 1: about that, and so when they found him empty at Genoa,
Speaker 1: I don't know if they reported back to the authorities
Speaker 1: in Gibraltar. I mean, obviously somebody made a note of
Speaker 1: it and told somebody else. But well, and how long
Speaker 1: was it between when they were found and that cargo
Speaker 1: was offloaded? Another week or so months? Okay? Well, and
Speaker 1: there's another problem with how fast does the alcohol come
Speaker 1: out of the barrel? Is that if it's slowly leaking,
Speaker 1: but people are coming in and out of this ship
Speaker 1: constantly checking stuff out and looking at it, and no
Speaker 1: wonder it's ventilating and nobody's smelling it. I wonder also
Speaker 1: if the problem, one of the problems came from the
Speaker 1: fact that the captain was so anti alcohol. So you
Speaker 1: can think like if he was like, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: a little if he that we're even transporting this, We're
Speaker 1: just gonna lock it up and keep it under long
Speaker 1: and key while we're transporting it gets so it never
Speaker 1: gets ventilated while he's the boss, and then they think, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess we should just check on it or something.
Speaker 1: So they check on it and they're like, oh crap,
Speaker 1: we ought to ventilate this out. But once the other
Speaker 1: people are taking over, they don't really care so much,
Speaker 1: or it's nicer weather or whatever, so it's getting better ventilated.
Speaker 1: So things are kind of ventilating out as it's I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean, I would like to advance another
Speaker 1: another theory, which is is possible that there was never
Speaker 1: any alcohol in those barrels to begin with, because because
Speaker 1: red oak is so unsuitable for that kind of a use,
Speaker 1: it seems unlikely the manufacturer of the ahol would have
Speaker 1: used red oak barrels to put alcohol, especially for just
Speaker 1: nine of them, untlus, they were just filling, they were
Speaker 1: ran out, and hey, Billy, quick, go go get us
Speaker 1: nine more barrels and fill them. And that is possible
Speaker 1: because red oak is used for grains and dry stuff
Speaker 1: things like that, because it's okay there, it's just not
Speaker 1: with liquids, right, Yeah, as far as I know, and
Speaker 1: so well, I think it's entirely possible. It's some longshoreman
Speaker 1: in New York who were loading in charge of loading
Speaker 1: the boat probably just said, hey, we need to pill
Speaker 1: for some of these and and how many how many
Speaker 1: barrels can you round up in short order? Nine? Okay,
Speaker 1: stick them in there, and we're gonna we're just gonna
Speaker 1: spirit these things off and sell them or drink to
Speaker 1: disappear in port on a regular basis. So much today
Speaker 1: with barcodes. But yeah, and again, like I said, no,
Speaker 1: nobody was smelling any alcohol. That's saw again that that
Speaker 1: that casts a little bit of down on the alcohol.
Speaker 1: That the alcohol theory is still the strongest one. But
Speaker 1: even so, their behavior was a little bit explicit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's definitely some poles in that, so I wonder
Speaker 1: if there's like a mix of theories that could kind
Speaker 1: of explain this, right, Yeah, no, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of idea that maybe it was a specific
Speaker 1: loaf of bread was that kind of horrible hallucinogenic mold
Speaker 1: and they ate it. And that's the reason that the
Speaker 1: crew that took over didn't have that problem is because
Speaker 1: you know, these other loaves of bread, she didn't have it.
Speaker 1: It was just the water of the couple. So they're hallucinating,
Speaker 1: or maybe they're they've got cabin fever, or maybe there's
Speaker 1: some kind of unrest happening. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: this alcohol thing happens, so everybody kind of thinks it's
Speaker 1: best to just like leave. Yeah, they kind of have
Speaker 1: a sort of an impaired judgment for one reason or another.
Speaker 1: They decide, all right, we're gonna get on this life boat.
Speaker 1: The best idea is to just get on this life boat.
Speaker 1: And that rope looks pretty strong, so we'll just drag
Speaker 1: ourselves behind it and surely we'll be able to get
Speaker 1: back on. That's not a problem, and we won't bother
Speaker 1: with tying it to the boat. I can just hang on,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it. I'm strong, or I didn't they
Speaker 1: wasn't the rope. They found the rope, so like, okay,
Speaker 1: so maybe it just like broke, like there was a
Speaker 1: big swell and it broke its snapped in half, or
Speaker 1: maybe the kragg and cut it there. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think there's the potential for merging of a couple
Speaker 1: of these things. But it's let's let's go completely off
Speaker 1: track for a second. I saw, and I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you came across, if either of you
Speaker 1: came across this, but I saw something. Somebody was reporting
Speaker 1: that one of their theories was correct. And that's why
Speaker 1: everybody got on the lifeboat and was citing something that
Speaker 1: I couldn't I couldn't track it down anywhere else. That
Speaker 1: a month later, a lifeboat was found owned south of
Speaker 1: that area with two skeletons on it, one of whom
Speaker 1: was wrapped in an American flag. Yeah, and well, you know,
Speaker 1: actually in uh, there's a little variant on the in
Speaker 1: David Williams book called Seaquick Sequick. Is that where that
Speaker 1: came from? He said that five months after after their disappearance,
Speaker 1: that's the one. Five highly decomposed buyers were found tied
Speaker 1: to two rafts off the coast of Spain. One body
Speaker 1: was wrapped in an American flag, so tied to two rafts.
Speaker 1: I I'm not really sure, because because they were they
Speaker 1: took off on a lifeboat and maybe somewhere in their
Speaker 1: journeys in the lifeboat they came across a couple of
Speaker 1: rafts and tied themselves to it. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: you know, so it could have been anybody's body. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's too bad that. I mean, they had just
Speaker 1: parted right recently. I don't Yeah, well they have the
Speaker 1: in the log it said they they said they made
Speaker 1: Santa Maria, but didn't didn't say whether or not they
Speaker 1: actually want to shore. I want, you know, I kind
Speaker 1: of wonder maybe there was like some kind of sickness, right,
Speaker 1: maybe somebody had like the measles or Spanish flu something something,
Speaker 1: you know, where they didn't want to catch it. So
Speaker 1: so some of them abandoned ship and some of them
Speaker 1: killed themselves overboard. This is another one of those ones
Speaker 1: where the possibilities are literally endless. And actually I like
Speaker 1: that because sickness is something that I have not come
Speaker 1: across in any of the reading, and it may have
Speaker 1: been that they just I mean, this is not unheard of.
Speaker 1: As somebody says, this boat is cursed. It's making us sick,
Speaker 1: and we have to get out of here. And we've
Speaker 1: just put you know, Jimmy and Sammy overboard to a burial.
Speaker 1: Let's see, let's get on the boat and get away
Speaker 1: from this ship before it makes us sick. Not understanding
Speaker 1: how diseases work, and it's too late. They're the couple
Speaker 1: that are already infected, that infect the rest of them. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess that's the thing. It's even with that description
Speaker 1: right of like one of them was wrapped in an
Speaker 1: American flag. That speaks very deeply to me of like
Speaker 1: that person was dead, that was a corpse when they departed, Right,
Speaker 1: that wasn't somebody who wrapped themselves in an American flag.
Speaker 1: They didn't take the American flag with them, That that
Speaker 1: was a corpse, and that they were going to do
Speaker 1: something with it and something went wrong, and maybe that
Speaker 1: or just maybe they on the way overboard, they grabbed
Speaker 1: the ship's flag to use as a blanket or a sail,
Speaker 1: and the guy was just sleeping in. You know, it's
Speaker 1: hard to say. And speaking of the lifeboat, this is
Speaker 1: another thing that's inexplicable, is the size of the lifeboat.
Speaker 1: Putting ten people in the in the lifeboat. Do you
Speaker 1: know the size of the life you know, I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find out anything definitive. But I found a
Speaker 1: picture of a scale model from some maritime museum, and
Speaker 1: the lifeboat is mounted transversely in the in the middle
Speaker 1: of the boat, across the cargo hatch. Transversely means sideways, side, sideways.
Speaker 1: In other words, yeah, it's it's it's right, not front
Speaker 1: to back, so that you can slide it one way
Speaker 1: or another off the ship. Yes, yeah, I got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so it's always mounted right side up. And the
Speaker 1: beam of the ship is twenty six and a half feet,
Speaker 1: and so in order to have room to get around
Speaker 1: And again, looking closely at this photograph, it looks like
Speaker 1: there must be at least three feet on either side
Speaker 1: of that thing to get around it. So that makes
Speaker 1: it at most twenty ft long. Maybe it makes it
Speaker 1: at most long, So I don't know. Well, you know
Speaker 1: what what I think of is if did if you
Speaker 1: ever read Moby Dick or you've ever seen any of
Speaker 1: the Hollywood reenactments of it. They cram I think it's
Speaker 1: about eight guys into a little boat to go out
Speaker 1: and chase a whale, and it's tight quarters, But they do.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can do it on necessity. Necessity is
Speaker 1: the mother of all inventions. Yeah, but but it just
Speaker 1: seems to me that again, it makes getting into the
Speaker 1: lifeboat that's small of a boat with ten people, it
Speaker 1: just makes it seem like that much more unpalatable of
Speaker 1: an option. Oh no, I'm I'm not saying. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying I can see it being possible. If you gotta
Speaker 1: get out, you gotta get out, do what you gotta
Speaker 1: left behind. Yeah, you gotta get off. But it's still
Speaker 1: it's still a kind of a head scratcher. Why would
Speaker 1: you leave? So yeah, the alcohol fumes, the explosion, it's
Speaker 1: all possible, but it doesn't really make sense. Really. I
Speaker 1: kind of think we might be out of theories on
Speaker 1: this one. Yeah, there's no, there's no you know, even
Speaker 1: though the alcohol fields theory is that seems to be
Speaker 1: the strongest one out there. Everybody seems to like it,
Speaker 1: even even it's got his holes, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: really entirely make sense. Again, Like you were saying, why
Speaker 1: would everybody leave the boat? Yeah, you know, because even
Speaker 1: with the danger of explosion or whatever, leaving the boat
Speaker 1: is pretty danger pretty damn everybody leaving the boat, right,
Speaker 1: especially everybody leaving Yeah. Yeah, Well, in the end, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's was. It was a bit of a tragedy
Speaker 1: obviously because the crew died, and it really kind of
Speaker 1: sang the end of the Mary Celeste because she didn't
Speaker 1: last much longer after that. Did she through about another
Speaker 1: thirteen years I believe, Yeah, But and then somebody scuttled her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody like ran her, ran her aground some shoals and
Speaker 1: haiti as a part of an insurance scam. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was trying to collect insurance. She was not a good
Speaker 1: luck Maybe that's what this was. This was an attempt,
Speaker 1: a really ill fated attempt to collect insurance. Man, I
Speaker 1: don't think that somebody would say, Hey, I've got my
Speaker 1: wife and kid on board, but you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna I'm just gonna sink this thing. That'll be fine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I mean things like disease outbreaks, things like that,
Speaker 1: I mean those are kind of compelling, except there'd be
Speaker 1: entries in the log, so that's you would think. So,
Speaker 1: you know, and like that, I'm compelled to think, like,
Speaker 1: you know, say, their cruising along and they find another
Speaker 1: ghost ship, and so they stopped. They put the lifeboat
Speaker 1: out so they can paddle over to check this this
Speaker 1: empty ship out, and that for some reason, they never
Speaker 1: never make it back to their own ship. Now this,
Speaker 1: you know, this makes no sense either, because I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously they all just go hop on another ship, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean there must have been one hell of a
Speaker 1: nice ship, but that everybody leaves. Yeah, So so I'm
Speaker 1: always liking the double the double sort of ghost ship idea.
Speaker 1: That's kind of cool, the double double double ghost One
Speaker 1: ghost ship met another ghost ship. So yeah, there was
Speaker 1: there was one that I was I was reading about
Speaker 1: and I was doing some research. This is months ago,
Speaker 1: and there was like some ghost ship where and this
Speaker 1: might have been entirely affectional. I didn't have enough time
Speaker 1: to research it. But so that a ship comes upon this,
Speaker 1: this abandoned empty sailing ship and some of them and
Speaker 1: so they go aboard. Nobody's nobody is there. It's just
Speaker 1: sailing sitting there empty. They put some crew on board
Speaker 1: this ship because it's a nice ship. They want to
Speaker 1: salvage and claim salvage title. And so they had a
Speaker 1: sort of in tandem to wherever they're going I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't remember where. And then and there's a there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of foul weather, they kind of lose
Speaker 1: track of each other, and then eventually the first ship
Speaker 1: finds the ghost shipped again, but it's the crew was
Speaker 1: gone again. Yes, I do remember that story was in
Speaker 1: the research that that was up when we were doing
Speaker 1: the houring mcdan one of those little probably stories that
Speaker 1: was probably one that came across and that if that
Speaker 1: Roy told us that one. Yeah, I don't know. And
Speaker 1: then but then at that point, it's a really tricky part,
Speaker 1: which is persuading still more members of your crew to
Speaker 1: go up. Yeah, yeah, alright, alright, So anyway, um, so
Speaker 1: out of all the possible ones, let's see what we
Speaker 1: got here. But I'm gonna go with dlex What are
Speaker 1: you guys gonna go with? And if I like it,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, yeah, I God, if I have
Speaker 1: to choose one, do I have to choose one? Because
Speaker 1: I don't really, I don't. None of these just seem
Speaker 1: applauseable enough to me, not cohesive. And yeah, there's and
Speaker 1: I understand that this is a hundred and fifty years
Speaker 1: ago or dang near under forty years ago, and so
Speaker 1: the pieces have fallen apart in the retelling. But it
Speaker 1: just I know, I just I can't. I can't see
Speaker 1: anyven be incredible enough. There's got to be something that
Speaker 1: we haven't thought of that swept all of those people
Speaker 1: off in a hurry. I mean, who knows. Maybe they
Speaker 1: changed over and hopped onto a carnival cruise. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but that was a mistake because the carnival cruise built down.
Speaker 1: Well obviously we know now that was their mistake, but
Speaker 1: at the time they didn't know who was I don't know,
Speaker 1: I really did. I can, and I can speculate that perhaps, um,
Speaker 1: perhaps that broken that broken rope was actually an anchor rope,
Speaker 1: and maybe they found some deserted cool island and they
Speaker 1: decided to, like, I'll go ashore. They anchored, but have
Speaker 1: a little holl Yeah, I have a little holiday. But
Speaker 1: you know why they would have left several sales set
Speaker 1: as opposed to furlier on their sales that that kind
Speaker 1: of shoots the hell out of that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's possible. I mean, if they only wanted to
Speaker 1: set one anchor, they could just put a few sales
Speaker 1: up and imagine the wind is really really light. I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: you go shore, you're you're you're partying down on shore.
Speaker 1: You know. But you know what, captain would leave his
Speaker 1: ship completely empty circumstances. That's the thing that always just
Speaker 1: gets me. Yeah, and so yeah, so once again there's
Speaker 1: always some little hitch in all these different theories there.
Speaker 1: It's just nothing that can explain, you know. And that's
Speaker 1: where you know, the food contamination one. In a sense,
Speaker 1: it's almost compelling because because it's just insane, it's stupid
Speaker 1: enough to do what they did, that would that would
Speaker 1: kind of make you think that maybe you know, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's i mean, it's not uncommon. Are their
Speaker 1: stories such it's not a coming, but there are stories
Speaker 1: of people who are stuck at sea and they get
Speaker 1: things that are tainted or worse off, they drink sea
Speaker 1: water and they start to hallucinate and then they go, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: there's my car, and they just walk off the boat
Speaker 1: and go swimming away and there's nothing you can do
Speaker 1: to stop him. Yeah, I know, it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: it's hard to imagine that all ten people would have
Speaker 1: been equally looney and equally motivated to just walk off
Speaker 1: the boat. And so again that kind of shoots that
Speaker 1: one to hell. But that that might explain maybe the
Speaker 1: way the lifeboat was gone, because if somebody was I
Speaker 1: wanted two people walked off the boat and the rest
Speaker 1: of them sort of like launched the boat not realizing.
Speaker 1: Maybe they were just addled enough to not realize, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, we can just turn the boat around. So
Speaker 1: they loaunched the life or they don't it, or well,
Speaker 1: think about this, if it's a couple of the seamen
Speaker 1: to go over, and then it's the wife and the
Speaker 1: child and one guy who's the lowest mate on the
Speaker 1: wrong that doesn't know what's going on. He's the the greenhorn.
Speaker 1: He said, I don't know how to steer this thing. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's take the boat out there. We'll get him.
Speaker 1: We'll come. Can't be going that fast. I feel like
Speaker 1: we could literally do this for hours. Yea, we have
Speaker 1: definitely gone on, gone on too long. I think as
Speaker 1: it is so anyway, folks, I guess this is the
Speaker 1: first we haven't solved the mystery. Yeah, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: Well anyway, Uh, we're gonna have some cool links on
Speaker 1: our website that's Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And if
Speaker 1: you want to look us up on iTunes, you'll find
Speaker 1: us out there. Download all the episodes that you want
Speaker 1: to be sure to leave us a rating and comments
Speaker 1: are always welcome, of course, to find us on Facebook.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Stitcher. I send us
Speaker 1: an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: And actually, the one the people I'd really like to
Speaker 1: hear from it, I'd like at least one of you
Speaker 1: to buy a red oak barrel, fill it full of
Speaker 1: alcohol and just see how long it takes for all
Speaker 1: the alcohol to see entirely away like a project. Oh
Speaker 1: that's a bad idea. In his basements. We have many eager,
Speaker 1: helpful readers or listeners, and I'm sure some of them,
Speaker 1: at least one of them, is going to want to
Speaker 1: do this for us. And also, of course, if you
Speaker 1: have any thoughts yourselves, any any possible new theories that
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about and you'd like to bring to
Speaker 1: our attention. We'd love to hear about it. So again,
Speaker 1: that email addressing you, Saide was podcast at gmail dot com. Ah,
Speaker 1: so it concludes another um, what's the word, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: hard hitting? You say you use hard hitting before at
Speaker 1: the beginning. I can oh no, not at all. It
Speaker 1: was very climatic. So concludes another scintilating episode of yes, yes,
Speaker 1: be using theories again. Yeah I obviously haven't because I
Speaker 1: can't say yeah. So anyway, episode of thinking sideways, so
Speaker 1: folks until next week. By everybody, I think he meant scintillating.
Speaker 1: It was scintillating. Yeah, you're right. W