The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

The Mary Celeste is one of the great unsolved mysteries of maritime history. Discovered adrift 600 miles west of Portugal in early December, 1872, the ship was bereft of captain and crew, even though it was seaworthy and had a six-month supply of food and water.

Piracy? Mutiny? Did the crew and a well-respected captain — along with his wife and two-year-old daughter — abandon ship for a lifeboat and perish? Or were sinister forces at play?

American author, Valerie Martin, opens her tenth novel in 1859, with an account of a shipwreck. The lives lost resonate down through the generations, particularly through the Briggs family of Marion, Massachusetts, which has a noble tradition of seafaring. Sarah Cobb picks up the story, telling us, via her journal, about her fears for her younger sister, Hannah, who believes that she can channel the spirits of the dead. Sarah Cobb would marry Benjamin Briggs, the captain of the Mary Celeste, which set sail from New York late in 1872.

Martin has previously incorporated historical or literary figures into her fiction, most notably in Mary Reilly (1990), a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story told from the perspective of Mary, a servant in Dr Jekyll’s house. Here, she weaves a novel around the Briggs family, and includes an investigation into the Mary Celeste by Arthur Conan Doyle, who, in 1884, published an anonymous account of the mystery, titled ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (in which he called the ship ‘the Marie Celeste’), which purported to be a survivor’s testimony.

Meanwhile, journalist Phoebe Grant’s memoir recounts her meetings with Violet Petra, a young woman who is one of the leading lights of Spiritualism, a quasi-religion featuring mediums who can speak with, and for, the dead, a phenomenon that also fascinates Conan Doyle on his travels through the United States.

Even though there is little to suggest that the Mary Celeste fell victim to a supernatural agency, Martin nails her colours to the mast by including the word ‘ghost’ in her title. This is a novel about faith and doubt, which explores our willingness — with Doyle as a credulous believer, and Grant his sceptic counterpoint — to accept the possibility that there is a world beyond the one we can see, touch and hear. What makes the novel engrossing is that the author is as persuasive when recording Petra’s apparently miraculous powers of divination as she is at constructing a robust rebuttal of human interaction with the spirits who reside, according to the Spiritualists, in ‘Summerland’.

It’s a beautifully written book. Martin has the eye of a poet, particularly when writing about the sea, and the stormier passages bring to mind Conrad at his most vivid. Martin is the daughter of a sea captain, but she has never been to sea. Nevertheless, the novel is strewn with fabulously detailed images: “Gradually, the wind abated, though the sea was still high, kneading the ship like bread dough between the waves.”

There is much to admire here, not least Martin’s confidence in creating convincing voices for her characters, be they historical figures or fictional creations. Moreover, it’s a deliciously readable novel of ideas that challenges readers to question what they truly believe when it comes to the greatest of all the metaphysical concepts, that of the possibility of life after death.