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Why digging into old ship logs changed my mind on the Mary Celeste

I always accepted the abandoned ship story without question. Making a point to read actual crew diaries and weather reports from that year showed gaps in the common tale. Records hint at a rough storm and a rushed leave, not something spooky. Now I see it as a probable accident, not a full mystery.

3 comments

3 Comments

mason_knight1mo agoMost Upvoted

Doesn't that just show how we fill in blanks with what makes sense to us? A ship in good shape feels wrong for a storm, so we rule it out, but maybe the damage wasn't obvious or got fixed before they left. I see this all the time at work where a small detail changes the whole story everyone believes. We love a clean mystery so much we ignore the messy, simple answer right in front of us, don't you find that?

thomas_hall1mo ago

But the ship was found in good shape, so a storm doesn't fit. The logs from that trip show calm weather when it was left.

lane.drew1mo ago

Yeah but who wrote those logs, and were they the only record kept? Ships usually had a few different people keeping notes, and sometimes the official log was cleaned up later for the company's sake. What if the person writing it down had a reason to make the weather sound better than it was?