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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.
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mason_knight6mo ago
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?
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thomas_hall6mo 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.
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lane.drew6mo 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?
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