On December 5, 1872, the Mary Celeste was found drifting in the Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles east of the Azores. The ship had left New York for Genoa, Italy, carrying more than 1,700 barrels of industrial alcohol. The ship was still afloat and much of the cargo and the crew’s belongings were still aboard. But the lifeboat was gone, along with Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and seven crew members.

There were signs that something had gone wrong, but nothing that explained why everyone would leave the ship. There was water in the hold, one of the pumps had been taken apart, and some of the alcohol barrels were later found empty. But there was no clear evidence of violence or piracy, and the ship itself was still capable of sailing.

The missing lifeboat has always been one of the biggest clues. It strongly suggests that the people aboard left the Mary Celeste themselves. The problem is that no one knows what convinced an experienced captain to move his family and crew from a large ship into a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic.

Neither the lifeboat nor the ten people aboard it were ever found. More than 150 years later, theories still range from problems with the ship’s pumps and fears about the alcohol cargo to bad weather and navigational concerns. None has completely explained what happened.

For this reading, I wanted to look at what may have been happening before the Mary Celeste was abandoned, what pushed the decision to leave, and why a choice that may have seemed safer in the moment ended with ten people disappearing.

About This Reading

I use tarot as another way of looking at the questions and possibilities surrounding an unsolved mystery. The cards can point toward patterns, fears, decisions, and things that may have been happening beneath the surface, but they can’t tell us what factually happened. This reading follows the story the cards told without treating that story as proof.

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