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on a swift succession of skippers; however, not until the middle of 1872 did a serious misfortune befall him. A Boston Marshal charged Winchester with fraudulent ownership. The Marie Celeste was immediately bonded for $2,600. Reeling under the blow, Winchester was reedy to let the bedeviled craft go, but fate, through the court, settled in his favor. During ensuing repairs, the ill-fated Benjamin S. Briggs reduced Winchester's costs by purchasing a third interest. And the Captain's wife, Sarah, penned these final words to her mother-in-law, on November 7th, 1872, off Staten Island: "Benje thinks we have a pretty peaceable set (crew) this time, if they continue as they have begun. Can't tell you how smart they are." Had Captain Briggs conveyed any suspicions of his crew to his wife? One theory of what happened to the Marie Celeste's human cargo, with a possible correlation to Sarah Briggs' words, comes from an English author, Laurence J. Keating. In 1929 his book, The Great Marie Celeste Hoax, "exposed the famous sea mystery with ruthless truth." Keating charged that: "Mrs. Briggs was a prime irritant on board the Marie Celeste, trouble rode most of the voyage; she died and was cast overboard; Captain Briggs disappeared one night from the brig, apparently murdered while most of the men were drunk. Lastly, the Dei Gratia had not found the Marie Celeste, but a brig named Julia—and the whole puzzle was the result of a criminal conspiracy between Captains Morehouse and Briggs, which unfortunately cost the latter his life!" More than any other theory to date, this astonishing one from Keating has been shouted down. J. Franklin Briggs, nephew of the lost skipper and now living in New Bedford, Massachusetts, has spent many years trying to disprove both Keating's claims and other statements he considers a defamation of the innocent dead. In a privately circulated booklet published August 8, 1944, the surviving Briggs presents a digest of his voluminous investigations which included interviews with H.S. Morehouse, the Dei Gratia's Skipper's son; Winchester Noyes, grandson of Captain Winchester; and Mrs. Alice Melason, Mate Oliver Deveau's daughter. Still, the booklet does not solve the riddle. "We may believe," J.F. Briggs concludes, "that the Captain became suddenly alarmed (Presumably by rough weather), hauled aback the square sails to stop the brig's headway, ordered all hands into the yawl, and temporarily left the ship, which subsequently gathered way and sailed off." This view is the simplest explanation. But scores of other solutions have been just as sincerely forwarded. There is the letter Proctor Flood wrote to the London Board of Trade on January 22 or 23, 1873: "My own theory, or guess, is that the crew got at the alcohol and in the fury of drunkenness murdered the master, his wife, child, and the chief mate; that they damaged the bows of the vessel with the view of giving it the appearance of having struck on rocks...so as to induce the Master of any vessel which might pick her up to think her not worth saving; and that they did, sometime between November 25, and December 5, escape on board some vessel." This, so closely paralleling Author Keating's accusations, was countered by a Captain Shufeldt, U.S. Navy, who had examined the Marie Celeste. "The damage about the bows of the brig appears to me to amount to nothing more than splinters made in the bending planks,,, neither hurting the ship nor any possible chance the result of intention to do so," In Yachting, for February, 1940, Dr. Oliver W. Cobb, cousin of Sarah Briggs, wrote: "there may have been leakage, and gas may have accumulated in the hold" because of the effects of temperature changes on the alcohol store. Thus, the Marie Celeste's master, fearful of an explosion, got his crew off the craft. Cobb feels that Briggs used a halyard line to hold the brig until it was determined safe for a return aboard. "Probably a fresh northerly wind sprang up, filled the square sails—these people were left in an open boat on the ocean." A sailor named Lund, one of the three who sailed the Marie Celeste into Gibraltar claimed that the derelict's "peak halyards were broken and gone." The second seaman, Anderson, "saw ropes hanging over the side." Deveau at the same time testified: "the main peak halyards were broken." He didn't say, "gone." Has Dr. Cobb provided the true solution, then? 86