Dominic Selwood

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436 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Forbidden History · Mary Celeste: The Ghost Ship Whose Crew Vanished · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

The next phase in it becoming a timeless legend was down to the writer Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now he had been a ship surgeon, and twelve years after The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, he wrote one of the first of his short stories, so before the Sherlock Holmes stories, and he called it Jay Habercock Jeffson's Statement.

And now this was a fictionalized account of the story of the Mary Celeste.

And it made the tale even more famous.

It also introduced differences from the real story, which created confusion in people's minds, and still does.

So for example, he called the ship not the Mary Celeste, but the Mary Celeste, which most people still think was its name.

There are inevitably many, many theories about what happened on the Mary Celeste.

One of the most popular is that the ship took on water.

And the crew misread the severity of this water, the pump malfunctioned, and as a result, they abandoned the ship.

A similar idea is that they abandoned the ship because of alcohol vapor and fear of explosion.

And the evidence for that is the nine empty barrels.

And there's quite a lot of work being done on the kind of wood used for the barrels.

Whether it was porous, whether it allowed for evaporation, but it is known that alcohol can evaporate from barrels made of certain types of wood.

So that's a theory that they got worried about a buildup of alcohol vapor that could lead to a very large explosion that would destroy the ship.

Another theory is that there was a navigation error, and that led Captain Briggs to think that he was near to rocks or near to items of danger, and that they had to abandon the ship.

Severe weather or rogue sea events are also cited as something that could have caused them to abandon the ship.

Piracy or mutiny, of course, is one of the favorites of all of the storytellers, because piracy was rife in the period.

Mutiny is less likely

Piracy probably is not a runner because pirates would have taken either the personal belongings or the ship, but they took neither.

And there's no sign of any struggle or any violence.

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