Category: nudes

Calendar: December 19

Year: Day to Day Men: December 19

The Green Door

On the 19th of December in 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s X-rated film “A Clockwork Orange” premiered in New York City. Based on author Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same name, the film commented on juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, psychiatry and other social issues in a dystopian near-future England. The film received mixed reviews and had notable detractors including film critics Stanley Kauffman, Leslie Halliwell and Roger Ebert. In 1972, “A Clockwork Orange” won the New York Film Critics Award.

“A Clockwork Orange” was released a month later in the United Kingdom on the 13th of January in 1972. The film was passed in an uncut version for the UK cinemas despite British authorities considering the film’s sexual violence to be extreme. After reports of copycat acts of violence linked to the movie, Warner Brothers at the request of Kubrick withdrew the film from British release. As a result, it was difficult to see “A Clockwork Orange” in the United Kingdom for a period of twenty-seven years. After Kubrick’s death in 1999, the film was finally re-released in theaters.

In Ireland, “A Clockwork Orange” was banned on the 10th of April in 1973; Warner Brothers did not appeal the decision. Eventually, the film was passed uncut for cinema in December of 1999 and released in theaters in March of 2000. In Singapore, the film was banned for over thirty years and was finally shown uncut with an R21 rating on the 28th of October as part of the 2011 Perspectives Film Festival. 

Under apartheid, the South African government banned it for thirteen years, finally releasing the film with one cut scene to people over the age of twenty-one. Brazil’s military dictatorship banned the film until 1978; it was released in a version with black dots covering the breasts and genitals of the actors in the nude scenes. In Spain, the film debuted at the 1975 Valladolid International Film Festival after students protested and closed the University of Valladolid for two months. Long queues of students formed at the festival and later commercial theaters and arthouses. 

Author Anthony Burgess had mixed opinions about the film. He loved the acting of Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates and Kubrick’s use of music. He was concerned though that the novel’s final redemptive chapter was missing, a fact he blamed on the American publisher who had omitted the chapter in all US editions prior to 1986. In fact, Kubrick claimed he had not read that chapter until he finished the screenplay; he felt it was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book. 

“A Clockwork Orange” was nominated for numerous awards including four Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and a Director Guild of America Award, among others. It won two New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and the Online Film & Television Association Award (Hall of Fame-Motion Picture).

Notes: Film collector Mark E. Phillips wrote an extensive article on “A Clockwork Orange” for his “NYC in Film” site. The article offers a concise list, in chronological order, of each filming location in London for Kubrick’s masterpiece. Each location, from the Korova Milk Bar to the final scene at Princess Alexandra Hospital, is illustrated by film stills and current photos. Phillips’ article is located at: https://nycinfilm.com/2023/06/04/clockwork/

Director Pedro González Bermúdez made a 2021 documentary entitled “A Forbidden Orange” which examines Spain’s Franco government’s banning of “A Clockwork Orange” and the efforts of a long-running religious film festival, the Seminci in Valladolid, to premiere the film. Produced in collaboration with actor Malcolm McDowell as narrator, this documentary is worth seeing if you are interested in the history of Kubrick’s film.

Calendar: December 18

Year: Day to Day Men: December 18

Locker Room Moment

On the 18th of December in 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human, the missing link between apes and man. This human ancestor was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but became known as Piltdown Man from the gravel pit in which the remains were found. 

Although there were doubts about its authenticity from early 1912, the Piltdown Man remains were widely accepted for many years. In November of 1953, Time magazine published evidence gathered by anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, primatologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and biologist Joseph Weiner that proved the Piltdown Man was a forgery composed of three distinct species. This hoax was notable for the attention it generated on the subject of human evolution and the fact that it took forty-one years to its definitive exposure as a forgery.

In February of 1912, Dawson contacted the Keeper of Geology at London’s Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, that he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. Later in the summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered a jawbone, skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools at the site. From the outset, the reconstruction of the skull was strongly challenged by researchers.

Waterston, Boule and Miller’s evidence proved the remains of the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The fossils consisted of a human skull of medieval age, a five-hundred year old lower jaw of an orangutan and fossil teeth from a chimpanzee. Someone had simulated age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. A microscopic examination of the teeth showed file-marks that had modified the teeth to a shape more suited for human diet. The identity of the forger remains unknown; however the focus on Dawson is supported by evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he had perpetrated in the previous two decades.

Notes: The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John T. Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before the Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

Calendar: December 17

A Year: Day to Day Men: 17th of December

The Victory of a Clean Sweep

On December 17th of 1531 Pope Clement VII published a papal bull, an official decree, entitled “Cum ad Nihil Magis”, which introduced the Inquisition into Portugal at Evora, Colmbra and Lisbon. The Inquisition eventually extended into the Portuguese colony of Goa for the period between 1562-1563. Its influence was weakened severely by the late eighteenth-century under the government of the 4th Marguês de Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho Melo e Daun. The Portuguese Inquisition lasted officially until 1821.

Notes: Duarte de Paz was a representative in Rome of the Portuguese Marrano family. He had begun his career in diplomacy as the Portuguese military attaché for the Marranos. De Paz won the confidence of King John III of Portugal and the Algarves, who knighted him in 1532 and sent him on a secret mission. Instead, De Paz went to Rome to enlist the Curia’s intercession for the Marranos who were accused of lapses into Judaism. 

De Paz had a relaxed and cunning style and plied the cardinals and Pope Clement VII with money made available for this purpose by the Marranos. His success was the issuance on October 1532 of a papal decree repealing the “Cum ad Nihil Magis” of 1531, which had introduced the inquisition into Portugal. 

De Paz’s second success was the issuance of the bull “Sempiterno Regi” pardoning the Marranos for their lapses on the ground that their forced conversions were not valid. Under the new Pope Paul III, he achieved another success with a papal bull that extended the civil rights of the Marranos which resulted in the release of eighteen-hundred Marranos from Portuguese dungeons. 

Duarte de Paz’s insubordinate activities was noticed by King John III who stripped him of his commission and honor. He narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, denied by the king, and proceeded to bring his affairs to a close. Accused by the Marranos of having taken a missing four thousand ducats, De Paz denounced the family and traveled to Italy. Surprised and imprisoned in Ferrara, he openly espoused Judaism upon his release and migrated to Turkey where, shortly before his death, he reportedly became a Muslim.

An extensive history and description of the Portuguese Inquisition process can be found at: http://www.jewishwikipedia.info/auto_de_fe.html

Calendar: December 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of December

Observing the Street Below

The sixteenth of December marks the beginning of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a conical Italian volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and unconsolidated material. The eruption, marked by columns of volcanic debris, ash and hot gases, buried many villages under the resulting lava flows. It is estimated that four-thousand people were killed by the eruption, which was so intense that it lowered the summit of Vesuvius by four hundred and fifty meters.

Located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Mount Vesuvius has a long historic and literary tradition. At the time of the 79 AD eruption, the volcano was considered a divinity of  nature. The Roman cities surrounding the volcano regarded Mount Vesuvius as being devoted to Hercules. This was particularly true for the city of Herculaneum ,which was named after its mythical founder. Frescoes depicting Vesuvius as a serpent decorated many of the household shrines in Pompeii;  inscriptions on walls linked the power of the god Jupiter to the volcano, IOVI VESVVIO, or Jupiter Vesuvius.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted multiple times with varying grades of severity. All of its eruptions included explosive outbursts named Plinian after the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who published a detailed account of the 79 AD eruption that killed his uncle. That eruption was largest and most destructive of all Vesuvius eruptions. Its cloud of super-heated gases and particles reached a height of thirty-three kilometers. The molten rock, pumice and hot ash ejecta reached sped at a rate of  one and a half million tons per second. This volcanic event destroyed several Roman towns and completely obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum under massive pyroclastic surges and ash fall deposits.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is considered the world’s most dangerous volcano. This is due to two main factors: it has erupted violently and frequently through the years and the large number of people living in its vicinity. The area surrounding Mount Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Three million people live near enough to be affected by an eruption, with at least six-hundred thousand in the danger zone. Mount Vesuvius is among the most closely monitored volcanoes in the world. The network consists of a number of fixed seismic stations on the surface of the earth with sensors that detect the motion of the soil, changes in the gravimetric field and indicative shifts in the magnetic masses in the subsurface.  

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France. 

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business. 

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel  believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling. 

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: December 13

A Year: Day to Day Men; 13th of December

Black Leather Sofa with Pillow

On the thirteenth of December in 1577, the English explorer and privateer Francis Drake set sail from England on a mission to circumnavigate the world aboard the “Pelican”. 

Born in Tavistock, Devon, Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve sons of Edmund Drake and Mary Mylwaye. As his birth date was not formally recorded, the date of 1540-1541 derives from two portraits painted in his later life. Drake was placed at an early age into the household of sea-captain William Hawkins and began his life as an apprentice sailor on Hawkins’s boats. A purser by the age of eighteen, Drake was given a position with the owner and master of a small trading vessel along the coast of England, France and the Low Countries. Satisfied with Drake’s conduct, the ship’s master, at his death, bequeathed the vessel to Drake. 

Beginning in 1562, Drake became involved with the West African slave trade. There is some anecdotal evidence to support his sailing on several slaving voyages with Sir John Hawkins, considered the first English merchant to profit from the Triangle Trade which sailed enslaved people from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth-century. It is known that he sailed on a slave voyage under John Lovell’s command, sponsored by Hawkins, in 1566 and, in 1567, accompanied Hawkins on his last voyage around Cape Verde; the voyage was considered unsuccessful as more than ninety enslaved Africans were released without payment. Although not a member of the consortium of investors, Drake was in his twenties and a member of the crew which shared in the ship’s profits, thus being culpable for his participation in the slaving enterprise.

In the period from 1572 to 1573, Francis Drake attacked the Spanish colonies as a privateer under English authority. After a failed attempt in July of 1572 to capture the Spanish town of  Nombre de Dios, the storage point for the gold and silver treasure of Peru, Drake raided Spanish galleons along the coast of Panama. He also looted the mule trains that transported the gold, silver and trade goods from Panama City. Drake eventually captured the Spanish silver train at Nombre de Dios in April of 1573 which made him both rich and famous. From the heavily laden mule train, they had captured approximately twenty tons of silver and gold. It was during this expedition that Drake and his lieutenant John Oxenham became the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean from the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama.

Queen Elizabeth I likely invested in Drake’s 1577 voyage to South America but never issued him a formal commission. This was the first circumnavigation in fifty-eight years, the last one being Garcia Jofre de Loaisa’s Spanish expedition 1525 to1536. Drake and his fleet set out from Plymouth on the fifteenth of November but were forced by bad weather and repairs to return to Plymouth. Drake set sail again on the thirteenth of December aboard the Pelican with four other ships and one hundred sixty-four men. 

On the twenty-sixth of September in 1580, the “Golden Hind”, formerly the Pelican, sailed into Plymouth with Drake and a crew of fifty-nine men, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasure. The queen’s half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown’s income for that entire year. Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth; his voyage was also the second to arrive back home with at least one intact ship. All written records of the voyage were to be become the queen’s secrets of the Realm; Drake and other participants were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Elizabeth I wanted the voyage kept hidden from Spain, England’s rival. 

Calendar: December 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of December

The Library’s Leather Armchair

Born at Haggerston, Middlesex in November of 1656, Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Very interested in mathematics as a child, he studied at London’s St. Paul’s School where he developed an interest in astronomy. In July of 1673, Halley began studying at Queens’ College, Oxford where he was influenced by the work of the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s effort to catalogue the stars of the northern hemisphere. While still an under graduate, he published papers on the solar system and sunspots. 

In 1676, Halley published his first paper about planetary orbits. He later dropped out of school to travel to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, west of Africa, to observe and chart the stars of the southern hemisphere with cross-references to the northern stars. Supported in his endeavor by King Charles II, he set up an observatory and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. From the solar parallax of the planet, he determined it was possible to trigonometrically to determine the distances between the Earth, Venus and the Sun. 

Edmond Halley produced his chart of the southern stars and, with the assistance of Charles II, was awarded his Master of Arts degree from Oxford in December of 1678; a few days later, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. In September of 1682, Halley conducted a series of observations on what would be known as Halley’s Comet. Because of his work on the orbit, he was able to predict its return in 1758. 

In 1691, Halley sought the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. While a candidate, he faced the opposition of both John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and the Anglican Church which questioned his religious views, specifically because he has questioned the Earth’s age as given in the Bible. Halley, also opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. was unsuccessful in his attempt.

On December 12th in 1696, Edmond Halley was censured by the Royal Society for suggesting in a 1694 paper. titled “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge”, the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible could be an account of a cometary impact. It should be noted that a similar theory was suggested three centuries later; however, it has generally been rejected by geologists of the present day. 

Halley eventually succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720, a position he held until his death in 1742 at the age of eighty-five. He was interred at the old church of St. Margaret’s, Lee Terrace,  Blackheath; he lies within the same vault as Astronomer Royal John Pond and close to the unmarked grave of Astronomer Royal Nathaniel Bliss.  

Calendar: December 11

A Year: Day to Day Men; 11th of December

Handstand at Window

December 11 was the birthdate of American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon. 

Born in Dover, Delaware to Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder, and Mary Jump, Annie Jump Cannon was encouraged by her mother to follow her own interests and suggested studies in chemistry, biology and mathematics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Taught by her mother to identify stars at an early age, Cannon decided to pursue her love of astronomy. She also made the choice not to marry or bear children. 

In 1880, Annie Cannon attended Wellesley College, one of the top academic schools for women, where she studied under Sarah Francis Whiting, one of the few women physicists in the United States at that time. Cannon graduated as the valedictorian of the college in 1884 with a degree in physics. She returned for a decade to Delaware where she developed skills in the new art of photography. Cannon traveled through Europe in 1892 taking photographs, later published along with her prose in a pamphlet, “In the Footsteps of Columbus”. This pamphlet was later used as a souvenir for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 

Stricken with scarlet fever, Cannon became nearly deaf and immersed her self in her work. She became a junior physics teacher at Wellesley College in 1894 and took graduate courses in both physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a more powerful telescope, Cannon enrolled at Radcliffe College as a special student; she was able to attend lectures by Harvard professors and gained access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 Cannon was hired as an assistant to the observatory’s astronomer and physicist Edward C. Pickering. In 1907, she graduated with her Masters Degree from Wellesley in 1907. 

In 1896, Annine Cannon became a member of Pickering’s Harvard Computers, a group whose goal was to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a mapping and definition of every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of nine. When Cannon first started cataloging stars, she was able to classify one- thousand stars in three years. By 1013, she was able to accurately classify two-hundred stars an hour by looking at their spectral patterns. 

Cannon is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperature and spectral types. She initially started by examining stars in the southern hemisphere and divided them into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M based on the Balmer absorption lines that describe the spectral line emissions of the hydrogen atom. After this was understood, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid updating previous star catalogues. 

In 1911, Annie Jump Cannon was made Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard. Three years later, she became an honorary member of England’s Royal Astronomical Society. In 1922, the International Astronomical Society adopted Cannon’s classification system; except for a few minor changes, it is the basis of star classification to this date. Throughout her forty year career, Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime then anyone else, a total of approximately three-hundred and fifty thousand stars. 

Tim O’Brien: “The Implacable Otherness of Others”

Photographer Unknown, Title Unknown, (The Red Wall)

“We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.”
― Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

John Steinbeck: “Our Species is the Only Creative Species”

Photographers Unknown, Our Species is the Only Creative Species

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.” 

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Calendar: December 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of December

Amazon River Boat

The fifth of December in 1901 marks the birthdate of Walter Elias Disney. He was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the American animation industry. Interested in drawing from an early age, Disney was employed as a commercial illustrator at the age of eighteen. In the early 1920s, he relocated to California and co-founded with his brother Roy the Disney Brothers Studio, now the Walt Disney Company. 

Disney developed, with the design work of American animator Ubbe Ert Iwerks, the character of Mickey Mouse in 1928. In the early years, he provided the voice for this highly popular character. As the studio grew, Disney introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, technical developments for cameras, and the introduction of full-length cartoons. The results of these additions can be seen in the Disney Studio’s many popular animated films. 

The first full-length traditionally animated feature film was the 1937 musical fantasy “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which was based on the Brothers Grimm 1812 German fairy tale. “Pinocchio” and the animated musical anthology film “Fantasia” followed in 1940. “Dumbo”, released in 1941, was based on a storyline about a young elephant with big ears by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. This film is one of the shortest animated features for the studio; it was also one of the few features to use wateroolor paint to render the backgrounds.

 In 1942, the Disney Studio released “Bambi”, based on the 1923 novel by Austrian author Felix Salten. Great lengths were taken to animate the deer more realistically; reference studies were made at the Los Angeles Zoo as well as in the Vermont and Maine forests. The film received three Academy Award nominations and was inducted into the National Film Registry. Following World War II, Disney produced both new animated and live-action films, among which were “Cinderella” and the 1964 “Mary Poppins”. 

In the 1950s, Walt Disney expanded into the amusement park industry and opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California in July of 1955. To fund the large project, he diversified into television with “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “Walt Disney’s Disneyland”. Disney was also involved in planning for the 1959 Moscow Fair, the 1960 Winter Olympics, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Another theme park, Disney World, started development in 1965; the center of the park was to be a new type of city, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. 

A shy, self-depreciating man with an outgoing public image, Walt Disney died of lung cancer in December of 1966, five years before the opening of Disney World. 

Calendar: December 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of December 

Lost in Thought

On the fourth day of December in 1872, the American-registered merchant brigantine, Mary Celeste, was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands. 

The Mary Celeste was built in Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1861 under British registration as the “Amazon”. Seven years later, she was transferred to American ownership and renamed the “Mary Celeste”. She was a brigantine, a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on her main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail behind the mast. The Mary Celeste had a single deck, tonnage of 198.42 gross tons and a length of 30.3 meters. After her salvage in 1872, the Mary Celeste was rebuilt with a second deck and  additional depth; her tonnage was increased to 282.28 gross tons. 

In October of 1867, the “Amazon” was driven ashore during a storm and was so badly damaged that her owners abandoned her as a wreck. She was eventually acquired by a New York mariner Richard Haines who restored her and registered with the Collector of the Port of New York as an American vessel named “Mary Celeste”. The ship was seized by Haines’s creditors and sold to a consortium headed by James H. Winchester. Early in 1872, the Mary Celeste underwent a major refit which enlarged her considerably. 

In October of 1872, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs took command of the Mary Celeste for her first voyage following her extensive refit. As the voyage was to Genoa, Italy, Briggs arranged for his wife and infant daughter to accompany him, but left his school-aged son in the care of his grandmother. Satisfied with his ship and crew, the Mary Celeste was loaded on the twentieth of October with a cargo of seventeen-hundred barrels of alcohol. On November 5th, the ship left the pier with Briggs, his wife and daughter and seven crew members. 

On November 15th in 1872, the Canadian brigantine “Dei Gratia” left New York harbor with a cargo destined for Genoa, Italy. She followed the same general route as the Mary Celeste, only eight days behind. On December 4th at a point midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia reported a vessel with an odd set to her sails heading erratically towards their ship. Seeing no one on deck and receiving no replies to their signals, Captain Morehouse sent the first and second mates to investigate. The ship was deserted, the sails poorly set with some missing, and much of the rigging was damaged.

While the main hatch was secure, the other hatches of the Mary Celeste were open with the covers on deck. The ship’s single lifeboat was gone and the glass cover of the ship’s compass was shattered. There was a meter of water in the hold but that was not an alarming amount for the size of the vessel. The last entry in the daily log was November 25th, nine days earlier. While personal items in Captain Brigg’s cabin was scattered, gallery equipment was neatly stowed and there were ample provisions in the stores. With no signs of fire or violence, the missing lifeboat indicated an orderly departure from the ship. 

Captain Morehouse divided his crew of eight men to sail the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia to Gibraltar. The weather was calm but the progress, being under-crewed, was slow. A series of hearings were held at the Salvage Court in Gibraltar beginning in the middle of December. Various theories, based on testimonies from the Dei Gratia crew, were presented from mutiny and murder to conspiracy of fraud, due to the fact that the Mary Celeste was heavily over-insured. Fact and fiction became entwined over the decades with no determination as to the cause of the missing crew. At Spenser’s Island, the site of Mary Celeste’s original construction, a commemorative monument for her lost crew was erected as well as a memorial outdoor cinema theater.