Original subtitles

On this episode of "Expedition Files"...

[horse whinnies]

In 1846, a courageous group of settlers known as

the "Donner Party" travel halfway across the country

in search of a new life, but find only death.

Starving, they cross the ultimate line -- cannibalism.

Now, we reveal shocking new details

about their horrifying final days.

Then, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S.

builds a top-secret nuclear missile base

deep under the Arctic...

[alarm blaring]

...before abandoning it years later.

Today, as the ice melts,

a ticking time bomb is revealed.

And in 1872, the Mary Celeste is discovered drifting

in the Atlantic.

The ship is intact, but the entire crew has

vanished into thin air.

Now, a shocking new theory may uncover the truth behind

history's most haunting ghost ship.

In the corridors of time...

are mysteries that defy explanation.

Now, I'm traveling through history itself...

on a search for the truth.

New evidence.

Shocking answers.

I'm Josh Gates, and these...

are my "Expedition Files."

My mom's British, and like all Brits, she loves to talk

about the weather.

"It was sunny for a couple of hours, then it was rainy

for a minute, then it was sunny again."

It's a real roller coaster.

But, you know, she might actually be onto something,

because powerful weather often leads to powerful stories.

And tonight, we brave the toughest conditions

imaginable to discover the secrets

of three historic mysteries that unfold

where man and Mother Nature meet.

We begin on the 19th of July, 1846.

I'm at Little Sandy River in Wyoming.

[horse whinnies]

A caravan of roughly 20 wagons and 87 hopeful men,

women, and children are crossing the country to realize

their dreams in California.

But here, at a fork in the trail, that dream will turn

into a nightmare, all because of a single choice,

left or right.

Weeks from now, this group will become trapped in the snows of

the Sierra Nevada mountains, culminating in starvation,

madness, and cannibalism.

The traumatized survivors will speak of a place called

the Camp of Death, where the unthinkable choice to

eat their own was first made.

But for nearly two centuries, the location will be lost

to time until a new four-legged search team reveals what may be

the true location of the demise of the Donner Party.

[upbeat, twangy music plays]

Leading the Donner Party is 60-year-old George Donner.

He, his wife Tamsen, and their children have left

their farm in Illinois in search of a better life

on the California coast.

Sharing leadership duties with Donner is James Reed

and his family.

He's hoping California's climate will improve his wife

Margaret's poor health.

Joined by more than 80 other pioneers, the group

at first sets out along the tried-and-true path west,

the Oregon and California trails.

But George and James have a detour in mind,

something called the Hastings Cutoff

that's said to take a more direct route and trim

300 miles and a whole month off the journey.

This supposedly faster route is publicized by real estate mogul

Lansford Hastings, mostly to lure people to California,

where Hastings conveniently has land to sell.

Hastings has promotional letters distributed

along the trail.

George Donner received one just a week before his expedition

was set to begin.

Hastings' letter claims the cutoff is not only

passable, but preferable.

His encouragement fills the Donner Party with

confidence as they set out on their journey.

There's just one problem.

Hastings had never fully traveled

the specific route he recommended.

Unaware that the route is largely untested,

George, James, and the rest of the party forge ahead from

Little Sandy toward Fort Bridger.

[birds singing]

Just days into their journey along the Cutoff,

the supposedly easier terrain turns out to be

a brutal slog through Utah's mountainous terrain,

with boulders and fallen trees blocking their path.

And after a month of this, they're faced with

an even worse challenge,

an 80-mile crossing over the Great Salt Lake Desert,

a barren, waterless expanse.

[clanking]

They run out of water.

Their wagons break, and many of their livestock

escape or perish.

The pioneers are close to their breaking point,

but remarkably, no one in the party dies...

at least not yet.

Finally, on September 26th, the party is able to rejoin

the traditional trail.

This shortcut has left them

more than a month behind schedule.

-They are now on winter's doorstep. -[thunder rumbles]

In fact, they're the last group of settlers to attempt the trip

to California this year,

and their toughest challenge lies ahead.

They must climb 7,000 feet and cross the Sierra Nevadas

ahead of the coming snow.

Over the next four weeks, the Donner Party

continues to unravel.

With food dwindling and the conditions only getting

colder, several members succumb to sickness and exhaustion.

As desperation sets in, tensions explode.

Co-leader James Reed stabs another man during a dispute

and is banished from the group... -[indistinct shouting]

...leaving his wife, Margaret,

alone to care for their children.

[shouting continues]

It's the beginning of a rift between the expedition's

two leading families, the Donners and the Reeds,

one that will have catastrophic results.

Eventually, the pioneers reach the Sierra Nevada mountains,

the gateway to California.

But it is now early November, and five members of the once

87-strong party are already dead.

As the expedition climbs the eastern slopes of

the Sierras, they reach Alder Creek,

where disaster strikes again.

George Donner's wagon axle snaps,

forcing his family to stop.

[horse neighing]

It is here that the group fully splinters.

The party is officially over.

George and Tamsen Donner decide to remain at Alder Creek,

along with their three children and 16 others.

Meanwhile, Margaret Reed, the wife of the banished

expedition leader James Reed, continues toward a place called

Truckee Lake with the surviving 60 members of other families.

Margaret's group wants to push through the mountain pass

before winter takes hold,

but Mother Nature has other plans.

Attempts to cross the mountain pass are futile.

The snow is already falling, and the trail is socked in.

The exhausted families have no choice but to wait out

the winter here near Truckee Lake.

But sadly, many of them will never see spring.

[wind whistling]

Margaret, her family, and the rest of her group

desperately seek safety in a series of rickety shelters

they build at Truckee Lake.

And their former companions aren't faring any better.

Six miles back down the trail at Alder Creek, George Donner's

group are also weathering the snowstorm, trying to forge

a permanent camp in the icy wilderness.

The Donner Party is forever fractured,

but united in suffering.

And conditions only go from bad to worse.

A series of 100-year storms roll in one after another,

and 25-foot-high snowbanks wall them in like prisoners.

Their makeshift cabins and lean-tos are no match

for the punishing snowfall.

The pioneers barely cling to life, and with their animals

either dead or eaten, they desperately turn

to gnawing the ox-hide rugs they usually sleep on.

Back at Truckee Lake, in a last-ditch bid for

survival, five women, nine men, and a 12-year-old boy

make the harrowing choice to leave

their comrades behind and strike out

across the Sierras on crude, homemade snowshoes.

Their only hope is reaching Sutter's Fort near Sacramento,

a well-known supply station about 100 miles away.

This courageous band of pioneers

will later be known as the "Forlorn Hope."

A week into their grueling journey, the Forlorn Hope's

progress grinds to a halt.

Snowed in and completely out of food,

they contemplate the horrifying reality that their only chance

of survival means resorting to cannibalism.

They draw straws to decide the first person

who should die and be eaten.

A man named Patrick Dolan draws the short straw, but nobody can

bear to kill him.

That night, temperatures continue to

plummet, and the next day, Dolan dies, not at the hands of

the others, but because of hypothermia.

The members of Forlorn Hope make the nearly impossible

decision to eat Patrick's remains.

This place deep in the mountain wilderness will come

to be known as the Camp of Death...

the place where the Donner Party are first

forced to eat their own.

No record tells us exactly how many are eaten.

What is certain is Patrick Dolan

was not the only one.

Eventually, the weather clears, and those remaining are finally

able to leave the Camp of Death and its horrors behind.

Finally, on January 17th, 33 days after leaving

the others behind at Truckee Lake

in a desperate search for help, the remaining members

of the Forlorn Hope are saved by Native American guides

who lead them to shelter.

The cost of their bravery is staggering.

Of the 15 who set out, only seven survive.

Eventually, reaching the remote frontier settlement of

Johnson's Ranch, the survivors alert the outside world

and trigger rescue efforts for the two groups

still stranded at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek.

Rescue teams are dispatched to reach the settlers before

it's too late, but what they discover will

expose the true cost of survival

and a mystery that endures for 180 years.

[Josh] It's 1847.

The rescue of the Forlorn Hope marks a turning point,

triggering coordinated efforts to reach the remaining members

of the Donner Party snowed in at remote camps.

The first rescue team sets out to find the stranded pioneers

at Truckee Lake, and amazingly, they manage to

evacuate 23 survivors, including Margaret Reed.

But heartbreak shadows the mission.

James and Margaret's two youngest children are too weak

to travel and must be left behind.

At nearby Alder Creek, the outlook is just as grim.

George Donner is deathly ill and his wife, Tamsen,

refuses to leave with the rescuers.

Those rescuers can only promise to send more help when they can

and hope it will arrive in time.

Two weeks later, a second rescue team arrives,

but this time they're met with a nightmarish reality.

At Truckee Lake, the remaining pioneers

had turned to cannibalism,

just like the Forlorn Hope Party had done first

at the Camp of Death weeks earlier.

Still, the team rescues 17 more people, including

the two Reed children their mother was forced

to leave behind.

But George Donner can't be saved.

He dies of infection.

And Tamsen Donner's body is later found near the camp,

alongside chilling evidence that George's brother Jacob

may have been their final meal.

Of the 87 who set out in the Donner Party, 48 survived,

39 were lost.

Also lost was the exact location where much

of the tragedy played out, the place where the group known

as Forlorn Hope first turned to cannibalism.

So, in 2022, I joined historical researchers

Bob Crowley and Tim Twietmeyer on a trek into the Sierras for

the seemingly impossible task of finding the Camp of Death.

By following the route of the Forlorn Hope through

the Sierra Nevadas and using clues to the terrain they left

behind in diary entries, we identify an area of interest

in what is today, California's Tahoe National Forest,

and fan out with metal detectors.

One survivor wrote in his diary that they had left many items

behind, including his hand ax.

We knew we were hunting for a needle, or a hand ax,

in a haystack.

But then it happened.

-[beeping] -Oh...hold on.

-[explorer] You got something? -[Josh] Yeah, I got a hit.

Something here for sure.

[metallic dinging]

That sounds like metal.

What did you find?

[Josh] Oh...my word.

Oh my word, look at that!

[Greg] That's what we were looking for.

Unbelievable. Greg, what do you think?

-Wow, fantastic. -Amazing.

Yeah, that is.

That is...

...a hand-forged ax. -This is wild.

I mean, could this really be?

And if this is that ax, then we're standing in

the Camp of Death. -No doubt about that.

Amazing.

Unearthing the ax head was astonishing.

Finally, a tangible link to the lost camp

of the Donner Party.

But we found no trace of the bodies of those that died

at the Camp of Death.

Recently, Bob and Tim returned to the site we found,

and this time, they brought cadaver dogs.

Canine forensics is a way of training the dog to search out

and find human remains that have been buried for decades,

if not centuries.

When we decided we wanted to try to do a search at

the Camp of Death, we contacted

the Institute for Canine Forensics.

And they connected us with John Grebenkemper

and his dog Kayle, and the forensics search began.

[Tim] As the dog searches in a pattern where it's directed,

it's kind of saying, "Here's an area I need you to search."

Kayle's wandering around, sniffing,

and sitting and wandering, and John's marking these spots

with his GPS.

In the end, when they searched for an hour or two,

she had like 25 alerts.

And then when you map that at a high level, you can see

the concentration of where each of the finds was made scattered

around in some of the edges of the search pattern.

There's definitely something out there

that we wouldn't see somewhere else.

And we just kind of looked at each other and went, "Oh, wow."

It became very clear to us that this was the location that

we were looking for.

A subsequent search with a different cadaver dog

confirmed the findings.

There were human remains at the site, and it turns out

it's less than 30 feet from where we discovered

the ax head.

The place known as the Camp of Death had at last been found,

deep in a remote area

in the North Fork American River Canyon

of Tahoe National Forest.

The courage and sacrifice that took place at this long-lost

location is what saved the rest of the Donner Party.

We did the calculation, and that saved 25 additional

lives, which when we did the actuarial table of

descendants, is 25,000 people that were born

because of the bravery of what they'd done.

A lot of people have asked us, what are we going to do next at

the Camp of Death?

And we have been in touch with many of the descendants

of those in the Forlorn Hope, and I think they were joyful to

learn that we believe we found the Camp of Death,

and for those that were descendants of those that

perished there, it gave them closure, peace of mind.

We're gonna leave it at that.

The real story of the Donner Party

is not just a tale of macabre horror,

but a raw human saga.

Parents making unthinkable sacrifices, strangers risking

everything for each other, and pioneers braving it all

for a better life.

Their legacy is one of exceptional resilience.

And now, for the first time, we have another place

we can honor that legacy

with a hope that's not so forlorn after all.

Welcome to Greenland, a frozen island in

the North Atlantic, roughly three times the size of Texas.

It's 1966, and nearly 100 feet below me lies Camp Century,

a Cold War base with a top-secret purpose.

Unfortunately, the ice beneath me is shifting dramatically.

And so the U.S. soldiers

stationed here are abandoning the base and sealing it up,

never to return.

But over 50 years later, the relentless Arctic elements

will expose the dirty secrets of a forgotten outpost

of America, frozen in time.

[military archive] Today, on the island of Greenland,

as part of man's continuing efforts to master

the secrets of survival in the Arctic,

the United States Army has established

an unprecedented nuclear-powered

Arctic research center.

[Josh] This sounds like something out of a Cold War comic book,

but it's entirely real.

That smooth-voiced narrator you just heard is from an old

United States Army film strip, introducing what was

then hailed as a marvel of military engineering,

Camp Century.

Nicknamed "The City Under Ice,"

Camp Century is a stunning example of American ingenuity,

or so the Army says.

Officially, the mission is to improve glaciological research

and Arctic survival strategies.

Construction kicks off in June, 1959,

but building a subterranean base 100 feet beneath shifting

glacial ice requires solving an avalanche of problems.

They have to dig massive trenches in the ice and use

huge steel arches to keep the structure

from being crushed.

And temperature is a constant enemy.

Too much heat and the base will melt from the inside out.

Too little, and the soldiers will become human popsicles.

The final hurdle, getting power to this underground city.

Meet the PM-2A, no relation to R2-D2.

This is the world's first portable nuclear power plant.

If you define portable as a 330-ton behemoth, that has

to be shipped in pieces and assembled like

radioactive IKEA furniture.

But once operational, it delivers a whopping

two megawatts of electricity,

enough to power over 1,500 homes.

In October 1960, Camp Century opens for business.

Twenty-one underground tunnels stretching approximately

two miles under the ice, complete with dormitories,

a mess hall, chapel, hospital, even a theater.

The base can house over 200 people, which is exactly

what causes outsiders to start asking questions.

Like, why is such a large facility needed

for "glacial research"?

Why do they require a nuclear reactor?

Why is the U.S. Army calling the shots?

The answer?

This is no ordinary science base.

This is Project Iceworm, a Cold War weapon hidden behind

a scientific snowstorm.

The plan?

To secretly install hundreds of nuclear missiles under the ice,

poised to strike the Soviet Union

at a moment's notice.

Because at the dawn of the '60s, many believe the world is

inching toward nuclear annihilation.

Why is Greenland so perfect

to house U.S. nukes?

Simple. It's close to Russia.

[explosion blasts]

In 1957, the Soviet Union launches Sputnik,

the first artificial satellite, which sends shockwaves

through the West.

More than a breakthrough, it's a warning.

If the Soviets can reach orbit,

they can strike across the globe.

Panic spreads, shelters are built in backyards,

and kids practice duck-and-cover. -[alarm blares]

The Cold War has arrived in everyday life.

So the U.S. responds with stealth and scale.

The plan is for Project Iceworm to sprawl beneath

52,000 square miles of ice,

hiding up to 600 nuclear missiles, which will be

able to pierce through the ice upon launch.

But serious firepower needs serious secrecy.

So the cover story of Camp Century and its so-called

"glacial research" is born.

And the ruse works until nature has its say.

It turns out the Greenland ice sheet is anything but stable.

Tunnels warp, walls crack, water seeps and pools.

The base is constantly soaked, not to mention foul-smelling.

By 1964, the operation is collapsing, literally.

Project Iceworm is scrapped, thankfully, before any missiles

arrive on the island.

And in 1966, the Army begins dismantling Camp Century.

The nuclear reactor is removed.

But in what will prove to be a fateful decision,

everything else is left behind.

For decades, the details of the base stayed buried

in heavily classified files until January of 1995,

when the Danish Foreign Policy Institute launched

an inquiry into the history of nuclear weapons in Greenland.

[explosion blasts]

That's when Project Iceworm was exposed to the public

for the very first time.

But the real shock came after further research.

Hidden beneath the ice wasn't just a ghost base.

It was a toxic hell.

53,000 gallons of leaking diesel fuel, 63,000 gallons

of sewage-laced wastewater, and unknown amounts

of radioactive coolant.

The Army assumed it would all remain frozen forever.

What they didn't count on was rising temperatures.

And now a shocking catastrophe is coming,

a ticking time bomb under the ice.

When the Danish government discovers the U.S. Army

secretly hid highly toxic waste in Greenland as part

of an abandoned nuclear weapons base,

there is widespread outrage.

Professor of Ecology, Steven Allison,

has studied the site, and what he's discovered

is deeply disturbing.

One of the materials present at Camp Century is called PCB

or polychlorinated biphenyls.

They're carcinogens, which could then have

human health impacts like causing cancers or causing other

neurological problems, reproductive issues, etc.

They bioaccumulate in the food chain.

What that means is that when a predator eats a prey fish,

for example, then the predator gets all the toxin that was in

that prey and so on and so forth up the food chain.

That becomes a problem if people are eating marine life

anywhere in the food chain.

So, those are some pretty substantial negative impacts

that could arise from the legacy of toxins

at Camp Century.

In 2016, a team of international scientists

applied the latest climate models to the region.

The results show that steadily warming conditions

make Camp Century a ticking time bomb.

What they found was that by 2090, the ice would stop

building up, and after 2090, within 50 or 60 years,

the ice surface would actually begin melting down,

exposing all of that nuclear waste and other toxic material

to the environment.

OK, so the U.S. Army

made a mess and now they just have to go

clean it up, right?

Well, first they have to go find it.

After all, nobody has stepped foot inside Camp Century

for over 50 years.

In April 2024, a team of NASA scientists took off on

a mission from the Air Force Base in northern Greenland.

On their jet plane, they had a sophisticated

new radar system that would allow them to map, in detail,

the structure of the ice sheet and its depth.

And on this radar system,

they were able to find Camp Century,

buried below the ice surface by about 200 feet.

As for the looming ecological disaster,

it's locked deep in ice, but it isn't exactly easy to extract.

[Steven] Right now, that toxic material is buried underneath many

hundreds of feet of ice, so it's not like we can just go

in there with a drill or a shovel and take it out

and remove it.

We're gonna have to wait for it to start moving and melting

out of the ice.

While we might not be able to dig up the waste

before it's exposed, scientists believe there may be

another way to clean up these pollutants using nature itself.

One option might be to rely on our natural ecosystems,

and the good news is that we may be able to use

microorganisms like bacteria to help clean up these pollutants.

I study microbes in the environment,

and there's potential that they could break down compounds

like PCBs and the sewage material that's coming out

of Camp Century, potentially in the future.

We have some examples of this from oil spills

that have happened.

And there were actually communities of microbes that

blossomed in that water and chewed up and ate much

of the pollution.

We're still a long way from being able to deploy microbes

on an industrial scale to tackle the severe pollution

that remains at Camp Century.

But hopefully, through science, ingenuity,

and most importantly, our own sense of

responsibility, we will one day be able to ensure that

the poisons of the past don't define our future.

It's December 5th, 1872.

I'm standing on the deck of a Canadian merchant ship called

the Dei Gratia.

We're 400 miles off the coast of Portugal,

and Captain David Reed Morehouse

has just spotted something alarming,

a large ship that's seemingly adrift

in the open sea. -[indistinct]

Moments from now, Morehouse's men will

board the vessel, and what they discover will

chill them to their bones, because this is the most

infamous ghost ship in history, whose entire crew has vanished

without a trace.

It's a maritime mystery that will endure for 150 years.

What happened to the sailors of the Mary Celeste?

[adventurous music plays]

November 7, 1872, a month before being found

adrift, the Mary Celeste sets sail from New York Harbor.

She's bound for Genoa to deliver 1,700 barrels

of denatured alcohol, used as a cheap solvent and fuel.

The 37-year-old captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs,

is an experienced sailor commanding a crew of seven.

A devoted family man, Briggs brings along his beloved

wife, Sarah, and their young daughter, Sophia.

He doesn't want to be separated from them

during the two-month round trip.

But little does Captain Briggs or anyone on board know,

the Mary Celeste will never reach its destination.

Three weeks later, another ship sailing the Atlantic, known as

the Dei Gratia, will stumble upon the unhelmed Mary Celeste

in the 1,000-mile gulf

between the Azores Islands and Portugal.

Pulling the Dei Gratia alongside her,

Captain Morehouse, first mate Oliver Deveau,

and several crew members board the Celeste to investigate.

They find it deathly silent.

Ahoy!

Is anybody there?

[wood creaking]

[Josh] No reply.

Eerily, there's also no sign of struggle or violence.

But the sailors do notice that the Celeste's sails are only

partially set, with ropes and rigging hanging loose

and disorganized, as if abruptly abandoned.

Captain Morehouse then heads below deck.

What he finds there will only deepen the mystery of

what happened on board the Mary Celeste.

[Josh] Captain Morehouse and his men have stumbled upon

the Mary Celeste, drifting at sea, abandoned.

As they search the vessel, there are no signs of the crew

or the captain, Benjamin Briggs.

On the lower deck, they find the galley tidy,

with the food stores intact.

Down in the cargo hold, First Mate Deveau finds that

several of the barrels of the denatured alcohol

the Celeste is transporting are busted open.

But they are all accounted for. None are lost or stolen.

The crew's quarters are all in order, but there is

one curious thing.

The sailors have all left their pipes behind.

Unusual.

That's something 19th-century sailors

would seldom be without.

As they explore the ship further, Deveau notices

something even stranger.

Many of the hatches, doorways, and windows aboard

the Mary Celeste are open,

even here in the captain's quarters,

where the floor and the furniture are soaking wet.

Whatever happened here, everyone seems to have left

in a hurry.

And then, Deveau zeroes in on something that could reveal

everything, the captain's log.

Its pages run steadily until November 25th, ten days prior.

The last note is routine, just a navigational position.

After that, nothing.

Finally, Morehouse's men discover perhaps

the most compelling clue.

The Mary Celeste lifeboat is missing, and oddly,

the ship's sail line is being dragged behind the vessel

and appears to have snapped.

The ship's main navigational instruments are also

not on board.

Based on these details, plus the state of the captain's

quarters and the disarray on deck, it appears Briggs ordered

everyone to quickly abandon ship.

But why?

Unable to solve the mystery himself, Captain Morehouse has

the Mary Celeste sailed to port in Gibraltar.

There, a formal inquest commences on December 17, 1872.

The investigation focuses on something curious.

It turns out that Captain Morehouse

of the Dei Gratia and Captain Briggs

of the Mary Celeste knew each other well.

It's even reported the two captains were dining together

a few nights before the Mary Celeste departure.

People begin to wonder if the Celeste crew didn't go

missing at all, but that the two old buddies

simply cooked up a mystery to commit insurance fraud.

In spite of this intriguing theory, the formal inquest

reveals no evidence of criminal activity.

After all, there wasn't enough damage to the Mary Celeste

to warrant any claim to the insurance company.

The three-month official investigation concludes without

determining any credible cause for the crew's disappearance.

[thunder cracking]

Over the years, countless theories surface.

One of the most enduring is the waterspout theory,

a sudden violent tornado at sea that whipped up towering waves

and drove the crew to abandon ship in the lifeboat.

It sounds plausible until you remember two things.

First, the Mary Celeste showed no serious damage.

And second, fleeing into a small lifeboat during

a waterspout would have been suicide, not salvation.

In the decades that follow, the mystery of the Mary Celeste

will seize the world's imagination.

From sea monsters rising out of the deep to alien abductions,

to the more earthly idea of a pirate attack.

Yet piracy was virtually unheard of in those waters.

And with no signs of violence or missing cargo,

that explanation never held.

But now a credible scientific explanation has surfaced,

one that may finally unravel the enigma of history's

most infamous ghost ship.

In 1846, the Donner Party became trapped

in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada mountains,

resorting to cannibalism to survive.

More than a century later, in 1972, Uruguayan charter

flight 571 crashed in the frigid Andes,

with 45 aboard -- rugby players, friends, and family.

Twelve died instantly and more followed over 10 hellish weeks

in the frozen wilderness.

Two young men finally hiked 10 brutal days for help,

saving the other survivors.

Like the Donner Party, they faced the unthinkable,

consuming the dead to live.

Today, survivor Eduardo Strauch leads private tours to

the crash site, sharing lessons of perseverance and bravery.

The incident is a reminder, just like the Donner Party,

of the unbreakable will to survive

when all hope seems lost.

[Josh] For a century and a half, the question of what happened

aboard the ghost ship known as the Mary Celeste has

remained a mystery.

Now, historian Brian Hicks proposes a bold new theory.

The crew wasn't undone by pirates or sea monsters,

but by something within the vessel itself.

The investigation of the Mary Celeste,

when it was brought into port in Gibraltar,

found that nine barrels of alcohol had busted open.

That was 450 gallons.

Denatured alcohol is kind of industrial alcohol, the sort

of thing used in solvents as a fuel additive.

The fumes from it can cause serious medical damage

to a person and not only knocking you out,

but making you hallucinate and making you physically ill,

vomiting, what have you. -Don't worry.

When the Mary Celeste left New York City in the middle

of storms, for three weeks, the storms were so bad,

they couldn't open the cargo hold because the rainwater

and the storms would have flooded the ship and sank it.

On the morning of November 25th, they had the first chance

since they'd left New York to open the hold.

And I think that after three weeks of sailing,

the fumes overtook them immediately.

[Josh] According to Hicks' research, the massive amount of fumes

from that 450 gallons of industrial-strength,

denatured alcohol would have quickly filled the entire ship

with noxious gas, causing panic

and impairment for everyone on board.

The biggest thing that this explains is, why was every

hatch, why was every window, why was every door, why was

the skylight over the captain's bed and his baby's bed left

open on a ship? They were letting it air out.

They also realized that the least little spark

could blow up the entire ship.

One of the things that scared Oliver Deveau more than anything

is when he was going through the crew cabin,

he noticed there were pipes. There was a pipe for every man.

Left lying there.

Sailors never went anywhere without their pipes.

And there's only one reason those guys would not have had

their pipes, and that was that they couldn't light a match.

When you're in the middle of the ocean and your ship is

spewing fumes out of the hold, what would you want to do?

You would want to get away.

They didn't take the time to tie up the sails,

furl the sails.

They didn't have time to rope off the wheel, where the ship

would sail in a circle. They just got off,

but they expected to come back.

They simply got a lifeboat, grabbed the longest rope that

they could find, which was the main sail line, tied it to

the lifeboat and backed away.

And that way they could get as far from the ship as they could

and still remain tethered to it.

Hicks believes the crew retreated in panic, wanting to

stay close, but not too close to their vessel,

which they feared might explode at any moment.

But what happened next?

Why didn't they return to the Mary Celeste

once the fumes died down?

I checked the weather reports for the Azores that day.

And that afternoon, the weather went from calm,

sunny, no wind, to this huge storm.

And it was just enough of a storm to make

the Mary Celeste take off, towing that lifeboat.

And at some point, the Mary Celeste would have gone

a lot faster than that lifeboat could travel.

And whether the lifeboat capsized first or the towline

snapped first, the end result was Benjamin Briggs,

his wife, his baby daughter, and those crewmen in the water

watching their ship sail away without a soul on board.

If you've got 10 people in a small lifeboat in the middle

of the Atlantic Ocean, no sails, no provisions,

there is no good outcome.

They are either gonna die of exposure,

starvation, or the boat's gonna capsize and they're all

gonna drown. There is no way out.

Hicks' theory is compelling.

The crew of the Mary Celeste, in a confused and terrified

state, take to their lifeboat only to have the weather

suddenly change, tragically sealing their fate.

Still, there are lingering questions.

Why take navigational tools into the lifeboat if

they intended to return once the fumes cleared?

And why wasn't the lifeboat

or remains of the crew ever found?

Without definitive evidence, the mystery of the Mary Celeste

will sail on, eternally drifting through

the mists of time.

I'm Josh Gates.

I'll see you on the next expedition.