Graham Faiella

Life at sea in the nineteenth century was demanding and perilous. Seamen had to be able to rely on those around them. This was easier said than done. The sea could be, and still is, a place of constant and unpredictable danger, whether by storm, shipboard disease or threat from the crew. Stories of unimaginable cruelties inflicted upon crews by savage officers and treacheries committed by mutinous crews were the soap operas of the day. People followed...

4 DECEMBER 1872: The brigantine Dei Gratia chances upon another brigantine out on the Atlantic near the Azores. She is the Mary Celeste. She is under sail. But she is deserted. Silent as a drowned cadaver. For 150 years since then, the mystery of why the Mary Celeste was abandoned, and what happened to the ten souls on board, has spawned thousands of conjectures, conspiracy theories, fictions and fantasies. Some have thought they solved the mystery....

In the nineteenth century true stories of cannibal tribes massacring white traders (and vice versa) and missionaries fed the morbid appetites of Europeans, North Americans and colonials. Accounts of cannibalism committed by seafarers on their dead shipmates quickened the pulses of landfolk even more, and pricked their moral disquiet. Acts of desperate men committing unspeakable atrocities. The warring frenzy of cannibal headhunters and their gruesome...