In 1872 a seaworthy ship was found drifting in the Atlantic with its cargo intact, six months of food below deck, and every one of its ten people vanished. No bodies, no distress, no struggle — just an open logbook and a missing lifeboat. It became the template for every ghost-ship story since.
A full narrated documentary walking through the last known days of the ship and the eerie state she was found in. The best single starting point for the whole rabbit hole.
The exhaustively sourced timeline: the New York departure, the Dei Gratia's chance sighting near the Azores, and the salvage hearing in Gibraltar. Strips the facts from the folklore.
Focuses on the cargo of 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol and the ten people aboard — Captain Briggs, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and seven crew.
Lays out exactly what searchers found belowdecks — a disassembled pump, three feet of water, scattered charts, and personal belongings left behind by people who never came back.
Discovery UK weighs the leading modern theory: alcohol fumes venting from the barrels convinced the crew an explosion was imminent, so they fled to the lifeboat — and lost the ship.
Runs through the wilder theories too — waterspouts, mutiny, seaquakes, insurance fraud — and why none of them fully fit the evidence after a century and a half.
The warm coffee, the untouched meal, the bloody sword — none of it was in the record. A young Conan Doyle added them in an 1884 short story, and the myth swallowed the facts.