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Greetings CYStians!

It's another published issue of the CYS Monthly Gazette, and we got some awesome interviews and interest pieces here for you all to enjoy! We also have a teaser for next issue as well! Hope you all like this one as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Thank you to all our staff members who continue to graciously support this newsletter, RKrallonor, Suranna, Yummyfood, Anthraxus, Benholman44, Mystic_Warrior and Will11. You're all truly amazing and wonderful people!

The pictures here are clickable! If you want the slideshow of this article, here's a link.

Great job everyone!

Yahoo!

Nice

Happy to be a part of this. Now back to the shadows I go.

Thanks again for the interview, and for being so kind and gracious with answering all my questions! It was a real treat to be able to speak with you, and for people who haven't already, check out Sindri's games!

I hope you enjoyed this just as much as I did.

Hey, fuck you! Your shit sucks ass! Dammit! Can't believe I missed him

Here's a link to the google form! Answer as many or as few questions as you want to, and the solutions will be provided next month on the Gazette's anniversary.

That quiz was really tricky but fun :D I get the feeling I didn't do well but I think I got at least one question correct ( it'd hilarious if I got that wrong!). Thanks for putting this together guys :)

Another fantastic edition :D Great work everyone and especially Milton for pulling it all together month after month :)

Wow! Great issue, everyone. I'd love to take part in secret santa!

     This is cool! I like that it mentions birthdays but it's a tad annoying when the birthday has already passed... oh well, happy late birthday Chris!

     I'm interested in the Secret Santa thing. I don't know much about it and once glanced at a thread of some past Secret Santa but it looks cool. I'll probably have to stay out if there's an age cap or requires discord, though.

     I want to do the trivia but I've only been around for one edition before this and I'm not going digging for past editions than reading them all for god knows how long.

     I am thankful for having everything I have, and to have the opportunities I have which I'm fully aware not everyone does.

     Great edition! :D

 

EDIT: this is kind of random, but what happened to sent's gun and sunglasses in the image? And his jacket? (and gloves!) I'm just saying, his profile picture's a lot cooler.

Tad late here, but great issue everyone! I'd like to participate in the Secret Santa if possible, btw, it sounds fun!

As promised, a discussion post about my article to hear your theories about the Mary Celeste :) The situation:

December 1872, an abandoned ship is discovered in the middle of the sea. There is no sign of her crew of ten people (including a young mother and child), no indication of why the ship was abandoned, just a mix of bewildering, possible clues. Now is your chance to be real-life Sherlocks, what do you think happened?

A) Violence: the Captain, crew, pirates, the crew of the Dei Gratia (the ship that found the Mary Celeste) or some combination of these killed one or more of those on board, threw the bodies in the sea and escaped by boat or ship.

B) A Conspiracy: The crew abandoned the ship to the crew of the Dei Gratia so all could share in the salvage reward. The crew of the Mary Celeste then went off to live secret lives elsewhere.

C) An Explosion: An explosion of alcohol fumes from the ship's cargo of alcohol barrels prompted the crew to hastily abandon ship.

D) Sinking: The crew thought the ship was sinking and decided to abandon ship (some evidence found on deck may support this theory).

E) Natural Disaster: A water spout, underwater reef, iceberg, underwater earthquake or rogue wave panicked the crew into abandoning ship.

F) Aliens did it.

What do you think? Post your ideas and I'll respond with my own opinion about what happened in another week :)

     Maybe I'm wrong, but violence would probably leave signs like blood or some broken furniture or something. B is possible. C would leave a mass of hints from damage to the ship I would think. D is possible, and more supported than B. E is possible, but I'm not really sure I'm on board with this idea. F, you must be kidding.

     So I think B, D, or E, and choosing out of those I believe D is most likely.

Interesting... good analysis there :)

Option D seems the most straightforward so likely true, but wouldn't they have waited around afterwards to watch and see if the ship actually sank?

Option A is also possible since whoever did it would've had plenty of time to clean up and then alter the scene how they liked.

Some interesting ideas here :)

There is evidence that the crew may have tied themselves to the ship after taking to the boat: at least one broken rope was trailing from the ship into or towards the sea and while this might have been wear and tear from the sails it could also have represented an attempt to secure themselves to the ship. If someone did murder ten people he (or they) would have had to have gone through a really intensive cleaning effort to scrub all the blood from the ship and deliberately lower and cast loose the boat from the ship. I don't think one person could have done it.

Yeah, I'm still going with some variant of D. Even if the least interesting that probably means it's also the most likely to be true.

Or for safety they intentionally got in the smaller boat in any case and somehow things went wrong from there. Maybe the captain was taking extra precautions because of his family and they were staying in the boat to monitor the situation, and it snapped unexpectedly during the night or something.

Honestly though, some of the more complicated conspiracy theories don't have to be an all or nothing situation. If you were a sailor and something went wrong leading to the demise or disappearance of the captain and his family, that's a pretty good motivation to disappear as well, especially when they might have guessed they'd be the first ones blamed.

I do think the captain was more cautious than he normally would have been because he had his family with him (nothing more high-pressure when you're trying to captain a ship in a crisis than having your wife standing behind you silently judging your decisions :D). It is true there may have been an unknown element, the crew absconding after doing away with the captain and his family is possible and there are certainly cases of ships being abandoned by a crew who killed the officers then didn't know how to navigate them correctly (basically pirates). Even if it was an accident they might be hard-pushed to explain their way out of a hanging and people definitely panicked and abandoned the Mary Celeste in a hurry.

Based on just what you said here, could they have just been taken by accosting pirates? Like, all of the occupants were just abducted by pirates to do who-knows-what with or even just joined the pirates willingly? That would leave little trace on the Mary Celeste and seems a more realistic occurrence than many of the other options. Piracy seems to have been a common thing in those days, too.

Pirates would've cleaned out the valuables though.

Do we know where the valuables were being stored? Were they well hidden and the pirates couldn't find it? Maybe the pirates were in a hurry, perhaps to avoid another ship or reach some destination?

There are so many possibilities involving pirates. Maybe the pirates saw a bigger ship coming while they were about to ransack the Mary Celeste and immediately left. And then the other ship asked the group if they were alright, and they were like, we don't feel safe out here with pirates everywhere, mind if we hitch a ride with you, and they said sure, and then the bigger ship sank later on the journey.

Although, now that I have actually read the article that Will's post was about, based on the sounding rod and taken navigational instruments, it seems most likely that they were spooked by the ship taking on water due to damage from the alcohol explosions and took the lifeboat thinking that they were closer to land than they actually were and ended up dying at sea.

Some good ideas Urnam :)

With the pirates, piracy was quite rare by the late 1800's and though the size of the Mary Celeste and its crew were the right size for a piracy target their last recorded position in the Azores was quite far from where pirates were active off Morocco (a little bit like Somali pirates attacking a ship near the coast of India). As with Mizal's comment they must have done a hell of a clean-up job (or made everyone walk the plank, including a woman with her child). Pirates aren't a secretive lot though so it's odd that rumour wouldn't have spread of what they'd done.

The second theory is also very intriguing and holds together well under scrutiny. I'll give my fuller thoughts on this next week :D

They were obviously lured underwater by sirens.

Joke aside, D seems the most likely since the navigational tools were taken and chronometer was faulty, and based on the article it seems to be the only theory that doesn't have substantial evidence against it. Perhaps once they were deciding to escape, the sight of another ship or looming natural disaster caused them to leave immediately without second thought.

Another more far-fetched idea would be the one involving conspiracy, except that since the rewards wouldn't have made sense split between so many, it may just have been between the two captains. In any event, the men of good character (whether killed onboard or more likely, at sea after a senseless 'abandon ship' order) wouldn't be able to speak up if they're dead.

Now that's an original idea :D The evidence on the scene does indicate a failed attempt to clear water from the ship and the missing navigational tools suggests they were trying to navigate their way to land in the boat. If they saw another ship though surely it would have helped them and if it was a pirate ship they had no chance of escaping it in a small boat. Yeah, the ship and cargo weren't that valuable and, though people have been killed for less, it's a bit of a long shot to do away with seven innocent sailors for (assuming Captain Briggs' wife and child joined him in his new fugitive life, incidentally abandoning their oldest son who was staying with relatives in the US at the time).

Some interesting ideas have been raised here and I'll give my opinion on what I think happened to the vanished crew of the Mary Celeste: I think it was a combination of C and D. I think the violence option is difficult as there is no evidence for it and what evidence was left on the ship points to concern with a rising water level inside the ship and a hasty evacuation. It makes sense than an explosion would lead to suspicions the ship was sinking (as Urnam said) but the problem with this is a lack of evidence.

A possible solution to this question was suggested by Andrea Sella of University College in London in which he made a replica model of the ship, filled its hold with butane (alcohol fumes) and ignited it. The resulting fireball was impressive but no damage was left to the model ("no soot, burning or scorching"). Thus there would have been no trace of the explosion left when the crew of the Dei Gratia searched the ship except the blown-open hatch covers on the deck. Whatever happened was certainly something exceptional and unique.

What I think happened then was this: a stray spark caused by the metal bands of two barrels rubbing together in the ship's hold ignited the alcohol fumes, causing twin bursts of flame to explode fore and aft. This would have caused panic (exacerbated by the presence of the captain's family on board) and hastily checking the hold would have revealed several feet of water (the timbers of all wooden ships warp and leak a little and it is possible the explosion had caused minor damage to let more water in).

In an atmosphere of panic the crew would have discovered that their pump wasn't working and couldn't be fixed, leaving them no way to get rid of what they would have considered to be rising water in the ship. They took to the boat and as Mizal mentioned probably fixed themselves to the ship but the rope wore and snapped. They thought they were close to land but they weren't. By the time they realised their mistake and rowed after the ship the wind would have moved it faster than they could row and the ghost ship would have left them behind, stranding them alone and to a horrible fate in the Atlantic Ocean.

During my research I came across a few unsubstantiated reports that a few months after the Mary Celeste was found a boat washed up on the Spanish coast containing several skeletons in rags - it was posited that these may have been the crew of the Mary Celeste (or certainly the crew of some other unfortunate wreck!). The fate endured by those poor souls drifting on the ocean waves without food or water doesn't bear thinking about and though the truth will never be known the tale of the ghost ship is certainly evocative enough that it is no surprise it has inspired so many writers of fiction, beginning with Arthur Conan Doyle. As they used to say in sailor taverns, the story of the Mary Celeste "it is a tale worth the hearing".