"The _Marie Celeste_ is a mystery of the sea. This brig left America for Gibraltar; and nothing more was heard of her until she was sighted approaching the Strait in a suspicious manner, when she was found to be derelict. Her hull was sound, there was no sign of an accident aloft, and her boats were in their appointed places. Some remains of a meal on the cabin table were still fresh, and a watch was ticking unconcernedly; yet her captain and his wife and daughter, together with the crew, had disappeared forever. "Nautical novelists have made moving pictures of drifting derelicts, and hoaxers have also utilized them. In 1893 some witty person closely copied parts of a soul-stirring yarn by Clark Russell, and the alleged modern experience was telegraphed round the world, appeared in the press, and was then decisively contradicted. It was asserted that the Norwegian ship _Elsa Anderson_ arrived at Galveston with an English-built brig in tow, which had apparently been burned and sunk more than a half century previously. A submarine seismic disturbance was invented to account for the vessel's return to the surface. The hull was covered with strange sea shells, and in the hold were chests containing many guineas bearing date 1800, several watches, and a stomacher of pearls! One of three skeletons was said to be that of a man over seven feet in height. This hoax was successful until it reached Galveston. Then the authorities denied that the story had the slightest foundation in fact. Six years later a similar hoax was perpetrated, which ought immediately to have been recognized as merely a variant of _The Frozen Pirate_, by the above-mentioned eminent nautical novelist. It was gravely asserted that the barque _Silicon_, on her way from the United States to Greenland, had picked up an old-fashioned derelict ship near the Greenland coast. When access to the hold was gained, the salvors, so ran the hoax, discovered that she was laden with furs in good condition; and her log book showed that she had been abandoned by her crew in 1848. Like the ship imagined by Clark Russell, she was said to have been fast in the ice in the far North. One of the most ridiculous derelict-ship hoaxes of the past century had quite a boom in 1896. A burning derelict, read an astonished world, had been passed between the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, with her lower holds full of coal and petroleum, and the between-decks portion crammed with the dead bodies of people who had met their fate by suffocation while on their way from Russia to Brazil. The burning cargo had generated gas which suffocated the emigrants; the bodies had swollen out of human shape, and subsequent explosions had torn many limb from limb! This tissue of falsehoods appeared in many of the world's daily papers without comment.