[Two leaves, foolscap, bound into a clerk's letter-book of the Gibraltar Vice-Admiralty salvage proceedings, 1873. The letter-book was sold at the Barlin auction in a lot of unrelated marine papers and is not part of the official record. The first leaf is a fair copy in a clerk's hand; the second is the same clerk's private marginalia, written on the verso and crossed through once, lightly, as though by a man who changed his mind about destroying it.]
Leaf one — fair copy
Gibraltar, the 9th of March, 1873
To the Proctor's office.
Respecting the several enquiries lately received from shore relations of the missing hands of the Mary Celeste, brigantine, found derelict the 5th December last: the Court's business is the salvage claim and the seaworthiness of the vessel. It is not the business of this Court to account for the men. Enquiries touching the condition or conduct of the crew prior to sailing are not admissible and will be answered in the usual form.
Three such enquiries are lodged this quarter. I have answered all three alike. I append the form of words.
The Court is unable to assist you. No further enquiry is contemplated.
Leaf two — verso, same hand, crossed through
I have written that sentence eleven times this winter and I did not expect the eleventh to trouble me.
The third enquiry was brought in person by a woman who had come from the north with a child and could not afford to have come. She did not ask what became of her husband. She said she knew what became of him and had known since before he sailed. What she asked for was whether any other wife had written.
I told her the office could not say. That is true. I did not tell her that two had, and that one of the two used a phrase near enough to her own that I had copied it into this book a fortnight before she ever stood in front of me, because I thought it a curiosity of speech.
Both said the man complained of the noise. Neither could say what noise. The Southampton woman wrote that her brother-in-law would not sleep on the shore side of the house in his last year and could not tell her why, and grew angry at being asked, and that he said it was not a sound, it was in the chest. This woman today said her husband stopped hearing the church bell. She was particular about it. Not that he disliked it. That he stopped hearing it, and knew he had stopped, and was frightened of it, and that she had thought it was drink and now does not think it was drink.
There is nothing here for the Court. Two women a thousand miles apart with the same complaint of their men is a coincidence and a proctor would call it an hysteria and he would very likely be right, and I have no standing to call it anything at all. I am a clerk. My standing is the form of words.
I have entered them both as answered.
I will set down what I would not say aloud in the Court, because no one will read this book: the Attorney here has decided what he thinks happened to those men and is prosecuting it, and what he thinks happened requires them to have been ordinary men who did a wicked ordinary thing. If they were ill before they sailed, his case is worth nothing. So it will not be asked. It is not that the question is answered. It is that the question is not convenient, and the Court has a form of words for that too, and I am the man who writes it out.
The woman asked me a second thing on her way out, which I did not enter. She asked whether the ship had been found in a quiet part of the sea. I said I did not know what she meant. She said her husband's people had a saying about it and did not explain the saying, and went out, and I have thought about it since and I would rather not have.
[At the foot of the leaf, in pencil, undated, a different and much later hand:]
Copied from the letter-book before it was sold. The clerk is J. Fairfax, d. 1889. Query whether any relation to the Port Hume office of that name — the name is common on this coast and I assert nothing.