Rule 5 Warships – Mary Celeste

The Tempesta and the Fountain of Youth event may be over in Azur Lane, but I feel like there’s one more member of the Tempesta fleet who needs to emerge from the gloom and take her turn in the limelight. It’s time to meet one of, if not the, most famous ghost ships in history, the Mary Celeste.

If ever an argument could be made that a ship was cursed from launch, Mary Celeste might be the poster child. Her first captain died on her maiden voyage, when she was still named Amazon. She was wrecked, salvaged, rebuilt, and renamed Mary Celeste, and relaunched to ship cargo between North America and Europe. Which was when her most famous disaster occurred.

For those not familiar with the history, in 1872, Mary Celeste was discovered part way through her voyage to Genoa. She was under partial sail, her cargo of alcohol intact, still with a good amount of provisions remaining, but no crew to be found. The lifeboat was missing. The crew’s personal belongings were undisturbed. No evidence of what happened to the crew has ever been found.

The ship would be returned to service, and continue to ply routes for another thirteen years, before being deliberately wrecked as part of an insurance fraud scam.

The Mary Celeste was initially made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” which was a fictionalized account of what might have happened, as told by a fictitious survivor. Since then, she has been the subject of numerous stories, documentaries, and History Channel level “What might have happened” shows.

With a past like that, it’s not hard to imagine a spectral version of Mary Celeste still plying the Caribbean, searching for her lost crew. Or perhaps crewed by the spectral remains of a mutinous crew (one of the theories for what happened) and doomed to sail the seas for eternity as punishment for their treachery.

We meet Mary in Azur Lane as a ghost ship, whose default costume is really pushing the limits of acceptability. But it’s in tatters, because she’s a ghost ship, and can phase through things (because ghost). How does an actual ghost ship fit in in a world where shipgirls summon rigging out of Hammerspace, and all sorts of other things that defy all reason? Just roll with it. At this point, none of this makes sense if you think about it too hard. Look – more pretty shipgirls! It’s a swimsuit event!