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This sequence of pages presents the words of a musical I wrote in 1991 / 92 for the junior arm of the Bristol Light Opera Company, who performed it at the Winston Theatre, Bristol, in April 1993. I also wrote the music and directed it, though neither of those feats was part of the original commission!

The twenty-five songs retell the famous story of the little Victorian sailing-ship that was discovered drifting empty in the North Atlantic in 1872: somewhere along the way they present a solution to the mystery. They weren't written to be read, of course, but looking at them afresh, four years on, I think they stand up on their own, if taken in the right order.

All my characters are taken from history, with the following liberties: Edward Lear and Heinrich Schliemann weren't necessarily in Gibraltar at the time the show takes place, though they could have been; the Captain's mother and son probably stayed in America, and his daughter was a little younger than I've suggested; the ship's Cook wasn't female, and I've made up names for the crew's sweethearts where research could not reveal them.

Of course I'm not pretending I actually know what was said on board Mary Celeste or during the salvage trial at Gibraltar, but the dates and circumstances encountered in the show are not made up. The attitudes of the people on the quayside are based on real attitudes and crazes of the time; and if the gullibility, hypocrisy and band-wagoneering of the British Tourists who comprise my chorus do not seem exclusively Victorian, that may not be entirely unintentional! I had to allow them to grind their various axes in public, so that I could legitimately brandish my own in the conclusion.  

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