George O. Smith 6 min read

A time traveler stows away in the cargo hold of a Nineteenth-Century sailing ship, and is hauled before Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste, days before that ship becomes history's great mystery.

George O. Smith's 1960 story is a clever social-SF and time-travel tale. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive story that offers a science-fictional solution to the enduring real-life riddle of the abandoned Mary Celeste, weaving a time traveler into one of history's great unsolved mysteries, in a well-turned golden-age piece.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

6 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay