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Gross Exaggeration
The story of the Mary Celeste was fictionalized and sensationalized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his short story J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement, which told the story from the point of view of a fictional survivor—ex slave J. Habakuk Jephson. While Doyle later became known as a fiction writer, at the time many people accepted his story as fact. In 1913, another supposed survivor’s story was published in The Strand magazine, but it was full of inaccuracies and was no better than Doyle’s fiction.
