Great sea disasters and fiction are firm friends. The Mary Celeste, discovered adrift in the Atlantic on 4 December 1872, has the peculiar distinction that its fictional counterpart, the Marie Celeste of a young Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “J Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” has become the “correct” spelling.
Virtually unknown in the west is the sinking of the PNS Ghazi on 4 December 1971 in the Indo-Pakistani Naval War. Its sinking crippled Pakistan’s naval presence in the Bay of Bengal. The cause remains a mystery. The Indian Navy maintains that it was responsible but destroyed its own records in 2010, while Pakistan maintains there was an accidental detonation.
Detonation and fiction met elsewhere on that same 4 December 1971. As Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played a member of the audience fired a flare gun into the ceiling of the
Montreux Casino. The meeting took on a maritime or at least lacustrine quality a year later when Deep Purple released their account of what happened on this the shore of Lake Geneva with “Smoke on the Water”.
On 4 December 1918, President Wilson became the first president to visit Europe while in office. He sailed for the Versailles talks in the USS George Washington. “Sailed” is a fiction. The president was
not on the Mary Celeste but under steam.
It is said that George Washington said that he could not tell a lie but as best we can tell, this lie was put about by an early hagiographer. Washington himself was feted by his officers at the Fraunces
Tavern in New York on 4 December 1783. The menu was the highly fashionable multi-course affair called a turtle feast, with the calipee, the calipash, fricassee, soup and fins coming in succession. As
far as we know, there was no cherry pie.
The last word on pies and lies must go to Mr Zappa, who died on 4 December 1993:
Well I found out baby
You told me a great big lie
Cause when I got inside
You didn’t have no cherry pie
