Frederick Solly Flood was the attorney general for Gibraltar, where the Mary Celeste had been taken by Morehouse and his crew, and the advocate general for the British Admiralty Court. He was an arrogant, excitable character, infamous for his snap decisions, who had lost his son’s entire inheritance on a horse called ‘The Colonel’ in the 1848 Epsom Derby. At the inquest into the Mary Celeste, Flood decided that the crew must have broken into the cargo hold and drunk the nine barrels of liquor before murdering the captain and his wife and abandoning ship. He had to rethink his ideas after it was pointed out that the Mary Celeste’s cargo was of denatured alcohol, a mixture of ethanol and methanol similar to methylated spirits, and more likely to kill than to intoxicate.
Unabashed, Flood rev
