Why was the lifeboat missing from 'Mary Celeste'?

That it was removed for use or that there were no lifeboats is the reason why the lifeboat was missing from the half brig Mary Celeste. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs requested that co-owner and majority shareholder James H. Winchester replace the rickety, substandard lifeboats, of which records total as three, before the fateful departure on Tuesday, November 5, 1872. Twentieth and twenty-first century investigators of the mystery of the hermaphrodite brig in question's dereliction between the Azores and Portugal in December 1872 tend to question whether the request was honored since the boarding party from Dei Gratia in 1872 and from the Gibraltar Admiralty Court in 1873 found no evidence of lifeboats other than a frayed halyard, whose use could have been as an inadequate towing line, and marks on the deck consistent with a rickety lifeboat having been moved.