Ms. Found in a Bottle

Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre

N’a plus rien a dissimuler.

—Quinault—Atys.

Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage

and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me

from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no

common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to

methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered

up.—Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me

great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their

eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid

thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been

reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of

imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism

of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a

strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my

mind with a very common error of this age—I mean the habit of

referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such

reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no

person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the

severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I

have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible

tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a

crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to

which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a

nullity.

After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year

18— , from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island

of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I

went as passenger—having no other inducement than a kind of

nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.

Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons,

copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was

freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands.

We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few

cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel

consequently crank.

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days

stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident

to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting

with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were

bound.

One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very

singular, isolated cloud, to the N.W. It was remarkable, as well

for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our

departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset,

when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting

in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a

long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted

by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar

character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change,

and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I

could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found

the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot,

and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising

from heat iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away,

an more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a

candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion,

and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without

the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain

said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were

drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled,

and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting

principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon

deck. I went below—not without a full presentiment of evil.

Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I

told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I

said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My

uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about

midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper

step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming

noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a

mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the

ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness

of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore

and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the

salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as

her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute,

heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense

pressure of the tempest, finally righted.

By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say.

Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery,

jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great

difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at

first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so

terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of

mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed.

After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped

with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with

all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon

discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All

on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept

overboard;—the captain and mates must have perished as they

slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without

assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the

ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary

expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like

pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should

have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful

velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over

us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered excessively, and,

in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but

to our extreme joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had

made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury of the blast

had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the

violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total

cessation with dismay; well believing, that, in our shattered

condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell

which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no

means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and

nights—during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of

jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle—the

hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly

succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first

violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest

I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was,

with trifling variations, S.E. and by S.; and we must have run

down the coast of New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became

extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the

northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and

clambered a very few degrees above the horizon—emitting no

decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was

upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury.

About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again

arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light,

properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without

reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before

sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went

out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It

was a dim, sliver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the

unfathomable ocean.

We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day—that day to me

has not yet arrived—to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward

we were enshrouded in patchy darkness, so that we could not have

seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night

continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric

sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We

observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with

unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual

appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All

around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering

desert of ebony. Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the

spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent

wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless,

and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the

mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had

no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our

situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to

the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great

amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In

the meantime every moment threatened to be our last—every

mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed

anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly

buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our

cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship;

but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope

itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I

thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot

of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas

became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at

an elevation beyond the albatross—at times became dizzy with the

velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew

stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.

We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick

scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. “See!

see!” cried he, shrieking in my ears, “Almighty God! see! see!”

As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light

which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and

threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards,

I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a

terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the

precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four

thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more

than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size exceeded

that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her

huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the

customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon

protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished

surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to

and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with

horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of

sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that

ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows

were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and

horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she

paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own

sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and—came down.

At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over

my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly

the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length

ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea.

The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in

that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the

inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence,

upon the rigging of the stranger.

As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the

confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the

crew. With little difficulty I made my way unperceived to the

main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an

opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can

hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of

the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps

the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself

with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I

had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and

apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a

hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion

of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a

convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.

I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold

forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of

concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his

face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance.

There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His

knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame

quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low

broken tone, some words of a language which I could not

understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of

singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation.

His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second

childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on

deck, and I saw him no more.

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my

soul —a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the

lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear

futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like

my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never—I know

that I shall never—be satisfied with regard to the nature of my

conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are

indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly

novel. A new sense—a new entity is added to my soul.

It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and

the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus.

Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I

cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter

folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just

now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate; it was no

long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private

cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have

written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is

true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the

world, but I will not fall to make the endeavour. At the last

moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the

sea.

An incident has occurred which has given me new room for

meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned chance? I

had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting

any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the

bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate,

I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a

neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The

studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless

touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY.

I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the

vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war.

Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a

supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily

perceive—what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not

how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular

cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her

severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally

flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is

always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an

unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.

I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a

material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character

about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the

purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme

porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition

which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart

from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an

observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every

characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by

any unnatural means.

In reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old

weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection.

“It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was

entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the

ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the

seaman.”

About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of

the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I

stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious

of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold,

they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their

knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double

with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind;

their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened

with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly

in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay

scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and

obsolete construction.

I mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From

that period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has

continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas

packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail

booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into

the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind

of a man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it

impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to

experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of

miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and

forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink

of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From

billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever

seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and

the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the

deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to

destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only

natural cause which can account for such effect. I must suppose

the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or

impetuous under-tow.

I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin—but,

as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his

appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might

bespeak him more or less than man, still, a feeling of

irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of

wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly my own

height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a

well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor

remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression

which reigns upon the face—it is the intense, the wonderful, the

thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which

excites within my spirit a sense—a sentiment ineffable. His

forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the

stamp of a myriad of years. His gray hairs are records of the

past, and his grayer eyes are sibyls of the future. The cabin

floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and

mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten

charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored,

with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a

commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a

monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I

saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue,

and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed

to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.

The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The

crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their

eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers

fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I

feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my

life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of

fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my

very soul has become a ruin.

When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions.

If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall

I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any

idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and

ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the

blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but,

about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly

and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into

the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.

As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current—if that

appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and

shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a

velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly

impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these

awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will

reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident

that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some

never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It

must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every

probability in its favor.

The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there

is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of

hope than of the apathy of despair.

In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a

crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the

sea! Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens suddenly to the right,

and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense

concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic

amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness

and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon

my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly

within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and

bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is

quivering—oh God! and—going down.

NOTE.—The “MS. Found in a Bottle,” was originally published in

1831, and it was not until many years afterwards that I became

acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is

represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar

Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole

itself being represented by a black rock, towering to a

prodigious height.