by Poe · Cluster: Night Journey Vision · Katabasis Descent · Quest Hero
Abstract
A rationalist narrator’s manuscript of a doomed sea voyage: storm, a spectral ghost-ship crewed by aged phantoms, and a final plunge into a southern polar whirlpool toward forbidden knowledge.
Testo / Text
Parti / Parts
Readability (prose)59.6 Flesch ease10.7 FK grade13.9 Fog12% complex23.1 words/sent
Connections
Topoi: Night Journey Vision, Katabasis Descent, Quest Archetypes: Ghost, Outsider Motifs: Sea, Storm, Water, Night, Ghosts, Decay, Ruins the Abbey, Letters and Writing Themes & Concepts: Sublime, Terror and Horror, Mortality, Uncanny Forms & Genres: Short Story, Gothic Novel Settings: Sea (2), Ship
Testo integrale / Full text
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.