 | Tales of the grotesque and arabesque |  |
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE.
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 works 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
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 like 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,
and looking like a long line of low beach. My
notice was soon afterwards attracted by the duskyred
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 heated iron. As night came
on, every breath of wind died away, and a 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 with a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned
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 all 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, and 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
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 Simoom 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
South; 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
degrees above the horizon—emitting no decisive
light. There were no clouds whatever 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 unaccompanied
by any ray. 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, silver-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 arrived—to the Swede, never
did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in
pitchy 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 was 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
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 extreme 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,
blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and
upon the very verge of the precipitous descent,
hovered a gigantic ship of nearly four thousand tons.
Although upreared upon the summit of a wave of
more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent
size still 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
off 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 stupendous bows were alone
to be seen, as she rose up, like a demon of the deep,
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
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. A nameless and 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
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 by-gone
time 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
it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavor.
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 operations
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 canvass, 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.
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 of 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 has every
characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were
distended or swelled 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 held her terrific course due
south, with every rag of canvass 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 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 buried 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
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 sybils 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, yet 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 figures fall athwart
my path in the wild glare of the battle-latterns, I
feel as I have never felt before, although I have been
all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed
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 canvass, 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 shrieking of ocean and
of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and—
going down.
| Tales of the grotesque and arabesque | |