Forthcoming from Nawakum Press
2022
A DESCENT into the
MAELSTROM
EDGAR ALLAN POE
“Here, my dear readers, is an American novelist of high reputation; you know his name no doubt... So allow me to tell you about the man and his work; they both occupy an important place in the history of the imagination, for Poe created a separate genre, proceeding only from himself... he has pushed back the limits of the impossible; he will have imitators. They will try to go beyond, to exaggerate his way; but more than one will think they can surpass him, who will not even equal him.”
~ Jules Verne, Musée des familles 1864
“As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed—to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion—heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.”
In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe, the architect of the modern short story, wrote ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom.’ Poe considered it one of his best tales. It draws its inspiration from the raging waters that surround the desolate Lofoten Island archipelago in the North Sea, off the Norwegian coast. Three fishermen, who are brothers, are caught in a windstorm and pulled into the swirling tumult that creates one of the largest whirlpools, or maelstroms, in the world. Poe had learned about this deadly sea phenomena from several sources, which included an account in Fraser’s Magazine in 1834 titled ‘The Maelstrom: A Fragment’. The narrator of Poe’s tale is a fisherman who tells the tale of how he and his two brothers were caught in the maelstrom, and how his brothers were sucked under into the abyss and perished, while he alone managed to survive.
