Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809, and
died in Baltimore, October 7, 1849. His father, David Poe,
while a law student in Baltimore, married Elizabeth Arnold,
a beautiful English actress, and went on the stage himself.
Several years later both died within a few weeks of each
other, leaving three children, of whom Edgar was the second.
Impressed by the boy's extraordinary beauty and
intelligence, John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond,
adopted him.
Poe was then sent to England to be educated. There he spent
five or six years in a school at Stoke Newington.
Subsequently he was sent to the University of Virginia and
to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but
remained only a few months at each institution. Finally he
quarreled with Mr. Allan, who died shortly afterward; and
Edgar was not mentioned in the will.
In 1833 the Baltimore _Saturday Visitor_ offered two prizes
of a hundred dollars each for a story and a poem. Poe won
both. This led to his employment in various editorial
capacities in Richmond and New York. Quarrels with his
employers usually resulted in his dismissal. During this
period he was distinguished by an extraordinary degree of
literary activity, however, and it was not long before he
was recognized as one of the most forceful figures in
American literature.
Scores of authors have found inspiration in the pages of
Edgar Allan Poe. Sardou, the celebrated French dramatist,
founded the main incident of his "Scrap of Paper" on Poe's
"The Purloined Letter," and Conan Doyle has admitted that
_Dupin_, the detective who appears in several of Poe's
tales, was the prototype of _Sherlock Holmes_. "A Descent
Into the Maelstroem" is generally regarded as one of the most
representative of his stories.
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the
old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on this
route as well as the youngest of my sons; but about three years past there
happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man--or at
least such as no man ever survived to tell of--and the six hours of deadly
terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul.
"You suppose me a very old man, but I am not. It took less than a single
day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs,
and to un-string my nerves so that I tremble at the least exertion and am
frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little
cliff without getting giddy?"
The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself to
rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over it, while he was
only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on its extreme and
slippery edge--this "little cliff" arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice
of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world
of crags beneath us.
Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink.
In truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion
that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me,
and dared not even glance upward at the sky--while I struggled in vain to
divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were
in danger from the fury of the winds.
It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up
and look out into the distance.
"You must get over these fancies," said the guide; "for I have brought you
here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event
I mentioned, and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your
eye.
"We are now," he continued in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him--"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast--in the
sixty-eighth degree of latitude--in the great province of Nordland--and in
the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is
Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher--hold on to
the grass if you feel giddy--so--and look out, beyond the belt of vapor
beneath us, into the sea."
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean whose waters wore so
inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account
of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human
imagination can conceive.
To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay
outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and
beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly
illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and
ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever.
Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a
distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small
bleak-looking island; or more properly, its position was discernible
through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped.
About two miles nearer the land arose another of smaller size, hideously
craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of
dark rocks.
The appearance of the ocean in the space between the more distant island
and the shore had something very unusual about it. Although at the time so
strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to
under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out
of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a
short, quick angry cross-dashing of water in every direction--as well in
the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the
immediate vicinity of the rocks.
"The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the
Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to the northward
is Ambaaren. Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm, Suarven, and
Buckholm. Farther off--between Moskoe and Vurrgh--are Otterholm, Flimen,
Sandflesen, and Stockholm. These are the true names of the places; but why
it has been thought necessary to name them at all is more than either you
or I can understand. Do you hear anything? Do you see any change in the
water?"
We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen--to which we
had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no
glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. 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 frenzied 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 a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical
alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the
whirlpools one by one disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became
apparent where none had been seen before.
These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance and entering
into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided
vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly--very
suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of
more than a mile in diameter.
The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray;
but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel,
whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining,
and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some
forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and
sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half
shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever
lifts up in its agony to heaven.
"This," said I at length to the old man--"this can be nothing else than
the great whirlpool of the Maelstroem."
"So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-stroem, from the island of Moskoe in the midway."
The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what
I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of
any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence or
of the horror of the scene, or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel
which confounds the beholder.
I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it,
nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of
Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages of his description,
nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their effect
is exceedingly feeble in conveying an impression of the spectacle.
"Between Lofoden and Moskoe," he says, "the depth of the water is between
thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward Ver, this
depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient passage for a vessel,
without the risk of splitting on the rocks, which happens even in the
calmest weather.
"When it is flood, the stream runs up the country between Lofoden and
Moskoe with a boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to
the sea is scarce equaled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts--the
noise being heard several leagues off; and the vortices or pits are of
such an extent and depth that if a ship comes within its attraction it is
inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to
pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes the fragments thereof
are thrown up again.
"But these intervals of tranquillity are only at the turn of the ebb and
flood, and in calm weather, and last but a quarter of an hour, its
violence gradually returning. When the stream is most boisterous, and its
fury heightened by a storm, it is dangerous to come within a Norway mile
of it.
"Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not guarding against
it before they were within its reach. It likewise happens frequently that
whales come too near the stream and are overpowered by its violence; and
then it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their
fruitless struggles to disengage themselves.
"A bear once, attempting to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the
stream and borne down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on
shore. Large stocks of firs and pine-trees, after being absorbed by the
current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew
upon them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among
which they are whirled to and fro."
In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could have
been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the vortex. The
"forty fathoms" must have reference only to portions of the channel close
upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden.
The depth in the center of the Moskoe-stroem must be unmeasurably
greater.... Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon
below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest
Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the
whales and the bears; for it appeared to me a self-evident thing that the
largest ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of
that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the
hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.
"You have had a good look at the whirl now," said the guide; "and if you
will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar
of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to
know something of the Moskoe-stroem."