A Descent Into the Maelström

A traveler in the Lofoten Islands, off the western coast of Norway, is led by a local guide to the summit of a black cliff and shown the great maelström that boils between the islands twice a day. The guide — gaunt, white-haired, and apparently aged before his time — points across the heaving water and tells his story. Three years before, in a sudden hurricane, his fishing smack was caught between the islands and dragged into the funnel. As his boat made its descent toward the spinning wall of the vortex, with his brother already lost overboard, he found himself doing something he could not entirely explain: he began, in the teeth of certain death, to observe.

Poe published A Descent into the Maelström in Graham's Magazine in 1841, in the same period as The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It is the prototype of a strain of his work that anticipates Jules Verne and Conrad more than the gothic tradition — the survival story powered by intellectual observation, in which the human capacity for analysis is what stands between a man and annihilation. The fisherman's saving insight — that cylindrical objects in the whirlpool descend more slowly than other shapes — is presented as a real physical principle, lashed to a cask, and used as the lever that finally pries the narrator out of the vortex.

A Descent Into the Maelström rewards readers who want to see Poe at his most lucid and least gothic — the Poe whom Verne credited as the father of speculative adventure, whom Borges called the inventor of the analytical hero, and who in this story produces one of the great descriptions in English of an extreme physical phenomenon being apprehended in real time. It rewards them with a frame, a voice, and a closing image — the survivor returning to a village where no one believes him and where his hair has turned white in a single afternoon — that have been quoted, echoed, and re-imagined ever since.