United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
“Gratian,” cried West, calling one of the sailors, “take the helm; and you, Hearne, go down into the hold.” On a sudden the cry of “Land!” resounded, and every eye was turned southwards. “Land” is the only word to be found at the beginning of the nineteenth chapter of Edgar Poe’s book.
His narrative was founded upon the manuscript in which the details of that extraordinary and disastrous voyage across the Antarctic Sea was related.” I thought I must be dreaming when I heard Captain Len Guy’s words. Edgar Poe’s romance was nothing but a fiction, a work of imagination by the most brilliant of our American writers. And here was a sane man treating that fiction as a reality.
Then he promptly withdrew. The Jane was, in Edgar Poe’s romance, the name of the ship which had rescued Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters from the wreck of the Grampus, and Captain Len Guy had now uttered it for the first time. It occurred to me then that Guy was the name of the captain of the Jane, an English ship; but what of that?
Nothing remained of the eminence that had been carried away in the artificial landslip, from which the captain of the Jane, Patterson, his second officer, and five of his men had happily escaped. The village of Klock-Klock had thus disappeared; and doubtless the mystery of the strange discoveries narrated in Edgar Poe’s work was now and ever would remain beyond solution.
It was but recently that a writer in the New York Times declared Poe to have been “grub-staked by demons.” The story “Bon-Bon” offers a specimen of Poe’s grimly grotesque humour. It first appeared in the Broadway Journal of August, 1835. The devil of this most un-American of all American authors is not the child of New World fancy, but part of European imagination.
This writer, to whom the inner world was more of a reality than the external world, had many visions, especially of the devil. The two seem to have been on a familiar footing. The devil, we must admit, filled Poe’s imagination even if we will not go so far as to agree with his critics that he had Satan substituted for soul.
In this chapter I have to give a brief summary of Edgar Poe’s romance, which was published at Richmond under the title of We shall see whether there was any room for doubt that the adventures of this hero of romance were imaginary. But indeed, among the multitude of Poe’s readers, was there ever one, with the sole exception of Len Guy, who believed them to be real?
Then I remembered! Patterson was the second officer of the Jane, the mate of that schooner which had picked up Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters on the wreck of the Grampus, the Jane having reached Tsalal Island; the Jane which was attacked by natives and blown up in the midst of those waters. So then it was all true? Edgar Poe’s work was that of an historian, not a writer of romance?
The extraordinary thing is that Captain Len Guy and myself, who had read Edgar Poe’s book over and over again, did not see at once, when Hunt came on the ship at the Falklands, that he and the half-breed were identical! I can only admit that we were both blindfolded by some hidden action of Fate, just when certain pages of that book ought to have effectually cleared our vision.
I had only to listen to him, and as I had read Poe’s romance over and over again, I was curious to hear what the captain had to say about it. “And now,” he resumed in a sharper tone and with a shake in his voice which denoted a certain amount of nervous irritation, “it is possible that you did not know the Pym family; that you have never met them either at Providence or at Nantucket ”
Word Of The Day