A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM (1841)

DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM might be seen as a companion-piece to another "tall tale of the sea,' MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE. However, nothing occurs in DESCENT that seems to break the laws of causality, as MS. does, although once again we have a situation where a titanic storm picks up a ship and carries it in the storm's wake rather than simply overturning the craft.

It's close to being a naturalistic story, at least in terms of the science of Poe's time, but I choose to label it as "uncanny" because it portrays the maelstrom as being a phenomenon so intense that the young man who passes through it has his hair turned white in one night.

When the narrator begins expousing on how dreary the sea looks prior to a storm's outbreak, I half expected Poe to make another ill-considered attack on Kant's notion of the sublime, as he did in FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, but he did not.