The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

by Edgar Allan Poe

  Dorothy hopped inside the opening to escape being pricked, and Zeb and the Wizard, after enduring a few stabs from the thorns, were glad to follow her. At once the Mangaboos began piling up the rocks of glass again, and as the little man realized that they were all about to be entombed in the mountain he said to the children:

  “My dears, what shall we do? Jump out and fight?”

  “What’s the use?” replied Dorothy. “I’d as soon die here as live much longer among these cruel and heartless people.”

  “That’s the way I feel about it,” remarked Zeb, rubbing his wounds. “I’ve had enough of the Mangaboos.”

  “All right,” said the Wizard; “I’m with you, whatever you decide. But we can’t live long in this cavern, that’s certain.”

  Noticing that the light was growing dim he picked up his nine piglets, patted each one lovingly on its fat little head, and placed them carefully in his inside pocket.

  Zeb struck a match and lighted one of the lanterns. The rays of the colored suns were now shut out from them forever, for the last chinks had been filled up in the wall that separated their prison from the Land of the Mangaboos.

  “How big is this hole?” asked Dorothy.

  “I’ll explore it and see,” replied the boy.

  So he carried the lantern back for quite a distance, while Dorothy and the Wizard followed at his side. The cavern did not come to an end, as they had expected it would, but slanted upward through the great glass mountain, running in a direction that promised to lead them to the side opposite the Mangaboo country.

  “It isn’t a bad road,” observed the Wizard, “and if we followed it it might lead us to some place that is more comfortable than this black pocket we are now in. I suppose the vegetable folk were always afraid to enter this cavern because it is dark; but we have our lanterns to light the way, so I propose that we start out and discover where this tunnel in the mountain leads to.”

  The others agreed readily to this sensible suggestion, and at once the boy began to harness Jim to the buggy. When all was in readiness the three took their seats in the buggy and Jim started cautiously along the way, Zeb driving while the Wizard and Dorothy each held a lighted lantern so the horse could see where to go.

  Sometimes the tunnel was so narrow that the wheels of the buggy grazed the sides; then it would broaden out as wide as a street; but the floor was usually smooth, and for a long time they travelled on without any accident. Jim stopped sometimes to rest, for the climb was rather steep and tiresome.

  “We must be nearly as high as the six colored suns, by this time,” said Dorothy. “I didn’t know this mountain was so tall.”

  “We are certainly a good distance away from the Land of the Mangaboos,” added Zeb; “for we have slanted away from it ever since we started.”

  But they kept steadily moving, and just as Jim was about tired out with his long journey the way suddenly grew lighter, and Zeb put out the lanterns to save the oil.

  To their joy they found it was a white light that now greeted them, for all were weary of the colored rainbow lights which, after a time, had made their eyes ache with their constantly shifting rays. The sides of the tunnel showed before them like the inside of a long spy-glass, and the floor became more level. Jim hastened his lagging steps at this assurance of a quick relief from the dark passage, and in a few moments more they had emerged from the mountain and found themselves face to face with a new and charming country.

  —From L. Frank Baum’s 1908 novel Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, which takes his beloved characters underground into a Hollow Earth version of Oz.

  An anonymous nineteenth-century etching of “Symmes’s Hole, as It Would Appear to a Lunarian with a Telescope.”

  8. RECEPTION

  The first page of Pym in the January 1837 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. The novella was intended to be published serially; however, Poe left his job at the magazine on January 3 of that year, and only two installments of Pym were published in the Messenger.

  The title page of Pym as published by Harper & Brothers in July 1838. Though the publishing house intended to publish the work in May 1837, the Panic of 1837 delayed it. Ultimately, this publication marked the first full appearance of Poe’s work. Note that Poe’s name does not appear on the title page, since the book was published as an “authentic account” by Pym. Few of its early reviewers were fooled, though some of its readers seem to have been.

  Contemporary Reviews

  This work “comprises the details of a mutiny and atrocious butchery on board the American ship Grampus, on her way to the South Seas, in the month of June, 1827, with an account of the recapture of the vessel by the survivors; their shipwreck and subsequent horrible sufferings from famine; their deliverance by means of the British schooner, Jane Guy; the brief cruise of this latter vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; her capture, and the massacre of her crew among a group of islands in the eighty-fourth parallel of southern latitude; together with the incredible adventures and discoveries still farther south, to which that distressing calamity gave rise.” There are a great many tough stories in this book, told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition, beyond a Robinson Crusoe-ish sort of simplicity of narration. The work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is, that it is too liberally stuffed with “horrid circumstances of blood and battle.” We would not be so uncourteous as to insinuate a doubt of Mr. Pym’s veracity, now that he lies “under the sod;” but we should very much question that gentleman’s word, who should affirm, after having thoroughly perused the volume before us, that he believed the various adventures and hair-breadth ’scapes therein recorded. Such a capacious maw would swallow, as indubitably veritable, a story we have recently read or heard, of a serpent killed in the East Indies, in whose body was found, neatly dressed in black, the chaplain of an adjacent military station, who had been missed for a week.

  —A review by Lewis Gaylord Clark in the October 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker.

  An Indian warrior pursing a flying tory, seized his foe by the tail of his peruke, and drew his scalping knife for the purpose of consummating his victory, but the artificial head-covering of the British solider came off in the struggle, and the bald-headed owner ran away unhurt, leaving the surprised Indian in possession of the easily acquired trophy. After gazing at the singular and apparently unnatural formation, he dashed it to the ground in disdain, and quietly exclaimed “A d—d lie!” We find ourselves in the same predicament with the volume before us; we imagined, from various discrepancies and other errors discovered in a casual glance, sufficient also to convince us of the faulty construction and poorness of style, that we had met—with a proper subject for our critical scalping knife—but a steady perusal of the whole book compelled us to throw it away in contempt, with an exclamation very similar to the natural phrase of the Indian. A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised; the voyages of Gulliver were politically satirical, and the adventures of Munchausen, the acknowledged caricature of a celebrated traveller. Sinbad the sailor, Peter Wilkins, and More’s Utopia, are confessedly works of imagination; but Arthur Gordon Pym puts forth a series of travels outraging possibility, and coolly requires his insulted readers to believe his ipse dixit, although he confesses that the early portions of his precious effusion were published in the Southern Literary Messenger as a story written by the editor, Mr. Poe, because he believed that the public at large would pronounce his adventures to be “an impudent fiction.” Mr. Poe, if not the author of Pym’s book, is at least responsible for its publication, for it is stated in the preface that Mr. Poe assured the author that the shrewdness and common sense of the public would give it a chance of being received as truth. We regret to find Mr. Poe’s name in connexion with such a mass of ignorance and effrontery.

  The title of the work serves as a full index of the contents. The “incredible adventures and discoveries” in the An
tarctic ocean conclude somewhat abruptly; the surviving voyageurs, Pym and a half-breed Indian, are left, madly careering, in a frail bark canoe, in a strong current, running due south, in the immediate vicinity of the Pole—volcanoes bursting from the “milky depths of the ocean,” showers of white ashes covering the boat and its inmates, and a limitless cataract “rolling silently into the sea from some immense rampart in the heavens, whose summit was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance.” Two or three of the final chapters are supposed to be mislaid; therefore, we have no account of the escape of Arthur Gordon Pym from the irresistible embraces of the cataract to his snuggery at New York.

  There is nothing original in the description of the newly discovered islands in the Antarctic sea, unless we except the scene wherein a few ambushed savages precipitate more than a million tons of soft rock from the hill side, by merely pulling at a few strong cords of grape vine attached to some stakes driven in the ground. The shipwreck is unnecessarily horrible—a rapid succession of improbabilities destroys the interest of the reader, and the writer’s evident ignorance in all nautical matters forbids the possibility of belief. We are told that when his boat, sloop-rigged, carrying a mainsail and jib, lost her mast close off by the board, he boomed along before the wind, under the jib, and shipping seas over the counter! A cabin boy of a month’s standing would have been ashamed of such a phrase! Then, we hear of a ship sailing over a boat in a gale of wind, and hooking one of the boatmen by a copper bold in her bottom—the said bolt having gone through the back part of the neck, between two sinews, and out just below the right ear! The body was discovered by the mate of the ship, when the vessel gave an immense lurch to windward! and was eventually obtained after several ineffectual efforts, during the lurches of the ship—and, notwithstanding its long immersion and peculiar transfixion, was restored to life, and proved to be the hero of the tale, Arthur Gordon Pym.

  The mutiny is rather a common place mutiny; but Pym’s secretion in the hold is a matter of positive improbability. No Yankee captain of a whaler ever packed his oil casks in such a careless manner as described by the veracious A. G. P., who, by the way, sleeps a nap of three days and three nights duration, “at the very least.”

  The annexed description of the river waters of the Antarctic isles is a fair specimen of the outrageous statements which “the shrewdness and good sense of the public” are required to believe.

  “At every step we took inland the conviction forced itself upon us that we were in a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men. We saw nothing with which we had been formerly conversant. The trees resembled no growth of either the torrid, the temperate, or the northern frigid zones, and were altogether unlike those of the lower southern latitudes we had already traversed. The very rocks were novel in their mass, their color, and their stratification; and the streams themselves, utterly incredible as it may appear, had so little in common with those of other climates, that we were scrupulous of tasting them, and, indeed, had difficulty in bringing ourselves to believe that their qualities were purely those of nature. At a small brook which crossed our path (the first we had reached) Too-wit and his attendants halted to drink. On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted; and it was not until some time afterward we came to understand that such was the appearance of the streams throughout the whole group. I am at a loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words. Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum Arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform color—presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk. This variation in shade was produced in a manner which excited as profound astonishment in the minds of our party as the mirror had done in the case of Too-wit. Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled.”

  —William Evans Burton’s review of September 1838, published in his own Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. In a letter of June 1840, Poe addressed this very review: “You once wrote in your magazine a sharp critique upon a book of mine—a very silly book—Pym. Had I written a similar criticism upon a book of yours, you feel that you would have been my enemy for life, and you therefore imagine in my bosom a latent hostility towards yourself. This has been a mainspring in your whole conduct towards me since our first acquaintance. It has acted to prevent all cordiality. In a general view of human nature your idea is just—but you will find yourself puzzled in judging me by ordinary motives. Your criticism was essentially correct and therefore, although severe, it did not occasion in me one solitary emotion either of anger or dislike. But even while I write these words, I am sure you will not believe them.”

  “The marvelous story—as we learn from the preface—was first published in an American periodical as a work of fiction. It is a pity it was not left as such. As a romance, some portions of it are sufficiently amusing and exciting; but, when palmed upon the public as a true thing, it cannot appear in any other light than that of a bungling business—an impudent attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant.”

  —From an anonymous review in The Metropolitan Magazine, November 1838.

  9. AFTERLIFE

  A Voyage to Cythera

  My heart was like a bird and took to flight,

  Around the rigging circling joyously;

  The ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky

  Like a great angel drunken with the light.

  “What is yon isle, sad and funereal?”

  “Cythera, famed in deathless song,” say they,

  “The gay old bachelors’ Eldorado—Nay,

  Look! ’tis a poor bare country after all!”

  Isle of sweet secrets and heart banquetings!

  The queenly shade of antique Venus thrills

  Scentlike above thy level seas and fills

  Our souls with languor and all amorous things.

  Fair island of green myrtles and blown flowers

  Held holy by all men for evermore,

  Where the faint sighs of spirits that adore

  Float like rose-incense through the quiet hours,

  And dovelike sounds each murmured orison:—

  Cythera lay there barren ’neath bright skies,

  A rocky waste rent by discordant cries:

  Natheless I saw a curious thing thereon.

  No shady temple was it, close enshrined

  I’ the trees; no flower-crowned priestess hither came

  With her young body burnt by secret flame,

  Baring her breast to the caressing wind;

  But when so close to the land’s edge we drew

  Our canvas scared the sea-fowl—gradually

  We knew it for a three-branched gallows tree

  Like a black cypress stark against the bl
ue.

  A rotten carcase hung, whereon did sit

  A swarm of foul black birds; with writhe and shriek

  Each sought to pierce and plunge his knife-like beak

  Deep in the bleeding trunk and limbs of it.

  The eyes were holes; the belly opened wide,

  Streaming its heavy entrails on the thighs;

  The grim birds, gorged with dreadful delicacies,

  Had dug and furrowed it on every side.

  Beneath the blackened feet there strove and pressed

  A herd of jealous beasts with upward snout,

  And in the midst of these there turned about

  One, the chief hangman, larger than the rest.….

  Lone Cytherean! now all silently

  Thou sufferest these insults to atone

  For those old infamous sins that thou hast known,

  The sins that locked the gate o’ the grave to thee.

  Mine are thy sorrows, ludicrous corse; yea, all

  Are mine! I stood thy swaying limbs beneath,

  And, like a bitter vomit, to my teeth

  There rose old sorrows in a stream of gall.

  O thou unhappy devil, I felt afresh,

  Gazing at thee, the beaks and jaws of those

  Black savage panthers and those ruthless crows,

  Who loved of old to macerate my flesh.

  The sea was calm, the sky without a cloud;

  Henceforth for me all things that came to pass