The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics)
Page 39
Opening into the garret where they caught him, was a closet, ten feet by eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which the object has not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible – two crucibles connected by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of lead in a state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube, which was close to the brim. The other crucible had some liquid in it, which, as the officers entered, seemed to be furiously dissipating in vapor. They relate that, on finding himself taken, Von Kempelen seized the crucibles with both hands (which were encased in gloves that afterwards turned out to be asbestic), and threw the contents on the tiled floor. It was now that they hand-cuffed him; and, before proceeding to ransack the premises, they searched his person, but nothing unusual was found about him, excepting a paper parcel, in his coat pocket, containing what was afterwards ascertained to be a mixture of antimony and some unknown substance, in nearly, but not quite, equal proportions. All attempts at analyzing the unknown substance have, so far, failed, but that it will ultimately be analyzed, is not to be doubted.
Passing out of the closet with their prisoner, the officers went through a sort of ante-chamber, in which nothing material was found, to the chemist’s sleeping-room. They here rummaged some drawers and boxes, but discovered only a few papers, of no importance, and some good coin, silver and gold. At length, looking under the bed, they saw a large, common hair trunk, without hinges, hasp, or lock, and with the top lying carelessly across the bottom portion. Upon attempting to draw this trunk out from under the bed, they found that, with their united strength (there were three of them, all powerful men), they ‘could not stir it one inch’. Much astonished at this, one of them crawled under the bed, and looking into the trunk, said:
‘No wonder we could n’t move it – why, it’s full to the brim of old bits of brass!’
Putting his feet, now, against the wall, so as to get a good purchase, and pushing with all his force, while his companions pulled with all theirs, the trunk, with much difficulty, was slid out from under the bed, and its contents examined. The supposed brass with which it was filled was all in small, smooth pieces, varying from the size of a pea to that of a dollar; but the pieces were irregular in shape, although all more or less flat – looking, upon the whole, ‘very much as lead looks when thrown upon the ground in a molten state, and there suffered to grow cool’. Now, not one of these officers for a moment suspected this metal to be anything but brass. The idea of its being gold never entered their brains, of course; how could such a wild fancy have entered it? And their astonishment may be well conceived, when next day it became known, all over Bremen, that the ‘lot of brass’ which they had carted so contemptuously to the police office, without putting themselves to the trouble of pocketing the smallest scrap, was not only gold – real gold – but gold far finer than any employed in coinage – gold, in fact, absolutely pure, virgin, without the slightest appreciable alloy!
I need not go over the details of Von Kempelen’s confession (as far as it went) and release, for these are familiar to the public. That he has actually realized, in spirit and in effect, if not to the letter, the old chimera of the philosopher’s stone, no sane person is at liberty to doubt. The opinions of Arago are, of course, entitled to the greatest consideration; but he is by no means infallible; and what he says of bismuth, in his report to the academy, must be taken cum grano salis. The simple truth is, that up to this period, all analysis has failed; and until Von Kempelen chooses to let us have the key to his own published enigma, it is more than probable that the matter will remain, for years, in statu quo. All that yet can fairly be said to be known, is, that ‘pure gold can be made at will, and very readily, from lead, in connection with certain other substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown’.
Speculation, of course, is busy as to the immediate and ultimate results of this discovery – a discovery which few thinking persons will hesitate in referring to an increased interest in the matter of gold generally, by the late developments in California; and this reflection brings us inevitably to another – the exceeding inopportuneness of Von Kempelen’s analysis. If many were prevented from adventuring to California, by the mere apprehension that gold would so materially diminish in value, on account of its plentifulness in the mines there, as to render the speculation of going so far in search of it a doubtful one – what impression will be wrought now, upon the minds of those about to emigrate, and especially upon the minds of those actually in the mineral region, by the announcement of this astounding discovery of Von Kempelen? a discovery which declares, in so many words, that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes, (whatever that worth may be), gold now is, or at least soon will be (for it cannot be supposed that Von Kempelen can long retain his secret) of no greater value than lead, and of far inferior value to silver. It is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the discovery; but one thing may be positively maintained – that the announcement of the discovery six months ago, would have had material influence in regard to the settlement of California.
In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise of two hundred per cent in the price of lead, and nearly twenty-five per cent in that of silver.
Commentary
As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all…
‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845)
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE
First published
Baltimore Saturday Visiter (19 October 1833)
Reprinted
The People’s Advocate (Newburyport, Mass., 26 October 1833)
The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1836 (Philadelphia, 1835)
Southern Literary Messenger (December 1835)
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Vol. 1
Broadway Journal (11 October 1845)
Translated
Baudelaire, ‘Manuscrit trouvé dans une Bouteille’, Le Pays (January 1855)
Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.
– Hélas! tout est abîme, – action, désir, rêve,
Parole!
BAUDELAIRE, Le Gouffre (1862)
In July 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visiter announced an open competition: with a prize of $50 for the best short story and of $25 for the best poem. Poe submitted a whole series of stories (possibly six in all) under the general title, Tales of the Folio Club. Not only did ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ win the main prize but his entire entry received the judges’ accolade:
We cannot refrain from saying that the author owes it to his reputation, as well as to the gratification of the community, to publish the entire volume. These tales are eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous, and poetical imagination, a rich style, a fertile invention, and varied and curious learning.
His literary bottle had been miraculously retrieved. That prize marked the beginning of Poe’s career.
Even then his learning, however, seemed ‘various and curious’, half solemn, half bantering. He had drawn on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – that was clear. With its porous, worm-eaten timbers, his ghost ship too was a ‘skeleton ship’:
Like vessel, like crew! Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship’s crew, and… the latter winneth the ancient Mariner.
Part III
But there is evidence of other debts: to Captain Adam Seaborn’s Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery (1820), for example, and Jane Porter’s romance, Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative of His Shipwreck (1831). Was he then poking fun at Jane Porter and John Cleves Symmes? In part, perhaps. In part he was translating their conventional language into his own symbolic terms: where ‘thoughtless touches’ upon a sail spread out into the word ‘DISCOVERY’; where a split narrator (half sceptic, half neurasthenic) is driven beyond the reach of mechanical reason to rapt
s
ensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key…A new sense – a new entity is added to my soul.
This was the Edgar Allan Poe to be hailed by Dostoyevsky (of The Double) and Conrad (of The Secret Sharer). But the drive beyond reason, beyond the gadgets of mathematics and obsolete science, inevitably moves beyond intuition, beyond life itself (as the angelic dialogues will show), to ‘Life-in-Death’. Announced by ‘spiral exhalations’, the Flying Dutchman is inevitably whirled past the polar ice, through the polar night, to that ultimate polarization of black and white – issuing in the vortex.
1. (p. 1) ‘Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre…’ : ‘He who has but a moment to live, no longer has anything to dissimulate.’ Philippe Quinault (1635–88) – a suitably obscure but prolific dramatist for Poe to quote – wrote some fourteen opera librettos for Lully. His Atys, a tragédie-opéra in five acts, was first performed on 10 January 1676.
This supplanted the original epigraph in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter : ‘A wet sheet and a flowing sea. – Cunningham’.
2. (p. 1) the Pyrrhonism of my opinions : Viz, extreme scepticism as taught by Pyrrho of Elis (c. 300 B.C.), who argued that the ‘attainment’ of certain knowledge was impossible, since the contrary of every proposition can be maintained with equal plausibility.
3. (p. 1) from the port of Batavia… to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands : From modern Djakarta, that is, throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The Straits of Sunda divide Java and Sumatra.
4. (p. 2) We had… on board coir, jaggeree, ghee: Coco-nut fibre (for cordage), brown sugar (evaporated from palm sap) and butter (clarified from buffalo’s milk). The makeweight of ‘opium’ was to remain a hall-mark of Poe’s imaginary voyages.
5. (p. 2) the vessel consequently crank : Zig-zagged, twisted and turned.
6. (p. 2) the small grabs of the Archipelago : From Arab ghurāb, ‘a raven’ : two-masted coasting vessels.
7. (p. 2) in apprehending a Simoom : A misapprehension, possibly, for ‘typhoon’. The simoom or simoon is a dry desert wind.
8. (p. 3) We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea : Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner haunts and pervades this entire manuscript: ‘How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole’
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along…
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
Part I, lines 41–50
9. (p. 4) we must have run down the coast of New Holland: Yet as they scud down the Australian coast into the Antarctic night, ‘farther to the southward than any previous navigators’ they ‘felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice’. For Poe had been reading not only The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery (1820) by one Captain ‘Adam Seaborn’, possibly the eponymous Symmes himself.
‘I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within… that it is open at the poles’ pronounced a manifesto in 1818 to ‘all the world’. John Cleves Symmes, its author, had studied the confused mariners’ reports of warmer water and contrary migration of birds near the poles to promote one overriding idea: that the earth, formed by rotation, consisted of five concentric spheres with access through ‘holes at the Poles’.
Hollow Earthers were as vociferous in the early nineteenth century as Flat Earthers. Whether Poe really believed in ‘Symmes’s Hole,’ as it was popularly called, he liked to make play with this idea of the globe as a series of spheres with open drainage, as it were, passing from the outer rim of one down the inner side of another.
10. (p. 5) the slumbers of the kraken : This largest of all sea monsters was first mentioned by Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History of Norway (1752) – the ultimate source for A Descent into the Maelström.
11. (p. 5) ‘See! see!’ cried he… ‘Almighty God! see! see!’: cf. the sighting of Coleridge’s ‘spectre-bark’:
See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part III, lines 167–70
‘But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane.’
12. (p. 8) they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age: This whole company of decrepit, shrivelled ancients seems a multiplication of Coleridge’s one lone ancient:
whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part VII, lines 618–19
cf. Melville’s ship of Eld, the Albatross with ‘her long-bearded lookouts’ (Moby-Dick, ch. 52).
13. (p. 9) nearly my own height… about five feet eight inches: ‘I have seen the captain face to face’: for he is exactly Edgar Allan Poe’s own height. He is the narrator’s mysterious double – a theme to be more explicitly developed in William Wilson (1839).
14. (p. 10) some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue: After the stress on ‘DISCOVERY’, on ‘Spanish oak’, on obsolete ‘mathematical instruments’ and a royal ‘commission’ – Burton R. Pollin argued – is ‘there any doubt that the language was Spanish and that this was Christopher Columbus…?’ (Romance Notes vol. 12 (1971), p. 336). ‘His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future…’
15. (p. 10) fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis: At Baalbek in Lebanon, at Palmyra (biblical Tadmor) in Syria, and at Persepolis – ceremonial capital of Darius I, Xerxes and their successors – in Persia.
16. (p. 10) stupendous ramparts of ice… like the walls of the universe : cf. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen :
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken –
The ice was all between.
Part I, lines 51–8
17. (p. 10) howling and shrieking… to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract: That shriek, that ‘hideous velocity’ southward ‘into the embraces of the cataract’ – reach their fullest and final expression in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), ch. 25.
18. (p. 10) some exciting knowledge… whose attainment is destruction: cf. the end of Baudelaire’s Le Voyage:
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
This fire so scorches our brain, that we wish
To plunge into the depths of the gulf, Hell or Heaven, who cares?
To find something new in the depths of the Unknown!
19. (p. 11) we are whirling dizzily… round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre: Though Poe, with his note on Mercator, tries to put us off the trail, this spinning, vertiginous plunge must be into ‘Symmes’s Hole’. According to Symmes, as it happens, access was so wide that a voyager ‘might pass from the outer side… over the rim and down upon the inner side a great distance before becoming aware of the fact at all’. But Poe’s theatrical evocation (of the epigraph) is inevitably resolved in this stagey close.
20. (p. 11) originally published in 1831: The ‘NOTE’ was added in 1845. Either Poe made an error, or – more likely – was deliberately pushing this prize piece back among his twenty-two-year-old juvenilia. ‘The Tale… was among the first I ever wrote’, he told Bev
erley Tucker. ‘Generally, people praise extravagantly those of which I am ashamed…’ (Richmond: 1 December 1835)
Select Bibliography
JOHN C. GUILDS, JR, ‘Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”: A Possible Source’, Notes and Queries vol. 201 (1956), p. 452
FRANZ H. LINK, ‘ “Discovery” und “Destruction”… “MS. Found in a Bottle” ’, Die neueren Sprachen (1961), pp. 27–38