The MS. Found in a Bottle

Synopsis

"MS. Found in a Bottle" is an 1833 short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The plot follows an unnamed narrator at sea who finds himself in a series of harrowing circumstances. As he nears his own disastrous death while his ship drives ever southward, he writes an "MS.", or manuscript, telling of his adventures which he casts into the sea. Some critics believe the story was meant as a satire of typical sea tales. An unnamed narrator, estranged from his family and country, sets sail as a passenger aboard a cargo ship from Batavia (now known as Jakarta, Indonesia). Some days into the voyage, the ship is first becalmed, then hit by a simoom (a combination of a sand storm and hurricane) that capsizes the ship and sends everyone except the narrator and an old Swede overboard. Driven southward by the magical simoom towards the South Pole, the narrator's ship eventually collides with a gigantic black galleon, and only the narrator manages to scramble aboard. Once aboard, the narrator finds outdated maps and useless navigational tools throughout the ship, the timbers of which seem somehow to have grown or expanded over time. Also, he finds it to be manned by elderly crewmen who are unable to see him; he obtains writing materials from the captain's cabin to keep a journal (the "manuscript" of the title), which he resolves to cast into the sea. This ship too continues to be driven southward, and he notices the crew appears to show signs of hope at the prospect of their destruction as it reaches Antarctica. The ship enters a clearing in the ice, where it is caught in a vast whirlpool and begins to sink into the sea.