"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.
Poe submitted "MS. Found in a Bottle" as one of many entries to a writing contest offered by the weekly Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Each of the stories was well liked by the judges but they unanimously chose "MS. Found in a Bottle" as the contest's winner, earning Poe a $50 prize. The story was then published in the October 19, 1833, issue of the Visiter.
Plot summary
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 Once aboard, the narrator finds outdated maps and useless navigational tools throughout the ship, the timbers of which seem somehow to have grown or expanded over time.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.
Analysis
"MS. Found in a Bottle" is one of Poe's sea tales (others are "A Descent into the Maelström" and "The Oblong Box"). The story's horror comes from its scientific imaginings and its description of a physical world beyond the limits of human exploration.
Biographer Kenneth Silverman wrote that the story is "a sustained crescendo of ever building dread in the face of ever stranger and ever more imminent catastrophe". This prospect of unknown catastrophe both horrifies and stimulates the narrator. Like Poe's narrator in another early work, "Berenice", the narrator in "MS. Found in a Bottle" lives predominantly through his books, or more accurately his manuscripts.
The otherworldly ship on which the narrator finds himself may evoke the legendary ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman. A number of critics have argued that the story's ending references the Hollow Earth theories propounded by John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and Jeremiah N. Reynolds. Symmes and Reynolds proposed that the planet's interior was hollow and habitable, and was accessible via openings at the two poles. The idea was considered scientifically plausible during the early 19th century. Poe also incorporated Symmes' theories into his later work The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only novel. Pym bears a number of similarities to "MS. Found in a Bottle", including an abrupt ending set in the Antarctic.
However, Poe's story may have been intended to poke fun at the more outlandish claims in Symmes' theory. Indeed, some scholars suggest that "MS. Found in a Bottle" was meant to be a parody or satire of sea stories in general, especially in light of the absurdity of the plot and the fact that the narrator unrealistically keeps a diary through it all. William Bittner, for example, wrote that it was poking fun specifically at Jane Porter's novel Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative (1831) or Symzonia (1820) by the pseudonymous "Captain Adam Seaborn", who was possibly John Cleves Symmes. It may be significant that the other tales that Poe wrote during this period, including "Bon-Bon", were meant to be humorous or, as Poe wrote, "burlesques upon criticism generally".