Nautical Gothic

What could be more frightening than the crumbling spires of an ancient castle or the echoing halls of a cursed family’s ancestral home? How about the alien landscape of the open sea! With its unknowable depths and mercurial moods, the ocean is rife with mystery and danger. And out in the middle of the ocean, one can experience an isolation far more profound than even the most remote cliffside abbey. In many ways, the ocean is the perfect Gothic landscape. On any given voyage, a sailor might have to battle against the weather and natural environment, against monsters, against the restless dead, against the depravity and superstitious nature of his fellow man, or even against the phantasms of his own mind. Here are just a few examples of Gothic works that take place, in whole or in part, at sea:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

In the late eighteenth century, the Romantic movement in British literature emerged side-by-side and intertwined with the Gothic, with many of the same philosophies underpinning both movements. Coleridge is one of the best known Romantic poets, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is perhaps his most famous work. In this narrative poem, an aged sailor waylays a young wedding guest and launches into a tale about a harrowing sea voyage during which he brought a curse upon himself by killing an albatross. After days spent stranded in the middle of the ocean, the sailor and his fellow crew members encounter Death and Night-mare Life-in-Death, who gamble for their souls. The crew members drop dead, then rise again as revenants to steer the ship home. The sailor, meanwhile, survived the ordeal but now is compelled to wander the land telling his story to others. In this way, he embodies the Gothic and folkloric trope of the cursed wanderer—a lonely character, often immortal or in some other way set apart from normal human society, who is divinely or supernaturally driven to wander the world on some mission related to a long-ago sin. 

“MS Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

This is one of Poe’s earlier tales and not among his most commonly read. It employs the literary technique, common to so many Gothic works, of framing itself as a found document. In this case, the text reads as though the reader has quite literally just found a missive that had been sealed in a bottle and cast into the sea. The story is positioned as the journal entries of a nameless sailor who knows he is unlikely to ever see the shore again. Like the sailor in Coleridge’s poem, this narrator becomes the only survivor among his crew after a shipboard catastrophe. But instead of eventually making it back home to tell his tale to strangers, this sailor finds refuge on a strange black ship whose crew seem entranced and oblivious to his existence. The unearthly crew in both this story and Coleridge’s poem have echoes of the legendary ghost ship The Flying Dutchman.

The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat (1839)

For a more direct treatment of the Flying Dutchman legend, check out this Gothic novel by a British Royal Navy officer. Though Marryat is perhaps better remembered today for his system of maritime flag signaling than his fiction, he wrote many works, ranging from travelogues to children’s stories, inspired by his life at sea. The Phantom Ship centers on a young man named Philip Vanderdecken who learns that his sea captain father—long presumed lost at sea—has actually been cursed to sail in his phantom ship until the end of days. After struggling for weeks against stormy weather to round the Cape of Good Hope, the elder Vanderdecken made a Faustian bargain when he killed a crewman in a fit of rage and uttered a rash oath that he would accomplish his goal “in defiance of storm and seas, of lightning, of heaven, or of hell, even if I should beat about until the Day of Judgment.” But Philip can free him from this fate by presenting his father with the holy relic that his mother always wore. Philip embarks on this ambitious quest, joining the Dutch East India Company so that he can sail the world in search of the Flying Dutchman, which is said to bring ill-luck to any other ship that encounters it.

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

While most of Bram Stoker’s famous vampire novel takes place on dry land, there is a short interlude that perfectly exemplifies the nautical Gothic. This, of course, is the tale of Count Dracula’s voyage from Eastern Europe to England aboard a ship called the Demeter. In the novel, this journey is depicted through a record of the captain’s log, which Mina pastes into her journal. The attached newspaper clipping notes that the last few entries of this log were put into a bottle for safekeeping, much like in Poe’s story. At the beginning of the log, the captain of the Demeter notes that the crew seem unusually scared and anxious, a situation which only grows worse as the men seem to be picked off one by one during their late night watches. By the end of the journey, only the captain and first mate are still alive as they approach the coast of England and a mysterious, dense fog keeps them from making port or knowing quite where they are. When the first mate raves about a monster onboard and throws himself into the water, the captain dismisses him as a  madman. Ultimately, the Demeter becomes yet another phantom ship crewed by the dead—the corpse of the captain is found tied to the helm, where he had determined to die at his post. Meanwhile, it is the supernatural powers of the undead vampire that seem to guide the ship through the entrance of Whitby’s harbor and up onto the sand.

What other examples of nautical Gothic can you think of? Have you read any of the examples discussed above? Let me know in the comments!