Mysterious Sea Stories

INTRODUCTION

Not long before his death that great British seaman, Lord Nelson, remarked, ‘At sea, nothing is impossible and nothing improbable.’ Although he put it splendidly, what he said was really nothing new, even then - for almost since the first man pushed himself gingerly away from the safety of the shore and cast himself and his frail craft to the mercy of the waves and the elements, sailors have come to appreciate the mysterious powers of the sea. Even today when shipping has all the sophisticated equipment provided by modem technology at its disposal, there is still the element of the unknown lurking just across the horizon - and it is a foolish seaman who would choose to ignore such a fact.

Of course, in the early days of sail, mariners believed if they went too far from land their ships might fall off the edge of the world; and even in later ages seafarers clung tenaciously to the most amazing superstitions which gave the sea and all things above and below it quite extraordinary powers. The discoveries of the early explorers may well have removed fears about a flat earth, but there are still many of those old superstitions being religiously observed. Their influence is as powerful and mysterious and timeless as the very sea itself.

Because of the uncertainty of life at sea and the temperamental nature of the wind and weather - not forgetting the unusual conditions that can exist far from land - sailors have always been coming home with stories of strange, inexplicable happenings. Of ships beset by phantoms, of deep sea creatures unlike any seen before, and of places where none but the most foolhardy would go. These have provided the raw material for storytellers and have ultimately developed into what we now know as the sea mystery story.

Although the mysterious incidents which have given rise to these stories can be traced back many, many years, it is in fact only in the last couple of hundred years that they have become a literary genre in their own right. To be sure, there are whole libraries of books of ancient sea voyages in which are recorded encounters with strange people, sea serpents and ghostly vessels. But it is primarily with the work of Edgar Allan Poe at the beginning of the last century that such tales emerged and took on the form now so recognisable and widely read.

In this collection I have tried to assemble some of the best and most representative of the short sea mystery stories, taking a tale by Poe as my starting point. As the reader will discover, the tales range across many years and most of the great oceans of the world. They have for their themes some of the best known mysteries of the sea, and convey us as often by sail as by steam. They also happen to be written by some of the most popular authors of maritime fiction - although I have tried as much as possible to avoid frequently anthologised works by these people.

Consequently, you will find some rather unusual and, I trust, unexpected tales by authors such as Captain Frederick Marryat, Herman Melville, Jack London, W. Clark Russell, Joseph Conrad, John Masefield, and C. S. Forester. All of these keep happy company with some other familiar figures who were fascinated by mysteries of the sea and put pen to paper in a most imaginative way. There is Rudyard Kipling on sea monsters, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cleverly trying to solve the mystery of the Marie Celeste, Richard Sale doing the same for The Flying Dutchman, William Hope Hodgson exploring the legendary Sargasso Sea, H. G. Wells taking us into the depths of the ocean, and Ray Bradbury with a grim little fantasy about war at sea.

These, then, are your means of transport to mystery on the high seas - if, like me, you would prefer to voyage safe and warm in the comfort of your armchair. For those watery places where spirits haunt the upper deck and monstrous creatures tear at the ship’s bowels are not for the landlubber or the faint-hearted. All the stories will, I believe, intrigue, chill and entertain you, and in leaving you to your pleasures I am reminded of those lines by Shakespeare:

There are more things in Heaven and Earth

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When you have finished reading Mysterious Sea Stories, I have more than a suspicion you will want to add ‘and in the Sea’ to that perceptive phrase. . .

WILLIAM PATTRICK

Suffolk, 1984