Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 16 -- Underground Rivers in English Fiction
first American author to be widely read outside the United States -- Virginia died of tuberculosis
and Poe became increasingly depressed and erratic. In 1849 Poe disappeared in Baltimore and
was found five days later, intoxicated and near death near the river front. He died four days later.
Poe's fiction dealt with paranoia, obsessions, death, feverish fantasies, the cosmos as source of
both horror and inspiration.
The helpless passenger gazing in agony from the deck of his doomed ship at the approaching
fate -- what could be more to Poe's taste than a howling maelstrom? MS. Found in a Bottle
(1833) is the curiously-long message scribbled by the passenger prior to being sucked under.
But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny -- the circles rapidly grow small -- we
are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool -- and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and
thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and -- going down.
Poe pursues his fascination with whirlpools in Descent into the Maelstrom (1841), citing the 1823
Encyclopedia Britannica for historical and geographical reality, but this maelstrom was many
times the size of the Norwegian Moskenstrom of Chapter 15. Poe's maelstrom, as seen from the
mountain,
Suddenly -- very suddenly -- this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more
than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming
spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as
the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the
horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a
swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek,
half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.
And as seen from within,
The current acquired a monstrous velocity. The vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred
into a thousand conflicting, channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsions—heaving,
boiling, hissing -- gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on
to the eastward with a rapidity water never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents.
In a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical alteration... The gyratory
motions of the subsided vortices seemed to form the germ of another more vast.
The narrator refers to the whirlpool as a "Phlegethon," one of the rivers in the Greek underworld,
and recalls Athanasius Kircher’s claim that,
In the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in
some very remote part -- the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance.
That instance being Kircher, as per the pan-Scandinavian map of Chapter 15.
Poe even includes some applied physics,
I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that as a general rule, the larger the
bodies were, the more rapid their descent; -- the second, that, between two masses of equal
extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent
was with the sphere; -- the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical,
and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly.
The observations provide the narrator an escape scheme -- cling to an empty cask -- allowing his
tale to be written.
Although Poe called Kircher's views regarding the Maelstrom as "idle," he admitted that upon
viewing the Norwegian vortex, Kircher's explanation "was the one to which, as I gazed, my
imagination most readily assented."
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1850), Poe's longest tale, is a dramatization of the beliefs of
John Cleves Symmes (Chapter 14), the hollow-earth proponent whom Poe would have read in
his youth.
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