Edgar Allen Poe, The Titanic, and One of the Strangest Coincidences in Modern Literature

In 1838, Edgar Allen Poe published his first - and ultimately only - full-length novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. A departure from Poe’s typical horror short stories, the book is an epic pulp-adventure tale which follows its titular hero has he stows away aboard the whaling ship Grampus and encounters a series of increasingly extreme perils, including mutiny, shipwreck, corpse-strewn ghost vessel, hostile islanders, and even mythical beasts. At one point, Pym and three other sailors find themselves adrift at sea in a lifeboat. Though at first they manage to catch and eat a sea turtle, no further food is forthcoming, and they soon begin slowly dying of starvation and thirst. With no land or ships in sight, they decide to invoke the ancient custom of the sea, drawing straws to decide who among them will be killed and eaten to save the others. The unfortunate recipient of the short straw is the Grampus’s cabin boy, Richard Parker. The desperate ritual works, keeping the remaining sailors alive long enough to be rescued.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was met with mixed reviews, with longtime Poe critic Lewis Gaylord Clark writing:

“…[the story is] told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition…[yet] this work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is that it is too liberally stuffed with horrid circumstances of blood and battle.”

Even Poe himself dismissed the book as “very silly.” Nonetheless, the book proved surprisingly influential, with no less a figure than Herman Melville partially crediting Poe with inspiring his legendary 1851 work Moby-Dick. French writer Jules Verne even wrote a sequel titled Antarctic Mystery in 1897. Nonetheless, it is likely that Poe’s only novel would have remained a mere footnote in his bibliography were it not for an infamous real-life incident which took place 50 years later. This is the story of that event and one of the most studied court cases in history.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producers: Caden Nielsen and Alexis DeStout