Tales: MS. Found in a Bottle

 “MS. Found in a Bottle”   

(originally published October 1833 in Baltimore Saturday Visitor)

A man is a passenger on a ship when a ‘Simoon’ hits the vessel and only he and one other man survive. The Simoon carries them southward and, eventually, straight into the path of an eerie black galleon. Upon impact, the narrator alone is hurled into the galleon, where he finds old maps and obsolete equipment, men who appear to be oblivious to his presence among them, and a rapid current which is every moment hurrying them toward imminent disaster. “It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction,” writes the narrator, in his message in the bottle.

Summary written by Taylor Colegrove, May 2011. Title links to the full text of the story.