MS. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allen Poe (1833): A Review

We're still exploring Edgar Allan Poe's unique sense of humor, telling us about a ghost ship sailing through a terror-filled sea! This story draws heavily from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It feels like a wild mashup of horror story tropes and pirate antics, almost begging for an eye patch and a parrot. Also, like Richardson's Pamela, the main character is busy scribbling away while disaster unfolds around him.

As the plot thickens, our hero survives a shipwreck only to be rescued by a ghost ship sailing southward, likely heading straight to the afterlife (literally!). You can just picture the old Mariners cheering at the sight of doom while our protagonist is white-knuckled and sweating like Robinson Crusoe when he first spotted that mysterious footprint. Horror! Horror!

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