Since the beginning of time the sea has inspired fear. It covers most of the earth and what lies beneath it we may never truly know. Anything can reside beneath the waves. Men have gone forth on it and discovered new lands, but these journeys are often costly in human lives.

Horrors and dangers of the sea have made the way into mythology and legend. Creatures like the Norse Kraken and the Japanese Umibozu were said to attack ships. The gods cursed Odysseus in his wanderings. Then there are the tales of the Flying Dutchman.

So the sea and horror go hand in hand. This series of posts will look at horror stories set on or around the sea by many authors. It does not claim to be comprehensive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is, of course, the famous poet and one of his best-known works is Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The poem is in many ways a frightening story. It tells of an unnamed mariner who, for the sin of killing an albatross, is condemned to witness horrors and wander the earth telling his story.

Elements of cosmic horror come into play. In one scene, he encounters a ship on which is the personification of Death and a white spectral woman. The woman is known as Life-in-Death. They roll dice to determine the fate of the Mariner. Life-in-Death wins and she kills all the crew except the mariner. More frightening, the dead return to life and crew the ship.

The poem is, of course, considered a classic, but how many think of it as a horror or fantasy story? The work predates the rise of Realism and Naturalism in fiction. This trend in fiction is entirely modern and, though it produced some undoubted classics, it will not last. Unrealistic fiction is like the sea: it is deep, and below the waves swim Archetypes that will last until doomsday.

Edgar Allan Poe

The modern horror genre descends from the work of Poe. At least four of his stories are set at sea. “Ms. Found in a Bottle” was one of the earliest written by Poe. It concerns an unnamed narrator who finds that by accident he is cast from his own ship unto another. He seems to be invisible to the crew of the ship. Eventually, this ship is sucked into a whirlpool in Antarctica.

“Descent into the Maelstrom,” is exactly that. It does not involve supernatural horror in any way, but it is story of sensations including fear.

Poe’s longest sea story was “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” This is a macabre adventure story. In it the title character is a stowaway on a ship. He survives mutiny, sea storms, starvation, and attacks by vicious natives. The story is very much adventure but there are scenes of horror. The ship is wrecked by a storm and the cabins are flooded preventing Pym and the surviving crew from getting to their stores of food. They face starvation.

At first, it seems that they might be rescued when they sight a ship. Unfortunately, when the ship sails alongside them they see that all the crew and passengers have been killed. The cause of death is unknown but is probably plague. Again they face starvation. Eventually they decide that one must sacrificed so that the others may live. They choose straws to determine who dies. The loser is then eaten.

These scenes are harrowing to read. It took boldness on Poe’s part to have the characters commit cannibalism to survive. Eventually, they are rescued and go on to have adventures in the South Seas and Antarctica, but it is these scenes of starvation and cannibalism that stick in one’s mind. The novel ends rather abruptly with Pym’s tale unfinished.

“The Oblong Box” is also set at sea. It is a minor and predictable tale by Poe.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Known most for his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote ghost stories. The strongest of these stories is “The Captain of the Polestar.”

The story is narrated by a doctor on board a whaling ship. This is autobiographical in that Conan Doyle at the start of his medical career really was a ship’s doctor on a whaler.

It begins with the ship, the titular Polestar, stuck in the ice in the Arctic. The crew has been seeing and hearing strange things on the ice. The doctor is skeptical. The captain, however, believes and seems to reflect Doyle’s real-life Spiritualist beliefs. It becomes known that the captain chose the whaler’s life because of its dangers and has what today we would call a death wish.

Eventually, the captain sees something in the ice fields that causes his wits to leave and follows it out into the ice field. A search is made and the crew finds the frozen corpse of the captain. There is a gust of wind and the snow forms the shape of a woman which is stooping over and kissing the captain. It is revealed at the end that the captain was once married to a woman who died young.

This story is haunting and subtle and one of the best ghost stories I have read.

F. Marion Crawford

Best known today for his ghost stories, F. Marion Crawford was famous in his lifetime for his romantic novels of Italy. The story “The Upper Berth” is one of his best known ghost stories and was thought highly of by H. P. Lovecraft. The story deals with a passenger on a ship whose cabin is haunted after three previous inhabitants commit suicide. Eventually, he discovers what is sleeping in the upper berth of his cabin.

This is a fairly decent Victorian ghost story. It is not horribly frightening but it does produce pleasant shivers and is worth reading.

William Hope Hodgson

No one wrote more about the horror of the sea than William Hope Hodgson. As a boy Hodgson ran away to become a sailor. While he would grow to hate his life at sea, his stories about the sea rang with an authenticity.

Hodgson wrote so many stories about the sea that you could probably write a book about them. This article will only look at a few of them.

One of his most famous stories is “The Voice in the Night.” The story deals with a marooned couple who land on island covered with fungi. It soon begins to cover them as well. By the end of the story, the couple are covered with fungi. It is a story at once grotesque, horrific, and tragic.

“The Weed Men” deals with a group of sailors on an island who are attacked by creatures from a continent of sea weed. “The Thing in the Weeds” involves a ship besieged by an unknown creature. Both these stories are interesting because the characters fight back against the horrors. Hodgson himself was made of stern stuff. He rescued a sailor who fell overboard into shark infested water and died heroically during the First World War.

The Ghost Pirates, one of the four novels he wrote, deals with invisible beings that may be ghosts or perhaps creatures from another dimension. The novel simmers with tension from the first unexplained events and becomes increasingly horrific. The story was a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft’s.

In part two: the sea horror stories of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Jean Ray.