Who that has read the works of Edgar Allan Poe will ever forget his thrilling and detailed story of a descent into the maelström?(30) It bears the impress of close study, and is founded largely on recorded facts. Two brothers, the most daring fishermen of their coast, were accustomed to fish in closer proximity to the maelström than all the rest, because, although a desperate speculation, they would get more fish in a day than the others could at the distant fishing grounds in a week. The risk of life stood for labour, and courage for capital. In a terrible hurricane they were driven through the surf into the inner circle of the whirlpool, where (as is likely to be the case in actual fact) the wind nearly ceased, the surface of the water being lower than that of the surrounding ocean. “If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.” Now the two fishermen brothers were in a measure respited, as death‐condemned felons in prison are allowed petty indulgences forbidden them while their doom is yet uncertain. Round and round the belt the vessel flew rather than floated, getting nearer and nearer to the fatal inner vortex, and making wild lurches towards the abyss. “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun round, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth as the rays of the full moon ... streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.” Round and round they swept in dizzying swings and jerks. Above and below them were whirling fragments of vessels, timbers, boxes, barrels, and trunks of trees. And now a hope arose from the recollection of one circumstance: that of the great variety of buoyant matter thrown up by the moskoe‐strom on the coast of Lofoden, some articles were not disfigured or damaged at all. Further, light and cylindrical articles were the least likely to be absorbed into any watery vortex: for the last statement there are good scientific reasons. “I,” says the survivor, “no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water‐cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design, but whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring‐bolt.