Poe's 'Arthur Gordon Pym' and the white figure at the pole

Edgar Allan Poe's only novel (July 1838) ends with its narrator drifting south on a warm, milky sea towards a huge shrouded white figure, a polar mystery written when Antarctica was still unmapped.

1838 CE · -83.00, -43.00 · status: legend

The account

Poe drew on Jeremiah Reynolds, the champion of Symmes's hollow-earth voyage, and on the polar-opening ideas of the time. The black island of Tsalal and the unfinished ending inspired Jules Verne's sequel 'An Antarctic Mystery' (1897) and Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness'. Position is the novel's far south, notional.

Connections in the atlas

• The US Exploring Expedition, born of Symmes's hole
• Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness'
• Symmes's hollow-earth circular

Sources

1. Wikipedia: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket