Harry Clarke's 'MS. Found in a Bottle' — Poe's Doomed Ghost Ship, c.1919

A spectral sailing vessel — no steam, no engine, no rational propulsion — hurtles through a supernatural storm in this illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's 'MS. Found in a Bottle.' The ship, crewed by phantom figures, careens through crashing luminescent waves while ghostly shrouded forms loom from the darkness and a spectral chain trails into the abyss. Clarke's densely ornamental sails and jewel-like color fragments evoke a vessel sailing beyond the edge of known science into oceanic oblivion.