Dali House

Dali’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja Fixing a String of his Mandolin” from 1960 is sometimes referred to as “Maelstrom”, although, suspiciously, only the online poster shops seem to use the alternative title. It’s also typical of the whirlpool that Dali’s output has become that you’ll come across reproductions of this painting in three or four different hues, with the get-cheap-prints-here websites favouring Hallowe’en orange. The website of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where the original hangs, has it in greyish brown, as seen in the detail below. The version above comes from Olga’s ABC Gallery.

Here Dali is honouring Diego Velázquez, borrowing the palace-official-in-a-doorway from his feverishly adored 1656 “The Maids of Honour” (”Las Meninas”). Dali has him watching a commotion of a different order, and also utilises the subject of Velázquez’s “Portrait of Juan Pareja” from 1650. Pareja’s hand is at the lower centre, with a tack in the thumb. His head is in profile, with Velázquez’s quartered easel forming the bridge of the nose and the princess and her attendants his goatee.

I’m going to have a proper look at Velásquez soon, but this post is about maelstroms. Shown below is “Maelstrom” by Scottish-born Canadian Ruth Palmer.

I’m still puzzled about this notion of getting to the centre of the earth (here’s an early Dorseyland post about one hilarious plan). Is it a womb thing? Nothing to be ashamed of if so, seeing as how visionaries like Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne wanted to get back inside too.

The latter took his cues from the former, and even pushed his characters into the unknown abyss pit from a Scandinavian locale, as Poe had done, although Verne reckoned on an Icelandic volcano rather than a Norwegian whirlpool.

No one outside of Norway had heard of a maelstrom before Poe (read about his curious demise at Dorseyland) published “A Descent into the Maelstrom” in 1841. The Nordic word came from the old Dutch maalstroom, a grinding stream. It was Poe who parlayed little-known accounts into a convincing, culture-spanning argument that a maelstrom was a whirlpool, not a cranky creek.

By 2007 Disney buccaneer ships were fighting it out in the maw of a monstrous maelstrom in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. The picture below comes from the 1997 TV miniseries “The Odyssey”

Ten years after Poe’s short story, Herman Melville had Captain Ahab vowing to chase Moby-Dick around the world, right “round the Norway Maelström” if he had to. Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, published in 1870, characterised it as a “whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes”.

It’s not that bad, really. The Moskstraumen, as it’s properly known, is fairly powerful, but it’s just a tidal current. It’s probably never sucked down a ship in its life. Don’t blame Poe — he’d been up all night reading other people’s “journalism” on the Lofoten Islands Moskstraumen. We’ll have a look ourselves in a moment.

As viewed on Google Earth, This is the scene of “the Sicilian Charybdis”, the two-mile-wide mouth of the Strait of Messina, with a prominence called Scylla shown in the foreground. They catch a lot of fish here, even swordfish, but the daily double high and low tides are barely noticeable today. They may well have been more powerful in Homer’s era. An earthquake shifted the sea floor in 1783 and calmed things down, though right up to the 19th century they could still turn around a heavy ship.

On December 28, 1908, Messina and Reggio were flattened by a deadly earthquake, and the New York Times shouted on New Year’s Day 1909 that, “according to priests”, the town of Scylla, “near the famous rock of the same name, has completely disappeared, and owing to the topographical alterations even its site has vanished.

The beach at Scilla with Ruffo Castle above.

“Part of the promontory is reported to have fallen into the sea, and the whirlpools of Charybdis have shifted their location, forming a fresh peril to navigation. Scylla, the Italian Sciglio [which is actually well to the south on the Sicilian side, but anyway], is a high and steep promontory on the Italian side of the Strait of Messina. Charybdis, now called Golafaro [?], is described as an incessant undulation, rather than a whirlpool.”

In 2006 Peter Nichols wrote for VoyageOnline that 19 years earlier his 85-foot powered ketch had twirled around here “like a paper boat going down a drain”.

So, yes, rough currents meet here to wrestle, but modern mariners need have no mortal fear of getting ringside on a bewitched passage. If Poseidon’s daughter Charybdis, the charming sea nymph who Zeus turned into a monstrous mouth in the water for stealing Heracles’ cattle, used to gulp down half the sea here and projectile-vomit it back out again three times a day, that was Odysseus’ problem.

“Sirens, Scylla and Charibdis”, depicted in the 17th century by the Flemish painter Theodoor van Thulden.

Homer put Odysseus between a rock and a hard place here, twixt Charybdis’ vortex and the hungry edges of the granite perch on which her co-demon, Scylla, waited across the channel. Scylla lived in a cave on the cliff face and yelped at passing sailors with what was described in Homer’s Odyssey as “the voice of a little bitch”, but she was “a horrible monster” with 12 dogs’ legs, a cat’s tail and six long necks, on the end of each “a horrendous head with three files of teeth, numerous and dense, full of black death”.

Quite a come-down from the gorgeous nymph she had once been. She had spurned Glaucus, a sea god, and he took his broken heart to the sorceress Circe. She fell in love with him, but getting nowhere, aimed her anger at Scylla. She laced Scylla’s bathing pool with a potion that turned her into a gargoyle. The heads of ferocious wolves sprang from her waist, and despite her best efforts to brush them off, she became a menace to all who came near. It was the heads that snapped up passing sailors. But by the time Aeneas’ fleet came through the strait after the fall of Troy, Scylla had been changed into the hazardous rock outcrop that still stands.

The German-Swiss Briton Johann Heinrich Fuseli (1741-1825), way ahead of his time when it came to portraying horror, shows his talent in “Odysseus in Front of Scylla and Charybdis”, circa 1795, scary bits zoomed upon below.

In the glory days of Charybdis and Scylla, though, sailors had to wend carefully between them, as Jason’s Argonauts did with the guidance of the Nereid Thetis. Odysseus, on his 10-year journey home to Ithaca from the Trojan War, had the seemingly straightforward choice between losing his ship and entire crew to Charybdis or sacrificing some of his men to Scylla. He chose the latter and six sailors were wolved down, but the ship got through — until Zeus, still fuming about his cows, sent the boat to the bottom with a thunderbolt. Homer calls the play:

Now wailing in fear,
we rowed up those straits,
Scylla to starboard,
dreaded Charybdis off to port,
her horrible whirlpool gulping
the sea-surge down, down.

Odysseus clung to debris and got sucked back into the channel, escaping Charybdis’ jaws by grabbing hold of a fig branch at the last moment and holding tight until she spit his “raft” back out. Close call!

A lot of nonsense, the scholars say — the myth took place elsewhere. So I read at Wikipedia, but how do you debate a myth’s location? (Yes, I know: think “Troy”.) They say it more likely happened here, off Cape Skilla in northwestern Greece!

Let the scientists unweave Homer’s myths while we return north to the scene of Poe’s terrible gyre, the Moskstraumen.

Once upon a time it was believed that a pair of huge, magic millstones had sunk into the sea, north of either Scotland or Norway, and continued churning, forming mammoth eddies. In the eighth century, German writer Paulus Warnefridi recalled a legend about “the ocean’s navel” being somewhere in the north, sucking in and spewing out tremendous amounts of water.

In 1539 Olaus Magnus, a Swedish bishop in Rome, drew a map of the region, the Charta Marina, on which he described the God-made maelstrom as being stronger than the Sicilian Charybdis, with “a force as powerful as when torrents or swift rivers come rushing down … Navigation upon this sea is extremely perilous, for those who sail at the wrong time are suddenly snatched down into spiraling abysses.” A century and a half later the Norwegian priest Peter Dass was a little less hysterical in his poem “The Trumpet of Nordland”, blaming the phenomenon on lunar gravity.

An early-18th-century German print.

Poe drops Athanasius Kircher’s name in his story. Always a delight coming across this 17th-century oddball, but he didn’t help science along much by insisting that the Moskstraumen was the entrance to an underground network of passages.

In 1791 the American gadabout Henry Livingstone offered herehis observations in New York Magazine, claiming the sea between the island of Moskoe and the mainland was 400 fathoms deep, but beetween Moskoe and Ver not more than 10 feet. He described the current as “boisterous” at flood time, but at ebb the water “returns to the sea with a violence and noise unequalled by the loudest cataracts.

“It is heard at the distance of many leagues, and forms a vortex of great depth and extent; so violent, that if a ship comes near it, it is immediately drawn irresistibly into the whirl, and there disappears, till, at the turn of the tide, it rises again in scattered fragments. When it is agitated by a storm, it has reached vessels at more than four miles’ distance, where the crews thought themselves in perfect security.

“Perhaps it is not in the power of fancy to conceive a situation of more horror, than that of being thus driven forward by the sudden violence of an impetuous torrent to the vortex of a whirpool, of which the noise and turbulence, still increasing as it is approached, are an earnest of quick and inevitable destruction; — while the wretched victims, in an agony of despair and terror, cry out for that help which they know to be impossible, and see before them the dreadful abyss in which they are about to be plunged.

“Even animals who have come too near the vortex have expressed the utmost terror when they find the stream irresistible. Whales are frequently carried away, and the moment they feel the force of the water, they struggle against it with all their might, bellowing in a frightful manner.”

Livingstone, not done yet by half, goes on the describe a scene just five years earlier “unequalled perhaps in the annals of misery”. The wedding reception of the Count of Herndale went badly awry when the celebrants were returning from “the island Weroy” and a sudden gale brought up the tide.

“The roaring of the dreadful gulph grew more and more distinct, and the pinnace already got within the circuitous eddy, which whirls a vessel a hundred times around the vortex before its final destruction, and thereby procrastinates and increases the misfortune …

“At length the horrible chasm appeared in full tremendous view. It was sunk many fathoms below the level of the ocean — was gloomy as midnight, and stunned with its thunder. The agonies of the wretched victims were now wrought to the utmost height of human endurance … The hapless Adelia clung around her husband’s neck, and watered his bosom with her tears; while the once happy husband, speechless with grief, pressed her to his throbbing heart, and felt a thousand deaths in this excruciating anticipation.

“The violence of the motion now became excessive — the vessel was in a moment on the brink of the fearful declivity — it plunged in the roaring grave — a general shriek arose — and they were — no more!”

They don’t write stories like that these days, but you can just picture Poe drooling over it. Poe would have also had the equally irrational depiction of Jonas Ramus, written in 1715 and then included in the 1823 Encylopaedia Britannica. See if you can hear the chimes of plagiarism over the din of the maelstrom:

“The roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts … and the vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom.” Even whales that venture into the whirlpool cannot break free, and “it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings”. One day in 1645, Ramus wrote, the whirlpool “raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on the coast fell to the ground”.

In 1997, three University of Oslo researchers decided that the absence of sanity among the accounts could no longer be tolerated and built a tidal model to find out just what was going on. The technical stuff is all on their webpage, but basically they discovered that wind and northerly currents were likely bolstering the tidal flow, and that the sea level varies among the islands, as a scientist named Schelderup had realised in the 18th century, due to the width of the sea shelf being wider south of Lofoten and narrower further north. They came up with a six-kilometer-wide eddy running at 0.1 metres per second — “no comparison to the eddy in ancient literature”, they said with admirable restraint. Nor to anything from the 18th or 19th centuries either.

From the researchers’ webpage, a bit of commotion among the islands, Mosken in the middle and Lofotodden to the right.

Nevertheless, you don’t make fun of the maelstrom.

Nicolas Masse posted this terrific photo of a whirlpool in the Lofotens on Flickr (to which I’ve added a little colour), but he tells me this was actually one of several smaller maelstroms in the area, this one between Moskenesoya and Flagstadoya, and “still amazingly impressive!”

“I went to see it twice,” the long-time surfer says, “and it’s like whitewater in a rather narrow strait, about 20 metres wide. It looks like a torrent, but it’s the sea. It’s not Niagara Falls, but considering that it’s the sea, it’s quite something! I don’t think that this could cause much damage to a boat, at worse it would be taken by the currrent. In fact, you can rent boats to go and see the big one at Moskenesoya, so it can’t be that dangerous.
But I guess there is no way one could swim against the current.”

The Moskstraumen isn’t even the strongest tidal current in Europe, that title being held by the 40-kilometre-per-hour Saltstraumen in Norway’s Nordland region, which is the mightiest in the world, chugging through 400 million cubic metres of seawater in a 150-metre-wide strait every six hours and spinning out 10-metre vortices. Its current results from the tide rushing into the Skjerstad fjord which, again has a different water level than the sea.

Saltstraumen photographed by Jerome Cuny, with eddies about five metres across, as found on this travel page.

Still, that thing wouldn’t frazzle a halibut, let alone suck down a whale. And Nicolas Masse informs me that there’s a bridge over it, too, not something Poe’s imagination would have tolerated.

On the website SpiralWishingWells.com, where the Kiwanis Club sells fancy fountains in which charities can collect coins, I found “Whirlpool Facts and Myths, A Student’s Guide”.

“Can a whirlpool suck a boat or ship into it?” is the question, and the rather equivocal answer is that it’s understandable “that fables exist about large ships being sucked down and eaten up, but actual documented cases that we would consider trustworthy do not exist. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to try to paddle through a large whirlpool in a rowboat. While it may not suck a human being down into it, it is very likely that even an Olympic swimmer would soon tire trying to avoid it, and then risk drowning.”

It was of course Poe who put the “poe” in “poetic licence”. To begin with, he perched his narrator atop the mountain crag with his not-as-old-as-I-look-and-I’ll-tell-you-why guide, surveying a chain of islands: Ambaaren, Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm, Suarven, Buckholm, Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen and Skarholm.

According to the delightfully thorough charts at WorldMaps.Web, with the exception of Suarven, by which Poe may have meant Svarvan, which is indeed one of the Lofotens, the only actual island on this list is Skarholm, which is far to the south of the Lofotens. There is an Oterholman not too far away (rather than Otterholm) and Bukholmane and a pair of Bukkholmans (not Buckholm) cluster together just to the south. There’s an Indre Flesen (not Iflesen) to the south as well. Hoeyholm and Otterholm are towns far to the south, and Sandflesen comes up in old Norse legends.

Nor does Mount Helseggen exist currently, unless, like the islands, it’s been renamed. I’m not being pedantic, just geographically knicker-twisted.

Poe’s story is, like all of his work, sublime (and online here, among other places). That believe-it-or-not tease he pioneered makes it all the more memorable, and the guide’s tale within the tale is breathtaking.

Having explained that the only chance you have at the great fishing on the other side of Moskoe towards Vurrgh is a 15-minute window every six hours, when the maelstrom rests its fury, he recalls losing his two brothers on the one occasion when he’d forgotten to wind his watch and they overstayed their welcome.

The younger brother was swept away on the mast to which he’d lashed himself, and as the survivors were being curled inside the current, the guide took heart in realising that at least he’d finally discover what lay at the bottom of the vortex.

Harry Clarke’s illustration for a 1919 edition of Poe’s story.

Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. 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 around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.

The guide watched the debris whirring around them and, remembering that such things often washed up ashore undamaged, particularly if they were cylindrical, he tied himself to a water cask and cut himself free of the boat. An hour later the vessel with his older brother still on board vanished into the foaming depths, but the guide clung on, swirling, for another six, until the maelstrom was exhausted and he resurfaced, white-haired.

Most of us get no closer to the maelstrom than the vortex of the toilet bowl … or a popular tune, like Cream’s “A Mother’s Lament” …

A mother was washing her baby one night,
The youngest of ten and a delicate mite.
The mother was poor and the baby was thin,
twas naught but a skeleton covered with skin.

The mother turned round for a soap off the rack.
She was only a moment but when she turned back
Her baby had gone, and in anguish she cried,
Oh, where has my baby gone? The angels replied:

Oh, your baby has gone down the plug hole.
Oh, your baby has gone down the plug.
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin,
He should have been washed in a jug, in a jug.

Your baby is perfectly happy;
He wont need a bath anymore.
Hes a-muckin’ about with the angels above,
Not lost but gone before!