Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe

As the water continues to soar and crash above them, the narrator of "Manuscript" and his shipmate spend five days trying to keep the ship away from the brink of the whirlpool. On the fifth day, the skies and sea become cold. The sun seems sickly and does not give out much light, and then disappears at sunset and leaves a dull moonlight and then darkness. This darkness surrounds them and they await the sixth day in vain.
They eventually stop trying to take care of the ship and set themselves up in a nook and watch the storm, unable to calculate time and expecting each new burst of storm.
Poe often uses patterns to create his suspenseful plots, and often
numbers days and hours to give a sense of impending doom. The
loss of sunrise and sunset, which had marked the narrator’s voyage,
makes this pattern of days a dark, otherworldly time, and the
impending doom even more suspenseful and unknown.
The ship rises high on some swells, as if into the sky, and the next moment descends low into valleys between waves. It is in one of these depths that the shipmates see a strange red light,
flooding their deck, and realize, looking up, that it belongs to another vessel, the biggest ship they’ve ever seen, with a huge,
black, bare hull and a row of canons. The ship rises on the pinnacle of ocean in front of them, balanced therefor a second and then comes down. The narrator of "Manuscript" is thrown onto the deck of the ambushing ship.
The form of the ocean changes unpredictably. The heights and
valleys of the ship’s course go beyond natural limits. This
supernatural transformation takes all the familiarity from the sea
and leaves the sailors without any control or expertise. The
description then of the foreign vessel and its shocking size makes it
seem alien and monstrous.
For some reason, the narrator of "Manuscript" doesn’t alert the crew on board this new ship and secretly stows himself in the hold. He cannot explain why he hides himself, other than to say that the crew inspired some kind of awe and curiosity in him that he could not immediately confront. He makes a hiding place by removing some of the boards of the deck and shifting himself into a nook in the hold. Soon the appearance of an old man forces him to use his hidey hole. The man’s extreme age and infirmity surprises the narrator, but the man also has a curious manner, of childishness and godliness at once, and he speaks to himself in an unintelligible mutter.
The narrator has introduced himself to us as a traveler and a sailor,
always journeying and using the physical laws of the sea to do it, but
as the laws of the sea prove themselves to be less predictable than
he thought, his skills are useless and we see him hiding away on the
ship, giving his fate to this ancient, oblivious breed of sailors.
The narrator of "Manuscript" tells us that an inexplicable feeling has taken hold of him. Sometime has elapsed. The narrator has been living on the boat unseen by its crew, but not through effort on his part – the men just seem to wander around deck, speaking this incomprehensible language and do not notice him. He sneaks into the captain’s cabin and takes some writing materials, and vows to write down his experiences and put them in a bottle out to sea.

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