“I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie: and at the same moment I perceived what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity [...] The vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsions – heaving, boiling, hissing – gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity water never elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents. In a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical alteration [...] The gyratory motions of the subsided vortices seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly – very suddenly – this assumed a distinct and broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrible funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could see it, was a smooth, shining, and jet black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some 45 degrees, speedily, dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to heaven. [...] ‘This,’ said I at length, to the old man –'this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.’”