Sailors' superstitions "Souda" (modern Lefkai). Another mythological creature, the Scylla, is a similar female sea demon that is both dangerous yet beautiful. Sirens supposedly "lured mariners to their deaths with their melodious, enchanting song", while "Scylla sent countless sailors to the depths of the sea." The albatross as a superstitious relic is referenced in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's well-known poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is considered very unlucky to kill an albatross; in Coleridge's poem, the narrator killed the bird and his fellow sailors eventually force him to wear the dead bird around his neck. Having bananas on a ship,
A Descent into the Maelström the narrator will believe it. The story's opening bears a similarity to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798): in both, an excited old man tells his story of shipwreck and survival. The tale is one of sensation, emphasizing the narrator's thoughts and feelings, especially his terror of being killed in the whirlpool. The narrator uses his reasoning skills to survive and the story is considered one of Poe's early examples of science fiction. The story mentions Jonas Danilssønn Ramus, a man from Norway who wrote about a famous maelström at Saltstraumen. The opening epigraph is quoted