“The other day a terrible storm broke out here unexpectedly with strange and unique consequences.
… a schooner appeared between the breakwaters and, jumping from wave to wave, with dizzying speed, in full sail, entered the safe harbor. The searchlight brightly illuminated it, and horror seized everyone, for it turned out that a corpse was tied to the steering wheel, whose head dangled from side to side with every movement of the ship. There was no one else to be seen on deck.
The schooner swept across the harbor and crashed into a mountain of sand and pebbles. The gear flew down with a crash. As soon as the schooner touched the shore, a huge dog jumped out onto the deck, as if a concussion had pushed it out of the bowels of the ship, and, having run along the deck, jumped ashore. Rushing straight to the steep cliff on which the cemetery rose, the dog disappeared into the thick fog. Many members of the Animal Friends Society tried to take care of the dog, but they could not find it anywhere."
This is how the author of the novel "Dracula", Bram Stoker, described the arrival of his main character in Britain. The vampire count reincarnated as a black dog.
Further in the book it was said that the ship turned out to be a Russian schooner "Demetra", which arrived from Varna, and the logbook found on board said that the crew members mysteriously disappeared one after another during the voyage.
In 2013, the government of the Pacific island republic of Tuvalu issued a series of collectible coins “Famous ships that never sailed”. One of them depicts "Demeter".
However, the ship actually existed.
Promotional video:
The birth of Dracula
At the end of July 1890, 42-year-old Bram Stoker, managing director of the London Liceum Theater that still exists today, impresario of the famous actor Henry Irving, a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, after a tiring tour in Scotland, took a vacation and went to breathe by air to the port town of Whitby in northeast Yorkshire.
August 11 was a cloudy day. Leaving his wife and 10-year-old son at the hotel, Stoker went for a walk, where he got into conversation with the old boatman William Peterick. “He told about various shipwrecks,” the writer noted in his diary.
In particular, Peterik said that five years ago, on October 24, 1885, opposite Whitby, a Russian schooner was caught in a terrible storm. Almost all of the residents gathered on the shore and watched the attempt by the crew to slip into a relatively safe bay through a narrow neck between two cliffs.
“The ship sailed into the harbor, and no one knew how he did it. Everyone was just praying,”Stoker quoted a new acquaintance in his diary.
The crowd cheered the happy outcome with shouts of joy.
At night, the schooner was nevertheless washed ashore, and then smashed by large waves, but the crew was no longer threatened.
A photo taken by local photographer Frank Sutcliffe a few days later shows the ship's hull and separate masts in the sand.
The port log records that the schooner was called "Dmitry", had a displacement of 120 tons and arrived from Narva (modern Estonia) with a cargo of silver sand.
Apart from the horrors described by Stoker, he changed little in real history: he named the ship instead of some incomprehensible Dmitry by the name of the ancient Greek goddess, moved the action from October to August and made the Bulgarian Varna a port of departure - it sounds similar, but closer to Dracula's possessions.
Traces of "Dmitry"
Narva regional historian and video blogger Alexander Openko, who was contacted by the BBC Russian Service, said that he was aware of this case.
He clarified that "Dmitry" sailed with a cargo of timber - the main export item through the Narva port at the end of the 19th century - delivered it to Antwerp and there he took on board silver sand (fine pure white sand used for grinding building stones, arranging garden paths and handicrafts, including an hourglass).
The port of destination was Newcastle, and at Whitby the schooner was to replenish the coal supply.
According to Alexander Openko, the original cargo probably belonged to a large timber merchant, ship owner and philanthropist Pavel Kochnev, but it is not known whether he was also the owner of Dmitry.
"Researchers of Stoker's work from Great Britain and the United States contacted me for additional information about this vessel, but, unfortunately, the Narva archives burned down during World War II," said Openko.
The port from which "Dmitry" left on its last voyage is almost not used today, since it is located 12 km above the mouth of the Narva River, and modern sea vessels cannot enter it.
Creative process
It all started with the fact that Stoker ate crabs with mayonnaise at dinner and saw a vampire in his dream at night.
He had heard of Dracula before, and was fascinated by the sound of the word, which seemed to him ominous.
The rest was made by a picturesque town with winding streets climbing the mountain, an old abbey, a gloomy cemetery and Yorkshire legends about ghosts and a black dog with eyes the size of a saucer, meeting with which promises a quick death.
The coal-black carriage, in which the young English lawyer Jonathan Harker travels from the station to Dracula's castle, is also borrowed from local folklore: this was exactly what Lord Mulgrave, who lived near Whitby in the 18th century, used it.
Apparently, the idea of the book basically took shape in Stoker's head no later than a week after the conversation with the old boatman. On August 19, he went to the reading room of the Royal Hotel and picked up William Wilkinson's book The Principality of Wallachia and Moldova: With Various Observations Pertaining to Them.
Part of Dracula's action takes place in Whitby. In the novel, Mina arrives there at the end of July on the same train as Stoker, climbs a mountain of 199 steps and admires the city and the harbor from the bench on which the writer liked to sit.
“I think this place was a source of inspiration for him. He thought, “This is wonderful. I have a marina with sailing ships, there is an abbey, a church and a cemetery, "- said in an interview, the grand-nephew of the creator of" Dracula "Dacre Stoker.
"Whitby became the main catalyst, the gothic glue, for what eventually became the most famous vampire novel ever written," said Edgar Browning, an American expert on horror in literature and cinema.
“Bram put events in real time and in real places, filled them with the real names of the people he took from the gravestones. Readers were scared to death precisely because at that moment one might have thought that this story was real,”says Daker Stoker.
Through the centuries
Stoker worked on Dracula for seven years. He copied the appearance and manners of the main character from Henry Irving, hoping that he would play a vampire on stage, but the actor, after reading the book, was not inspired.
In general, the novel did not bring great fame and money to the author. Subsequent film adaptations made Dracula iconic.
The ruler of Wallachia and Transylvania, Vlad III, a contemporary of the English War of the Roses, is a historical figure. Dracula (in Romanian "dragon", "son of the dragon") he was called because his father put the dragon in his coat of arms.
The prince did not drink blood, but poured it fairly. His other nickname was Tepes (from "flail" - "stake"). He massacred captive enemies in this savage way, and he loved to build various geometric shapes from stakes with bodies.
The population of modern Whitby does not reach 14 thousand people. Dracula is its main attraction: guided tours in a top hat and a long black cloak with a red lining, during which tourists are frightened by mummers and vampires, Halloween Gothic Week, the Bram Stoker International Horror Film Festival.
Chocolate coffins are sold in pastry shops. Visitors are shown the "grave of Dracula" - a split tombstone with worn out inscriptions. And the tour guide Harry Collett assures the guests that he has been doing his business since 1892.