‘The Old Far West and the New’: Bram Stoker, Race, and Manifest Destiny

Abstract

The march of progress in the heyday of empire extended not only to this world but also to the next world, as is clear from an early scene in Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea (1902). At the opening of the novel, Archibald Hunter, the leading character, stands on a cliff above Cruden Bay in Scotland after a tragedy in which a local fisherman has drowned, and witnesses a grim procession of ghosts from the remote past of others who had died at the spot:

There was no need for me to judge by the historical sequence of their attire, or by any inference of hearing; I knew in my heart that these were the ghosts of the dead who had been drowned in the waters of the Cruden Skares. Indeed the moments of their passing - and there were many for the line was of sickening length - became to me a lesson of the long flight of time. At the first were the skin-clad savages with long, wild hair matted; then others with rude primitive clothing. And so on in historic order men, aye, and here and there a woman, too, of many lands whose garments were of varied cut and substance. Red-haired Vikings and black-haired Celts and Phoenicians, fair-haired Saxon and swarthy Moors in flowing robes, (p. 38)

Even in such a time of stress, racial matters were not to be altogether forgotten.

(Bram Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea)¹