The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.… Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym’s account.
—Note, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
IT would seem that The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters was that promised material that would reveal the true end of Arthur Pym’s Narrative, despite the fact that it was never delivered to the public during Peters’s lifetime.* Of course, Dirk Peters did make the effort to construct those missing chapters, and his memory should not be impugned just because he (unlike Booker T. Washington) was unable to hire a ghostwriter who could sufficiently convey his story. Peters’s attempt to secure the services of Edgar Allan Poe to relay his story may have failed, but this was not to be the end of his ambitions in the matter.
In a folder at the bottom of the Dirk Peters papers sat an envelope somewhat different from the others in the collection. For one thing, this packet contained stubs from what appeared to be both train and ocean-liner tickets, both of which were dated in the spring of 1895. The note that accompanied them is even more difficult to decipher than the muddled script in the rest of the collection. Its lines are shaken, the curves large and slow—this would of course make sense if it was indeed written in 1895, by which time Peters would have at least been in his eighties, his poor penmanship having even further degraded. Here it is in its entirety:
Arrived in Amiens. The canals make it smell something horrible. I went to the writer’s house, had a copy of 20,000 Leagues under [sic] Sea, going to tell him I like it, I want his help. I’m thinking that’s a good one, on account of it’s got an Indian in it, like me. That Nemo was a seafaring one two [sic], so if he can tell his story I don’t see why the man can’t tell mine. I speak a little of the Frenchy, so I plan on Parla vousing [sic] that to the man. Seems the book selling is behind him, and this Verne man he working at the politics. I ask the locals, they say just look for him. Then I see him like they say. It’s easy to see because the man got a bad limp, in his left leg, like the kind you get after you been shot. Well, I start feeling sorry for him, being a cripple, then I’m walking up to him telling him who I was and what I’m wanting. But then, after he listens for a bit and I tell him how that Poe man took my story from me and now for the truth I want Jules Verne writing in stead, being as my writing boy, he hits me with his cane! I run off a bit and then I’m glad he got a gimp leg, because I do believe he was still trying to kick me.
While there is no other historical record of this interaction, this final effort on Peters’s part to let his memoir be heard, it should be noted that Le Sphinx des Glaces emerged from Verne’s publisher just two years later.† While the account that Verne gives bears little resemblance to the one Dirk Peters hastily relayed and is largely a hackneyed attempt to find closure to Poe’s original tale, there are points of interest nonetheless. Verne’s sequel has a black ship chef as well, much like Poe’s novel. Describing this chef’s reaction to being cast away on an iceberg, Verne wrote, “As a Negro, who cares little about the future, shallow and frivolous like all of his race, he resigned himself easily to his fate; and this is, perhaps, true philosophy.”