When considering horror literature from 1800-1849, Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) does not often come to mind. In my view two of his tales fit squarely within the Top 30 horror short stories of this important half century for the horror genre. Who was Captain Frederick Marryat? He was an Englishman obsessed with seafaring travel since he was a boy and tried to run away from home a number of times and stow away on ships. When his family saw they could not keep him off the sea, they enlisted him at a young age. Marryat would then travel the oceans of the world for a good part of his life. From 1832 until his death he penned novels of the sea and a few short stories. Later in life he was a member of Charles Dickens's old circle of friends.
In Edgar Allan Poe's September 1841 review of Marryat's Joseph Rushbrook, he let the world know what he thought about Marryat as a novel writer:
He has always been a very Popular writer, in the most rigorous sense of the word. His books are essentially "mediocre." His ideas are the common property of the mob, and have been their common property time out of mind. We look throughout his writings in vain for the slightest indication of originality, for the faintest incentive to thought. His plots, his language, his opinions, are neither adapted nor intended for scrutiny. We must be contented with them as sentiments, rather than as ideas; and properly to estimate them, even in this view, we must bring ourselves into a sort of identification with the sentiment of the mass. Works composed in this spirit are sometimes purposely so composed by men of superior intelligence, and here we call to mind the Chansons of Beranger. But usually they are the natural exponent of the vulgar thought in the person of a vulgar thinker. In either case they claim for themselves that which, for want of a more definite expression, has been called by critics "nationality." Whether this nationality in letters is a fit object for high-minded ambition, we cannot here pause to inquire. If it is, then Captain Marryat occupies a more desirable position than, in our heart, we are willing to award him.
Fortunately, his horror short stories are of a much better lot. Unfortunately, Poe never commented on them.
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