Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishermen at Sea, 1796

“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium” – H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon”

The ocean floor houses more secrets than the space in between planets and lies closer to home. Telescopes allow for scientists to glimpse places trillions of light years away, but they cannot clearly gaze upon the thinnest portion of Earth’s crust. We do not know what rests on the ocean floor. We do not know what lives there. But we do know things can lurk and survive in the deepest ocean trench. This dearth in knowledge shrouds the ocean in mystery, leaving the deep waters of the world as an unexplored frontier. And we always fear what we do not know.

In Turner’s Fishermen at Sea, a whirlpool threatens to swallow up the fishermen’s boat and drag them to a watery Hell. The ominous feeling arising from the overall darkness of Fishermen depicts the ocean as an unstoppable force of nature that possesses the powers of a god. The darkness also gives the ocean an aura of primordial ambiguity.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a horror and science fiction writer of the early 20th Century, also explored the god-like qualities and mysteries of nature in his short fiction, such as “Dagon.” Lovecraft, unlike Turner, embodies the dark savagery of nature in a fictitious pantheon of dark gods that take pleasure in tormenting humanity. In both Turner and Lovecraft’s work, man fights nature, and man loses. Repeatedly.

In “Dagon,” a man who has been stranded at sea during a WWI naval raid accidently sails his raft into a portion of the ocean floor that has mysteriously risen to the ocean's surface after a large earthquake. The man finds obelisks decorated in images of sea monsters and other odd life forms and eventually comes face to face with Dagon, a weather god Lovecraft borrowed from ancient Canaanite lore. In Lovecraft’s tale, Dagon appears in the form of some humanoid monster and later haunts the nameless protagonist after he gets back to dry land. Dagon embodies the power Turner’s ocean has over the fishermen. Turner and Lovecraft painted and wrote of nature's conquest of mankind.