Travel Between The Pages

On a gloomy night in July, 1893, Bram Stoker’s mysterious Count Dracula embarked on a clandestine journey from his Transylvania home aboard the ill-fated ship Demeter. Unbeknownst to the unsuspecting crew of the Demeter, a malevolent force lay hidden in the ship’s hold—a coffin filled with the cursed soil of Dracula’s homeland, concealing the vampire lord himself.

By the time the Demeter’s ghostly silhouette loomed over the shores of Whitby, it carried with it a cargo of death. The once bustling ship had become a floating tomb, with the captain, the sole survivor, lashed to the ship’s wheel in a desperate bid to maintain control over the vessel.

You can follow Count Dracula’s frightening trip from Transylvania to England for yourself on a new interactive book map of the novel. Dracula: The Map is a project by Morgan Bishop, which plots all the locations mentioned in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Using the ‘Character Routes’ drop-down menu you can select to view an interactive map of the journeys undertaken by each of the five main characters in the novel; Count Dracula, Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina Murray, Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing.

The arrival of the Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as an important piece  the vampire’s story: the ship brings death himself to England. Stoker drew inspiration for his genre-defining horror novel from his time in Whitby, and the tragic 1885 fate of the real ship Dmitry on the town’s shore.

The death and tragedy around Stoker ultimately shaped the story that became one of the most famous pieces of English literature and set the stage for the next century of vampire lore.

During the summer of 1890, Irish novelist Bram Stoker vacationed at the seaside town of Whitby in northeast England. Despite spending only a month in the town, Stoker was enthralled by his surroundings: grand mansions and hotels lined the West Cliff while remains of the seventh century Whitby Abbey towered over the East Cliff. Nearby, the cemetery at the Parish Church also served as inspiration as the story of Dracula came to life.

Stoker was also fascinated by the many ships making harbor here. He reportedly visited the Whitby Museum to explore the history of these vessels. The author reportedly asked around the harbor about shipwrecks in Whitby, notably the Dmitry, a ship that had wrecked five years earlier.

The cargo vessel Dmitry had set sail from Narva, Russia in 1885. On October 24, the Dmitry was one of two ships run ashore at Whitby by “a storm of great violence,” according to contemporary newspaper accounts. The other vessel, the Mary and Agnes, was stranded in the raging sea and a lifeboat was sent to rescue its crew.

There were some aspects of the last voyage of the Dmitry that appear to have stood out to Stoker. The Demeter originated in Varna (an anagram for Narva, where the Dmitry originated), and similarly carried “ballast of silver sand, with only a small amount of cargo—a number of great wooden boxes filled with mould.”

In the novel, Dracula took the form of a dog to make his way from the Demeter to dry land, but there was no dog reported to have been on the Dmitry. In the novel,  “The very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand.”

The dog, a disguised Dracula, wrought bloodshed and death from that point forward. This dog resembled the barghest, a mythical monster often associated with Yorkshire. Spellings and specific forms of barghest vary but the dog-like being foretold of pain, disaster, or even death to all who saw it. The barghest also elicited howling from dogs in its vicinity, something Dracula protagonist Mina Murray reported took place soon after the arrival of the Demeter.

The journey maps in Dracula: The Map were all created using Knight Lab’s popular StoryMapJS format.