The nakedly fantastic plot of The Crater reveals more about Cooper's personal stake in the patriarch than any book since The Pioneers – that embryonic source of both the Leatherstocking tales and the novels of frontier settlement. In the tradition of exotic sea tales, Cooper, like the ancient mariner, commands the reader to his will, insisting that his narrative is entirely factual. But we are not misled for long, nor are we meant to be. The introduction, falling in tone somewhere between a definition of romance and a refusal to give a refund, prepares us for a bizarre world entirely and self-consciously of Cooper's making. First, he casts his hero on a barren reef; when additional characters demand greater acreage, the author – as First Cause – lifts a new archipelago above the ocean; when his characters anger him, he reaches down and apocalyptically destroys his newly created domain. For Cooper, the Pacific Ocean is a blank slate. On it, he inscribes his major preoccupations as an American artist as clearly as Poe charts the twists of A. Gordon Pym's psyche on the latitudes and longitudes of his South Atlantic. On this watery frontier, where the land cultivated by Cooper's pioneer is so patently land brought forth from the brow of the hero's creator, the connection between Cooper's assessment of patriarchal authority and his own claim to authority as a writer looms before the reader.