The story presents a boat carrying the long-dead Hunter Gracchus as it arrives at a port.
The mayor of Riva meets Gracchus, who gives him an account of his death while hunting, and explains that he is destined to wander aimlessly and eternally over the seas.
Written in the first half of 1917, the story was published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (Berlin, 1931).
[2] In a diary entry for April 6, 1917, Kafka describes a strange boat standing at port, which he is told belongs to the Hunter Gracchus.
[3] The story is paraphrased in, and its content interwoven throughout W. G. Sebald's novel Vertigo as well as in Hélène Cixous's Le Détrônement de la mort.