Stoker draws from personal experience and incorporates historical strands from the Spanish–American War as well as the sixteenth-century conflict between Spain and Elizabethan England, using these events to explore important themes of his time such as national identity and changing concepts of womanhood.

[16] Scholar Lisa Hopkins points out that this case is an "ominous" one for Stoker to reference while the men in the novel are searching for Marjory because it involved a corpse rather than a living person and the mystery was never quite solved.

[17] The fact that the Stewart case proved too much for even the Pinkerton Detective Agency to solve also could be an opportunity for Stoker to detract from "the American reputation for efficiency" and thus "incriminat[e] Marjory".

[17] Archibald Hunter, a young Englishman, is passing his leisure time near Cruden Bay in the small Scottish village of Whinnyfold when he has a vision of a couple walking past him, carrying a tiny coffin.

Don Bernardino was given a trust by Pope Sixtus V in the late sixteenth century, which included the charge of a substantial treasure to use against England after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Later, when he is in Aberdeen, Archibald encounters a pair of diplomats, and they inform him that the woman he has been spending time with is really Marjory Drake, an heiress from Chicago who used her fortune to buy a battleship for the U.S. Navy to use against the Spanish during the Spanish–American War.

Stoker creates a multi-layered historical and political background by setting the events of the novel during the Spanish–American War but with a centuries-old basis in the sixteenth-century conflict between England and Spain.

In this manner, the Spanish are presented as a looming threat to Anglo-American society, and the struggle of power and values characteristic of Imperial fiction manifests itself here on a domestic level, with fears of invasion reminiscent of Dracula.

The occult plays a role in confronting this foreign threat to power and stability through Archibald's gift of Second Sight and the presence of an ongoing dialogue on fate in the midst of the political intrigue.

Marjory's kidnapping is provoked by political motives, but this line of the story echoes the Gothic plotline of an innocent, imprisoned young woman whose lover must come and rescue her from wicked (often foreign) men.

The Mystery of the Sea, although difficult to classify, is a thriller in any context, and one that, as outlined above, displays tendencies of long-standing genres as well as those that were newly emerging in Stoker's time.

The Mystery of the Sea is not written in a series of journal entries and personal correspondence like Dracula, and it lacks a clear narrative frame except for certain instances when Archibald indicates that he is looking back on events and reflecting.

The novel, due to its memoir-like structure, is presented as a recollection of factual events, and is sensationalist and melodramatic in its fast-paced, busy plot, but it lacks the immediate currency of such epistolary classics as Dracula, and earlier, The Woman in White.

Nationality also is closely tied into the political backstory of The Mystery of the Sea, with an ancient conflict between Spain and England providing tensions that last all the way up to the days of the Spanish–American War.

Don Bernardino, like Marjory, is very proud of his national heritage, but instead of stressing his personal independence as she does, he emphasizes his role in a long family line and the importance of maintaining his honor and fulfilling an ancient trust.

Marjory and Don Bernardino clearly have different sets of values that are strongly influenced by their respective nationalities, but as the novel progresses, some of these stereotypes are supplanted by emerging individual personality traits.

[11] This ideological (and inaccurate) racial construction was largely unsuccessful after American forces had actually gone into Cuba,[25] but these ideas, namely judgment based on skin color, are important in The Mystery of the Sea.

It is unclear whether this apparent justification stems from the fact that the potential assailant was black or from the crime he was about to commit, but Stoker nonetheless presents only a negative picture of people of African descent, and one that is in accord with the tensions of the time period.

Regardless of how the reader reacts to Conrad's and Stoker's respective descriptions of dark-skinned people, it is important to recognize that The Mystery of the Sea is part of a larger discourse on race that was influenced by the vitality of the British Empire.

Indeed, racism has been characterized by some as "colonialism brought home",[27] which fits in with Archibald's thoughts on the one black character in the novel as well as the larger political and imperialist themes of the work.

He feels no qualms about killing the black man, recognizes an active evil in this racial "other", and triumphs in rescuing the purity of his white beloved from the threat of her dark-skinned attacker.

[28] Carol A. Senf notes this tension between the natural and the supernatural, describing Gormala as one who "haunts Hunter throughout the novel, frequently reminding him of his own occult abilities and reinforcing for the reader that science cannot provide the answer to everything".

I began to understand that the whole earth and sea, and air—all of that of which human beings generally ordinarily take cognizance, is but a film or crust which hides the deeper moving power or forces".

The kidnappers are drowned, Don Bernardino regains his honor in death, and the mysterious Seer, Gormala, meets her end near the same bay where she first met Archibald Hunter, lending a sense of justice and closure to what could have been a dark story.

Archibald loves her and is enamored with her fierce spirit, and admires her "coolness of head" but this does not stop him from noting that she possesses "the little morsel of hysterics which goes to make up the sum total of every woman".

[38] In many ways, this notion of honor contributes to the undermining of the New Woman in The Mystery of the Sea and is another remnant of the conventional Gothic within the novel's modern (for the time) political landscape.

This gendered conception of honor persists to the very end of the novel; Don Bernardino dies in his noble efforts towards rescuing Marjory and reclaiming the treasure from the kidnappers, and is buried in the vault of his ancestors.

This reviewer admits that Stoker weaves the different strands together well, but that he is "hardly justified in framing such colossal machinery to produce results more simply attained by less ambitious sensationalists".

Carol Senf, for example, looks at the role of technology as a means of "salvation" and problem-solving for the hero, while Andrew Smith analyzes the Catholic-Protestant and racial tensions underlying the historical backdrop of the Spanish–American War.

In general, modern scholars have shown that Stoker cannot escape the influence of his best-known work, but they have also demonstrated that The Mystery of the Sea is full of complex themes that are worthy of critical attention.