"Low morale aboard ship has nothing to do with captain calling everyone 'pig-dog,' all day and night" (Miskatonic Press, Vol. 7)

"If I am mad, it is a mercy!"

Miskatonic Press started because I couldn't remember which stories I'd already read in my H.P. Lovecraft anthology. When I finished a story, I would go to the table of contents and write a one-sentence summary of what happened (usually in a humorous way). I would typically phrase them like a newspaper headline or the tag line for a movie.

The Temple: Manuscript found on the coast of Yucatan (I Catan! We all Catan!)

U-boat captain goes insane, but wants us to know he knows he's insane. More importantly, he's German (may have mentioned it once or twice).

Low morale aboard ship has nothing to do with captain calling everybody "pig-dog" day and night.

"The Temple" is a first-person narrative presented as the discovered manuscript of Karl Heinrich Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, a proud German U-boat commander during World War I. Von Altberg recounts how his submarine crew found a small ivory carving of a strange, ancient-looking head on the body of a dead man they found floating in the water. The body is described by Von Altberg as: "one more victim of the unjust war of agression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the Fatherland."

The crew brings the idol aboard, and the U-boat begins to experience a series of bizarre and disturbing events. Crew members begin acting irrationally, reporting hallucinations and feelings of dread. One poor guy says he sees bodies drifting past the portholes staring at him. For some reason Von Altberg decides that whipping the man is a productive response. More crew members become violently insane, and Von Altberg declares that their subsequent death was good for morale.

Eventually, the submarine malfunctions and sinks to the ocean floor, deeper than it should be able to survive. Von Altberg is left alone with one other crewman, a fellow named Klenze. The captain had this to say about Klenze as they languished in their doomed vessel: "His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and speculations which have no value. The fact of our coming death affected him curiously, and he would frequently pray in remorse over the men, women, and children we had sent to the bottom; forgetting that all things are noble which serve the German state."

Yeah, Klenze is definitely the weird one.

Eventually, Klenze begs permission to be shot out the airlock. The captain complies, pulls the lever, and watches with sociopathic curiosity to see whether the unfortunate man's body will be crushed by the water pressure.

As he explores the ocean bottom in his drifting submarine, he discovers the ruins of a strange, ancient temple, far below the depths of the known world. He decides to leave the submarine and enter the temple on the seafloor.

This story covers a lot of Lovecraft's usual themes: the insignificance of humanity, the fragility of sanity, and mysteries beyond human understanding (and indeed, beyond human resistance to water pressure). It also focuses on Aryan superioroty a bit more than I deemed necessary, but that's one of Lovecraft's unfortunate traits that we can't ignore.