"Poe had certain obsessions that repeated themselves in several of his stories. In this case, I know of at least 4 different stories he wrote involving sailing ships, and in EACH one, the ship goes down in a storm."
Obsession or a genuine source of fear & unease of the time?
A few weeks ago I was looking up info on the Kingston Trio Song MTA & learned it was based on an older song The Ship That Never Returned. Back in the 1800s there were no ship radios, the only way to learn what had happened to a ship was if there was a survivor or witnesses to the event. People would get on a ship, sail away and nobody would know what happened if they never returned.
So for someone writing stories of terror, a ship at sea in the pre-radio era seems a natural setting.