Dangerous Work Diary of an Arctic Adventure

182 Pages·2012·2.32 MB·English

by  Arthur Conan Doyle

Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower are the editors of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and Conan
Doyle’s first novel, The Narrative of John Smith.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© in introduction and textual annotations, 2012 Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower
© in Arthur Conan Doyle’s diary, 2012 the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd
All rights reserved. Published 2012.
Published in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00905-6 (CLOTH)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00886-8 (E-BOOK)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04999-1 (SPECIAL EDITION E-BOOK, EPUB/MOBI)
A CIP record for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
‘DANGEROUS WORK’
Diary of an Arctic Adventure
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Edited by
Jon Lellenberg & Daniel Stashower
A complete facsimile edition is available from
The University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00886-8 (E-BOOK)
THE BRITISH LIBRARY
Arthur Conan Doyle, third from left, 12 July 1880.
(photograph by W.J.A. Grant, courtesy of Hull Maritime Museum.)
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MAP
INTRODUCTION “I came of age at 80 degrees north latitude”
Annotated transcript of Arthur Conan Doyle’s diary of his voyage
“It was quite an ovation” Conan Doyle revisits the Arctic
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Arctic writings
The Glamour of the Arctic
Life on a Greenland Whaler
The Captain of the “Pole-Star”
The Adventure of Black Peter
Notes
Acknowledgments
The editors are grateful for their assistance and encouragement to Christy Allen;
Philip Bergem; Peter Blau; Catherine Cooke, Marylebone Library; Alison
Corbett; Professor John Corbett, University of Macau; Richard Espley, National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich; George Fletcher; Douglas Garden, Shetland
Library, Lerwick; Michael Gunton, Laura Weston, and Dianne Cawood,
Portsmouth Central Library; Stuart N. Frank, Senior Curator, New Bedford
Whaling Museum; Roger Johnson; Timothy Johnson and Julia McKuras,
University of Minnesota Libraries’ Sherlock Holmes Collections; and Dr. Robert
S. Katz. Aberdeen University Library, the British Library, London, the
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, and the Library of Congress, Washington
D.C., also provided valuable support. Finally, the editors are grateful to the
family members who, as heirs of Anna Conan Doyle, are the owners of Arthur
Conan Doyle’s whaling diary, for making it available for the preparation of this
edition: Catherine Doyle Beggs, Georgina Doyle, Richard Doyle, and Charles
Foley.

Arthur Conan Doyle, in practice in Southsea, Portsmouth, early 1880s.
(Courtesy of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.)
INTRODUCTION
“I came of age at 80 degrees north latitude”
On a March afternoon in 1880, a young medical student named Arthur Conan
Doyle decided on a sudden impulse to suspend his studies and take a berth as
ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler. The six-month voyage took him into
unknown regions, gave him unimagined sights and experiences, and plunged
him into dangerous and bloody work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He
worked harder under more difficult circumstances than he ever had before, he
argued philosophy and religion with his shipmates, and he dodged death on more
than one occasion. It proved to be, he said, “the first real outstanding adventure
of my life.”
“It came about in this way,” he explained years later in his autobiography,
Memories and Adventures:
One raw afternoon in Edinburgh, whilst I was sitting reading hard for one of those examinations which
blight the life of a medical student, there entered to me one Currie, a fellow-student with whom I had
some slight acquaintance. The monstrous question which he asked drove all thought of my studies out of
my head.
“Would you care,” said he, “to start next week for a whaling cruise? You’ll be surgeon, two pound ten
a month and three shillings a ton oil money.”
“How do you know I’ll get the berth?” was my natural question.
“Because I have it myself. I find at this last moment that I can’t go, and I want to get a man to take my
place.”
“How about an Arctic kit?”
“You can have mine.”
In an instant the thing was settled, and within a few minutes the current of my life had been deflected
1
into a new channel.
Conan Doyle was only twenty at the time, and in his third year of medical
studies at Edinburgh University. “Speaking generally of my university career,”
he would recall, “I was always one of the ruck, neither lingering nor gaining – a
60 percent man at examinations.” His typically self-effacing comment made
light of a good deal of effort and accomplishment in the face of difficult
circumstances. In later years he would declare with characteristic cheer that he
had been raised in “the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty,” but the
remark glossed over considerable domestic turmoil and hardship, with the Doyle
family changing addresses at least five times before Arthur was ten. Though it
was a genteel poverty, his father Charles Doyle suffered for years from illness
and alcohol, until the income from his surveyor’s post ceased when he was only
forty-four.
Somehow money had been found to provide young Arthur with a first-class
education at Stonyhurst, a distinguished Jesuit boarding school in England, and
upon graduating he felt the need to assume some of his father’s responsibilities
and contribute to the welfare of the large family. “Perhaps it was good for me
that the times were hard,” he wrote, “for I was wild, full-blooded, and a trifle
reckless, but the situation called for energy and application so that one was
bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail
her. It had been determined that I should be a doctor, chiefly, I think, because
Edinburgh was so famous a centre for medical learning.”
By now the first seeds of the Sherlock Holmes stories were sown. As a boy
Conan Doyle had discovered Edgar Allan Poe, “the supreme original short story
writer of all time,” and would occasionally “petrify our small family circle” by
reading his tales aloud. At Edinburgh University he had the good fortune to
serve as an assistant to Dr. Joseph Bell, a physician whose powers of observation
and diagnosis were spellbinding. At a glance Bell could often discern not only
the nature of a patient’s ailment, but also numerous details of his background
and occupation. “To an audience of Watsons,” Conan Doyle joked in later years,
“it all seemed very miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple
enough.” The future creator of Sherlock Holmes had already published one
mystery story by the age of twenty, thrilled to receive three guineas for it when
often he went without lunch in order to spend two pence upon a used book.
Conan Doyle’s decision to sign onto the Arctic whaling expedition,
spontaneous and reckless though it undoubtedly seemed to his industrious and
thrifty mother, afforded him a rare set of opportunities. He would indulge his
budding taste for adventure, and be paid for doing so. At the same time, his six
months aboard ship would give him a chance to nurture his growing ambitions
as a writer. Before departing for Peterhead, the Scottish port where he would
join the whaler Hope, he augmented Claud Currie’s seaman’s kit with several
books of poetry, philosophy, and literature, as well as blank journals in which to
record his impressions of the voyage.2 They would become a deeply personal
chronicle of a young man testing himself as never before.