Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s large corpus grows ever-larger. In 2011 the British Library published his first attempt at a novel, The Narrative of John Smith, and now it has released an even earlier piece of writing, his record of a whaling trip to the Arctic in 1880. Only a third year medical student at the time, he signed on as ship’s doctor; all British whaling ships had to carry a medical officer as a legal requirement, but clearly the level of expertise was not considered to be a determining factor. He secured the position by chance because one of his fellow students couldn’t go and offered his place to Conan Doyle, even providing the necessary gear. Conan Doyle took time off from his studies to supplement his hard-pressed family’s income – earning £2. 10s. 0d a month, plus a bonus of 3/- per ton of whale oil obtained – making his presence on the voyage in effect a kind of early gap year. He was only twenty, and actually gained his majority while at sea.
The SS Hope left
Peterhead on 28 February 1880, under Captain John Gray, a member of a notable
whaling family (the Hope spent part
of the trip in company with the Eclipse, captained by John Gray‘s
brother David). Most injuries on board fortunately
were minor, though Conan Doyle experienced the first patient death of his
career. As his medical duties were not
arduous, much of his time was taken up with clerical tasks, including keeping
the ship’s log for the captain. In
addition to the official record, he maintained his own journal, and it is this
that the British Library has reproduced.
If all he had done had been
to keep the ship’s log and dress the occasional finger, it might have been a
dull read. However, he was never one to
sit around waiting for something to happen, and threw himself into the life of
the ship to such an extent that the captain offered to take him again the
following season as harpooner as well as doctor. Conan Doyle declined the offer, fortunately for
us, given the number of times he fell in the sea. He was comfortable with the captain, whom he
admired greatly and in whose company he spent much time in this stratified
community, and also with those below decks, enjoying their conviviality.
This was a formative
experience for the young man. As he
later put it, he left “a big, straggling youth,” but returned “a powerful,
well-grown man.” His writing, assured
for a twenty-year old, is a valuable unvarnished snap-shot of an industry that
was becoming harder to sustain even in the 1880s because the level of hunting
had reduced whale numbers significantly.
In fact the Hope didn’t have a great deal of luck with whales
this time out, and much of the trip was taken up with killing seals. The total haul was a poor one for nearly six
months at sea, just two whales, 3,600 seals, five polar bears, two narwhals,
twelve elephant seals and miscellaneous seabirds
The descriptions of how these
were obtained are not for the faint-hearted, as he nonchalantly describes harpooning
whales and clubbing and shooting seals.
He exhibits little sentiment, happy to shoot rare seabirds with no
thought of his impact on the survival of the species. Nothing seemed sacred, and while he may have
felt a twinge of remorse occasionally, it did not stay his hand, and he happily
took part in the slaughter, priding himself on being a better shot than many of
his shipmates. He saw himself as a
sportsman, and listed his and the Hope’s tallies as “game bags”. One harrowing passage describes an elephant
seal “sitting on a piece of ice very little larger than itself“, surrounded by
killer whales which were “striking the poor creature with their long fins,
trying to knock him off his perch.” The
desperate animal leapt off the ice and made for a boat, trying to jump in it
for safety, whereupon the men clubbed it.
Conan Doyle drew on his
Arctic experiences in later writings, and had a tendency to elaborate and
romanticise them, but this is the first draft, without risk of the
embellishments that came later (though probably not immune from its own share
of sailors’ exaggerations). After a
lapse of 130 years, Conan Doyle’s estate, better known for the undignified
behaviour of his heirs, has now approved its publication. The diary is beautifully printed in
full-colour facsimile, displaying Conan Doyle’s clear handwriting, and revealing
the stains and marks of the journey. He
was good at drawing, and frequently pasted his illustrations, some of which he
later coloured, into the text. Where they
were folded over, the relevant pages have been reproduced twice, once with the picture
folded to show the text, and once with it unfolded.
The volume has been edited by
Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower, who also edited Arthur Conan Doyle: A
Life in Letters and The Narrative of John Smith. In addition to the facsimile, they have
supplied an annotated transcription, with footnotes elucidating the entries,
both personal and relating to the whaling industry, and including the text of
two letters he sent home while at sea (amazing to think that any kind of postal
service could operate in those latitudes).
This is topped and tailed with an introduction and afterword.
The former sets the scene for
the trip, and sketches its course. The
latter traces how his Arctic experiences weaved through his career, from a talk
to the Portsmouth Literary & Scientific Society in 1883 (the lengthy report
of the meeting in the Hampshire Telegraph is included) to articles which
drew directly on the voyage, as well as less explicit references bearing the
influence of that seminal trip which appear in his work. Two articles and two short stories are
included: ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’, which appeared in the Idler in
July 1892;‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’ from the Strand Magazine for
January 1897 (the ending seems to be missing some lines, as it makes an abrupt
transition from a reference to arctic foxes to the method polar bears use to
catch seals.); the early Arctic-set ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’; and
the Holmes story ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’. Photographs and a map of the voyage complete
an elegant and comprehensive volume.
The journal would have been
an interesting account whoever had written it, but naturally it gains extra
interest coming from the pen that later gave us Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle demonstrates in embryo his
burgeoning capabilities as a story-teller, with an eye for quick detail, a
fluent style, and ability to evoke atmosphere.
And this glimpse of his developing style makes one wonder about a claim
by the editors. They feel that after his
early stories ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ and ‘J. Habakuk
Jephson‘s Statement‘, “Sherlock Holmes was but a matter of time.” Conan Doyle certainly shows more literary
promise here than he does in the leaden The Narrative of John Smith, but
bearing in mind the vigour of his maritime exploits, and the zest of his early
adventure stories, it is rather a surprise that he attempted the detective
puzzles of Sherlock Holmes rather than concentrating on producing the ripping
yarns that characterised much of his output.
It is fortunate for lovers of Sherlock Holmes that he did.
As a footnote, looking at the
famous photograph of Conan Doyle with other members of the crews of the Hope
and Eclipse standing on the deck of the Eira, the ship owned by
Benjamin Leigh-Smith that they encountered on 11 July 1880, I realised that
there are in fact two different shots, taken close together in time. Both versions are included in the book, one
credited to Hull Maritime Museum, the other to Hull Museums and Art Gallery.
The men are standing in slightly different positions, with Conan Doyle (third
from the left) much more visible in one than in the other. Conan Doyle wrote in his journal that when
photographed he was smoking a cigar, and worried that he might look “misty”,
but he does not appear to be smoking in either of these. Most likely the photographer, W. J. A. Grant,
discarded that one at the time, but prints of yet a third picture may have
survived.
