Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  At the time, as whale oil gave way to petroleum products, the era of the great fleets of sailing whalers was drawing to a close. Whale oil was still used for soaps and lubricants, but the baleen—the long, bony plates in a whale’s mouth—now had greater value. Strong and flexible, its uses ranged from kitchen utensils to corset stays.

  Apart from its cannon-fired harpoon guns, the Hope employed hunting techniques in use for centuries. When a whale was sighted, seven of the ship’s eight small whaling boats would be lowered into the water, and the crews would row silently toward the prey. When the boat pulled within range, the gunner fired a harpoon attached to a strong coil of rope, keeping the whale tethered as it sounded to as much as two hundred fathoms. The initial harpoon blast was seldom fatal; sperm whales were known to turn and ram the attacking boats, or even crush the vessels and crews in their powerful jaws. In most cases, however, the whale tired of being played on the line, allowing the lancers to finish the job. The carcass would then be towed back to the ship, lashed to the side, and stripped of its skin for processing. The blanket of blubber would be hacked into pieces and rendered in huge iron pots; the baleen was pried out, cleaned, and bundled.

  Conan Doyle was a young man on the first real adventure of his life, and he soon found himself caught up in the thrill and camaraderie of the hunt. “To play a salmon is a royal game,” he wrote, “but when your fish weighs more than a suburban villa … it dwarfs all other experience.”

  Even so, he would come to have qualms about this “murderous harvest,” as he called it. “Yet amid all the excitement—and no one who has not held an oar in such a scene can tell how exciting it is—one’s sympathies lie with the poor hunted creature. The whale has a small eye, little larger than that of a bullock, but I cannot easily forget the mute expostulation which I read in one, as it dimmed over in death within hand’s touch of me.”

  Fresh from his third year of study, Conan Doyle knew nothing of whaling when he came aboard the Hope. He had signed on not as a crewman but as ship’s surgeon. “I was only twenty years of age when I started,” he recalled, “and as my knowledge of medicine was that of an average third year’s student, I have often thought that it was as well that there was no very serious call upon my services.”

  The salary was “two pound ten a month and three shillings a ton oil money”—far more than he could hope to earn rolling pills for Dr. Hoare. Claud Currie, the student who offered him the berth, had arranged the adventure for himself, but found at the last minute that he could not go. He may have chosen Conan Doyle as his last-minute replacement because they were roughly the same size, and he could pass over the heavy clothing and leather boots he had purchased for himself. To Currie’s Arctic kit, Conan Doyle added some books, a journal, and two pairs of boxing gloves.

  The gloves caught the eye of Jack Lamb, the ship’s steward, as Conan Doyle stowed his things under his bunk. Lamb examined the gloves while Conan Doyle explained that he had taken up boxing as a form of exercise at Edinburgh. Lamb, sizing up the tall recruit, seized on the chance to test his mettle. The steward pulled on the gloves and proposed a bout right then and there.

  By all accounts Conan Doyle was a fine boxer, with a genuine appreciation for the rules and subtleties of the “manly art.” Boxing would feature in several of his books—The Croxley Master would follow the adventures of a boxing medical student—and he was even to write a play with a boxing theme. Lamb, by contrast, was a street brawler. Conan Doyle had no sooner pulled on his gloves than the smaller, bandy-legged steward charged across the cramped cabin. Alarmed, the young ship’s surgeon quickly put up his guard. For some time, Conan Doyle crouched behind his curled forearms in the best tradition of the Marquis of Queensberry. Lamb, meanwhile, flailed and thrashed as if trying to put out a grease fire with his fists. Every so often Conan Doyle ventured a sporting jab or a polite feint, then settled back, waiting for Lamb to play himself out like a whale on the line. In time, when Lamb showed no sign of tiring, Conan Doyle hauled off and flattened the smaller man with a thunderbolt to the head. Lamb was impressed. “So help me,” he told the first mate, “he’s the best surgeon we’ve had! He’s blackened my e’e!”

  “It was the first (and very nearly the last) testimonial that I ever received to my professional abilities,” Conan Doyle said.

  Having established his credentials, Conan Doyle quickly fell in with the rest of the ship’s officers. It seemed odd that the captain had chosen a weak, spindly man as his first mate, while a brawny red-haired giant named Colin McLean worked as an assistant to the cook. All became clear when the ship left the harbor: McLean, who was illiterate, did not qualify for a Board of Trade certificate. Once the ship was safely under way, McLean and his counterpart switched places.

  McLean, Conan Doyle soon learned, had a volcanic temper. “I have a vivid recollection of an evening which I spent dragging him off the steward, who had imprudently made some criticism upon his way of attacking a whale which had escaped. Both men had had some rum, which had made the one argumentative and the other violent, and as we were all three seated in a space of about seven by four, it took some hard work to prevent bloodshed. Every now and then, just as I thought all danger was past, the steward would begin again with his fatuous, ‘No offense, Colin, but all I says is that if you had been a bit quicker on the fush—’ I don’t know how often this sentence was begun, but never once was it ended; for at the word ‘fush’ Colin always seized him by the throat, and I Colin round the waist, and we struggled until we were all panting and exhausted. Then when the steward had recovered a little breath he would start that miserable sentence once more, and the ‘fush’ would be the signal for another encounter. I really believe that if I had not been there the mate would have hurt him, for he was quite the angriest man that I have ever seen.”

  McLean’s was not the only foul temper on the ship, and it often fell to the genial young surgeon to play peacemaker, as the captain would not have intervened in a case such as this. Ship’s protocol kept him largely isolated from the rest of the officers and crew, and Conan Doyle soon found that his chief duty was to keep him company. “I should have found it intolerable if the captain had been a bad fellow,” said Conan Doyle, “but John Gray of the Hope was a really splendid man, a grand seaman and a serious-minded Scot.” One hopes that Captain Gray shared his young surgeon’s fondness for the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose historical and social essays were Conan Doyle’s latest enthusiasm. For eight months he pressed Macaulay on everyone from the harpooner to the cook, at least some of whom were unacquainted with the works of this noted statesman-poet. “Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their brains over it,” he wrote of his prized volume, “and you may still see the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick the Great.”

  Macaulay’s influence faded somewhat as the ship progressed toward the Arctic ice fields. The vast white expanse seemed miraculous to the young surgeon, who had never set foot outside of Britain to that point. “I awoke one morning to hear the bump, bump of the floating pieces against the side of the ship,” he wrote, “and I went on deck to see the whole sea covered with them to the horizon. They were none of them large, but they lay so thick that a man might travel far by springing from one to the other. Their dazzling whiteness made the sea seem bluer by contrast, and with a blue sky above, and that glorious Arctic air in one’s nostrils, it was a morning to remember.”

  The Hope reached the open ice fields off the coast of Greenland by mid-March, but an agreement between Britain and Norway prohibited seal hunting until after the March breeding season. The crew used the time to track schools of seals to the main pack. “When you do come upon it, it is a wonderful sight,” Conan Doyle wrote. “From the crow’s nest at the top of the main mast, one can see no end of them. On the furthest visible ice one can still see that sprinkling of pepper grains.”

  On April 3, the date specified by the treaty, the crew fanned out across the ice with clubs in hand. Here, too
, Conan Doyle felt the stirrings of conscience, though he soon fell back on the accepted rationale of the time. “It is brutal work,” he admitted, “though not more brutal than that which goes on to supply every dinner table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the ice fields, under the peaceful silence of a blue Arctic sky, did seem a horrible intrusion. But an inexorable demand creates an inexorable supply, and the seals, by their death, help to give a living to the long line of seamen, dockers, tanners, curers, triers, chandlers, leather merchants, and oil-sellers, who stand between this annual butchery on the one hand, and the exquisite, with his soft leather boots, or the savant, using a delicate oil for his philosophical instruments, upon the other.”

  Conan Doyle’s qualms about the brutality of the hunt did not stop him from volunteering to participate on the very first day. As he prepared to lower himself over the bulwarks, however, Captain Gray ordered him back—the ice was too dangerous for a novice. Annoyed, Conan Doyle sat down on an icy bulwark and promptly fell overboard. “The accident brought about what I had wished,” he recalled, “for the captain remarked that as I was bound to fall into the ocean in any case, I might just as well be on the ice as on the ship.”

  Inexperienced on the ice, Conan Doyle fell in twice more and finished the day in bed while his clothes dried out in the engine room. “I had to answer to the name of ‘the great northern diver’ for a long time thereafter,” he admitted.

  Despite the inauspicious start, Conan Doyle soon became adept at hopping from one ice floe to another—so much so that he soon went off hunting by himself like any other member of the crew. One afternoon, while crouching over a freshly killed seal, he stood up to change position and slipped backward off the edge of the ice. Sheepishly, he reached up to pull himself out of the frigid water, but his hands slipped off the slick rim of ice. Fighting off panic, Conan Doyle tried another spot. He clawed frantically, but could not find a handhold on the smooth, glassy edge.

  No one had seen him fall in, and Conan Doyle realized—as both a medical man and a sailor—that he would be dead in minutes if he could not get himself back on the ice. Worse, he could feel the frigid water doing its work—his limbs were growing numb and would soon be useless. He remembered the seal he had been skinning. With a desperate effort, he churned the water with his legs, extending his reach just enough to grab hold of the dead animal’s hind flipper. Using the seal as leverage, he began hauling himself out of the water. To his horror, the dead seal’s carcass began sliding toward him across the ice, yielding to his weight. Conan Doyle knew that if he dragged the animal over the edge of the ice, he would certainly die. For a few tense moments there was “a kind of nightmare tug-of-war,” with Conan Doyle trying to ease himself over the rim before the animal came crashing down on top of him. At last he got one knee out of the water and flopped onto the ice beside the dead creature. Once again the great northern diver finished the day in bed. This time, he had to spend a while thawing his clothes before he could even manage to remove them.

  In June, the ship turned north and the whale hunt began. The Hope carried eight whaling boats, but it was usual to send out only seven while the so-called idlers, those who had not signed on as sailors, remained safely onboard. On Conan Doyle’s voyage, the idlers felt themselves to be a particularly robust group. They volunteered to man the extra boat and made it, at least in Conan Doyle’s estimation, one of the most efficient. “We were all young and strong and keen,” he later told an interviewer, “and I think our boat was as good as any.” Conan Doyle’s willingness to pull his own oar would have made him extremely popular with his shipmates. Each man—Conan Doyle included—had a stake in the profits of the voyage. As an idler, he was mere baggage; in a boat, he became one of the crew.

  For the young man, the whale hunt represented something more than money in his pocket. He had been raised on tales of knights and their quests. Now he himself was living a modern epic, pursuing a gigantic beast through a strange, otherworldly landscape. He may have felt misgivings about the slaughter—more than once he would be literally drenched in blood—but they gave way to the heady thrill of the hunt. The gloom of Edinburgh fell away under the brilliant midnight sun. His father’s illness and his family’s penury could not follow him here. His conscience was clear—the money he earned would go straight into his mother’s purse—but a deeper strain of longing had begun to stir. The Arctic, he believed, had awakened “the soul of a born wanderer.”

  Conan Doyle became a seasoned whaler as the weeks passed, so much so that Captain Gray offered him double pay if he would serve as harpooner as well as surgeon on the next voyage. “It is well that I refused,” he said, “for the life is dangerously fascinating.”

  In fact, it was dangerous in every way. On one hunt, Conan Doyle found himself in the lancing boat, charged with killing the whale once it had been harpooned and played. As the injured whale struggled, the rowers took up a safe position away from the thrashing tail. Suddenly, the wounded creature’s enormous “side-flapper” rose out of the water and poised over the boat. For a moment the six men watched in mute horror as the huge fin arched over them, blocking out the sun. “One flap would have sent us to the bottom of the sea,” Conan Doyle recalled, “and I can never forget how, as we pushed our way from under, each of us held one hand up to stave off that great, threatening fin—as if any strength of ours could have availed if the whale had meant it to descend.” As the terrified men eased away, the dying whale rolled back away from the boat, and the fin slipped harmlessly below the waterline.

  This brush with death only sharpened Conan Doyle’s taste for the adventure. “It is exciting work pulling on to a whale,” he would write. “Your own back is turned to him, and all you know about him is what you read upon the face of the boat-steerer. He is staring out over your head, watching the creature as it swims slowly through the water, raising his hand now and again as a signal to stop rowing when he sees that the eye is coming round, and then resuming the stealthy approach when the whale is end on. There are so many floating pieces of ice, that as long as the oars are quiet the boat alone will not cause the creature to dive. So you creep slowly up, and at last you are so near that the boat-steerer knows that you can get there before the creature has time to dive—for it takes some little time to get that huge body into motion. You see a sudden gleam in his eyes, and a flush in his cheeks, and it’s ‘Give way, boys! Give way, all! Hard!’ Click goes the trigger of the big harpoon gun, and the foam flies from your oars. Six strokes, perhaps, and then with a dull greasy squelch the bows run upon something soft, and you and your oars are sent flying in every direction. But little you care for that, for as you touched the whale you heard the crash of the gun, and know that the harpoon has been fired point-blank into the huge, lead-coloured curve of its side. The creature sinks like a stone, the bows of the boat splash down in the water again, and there is the line whizzing swiftly under the seats and over the bows between your outstretched feet.

  “And this is the great element of danger—for it is rarely indeed that the whale has spirit enough to turn upon its enemies. The line is very carefully coiled by a special man named the line-coiler, and it is warranted not to kink. If it should happen to do so, however, and if the loop catches the limbs of any one of the boat’s crew, that man goes to his death so rapidly that his comrades hardly know that he has gone. It is a waste of fish to cut the line, for the victim is already hundreds of fathoms deep.

  “‘Hold your hand, mon,’ cried the harpooner, as a seaman raised his knife on such an occasion. ‘The fish will be a fine thing for the widdey.’ It sounds callous, but there was philosophy at the base of it.”

  By the time the Hope turned back toward Peterhead after many months at sea, the hunters had taken only four whales. Even so, the ship’s hold carried sixty-six tons of cargo. For most of the crew, this fairly modest haul would have marked the voyage as uneventful, but Conan Doyle judged its success by a different measure. “I came
of age,” he was to tell an interviewer, “in 80 degrees north latitude.”

  * * *

  Conan Doyle parted from his shipmates in Peterhead and made his way back to Edinburgh, where his reunion with his mother was made all the happier by his £50 share of the crew’s profits. He threw himself back into his studies with his former diligence, but he was a changed man, something he attributed to the “peculiar other-world feeling” of the Arctic. “He who has once been within the borders of that mysterious region,” he wrote, “which can be both the most lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain something of its glamour.”

  Almost immediately, Conan Doyle’s whaling experience found its way into his fiction. In the chilling “Captain of the Pole-Star,” published in Temple Bar magazine in 1883, a distraught sea captain pursues the spirit of his lost love onto a treacherous ice floe, where he freezes to death. As the narrator and his shipmates discover the body, a strange gust of wind disturbs its covering of snow. “To my eyes,” the narrator relates, “it seemed but a snow drift, but many of my companions averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe.”

  Like his contemporaries Jack London and Joseph Conrad, Conan Doyle would draw on his sailing adventures for the rest of his life, notably in a series of tales chronicling the adventures of a brutal pirate named Captain Sharkey. The experience also gave Conan Doyle a surprising appreciation for the writing of Herman Melville, whose work was largely unnoticed at the time. He also immersed himself in the tales of William Clark Russell, whose “fine sea stories” would one day find their way into the hands of Dr. Watson.

  These influences were not immediately apparent as Conan Doyle returned to his studies in the autumn of 1880. What was obvious to all, however, was that Conan Doyle was no longer the gawky, uncertain teenager of old. “I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth,” he said. “I came off a powerful, well-grown man.”