In 1880, the year he turned twenty-one, Arthur Conan Doyle was nearing the end of his medical courses in Edinburgh. He was studying hard for an exam when a fellow student named Currie came to his room and asked, “Would you care 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?” young Arthur replied, always ready for sport or adventure.
“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.”
School was postponed. Arthur was off to the Arctic for seven months aboard the whaler Hope, captained by grizzly-bearded John Gray, a taciturn fellow Scot. Like Charles Darwin aboard the Beagle a few decades earlier, the future creator of Sherlock Holmes soon learned that the role of ship’s medical officer frequently translated into “companion for a captain imprisoned by the iron bars of class and rank that rule a ship”—even on a whaler. With fifty other men, half Scots and half Shetlanders picked up at Lerwick Harbour on the way north, Conan Doyle faced the first big adventure of his life. Before he knew it, he was waking to the tap of icebergs knocking against the hull. On deck, he could see vast floating fields of ice, so close together that a traveler could leap from one to another for mile after mile. Soon he was high in the crow’s nest, surveying the breeding ice fields, densely populated with many thousands of dark mother seals and their white cubs. The yowling of the cubs sounded so human that the Hope seemed moored beside a nursery—yet soon Arthur was helping slaughter them, as acres of crimson blood stained the ice. Then the Hope steered toward whaling waters, where at one point Arthur calculated that probably there were no other human beings within eight hundred miles. The unavoidable loneliness shook him.
Later Conan Doyle wrote of the Arctic, “He who has been within the borders of that mysterious region, which can be the most lovely and the most repellant on earth, must always retain something of its glamour . . . I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth. I came off a powerful, well-grown man.” His uncle had encouraged him to read Edgar Allan Poe, and probably he had already read the great American grotesque’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose science fictional and supernatural Antarctic adventures would influence Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, and many others.
Apparently they influenced Arthur Conan Doyle as well. In January 1883 Temple Bar published his ghost story “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” in which he conjured both the beauty and the terror of the Arctic. Four years later, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published, and gradually the world came to care about Arthur Conan Doyle. But this cold, dark story was published before anyone—including the young man himself—knew who he was.