Over the course of this year, I've written four short essays about Arthur Conan Doyle for inclusion in the Sherlock's Spotlight Gazette published by The Beacon Society for young readers. As I finished work on the final essay for 2023, I decided to post the four to this site. Here is the second, where I hoped to show the young readers how one unexpected opportunity can change everything.
Glimpses into the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes
From Experience to Inspiration
Fiction writers often draw on their life experiences to inspire their stories and Arthur Conan Doyle was no exception. He lived a very adventurous life, traveling to most parts of the world, experiencing many different cultures and climates. He dined with kings, worked in military hospitals, spoke to vast audiences, played numerous sports, learned musical instruments, investigated crimes, reported from the front lines of war, and so much more. One of his earliest adventures inspired several of his sea-going stories, including one considered by many people to be one of his very best, “The Captain of the Polestar” and a notable series of exciting tales about a brutal pirate named Captain Sharkey.
In February of 1880, twenty-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle was in his third year of medical school. He needed money to continue his studies, so he signed on as a crew doctor for the whaling ship, Hope. Although Arthur was not a full-fledged doctor yet, he had enough training to join the crew for the expedition. Captain John Gray gave him the job when Arthur’s friend Currie, a fellow medical student, changed his mind about taking the position. The Hope was to spend seven months in the Arctic Ocean.
The Arctic Ocean includes the North Pole region of the northern hemisphere. Its borders include the Bering Strait on the Pacific side and the Greenland Scotland Ridge on the Atlantic side. The ocean was covered by sea ice throughout the year and it was very dangerous for ships and the sailors. The Hope sailed from Peterhead, a town in Aberdeen, Scotland. But it immediately ran into foul weather. The captain managed to find a safe place in a harbor in the Shetland Islands just before the full force of a hurricane could cripple the ship. They could not leave for the arctic until March.
Only four days later, Arthur awoke to the sound of floating ice pieces bumping into the sides of the boat. It appeared the entire sea was covered with drifting ice. “They were none of them large,” he wrote later, “but they lay so thick that a man might travel far by springing from one to another.”
The ship’s crew intended to hunt for seals. Arthur hoped to go with the crew out onto the ice but because a strong swell had risen, the floating ice pieces were crashing into one another. The ship’s captain told Arthur he had to stay on the ship as he did not have enough experience to safely walk about on the moving ice and would surely fall into the dangerously cold sea.
A disappointed and angry Arthur obeyed the captain and went to sit on top of the bulwarks of the ship with his legs dangling over the side. He did not realize a sheet of ice had formed on the bulwark and in just a moment, he slid off the ship and vanished into the sea between two ice blocks. Luckily he crawled onto one of the blocks and managed to get back onto the ship.
As he had already fallen, the captain then allowed him to come out onto the ice with the crew, saying Arthur “was bound to fall into the ocean in any case and might as well be on the ice.” The captain was right. Arthur tumbled into the dangerous water two more times that day. He had to return to the ship and go to bed while his clothes were thawed and dried out in the engine room.
He went on to have other dangerous days on the ice. There were other surprises during the voyage including a chance to see a right whale (baleen) jumping completely out of the water into the air. Arthur was fascinated by the animal life that lived in such a stark and unforgiving atmosphere:
The perpetual light, the glare of the white ice, the deep blue of the water, these are the things which one remembers most clearly... the innumerable sea-birds, whose call is for ever ringing in your ears—the gulls, the fulmars, the snow-birds, the burgomasters, the looms, and the rotjes.These fill the air, and below, the waters are for ever giving you a peep of some strange new creature...the mis-shapen hunchback whale, the ghost-like white whale, the narwhal, with his unicorn horn, the queer-looking bottle-nose, the huge, sluggish, Greenland shark, and the terrible killing grampus, the most formidable of all the monsters of the deep,—these are the creatures who own those unsailed seas.On the ice are the seals, the saddle-backs, the ground seals and the huge bladdernoses, 12 feet from nose to tail, with the power of blowing up a great blood-red football upon their noses when they are angry, which they usually are. Occasionally one sees a white Arctic fox upon the ice, and everywhere are the bears.
After many months at sea, he finally returned home to Scotland and his medical studies. But his life had changed. The isolation, the danger, and the unusual life on the ship altered his thinking, his health, and his understanding of the world around him. He said the Arctic had awakened “the soul of a born wanderer.”
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