Spectres in the Arctic: Whales and Arthur Conan Doyle

Alder, Emily

Abstract

Whales have long held powerful symbolic places in the art, writing, and folklore of coastal and sea-going cultures globally. Under the expansion of industrialised whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, both the whales and their meanings found themselves under unprecedented threat. The cultures - including, in the case of this paper, the late Victorians - that over-hunted the whales were also the cultures most aware of changes in the animals’ population numbers, though it didn’t stop them. By the time Arthur Conan Doyle sailed to Arctic seas, the numbers of bowhead whales there were in steep decline, and his writings about his 1881 voyage express a melancholy sense that whaling was not the pursuit it had been. In his earliest non-fiction about the voyage, Conan Doyle expresses enthusiasm for whaling as a manly activity, but his later reflections and his fiction exhibit a much more ambivalent position. A repressed or latent uneasy awareness of the effects of over-hunting finds expression through Gothic codes in short stories like ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ (1883). This ghost story about a tormented whaling captain, lured to a frozen death by the apparent spectre of his lost beloved, is not ostensibly about whales, or even much about whaling - at least on the surface. But memories and meanings of whales outlive the creatures themselves; though the bowheads are gone, they continue to haunt Arctic space, and Conan Doyle’s story expresses an awareness, not yet ready to be openly spoken, of human responsibility for the Victorian Arctic’s bloody past and uncertain future.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Dark Economies
• Start Date: Jul 21, 2021
• End Date: Jul 23, 2021
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2023