Introduction

1In 1880, at the young age of twenty, Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle boarded the Peterhead whaler Hope, bound for the bowhead hunting grounds of East Greenland under John Gray’s captaincy, as ship’s surgeon. Prior to finding fame as the father of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle experienced the tiresome labour of Arctic seafaring life first-hand over the course of six months, and lived in close quarters with the Scottish and Shetlander sailors who had long been the prominent figures of whale-fishery in the United Kingdom. However, this predominantly Scottish industry was rapidly dwindling by the second half of the nineteenth century due to a steep decline in cetacean populations. Only seventeen years later, Doyle nostalgically reflected on his Arctic voyage in the article ‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’, calling it ‘an experience of a life which is already extinct’ (Doyle 1897, 326). This sentiment was not new for the author—he had already lamented the loss of a whole kind of Peterhead seamen in a previous article, ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’: ‘But now, alas! the whaling appears to be upon its last legs; the Peterhead ships are seeking new outlets in the Antarctic seas, and a historical training-school of brave and hardy seamen will soon be a thing of the past’ (Doyle 1892, 319). Doyle’s experience of Arctic whaling therefore came at a turning point for the industry, and as British and American whalers were turning their bow towards the Antarctic Circle in search of sperm whales, the author came to the realisation that he had witnessed the very last hunting voyages of what he considered traditional, hardened Scottish whalers.

2In addition to the aforementioned articles, Doyle explored the traditional figure of the Scottish Arctic whaler and its dying days in his fiction. In 1883, he published the stand-alone piece ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ in the Temple Bar magazine at the very start of his literary career; the short story is composed of short entries from the fictional diary of Doctor John M’Alister Ray, the ship’s doctor of the whaler Pole-Star, reporting on the unpredictable behaviour of his captain Nicolas Craigie, as well as the ghostly apparition and sounds witnessed by the crew above 80°N. The story ends with the captain’s death on the ice, caused by the alluring call of the spectral presence that he believes to be his long-lost fiancée. Close to twenty years later, Doyle also introduced this motif in the Sherlock Holmes canon, and most particularly in the 1904 short story ‘The Adventure of Black Peter,’ which has received very little critical attention considering the growing scholarly interest in Doyle’s work in recent years. In this short narrative, Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of Peter Carey, a bad-tempered Scottish whaling master found harpooned inside a wooden cabin in his Sussex garden. Whales and their mutilated carcasses are conspicuously excluded from the stories; by consciously placing his narratives outside of hunting grounds—whales rarely reach the 80°N latitude, as Emily Alder notes in one of the only studies dedicated to ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ (Alder 52)—Doyle instead chose to explore the gruesome demise of traditional Scottish Arctic whalers, and by extension, that of Scottish whale-fishery, through an anthropocentric lens.

3The recent publication of the diary that Arthur Conan Doyle kept while aboard the Hope—which only came to light in 2012—allows for a comprehensive examination of Doyle’s Arctic writing; it appears that while he delved into traditional hunting practices in great details in his non-fictional work, he instead used fiction in order to carefully examine the archetypal model of the Scottish Arctic whaler, omitting the hunting process almost entirely. This study will thus argue that through the medium of fiction, Doyle fully problematised the ambivalent and precarious typified model of the Scottish Arctic whaler in order to comment on the changing cultural and literary climates at the end of the century. Giving pride of place to the codified and constructed model in his work, he simultaneously examined its porosity and dissolution in light of the decline of the Scottish whaling industry.

4Following a brief overview of the history of Scottish Arctic whaling in the nineteenth century, this study will firstly examine how Doyle, always the typologist, identifies the model of the Scottish whaler, with specific physiognomic and stereotypical traits, and more specifically through his reliance on homodiegetic narrators’ binary perceptions of Scottish eccentricity and English rationality. This article then intends to demonstrate that this constructed identity serves to highlight the ontological instability and porosity of this model, which is systematically commodified and imitated in the narratives. This will provide the adequate framework to analyse the deaths of the whaling captains and the reversal of power dynamics that ensues, signalling both the end of the typified Scottish model and a reassessment of Realism at the fin de siècle.

A Brief Overview of Scottish Arctic Whaling in the Nineteenth Century

5Even years after his stint in the Arctic, Arthur Conan Doyle failed to fully comprehend the devastating effect of over-exploitation—which pushed the Greenland whale population to the brink of extinction at the time—as he believed a superior intellect (Doyle 1892, 320) to be the cause of progressively scarcer catches:

It is not that the present generation is less persistent and skilful than its predecessors, nor is it that the Greenland whale is in danger of becoming extinct; but the true reason appears to be, that Nature, while depriving this unwieldy mass of blubber of any weapons, has given it in compensation a highly intelligent brain. That the whale entirely understands the mechanism of his own capture is beyond dispute. (Doyle 1892, 320)

Typology, Physiognomy, and Characteristics of the Scottish Whaler Model

8The darkness of their physical traits, when associated with their famed toughness, justifies a physiognomic study of the whalers, at a time that saw the rise of the intersection between physiognomy and criminology. This pseudo-scientific practice postulated a correlation between physical appearance and moral character, and rapidly became associated with criminology and social Darwinism at the end of the century, notably through the work of Cesare Lombroso. Medically-trained John Ray gives his own definition of physiognomy in ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’, theorising that ‘a man’s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within’ (Doyle 1883, 337). Following that logic, Ray diagnoses his captain’s dark features as a symptom of his unpredictable and aggressive nature; Nicholas Craigie is ‘most subject to tempestuous fits of anger, and he seems to be aware of it, for I have known him lock himself up so that no one might approach him until his dark hour was passed’ (Doyle 1883, 337), whereas Peter Carey was ‘known in the trade as Black Peter . . . for the humours which were the terror of all around him’ (Doyle 1904, 353). In Doyle’s fiction, the Scottish whaler is therefore easily and visually identified by his strong, dark features, and a strong sense of towering manliness, in addition to an unpredictable, mysterious and shifty personality, hence underlining the physical and psychological invariants of the model.

Opposing Perceptions of Scottish Eccentricity and English Rationality

9Providing a presumably stable and uniform description of the Scottish whaler partly inspired by real-life experience, Doyle moreover consolidates it in its opposition to a sense of Englishness. In ‘The Adventure of Black Peter,’ in order to bait Peter Carey’s murderer, whom he knows to be a Scottish whaler, Sherlock Holmes conducts sham interviews for a whaling expedition to the Arctic. He dismisses the first two candidates on the basis of patronymics only; English-named Hugh Pattins and James Lancaster are sent home with half a sovereign for their troubles after introducing themselves. Watson even compares the latter’s figure to the seed of an apple variety that is typically cultivated in England: ‘The first who entered was a little Ribston-pippin of a man’ (Doyle 1904, 361). His small body, contrasting with the imposing build of Scottish whalers, is thus rooted in English arable land, far removed from the polar ice floes. This comparison echoes the very start of Doyle’s essay ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’, in which the author describes Scottish whalers as a category of men who have hardly ever experienced harvesting, being away at sea over the summer months:

It is a strange thing to think that there is a body of men in Great Britain, the majority of whom have never, since their boyhood, seen the corn in the fields. It is the case with the whale-fishers of Peterhead. They begin their hard life very early as boys or ordinary seamen, and from that time onward they leave home at the end of February, before the first shoots are above the ground, and return in September, when only the stubble remains to show where the harvest has been. I have seen and spoken with many an old whaling-man to whom a bearded ear of corn was a thing to be wondered over and preserved. (Doyle 1892, 320)

10Doyle seemed to find a poetic quality to this elliptic image, as he evoked this motif again in ‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’: ‘There were men on board the Hope who had never seen corn growing, for from their boyhood they had always started for the whaling in March and returned in September’ (Doyle 1897, 329). This imagery could be rooted in Scottish superstition, as Doyle’s Arctic diary reveals; in the entry for Tuesday 18th March 1880, Doyle mentions a common belief drawing a direct causal link between arable land and polar hunting: “Stewart dreamed that he was among a great herd of swine last night, so we are sure to see seals today. If a man dreams of anything agricultural it always means that seals are somewhere near” (Doyle 2012, 232). However, the agricultural image conjured up by the English whalers does not apply to the third candidate interviewed by Holmes, who stands in stark contrast with the two previous seamen with his Scottish ‘bold dark eyes’ that ‘gleamed behind the cover of thick, tufted, overhung eyebrows’ (Doyle 1904, 361). The sailor introduces himself as Patrick Cairns, a name reminiscent of the man-made piles of stones found in the Scottish mountains and Arctic icescapes. Sherlock Holmes is thus able to quickly identify Cairns as the culprit of the murder with only a bare-bones interview giving him all the clues he needs:

“Your name?” asked Holmes.
“Patrick Cairns.”
“Harpooner?”
“Yes, sir. Twenty-six voyages.”
“Dundee, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And ready to start with an exploring ship?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What wages?”
“Eight pounds a month.”
“Could you start at once?”
“As soon as I get my kit.”
“Have you your papers?”
“Yes, sir.”
He took a sheaf of worn and greasy forms from his pocket. Holmes glanced over them and returned them.
“You are just the man I want,” said he.
(Doyle 1904, 361–62)

11In addition to dichotomic characterisation, Doyle’s use of rational and sceptical homodiegetic narrators—namely John Watson in ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ and John Ray in ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’—serves to further widen the gap between Scottish and English sensibilities. Whereas John Watson is unequivocally an Englishman, it can be safely assumed that John M’Alister Ray is a Scotsman, given his Scottish name and the prestige of Scotland’s medical and anatomical training in the nineteenth century. Described by his father as ‘a strong-nerved and unimaginative man, with the strictest regard for veracity’ (Doyle 1883, 350), John Ray diagnoses a ‘perfect epidemic’ (Doyle 1883, 337) of ‘puerile superstition’ (Doyle 1883, 342) spreading amongst his Scottish crewmates once the ghost starts appearing near the ship. John Ray fits the definition of the sceptical ‘scholar’ as it was defined by Jacques Derrida in his study on hauntology Spectres de Marx:

• 4 ‘As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that loo (...)

Théoriciens ou témoins, spectateurs, observateurs, savants et intellectuels, les scholars croient qu’il suffit de regarder. Dès lors, ils ne sont pas toujours dans la position la plus compétente pour faire ce qu’il faut, parler au spectre . . . . Il n’y a jamais eu de scholar qui ait vraiment, en tant que tel, affaire au fantôme. Un scholar traditionnel ne croit pas aux fantômes — ni à tout ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’espace virtuel de la spectralité. Il n’y a jamais eu de scholar qui, en tant que tel, ne croie à la distinction tranchante entre le réel et le non-réel . . . . Au-delà de cette opposition, il n’y a pour le scholar qu’hypothèse d’école, fiction théâtrale, littérature et spéculation. (Derrida 1993, 33)4

12His exclusionary, empirical and patronising attitude towards Scottish superstition proves ambivalent, as it distances him from his own national roots, while simultaneously providing adequate vocabulary in order to describe the supernatural occurrences onboard: ‘He still looks somewhat distrait, however, and retains that wild look in his eyes which in a Highlander would mean that he was ‘fey’—at least so our chief engineer remarked to me, and he has some reputation among the Celtic portion of our crew as a seer and expounder of omens’ (Doyle 1883, 337). The dual meaning of the term ‘fey’—which, according to the OED, suggests both ‘Disordered in mind like one about to die; possessing or displaying magical, fairylike, or unearthly qualities’ in its general use, and ‘Fated to die, doomed to death; also, at the point of death; dying’ in Scots—foreshadows both the intrusion of the supernatural in the narrative, and the eventual demise of the captain, lending credibility to the clairvoyant instinct of the Scottish engineer in spite of the doctor’s scepticism. In Ray’s narration, the use of Scots is consistently linked to superstitions, folklore, and the supernatural, in keeping with Marina Dossena’s argument that ‘uses of Scots appear to take on ideological overtones that associate “Gothic” contexts with an ancestral, pre-rational past, while uses of English are associated with a more modern and “enlightened world” resulting in a certain degree of emphasis placed on how distant standard language speakers can be from the “dialect” speakers in terms of education or indeed civilization’ (Dossena 12). After Ray’s first confrontation with the ghost, the sardonicism of his exchange with chief mate Mr. Milne is emphasised by the latter’s use of Scots speech, defiantly showing linguistic and metaphysical resistance to the anglicised and rational doctor:

It shrilled out from close beside me, and yet as I glared into the darkness I could discern nothing. I waited some little time, but without hearing any repetition of the sound, so I came below, more shaken than I have ever been in my life before. As I came down the companion I met Mr. Milne coming up to relieve the watch. ‘Weel, Doctor,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s auld wives’ clavers tae? Did ye no hear it skirling? Maybe that’s a supersteetion? What d’ye think o’t noo?’ I was obliged to apologise to the honest fellow, and acknowledge that I was as puzzled by it as he was. (Doyle 1883, 346)

13The spectral quality of the interaction between John Ray and Mr Milne is further emphasised by Doyle’s previous experience in the Arctic; in his diary, Doyle recalls the loss of a crewmate named Andrew Milne to illness on Sunday 11th April 1880 (Doyle 2012, 245). The superstitious and fictional Milne hence embodies a real-life whaler who haunted Doyle’s memories of his Arctic journey, and the exchange reveals a conversation about the dead as much as with the dead.

14The Scottish whalers’ spirituality also comes into play by highlighting the inadequacy of the English presence aboard Scottish whalers: John Ray remarks that ‘it is a curious thing that in whaling vessels the Church of England Prayer-book is always employed, although there is never a member of that Church among either officers or crew. Our men are all Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, the former predominating’ (Doyle 1904, 342). John Watson also believes that Scottish Presbyterianism constitutes one of the ‘most singular points about Peter Carey’ (Doyle 1904, 353), whom he describes as ‘a strict Puritan—a silent, gloomy fellow’ (Doyle 1904, 353), making use of an archaic and somewhat pejorative term to emphasise a clear contrast between the stern Protestant whaler and the Anglican customs of the Sussex countryside. Both ancestral and Presbyterian beliefs are thus consistently associated with a distant past, anchoring the Scottish whalers in a by-gone and ultimately vanished era.

15While feeding his disdain for Scottish folk beliefs, John Ray’s restricted and anglicised perspective also influences his system of references when contemplating the Arctic seascape; he mentions England in two separate similes when he states that the iceberg ‘which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county’ (Doyle 1883, 335), and that ‘the nights are as dark now as they are in England’ (Doyle 1883, 344). Throughout the narrative, Ray only experiences alterity—may it be people or landscapes—through the myopic and autocentric lens of Englishness, hence reinforcing the binary opposition pitting Scottish eccentricity against English rationality. The vantage point of sceptical English narrators does not allow for a sense of united Britishness, and although this attests to the cultural climate at the time, which Jan Rüger calls ‘a kingdom that was feeling the forces of disunity’ (Rüger 159) amongst its sub-nations, the physical, linguistic, cultural, and religious gap between the stereotypical conceptions of the two nations also serves to solidify a monolithic and recognisable Scottish model within the British whaling industry.

The Imitation of the Model and Ontological Instability

16This seemingly fixed model however paradoxically appears as a particularly precarious and shifting construction resisting ontological circumscription. In spite of lengthy descriptions of Nicolas Craigie, John Ray is unable to thoroughly grasp his captain’s shifty character in ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’, and the lexical field used by Ray makes his character study seem like an elusive facial composite in a criminal investigation: ‘I should like to give a sketch of the character of this man, but it seems presumptuous to attempt such a thing upon paper, when the idea in my own mind is at best a vague and uncertain one. Several times I have thought that I grasped the clue which might explain it, but only to be disappointed by his presenting himself in some new light which would upset all my conclusions’ (Doyle 1883, 336). The crew of the Pole-Star shares their doctor’s impression, thinking that their ‘enigma’ (Doyle 1883, 339) of a captain may be concealing his identity using a pseudonym, and that he might even be a foreigner: ‘The unanimous opinion seems to be that he is not a Scotchman, and that his name is an assumed one’ (Doyle 1883, 339). His identity as a Scottish whaler is thus presented as a pretence, a disguise to conceal a potentially compromising past life on the ‘Cornish coast’ (Doyle 1883, 350). This again echoes John Coull, the whaler mentioned in ‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’, who happened to be the only Hope crew member who did not come from the Shetland Islands or Scotland, and who may have come from the South of England like Craigie:

There was only one man on board who belonged neither to Scotland nor to Shetland, and he was the mystery of the ship . . . . It was rumoured that he came from the South of England, and that he had fled thence to avoid the law. He made friends with no one, and spoke very seldom, but he was one of the smartest seamen in the ship. I could believe from his appearance that his temper was Satanic, and that the crime for which he was hiding may have been a bloody one. (Doyle 1897, 328)

17A secondary definition taken from the OED defines a model as ‘A person, or a work, that is proposed or adopted for imitation; an exemplar’: the generic codes of this archetypal identity thus make it particularly prone to impersonation in the narratives. Doyle fully invested this alternate meaning by endowing Sherlock Holmes with a talent for acting and a taste for disguises: using ‘a huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm’ (Doyle 1904, 352) as a prop in ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’, Sherlock Holmes acts the part of a harpooner in order to re-enact Peter Carey’s crime scene in the backshop of a London butcher’s—fabricating an identity he will develop into the persona of Captain Basil later in the story. He tells Watson: ‘If you could have looked into Allardyce’s back shop you would have seen a dead pig swung from a hook in the ceiling, and a gentleman in his shirtsleeves furiously stabbing at it with this weapon. I was that energetic person’ (Doyle 1904, 352). The distance that Sherlock Holmes creates between himself and his whaler persona is emphasised by his storytelling technique of using the third person: he mentions an unnamed ‘gentleman’ before revealing himself as that ‘energetic person’. Substituting a pig for a whale in this parodic scene, Sherlock plays with the harpoon in order to understand the scene, and to rehearse his Arctic whaler role, which can be replicated, taken up and discarded at his convenience.

18The crime scene echoes the same pattern of imitation; Peter Carey is found harpooned in his Sussex garden inside his ‘wooden outhouse’ (Doyle 1904, 352) which he modelled after a whaling master’s sleeping quarters filled with a collection of whaling paraphernalia. Doyle plays with the polysemy of the word ‘cabin’ to set the scene: ‘He had called it a cabin, and a cabin it was sure enough, for you would have thought that you were in a ship. There was a bunk at one end, a sea-chest, maps and charts, a picture of the Sea Unicorn, a line of log-books on a shelf, all exactly as one would expect to find it in a captain’s room’ (Doyle 1904, 354). If the whaler persona can be re-created and imitated by actor-like characters in the narratives, their tools, technical apparatus and everyday objects that invariably make up the whaler’s kit—and which helps create their idiosyncratic silhouette and uniform—are therefore turned into props transforming the whaler into a stock character. Sherlock Holmes’s investigative method of induction thus proves infallible for the profiling of Peter Carey’s murderer. By enumerating the culprit’s belongings, Sherlock Holmes identifies him with ease with ‘the rum and water, the seal-skin tobacco-pouch, with the coarse tobacco—all these pointed to a seaman, and one who had been a whaler’ (Doyle 1904, 364), and the absence of a pipe in the captain’s belongings comes as a surprise to the detective (Doyle 1904, 353). When John Ray visits his captain’s cabin aboard the Pole-Star, he finds a very similar set of props—in particular navigational instruments, tobacco-related products and uniform parts—as Sherlock Holmes does in Carey’s garden cabin: ‘uniform coats, a camp-stool, small looking-glass, tobacco-box, and numerous pipes’ (Doyle 1883, 344). Because of the invariable nature of what constitutes the whaler’s uniform and work kit, it can therefore be copied and duplicated, transforming their uniform into a disposable theatrical costume. The materiality of the Scottish whaler model thus becomes an archival collection in the narratives, and this textual inventory bridges the link between the archaic whaler and a new Britain, as Shane McCorristine argues: ‘Material objects bearing memories . . .  mediate processes of intimacy in Doyle’s supernatural fiction and highlight the deep connections between bodies and ghosts, presences and absences’ (McCorristine 192).

The Demise of the Whalers, Between Zoomorphism and Generic Reassessment

19Giving way to a sense of porosity between authenticity and artificiality, and between self and other, beyond the rigid oppositions of national differences, ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ and ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ jointly reveal that fixed identification is always an illusion. This section will thus examine the extent to which this inherent instability breaks down the borders between hunter and prey, which reveals a reassessment of the hegemonic realist genre at the end of the century. In ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’, Doyle remembers the compassion he felt for a parasite-infested whale during a hunt: ‘On catching it, we discovered that it was very thickly covered with a red, crab-like parasite, about the size of a shilling, and we conjectured that it was the irritation of these creatures which had driven it wild. If a man had short, nailless flippers, and a prosperous family of fleas upon his back, he would appreciate the situation’ (Doyle 1892, 322). This extract is only one of many that underline Doyle’s constant consideration of the fractured boundary between hunting and being hunted, as he consistently invokes mirroring images of humanised whales and animalised humans within the whale-hunting process.

And there in the middle of it was the man himself, his face twisted like a lost soul in torment, and his great brindled beard stuck upwards in his agony. Right through his broad breast a steel harpoon had been driven, and it had sunk deep into the wood of the wall behind him. He was pinned like a beetle on a card. (Doyle 1904, 354)

21To the attentive reader, Carey’s death will intertextually evoke that of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, killed by his own whaling equipment—although unlike Carey, Ahab is not speared, but strangled by his harpoon. Doyle however underlines the captain’s posture as a harmless prey by undermining the more obvious comparison to a hunted whale with the simile of a pinned beetle, denying his character the grandeur of Ahab’s tragic demise. While aboard the Hope, Doyle already made use of an entomological analogy to subvert the power dynamics at play between whales and whalers—in a journal entry dated June 1st, 1880, the author wrote an incantation-like stanza in his log:

Balaena mystractus!
Balaena mysticetus!
If we were animalculae
You wouldn’t take long to eat us.
(Doyle 2012, 267)

23Although zoomorphism is only explored through metaphors in ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’, Doyle invested the supernatural genre more overtly in ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ by exploring an otherworldly, man-eating Arctic through the feminine ghost that guides Craigie to his death. In the aftermath of the spectre’s repeated visits to the ship, the eerie icescape seems to infect John Ray’s storytelling with the superstitious imagery he originally dismissed and despised:

The night was dark and very still, save for the melancholy soughing of the wind among the spars. A thick cloud was coming up from the northwest, and the ragged tentacles which it threw out in front of it were drifting across the face of the moon, which only shone now and again through a rift in the wrack. (Doyle 1883, 348)

25However, instead of encountering Victor Frankenstein’s giant creature, John Ray comes face to face with the spectral apparition on the ice after discovering Craigie’s body:

He was lying face downwards upon a frozen bank. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman’s jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the sea. To my eyes 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. I have learned never to ridicule any man’s opinion, however strange it may seem. (Doyle 1883, 349)

26As Ray finally acknowledges the validity of his crewmates’ superstitions, Doyle explores a significant yet blurry paradox between the supernatural turn of his tale and its generic form. The mimetic verisimilitude of the doctor’s journal entries is even reinforced by a fictional post-script, isolated from the main text in square brackets, and signed by Dr John M’Alister Ray senior, the narrator’s father, who acts as the reviewer of his son’s testimony. This paratext, directly following the apparition of the ghost in the narrative, illustrates a juxtaposition of realist ‘English’ form with supernatural ‘Scottish’ themes, which eventually merge together to hybridise the realist genre. According to Kevin Mills, ‘this layering of doctorly authority both tempers the ready superstition of the sailors and lends (fictive) credibility to the supernatural implications of the tale’ (Mills 129).

Conclusion

28As both a testimony of, and a testament to the whalers he had known in the Arctic—going as far as modelling his characters after of real-life crewmates—Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to frame the defining features of Scottish Arctic whalers, with the acute awareness of the slow yet impending disappearance of the whaling industry. The model that he attempted to frame, fixed and homogenised through the use of stereotypes and physiognomy in his fiction, displays recognisable physical and psychological traits—notably dark features, black beard and eyebrows, and a mercurial personality. Mirroring the dominance of Scotland over England in the whaling industry, the characteristics of the two nations are utilised and set against each other in order to reinforce and legitimise an idiosyncratic Scottish whaling identity. What at first glance seems like a static and rigid model is however marked by a sense of instability leading to an ontological breakdown which turns this traditional identity into a costume to be played with, used, and discarded. This slippery model fractures several boundaries, and reveals the abject porosity between self and other, absence and presence, but also hunter and hunted; as such, the zoomorphic demise of the Scottish whaling captains stands out as a metaphorical echo of the cultural and commercial loss of the whaling industry and its actors at the fin de siècle. Although the iconic figure of the whaler would also be used in fin de siècle adventure fiction—W. H. G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne and William Gordon Stables all depicted whalers and sealers in their polar stories—Doyle is perhaps the only author of the time who fully explored this model through a supernatural turn. The gothic mode that Doyle found in the Arctic—the one he visited in real life as well as the one he explored in his fiction—not only hybridised the realist framework of his polar stories, but also conditioned the entirety of his literary career. Shane McCorristine argues that his Arctic narratives generated ‘a consistent theme in Doyle’s fiction, that of passion and love from beyond the grave’ (McCorristine 190), citing ‘De Profundis’ and ‘The Ring of Thoth’ as later iterations of this literary theme (McCorristine 190–91). Although he revisited the theme of imperial exploration in 1912 with the publication of The Lost World (1912), Doyle’s diary reveals that while on his whaling voyage, Doyle began the first draft of a polar story entitled ‘A Journey to the Pole’ (Doyle 2012, 239), which has since been lost. The posterity of the Scottish Arctic whaler model, while testifying to the end of a traditional way of life, therefore found ever-lasting life both in and in-between the lines of Doyle’s literary, and ghostly, experimentations.