Arthur Conan Doyle and the Dying Model of the Scottish Arctic Whaler at the Fin de Siècle

Before finding everlasting fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle became closely associated with his native Scotland’s whaling industry and its sailors when he worked as ship’s surgeon on the whaler Hope as a young man during his medical studies. Following this brief stint in the Arctic, the author wrote two articles on the subject, as well as two short stories entitled ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ and ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’. This article proposes the first cross-study of these two short stories in order to examine how Doyle explores the archetypal model of the Scottish whaler, in light of the decline of the whaling industry in the late nineteenth-century. Doyle delineates a typology of the Scottish Arctic whaler, with stereotypical and readily recognisable physical and psychological traits, which stands in stark contrast with the sceptical English narrators of the stories. Under the guise of a fixed and monolithic description, the archetype of the Scottish Arctic whaler nevertheless stands out as an imitable model that can be replicated, used, and discarded like a theatre costume, and proves a particularly porous and ambivalent construction. This ontological breakdown is however truly illustrated by the demise of the whalers, whose deaths mirror the reversal of the whale-hunt’s power dynamics, while embodying the disappearance of the whaling industry and an actualisation of the realist genre at the turn of the century.