Arctic Ghosts: Whale Hunting and Haunting in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’”

• Published in: Victorian Studies
• Main Author: Alder, Emily
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Indiana University Press 2022
• Subjects: Literature and Literary Theory; Sociology and Political Science; Philosophy; Visual Arts and Performing Arts; History; Cultural Studies; Arctic; Greenland; Balaena mysticetus; Greenland Sea
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/vic.2022.a901285

Abstract: Over-hunting in Arctic seas drove bowhead whales ( Balaena mysticetus ) nearly to extinction by the end of the nineteenth century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” (1883), inspired by his youthful 1880 voyage on the Scottish whaling ship Hope to the Greenland Sea, shows a nascent awareness of the implications of this ecological tragedy. The ghostly figure heard and seen in the story is on one level the spirit of the captain’s lost love, and on another a spectral trace of the lost bowheads. Conan Doyle’s Arctic ghost binds the personal grief and longing of the captain to the wider grief and longing of a late-Victorian culture becoming aware of its own environmental responsibilities and reaching belatedly toward wildlife protection.