I’ve been reading some early works by Arthur Conan Doyle. Some of this material was only rediscovered in recent years.
At the age of twenty, while still in medical school in Edinburgh, he shipped out on a whaling ship for six months. The ship went to the remote arctic islands of Spitzbergen [Svalbard] and Jan Mayen, and Doyle had his twenty-first birthday on the rim of the polar icepack. This was no tame adventure. It was 1880, and Doyle’s ship reached within three degrees of the record point that the British Arctic Expedition had turned back from in 1876. A year later, George DeLong’s American expedition would perish at a similar latitude. The pole would not be reached with certainty until 1926, when Doyle was an old man. Peary and Henson, often credited with reaching the pole in 1909, are now considered doubtful. Doyle’s voyage was on a commercial whaler and sealer, driven by profit, not glory, but it was certainly a dangerous and spectacular adventure for a bookish young Scott, and he later wrote that he left as a boy and came back as a man. He kept a diary, quite well written, but rather terse, and decorated with his drawings. On his return, he became caught up with his exams and his first attempts to build a medical practice, and so the diary was forgotten. It was not published until 2012, when it appeared as Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure. Read more »
