The Glamour of the Arctic

                          By A. Conan Doyle


[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration]

The trade which these men follow is old and honorable. There was a
time when the Greenland seas were harried by the ships of many
nations, when the Basques and the Biscayens were the great fishers of
whales, and when Dutchmen, men of the Hansa towns, Spaniards, and
Britons, all joined in the great blubber hunt. Then one by one, as
national energy or industrial capital decreased, the various countries
tailed off, until, in the earlier part of this century, Hull, Poole,
and Liverpool were three leading whaling-ports. But again the trade
shifted its centre. Scoresby was the last of the great English
captains, and from his time the industry has gone more and more north,
until the whaling of Greenland waters came to be monopolized by
Peterhead, which shares the sealing, however, with Dundee and with a
fleet from Norway. 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.

[Illustration: THE SWIVEL GUN.]

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. To swim backward and forward beneath a floe, in the hope of
cutting the rope against the sharp edge of the ice, is a common device
of the creature after being struck. By degrees, however, it was
realized the fact that there are limits to the powers of its
adversaries, and that by keeping far in among the icefields it may
shake off the most intrepid of pursuers. Gradually the creature has
deserted the open sea, and bored deeper and deeper among the ice
barriers, until now, at last, it really appears to have reached
inaccessible feeding grounds; and it is seldom, indeed, that the
watcher in the crow’s nest sees the high plume of spray and the broad
black tail in the air which sets his heart a-thumping.

[Illustration: A PETERHEAD HARPOONER.]

But if a man have the good fortune to be present at a “fall,” and,
above all, if he be, as I have been, in the harpooning and in the
lancing boat, he has a taste of sport which it would be ill to match.
To play a salmon is a royal game, but when your fish weighs more than
a suburban villa, and is worth a clear two thousand pounds; when, too,
your line is a thumb’s thickness of manilla rope with fifty strands,
every strand tested for thirty-six pounds, it dwarfs all other
experiences. And the lancing, too, when the creature is spent, and
your boat pulls in to give it the _coup de grâce_ with cold steel,
that is also exciting! A hundred tons of despair are churning the
waters up into a red foam; two great black fins are rising and falling
like the sails of a windmill, casting the boat into a shadow as they
droop over it; but still the harpooner clings to the head, where no
harm can come, and, with the wooden butt of the twelve-foot lance
against his stomach, he presses it home until the long struggle is
finished, and the black back rolls over to expose the livid, whitish
surface beneath. Yet amid all the excitement—and no one who has not
held an oar in such a scene can tell how exciting it is—one’s
sympathies lie with the poor hunted creature. The whale has a small
eye, little larger than that of a bullock; but I cannot easily forget
the mute expostulation which I read in one, as it dimmed over in death
within hand’s touch of me. What could it guess, poor creature, of laws
of supply and demand; or how could it imagine that when Nature placed
an elastic filter inside its mouth, and when man discovered that the
plates of which it was composed were the most pliable and yet durable
things in creation, its death-warrant was signed?

Of course, it is only the one species, and the very rarest species, of
whale which is the object of the fishery. The common rorqual or
finner, largest of creatures upon this planet, whisks its eighty feet
of worthless tallow round the whaler without fear of any missile more
dangerous than a biscuit.

[Illustration: A PETERHEAD SEAMAN—BOAT-STEERER.]

This, with its good-for-nothing cousin, the hunchback whale, abounds
in the Arctic seas, and I have seen their sprays on a clear day
shooting up along the horizon like the smoke from a busy factory. A
stranger sight still is, when looking over the bulwarks into the clear
water, to see, far down, where the green is turning to black, the
huge, flickering figure of a whale gliding under the ship. And then
the strange grunting, soughing noise which they make as they come up,
with something of the contented pig in it, and something of the wind
in the chimney! Contented they well may be, for the finner has no
enemies, save an occasional sword-fish; and Nature, which in a
humorous mood has in the case of the right whale affixed the smallest
of gullets to the largest of creatures, has dilated the swallow of its
less valuable brother, so that it can have a merry time among the
herrings.

The gallant seaman, who in all the books stands in the prow of a boat,
waving a harpoon over his head, with the line snaking out into the air
behind him, is only to be found now in Paternoster Row. The Greenland
seas have not known him for more than a hundred years, since first the
obvious proposition was advanced that one could shoot both harder and
more accurately than one could throw. Yet one clings to the ideals of
one’s infancy, and I hope that another century may have elapsed before
the brave fellow disappears from the frontispieces, in which he still
throws his outrageous weapon an impossible distance. The swivel gun,
like a huge horse-pistol, with its great oakum wad, and twenty-eight
drams of powder, is a more reliable, but a far less picturesque
object.

But to aim with such a gun is an art in itself, as will be seen when
one considers that the rope is fastened to the neck of the harpoon,
and that, as the missile flies, the downward drag of this rope must
seriously deflect it. So difficult is it to make sure of one’s aim,
that it is the etiquette of the trade to pull the boat right on to the
creature, the prow shooting up its soft, gently-sloping side, and the
harpooner firing straight down into its broad back, into which not
only the four-foot harpoon, but ten feet of the rope behind it, will
disappear. Then, should the whale cast its tail in the air, after the
time-honored fashion of the pictures, that boat would be in evil case;
but, fortunately, when frightened or hurt, it does no such thing, but
curls its tail up underneath it, like a cowed dog, and sinks like a
stone. Then the bows splash back into the water, the harpooner hugs
his own soul, the crew light their pipes and keep their legs apart,
while the line runs merrily down the middle of the boat and over the
bows. There are two miles of it there, and a second boat will lie
alongside to splice on if the first should run short, the end being
always kept loose for that purpose. And now occurs the one serious
danger of whaling. The line has usually been coiled when it was wet,
and as it runs out it is very liable to come in loops which whizz down
the boat between the men’s legs. A man lassoed in one of these nooses
is gone, and fifty fathoms deep, before the harpooner has time to say,
“Where’s Jock?” Or if it be the boat itself which is caught, then down
it goes like a cork on a trout-line, and the man who can swim with a
whaler’s high boots on is a swimmer indeed. Many a whale has had a
Parthian revenge in this fashion. Some years ago a man was whisked
over with a bight of rope round his thigh. “George, man, Alec’s gone!”
shrieked the boat-steerer, heaving up his axe to cut the line. But the
harpooner caught his wrist. “Na, na, mun,” he cried, “the oil money’ll
be a good thing for the widdie.” And so it was arranged, while Alec
shot on upon his terrible journey.

[Illustration: THE DECK OF A WHALER.]

That oil money is the secret of the frantic industry of these seamen,
who, when they do find themselves taking grease aboard, will work day
and night, though night is but an expression up there, without a
thought of fatigue. For the secure pay of officers and men is low
indeed, and it is only by their share of the profits that they can
hope to draw a good check when they return. Even the new-joined boy
gets his shilling in the ton, and so draws an extra five pounds when a
hundred tons of oil are brought back. It is practical socialism, and
yet a less democratic community than a whaler’s crew could not be
imagined. The captain rules the mates, the mates the harpooners, the
harpooners the boat-steerers, the boat-steerers the line-coilers, and
so on in a graduated scale which descends to the ordinary seaman, who,
in his turn, bosses it over the boys. Every one of these has his share
of oil money, and it may be imagined what a chill blast of
unpopularity blows around the luckless harpooner who, by clumsiness or
evil chance, has missed his whale. Public opinion has a terrorizing
effect; even in those little floating communities of fifty souls. I
have known a grizzled harpooner burst into tears when he saw by his
slack line that he had missed his mark, and Aberdeenshire seamen are
not a very soft race either.

[Illustration: THE FIRST SIGHT OF THE WHALE.]

Though twenty or thirty whales have been taken in a single year in the
Greenland seas, it is probable that the great slaughter of last
century has diminished their number until there are not more than a
few hundreds in existence. I mean, of course, of the right whale; for
the others, as I have said, abound. It is difficult to compute the
numbers of a species which comes and goes over great tracts of water
and among huge icefields; but the fact that the same whale is often
pursued by the same whaler upon successive trips shows how limited
their number must be. There was one, I remember, which was conspicuous
through having a huge wart, the size and shape of a beehive, upon one
of the flukes of its tail. “I’ve been after that fellow three times,”
said the captain, as we dropped our boats. “He got away in ’61. In ’67
we had him fast, but the harpoon drew. In ’76 a fog saved him. It’s
odds that we have him now!” I fancied that the betting lay rather the
other way myself, and so it proved; for that warty tail is still
thrashing the Arctic seas for all that I know to the contrary.

I shall never forget my own first sight of a right whale. It had been
seen by the lookout on the other side of a small icefield, but had
sunk as we all rushed on deck. For ten minutes we awaited its
reappearance, and I had taken my eyes from the place, when a general
gasp of astonishment made me glance up, and there was the whale _in
the air_. Its tail was curved just as a trout’s is in jumping, and
every bit of its glistening lead-colored body was clear of the water.
It was little wonder that I should be astonished, for the captain,
after thirty voyages, had never seen such a sight. On catching it, we
discovered that it was very thickly covered with a red, crablike
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.

When a fish, as the whalers will forever call it, is taken, the ship
gets alongside, and the creature is fixed head and tail in a curious
and ancient fashion, so that by slacking or tightening the ropes, each
part of the vast body can be brought uppermost. A whole boat may be
seen inside the giant mouth, the men hacking with axes, to slice away
the ten-foot screens of bone, while others with sharp spades upon the
back are cutting off the deep great-coat of fat in which kindly Nature
has wrapped up this most overgrown of her children. In a few hours all
is stowed away in the tanks, and a red islet, with white projecting
bones, lies alongside, and sinks like a stone when the ropes are
loosed. Some years ago, a man, still lingering upon the back, had the
misfortune to have his foot caught between the creature’s ribs, at the
instant when the tackles were undone. Some aeons hence those two
skeletons, the one hanging by the foot from the other, may grace the
museum of a subtropical Greenland, or astonish the students of the
Spitzbergen Institute of Anatomy.

[Illustration]

Apart from sport, there is a glamour about those circumpolar regions
which must affect everyone who has penetrated to them. My heart goes
out to that old, gray-headed whaling-captain who, having been left for
an instant when at death’s door, staggered off in his night gear, and
was found by his nurses far from his house, and still, as he mumbled,
“pushing to the norrard.” So an Arctic fox, which a friend of mine
endeavored to tame, escaped, and was caught many months afterwards in
a gamekeeper’s trap in Caithness. It also was pushing “norrard,”
though who can say by what strange compass it took its bearings? It is
a region of purity, of white ice, and of blue water, with no human
dwelling within a thousand miles to sully the freshness of the breeze
which blows across the icefields. And then it is a region of romance
also. You stand on the very brink of the unknown, and every duck that
you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which
the maps know not.

[Illustration: GEORGE, MAN, ALEC’S GONE.]

These whaling-captains profess to see no great difficulty in reaching
the Pole. Some little margin must be allowed, no doubt, for expansive
talk over a pipe and a glass, but still there is a striking unanimity
in their ideas. Briefly they are these: What bars the passage of the
explorer as he ascends between Greenland and Spitzbergen is that huge
floating ice-reef which scientific explorers have called “the
palæocrystic sea,” and the whalers, with more expressive Anglo-Saxon,
“the barrier.” The ship which has picked its way among the great
ice-floes finds itself, somewhere about the eighty-first degree,
confronted by a single mighty wall, extending right across from side
to side, with no chink or creek up which she can push her bows. It is
old ice, gnarled and rugged, and of an exceeding thickness, impossible
to pass, and nearly impossible to travel over, so cut and jagged is
its surface. Over this it was that the gallant Parry struggled with
his sledges in 1827, reaching a latitude (about 82° 30’, if my
remembrance is correct) which for a long time was the record. As far
as he could see, this old ice extended right away to the Pole.

[Illustration]

Such is the obstacle. Now for the whaler’s view of how it may be
surmounted.

This ice, they say, solid as it looks, is really a floating body, and
at the mercy of the water upon which it rests. There is in those seas
a perpetual southerly drift, which weakens the cohesion of the huge
mass; and when, in addition to this, the prevailing winds happen to be
from the north, the barrier is all shredded out, and great bays and
gulfs appear in its surface. A brisk northerly wind, long continued,
might at any time clear a road, and has, according to their testimony,
frequently cleared a road, by which a ship might slip through to the
Pole. Whalers fishing as far north as the eighty-second degree have in
an open season seen no ice, and, more important still, no reflection
of ice in the sky to the north of them. But they are in the service of
a company; they are there to catch whales, and there is no adequate
inducement to make them risk themselves, their vessels, and their
cargoes, in a dash for the north.

[Illustration: SPLITTING WHALEBONE]

The matter might be put to the test without trouble or expense. Take a
stout wooden gunboat, short and strong, with engines as antiquated as
you like, if they be but a hundred horse-power. Man her with a
sprinkling of Scotch and Shetland seamen from the Royal Navy, and let
the rest of the crew be lads who must have a training-cruise in any
case. For the first few voyages carry a couple of experienced
ice-masters, in addition to the usual naval officers. Put a man like
Markham in command. Then send this ship every June or July to inspect
the barrier, with strict orders to keep out of the heavy ice unless
there were a very clear water-way. For six years she might go in vain.
On the seventh you might have an open season, hard, northerly winds,
and a clear sea. In any case no expense or danger is incurred, and
there could be no better training for young seamen. They will find the
Greenland seas in summer much more healthy and pleasant than the
Azores or Madeira, to which they are usually despatched. The whole
expedition should be done in less than a month.

[Illustration: SCRAPING WHALEBONE]

Singular incidents occur in those northern waters, and there are few
old whalers who have not their queer yarn, which is sometimes of
personal and sometimes of general interest. There is one which always
appeared to me to deserve more attention than has ever been given to
it. Some years ago, Captain David Gray of the “Eclipse,” the _doyen_
of the trade, and the representative, with his brothers John and Alec,
of a famous family of whalers, was cruising far to the north, when he
saw a large bird flapping over the ice. A boat was dropped, the bird
shot, and brought aboard, but no man there could say what manner of
fowl it was. Brought home, it was at once identified as being a
half-grown albatross, and now stands in the Peterhead Museum, with a
neat little label to that effect between its webbed feet.

Now the albatross is an Antarctic bird, and it is quite unthinkable
that this solitary specimen flapped its way from the other end of the
earth. It was young, and possibly giddy, but quite incapable of a wild
outburst of that sort. What is the alternative? It must have been a
_southern_ straggler from some breed of albatrosses farther north. But
if there is a different fauna farther north, then there must be a
climatic change there. Perhaps Kane was not so far wrong after all in
his surmise of an open Polar sea. It may be that that flattening at
the poles of the earth, which always seemed to my childhood’s
imagination to have been caused by the finger and thumb of the
Creator, when he held up this little planet before he set it spinning,
has a greater influence on climate than we have yet ascribed to it.
But if so, how simple would the task of our exploring ship become when
a wind from the north had made a rift in the barrier!

There is little land to be seen during the seven months of a
whaling-cruise. The strange solitary island of Jan Meyen may possibly
be sighted, with its great snow-capped ex-volcano jutting up among the
clouds. In the palmy days of the whale-fishing the Dutch had a
boiling-station there, and now great stones with iron rings let into
them and rusted anchors lie littered about in this absolute wilderness
as a token of their former presence. Spitzbergen, too, with its black
crags and its white glaciers, a dreadful looking place, may possibly
be seen. I saw it myself, for the first and last time, in a sudden
rift in the drifting wrack of a furious gale, and for me it stands as
the very emblem of stern grandeur. And then towards the end of the
season the whalers come south to the seventy-second degree, and try to
bore in towards the coast of Greenland, in the south-eastern corner;
and if you then, at the distance of eighty miles, catch the least
glimpse of the loom of the cliffs, then, if you are anything of a
dreamer, you will have plenty of food for dreams, for this is the very
spot where one of the most interesting questions in the world is
awaiting a solution.

Of course, it is a commonplace that when Iceland was one of the
centres of civilization in Europe, the Icelanders budded off a colony
upon Greenland, which throve and flourished, and produced sagas of its
own, and waged war upon the Skraelings or Esquimaux, and generally
sang and fought and drank in the bad old, full-blooded fashion. So
prosperous did they become, that they built them a cathedral, and sent
to Denmark for a bishop, there being no protection for local
industries at that time. The bishop, however, was prevented from
reaching his see by some sudden climatic change which brought the ice
down between Iceland and Greenland, and from that day (it was in the
fourteenth century) to this no one has penetrated that ice, nor has it
ever been ascertained what became of that ancient city, or of its
inhabitants. Have they preserved some singular civilization of their
own, and are they still singing and drinking and fighting, and waiting
for the bishop from over the seas? Or have they been destroyed by the
hated Skraelings? Or have they, as is more likely, amalgamated with
them, and produced a race of tow-headed, large-limbed Esquimaux? We
must wait until some Nansen turns his steps in that direction before
we can tell. At present it is one of those interesting historical
questions, like the fate of those Vandals who were driven by
Belisarius into the interior of Africa, which are better unsolved.
When we know everything about this earth, the romance and the poetry
will all have been wiped away from it. There is nothing so artistic as
a haze.

There is a good deal which I had meant to say about bears, and about
seals, and about sea-unicorns, and sword-fish, and all the interesting
things which combine to throw that glamour over the Arctic; but, as
the genial critic is fond of remarking, it has all been said very much
better already. There is one side of the Arctic regions, however,
which has never had due attention paid to it, and that is the medical
and curative side. Davos Platz has shown what cold can do in
consumption, but in the life-giving air of the Arctic Circle no
noxious germ can live. The only illness of any consequence which ever
attacks a whaler is an explosive bullet. It is a safe prophecy, that
before many years are past, steam yachts will turn to the north every
summer, with a cargo of the weak-chested, and people will understand
that Nature’s ice-house is a more healthy place than her vapor-bath.

[Illustration]


[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1894 issue
of McClure’s Magazine.]