Arthur Conan Doyle: Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure (1880 / 2012)•
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)Arthur Conan Doyle: Dangerous Work (2012)
[Bookmark, Devonport - 9/12/2022]:
Arthur Conan Doyle. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure. 1880. Ed. Jon Lellenberg & Daniel Stashover. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
The NY Times reviewer is quick to point out the resemblance between this early, hitherto unpublished journal by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick:
A riddle: What does Captain Ahab have in common with Sherlock Holmes?Lest we should find this a somewhat far-fetched comparison, he goes on to specify in more detail the possible connections with Melville's masterpiece:
Answer: Both characters were created by writers who sailed on whaling vessels, who knew firsthand the heft of a harpoon, the bite of raging gales and the blisters raised by oars.
Herman Melville’s years as a sailor and whaler dominate his work, while for most readers Arthur Conan Doyle’s time at sea is either entirely unknown or, at best, something of a mystery. But now that mystery is unveiled, and like the mysteries unraveled by Holmes himself, it is unveiled with elegance and style in Dangerous Work.
A second riddle: What does Dangerous Work have in common with Moby-Dick?I do love that image of reading both books "from cover to cover ... in front of a warm fire." As far as his suggested analogy between the two authors goes, though, I'd have to admit a few reservations.
A few of a hundred possible answers: Both books disguise great depth beneath the cloak of an adventure story. Both offer accounts of what was once a major industry, comparable in relative terms to today’s oil industry. Both should be read from cover to cover, shared with friends and revisited in front of a warm fire. And both, for different reasons, are books to treasure, the kind that kindle and rekindle a love of words and a feeling of irredeemable debt to the men behind them.
- Bill Streever, "Before Sherlock". NY Times (30/13/2012)
After all, another reviewer comments, à propos of the 'copious notes' provided by the journal's two editors: "there's not much about any earlier Arctic expeditions, with the exception of the fictionalized one of Mary Shelley's "Captain Walton" in Frankenstein."
Doyle's journal, like that of Walton, is framed at first with a series of letters home, then quickly moves on to the daily business of the ship.- Russell A. Potter, The Arctic Book Review (5/11/2012)
Herman Melville, Mary Shelley ... I suppose an even more obvious comparison would be with one of Doyle's greatest literary heroes, the master of the mysterious, Edgar Allan Poe himself - either the story "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833), or the one novel he authored, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).
Instead, though, I'd like to explore the perhaps less obvious debt that Doyle's imaginative transformation of his arctic experiences - into, in particular, his early short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star" - owes to pioneering adventure-story writer Jules Verne.
Jules Verne. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. The Extraordinary Journeys. 1864-65. Trans. William Butcher. 2005. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.For those of you who haven't read it - which will be most people: even those who love and admire Verne's more famous works: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70) - Verne's early novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864-65) may come as a bit of a surprise.
The second in the sequence of fifty-odd "Extraordinary Voyages" which occupied Verne's energies between 1863 and his death in 1905, Captain Hatteras has never enjoyed the renown of such novels as Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), which kicked off the series in the first place, or even The Children of Captain Grant (1867-68), translated as "In Search of the Castaways", with its scenes of turbulent frontier life in New Zealand, amongst other places.
Perhaps this neglect may partly be due to the strangely obsessive nature of the feud between the mysterious Captain Hatteras and his brash American counterpart Captain Altamont. The resemblances between Hatteras and English explorer Sir John Franklin, who perished with his entire crew when their two ships, the Erebus and Terror, were caught in the ice in 1845, were a bit too close for comfort for British readers, in particular.
As I discussed in my post on the TV miniseries based on the subject, The Terror (2018), there's strong evidence that Franklin's crew were forced to resort to cannibalism in their final flight from the icebound ships, and this made it a rather controversial subject for Victorian mythologists of the glamour of the frozen north. So many relief expeditions were eventually sent in search of Franklin, that far more ships and men were lost looking for him than died in his own party.
Hatteras, a polar monomaniac, himself dies by plunging into the crater of the active volcano which marks the exact location of the North Pole - in the original draft of the novel, that is. Verne's editor, the publisher of the Voyages Extraordinaires, Jules Hetzel, forced him to moderate this into a case of incurable insanity which leaves Hatteras wandering disconsolately around the walls of the asylum in which he is housed, his feet drawn always, inexorably, northwards.
He went off the grating with a dull, sullen splash, and as I looked into the green water I saw him go down, down, down until he was but a little flickering patch of white hanging upon the outskirts of eternal darkness. Then even that faded away, and he was gone.How does this compare with Doyle's own story? I'm fortunate enough to own a copy of the 1893 'colonial' edition of the collection in which it first appears, and have just been rereading it in those time-creased pages. Doyle's Captain Craigie is less distant and uncommunicative than Verne's Captain Hatteras, but he seems every bit as driven and determined in his pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp.- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Captain of the Pole-Star" (Temple Bar, 1883)
In Craigie's case it's the ghost of his dead fiancée, a young lady who died "under circumstances of peculiar horror" on the Cornish Coast (perhaps the terrible case of poisoning recorded in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Devil's Foot"?); in Hatteras' case it's simply the renown of being first at the North Pole, but both take absurd risks to attain their particular fata morgana. And, for both, the adventure proves disastrous.
Wilkie Collins' play "The Frozen Deep", adapted and performed by Charles Dickens and his friends in 1856, probably provides the prototype for this motif of the lost beloved drawing men further and further into the Arctic snows.
In Dickens' case, of course, it also brought about his first meeting with the young actress Ellen Ternan, whose fate would be so strangely bound up with his for the rest of his life.
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