In the nineteenth century, the Arctic, then still largely undiscovered, captured the imagination of the Western world. Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

In February of 1880, the whaling ship Hope sailed north from Peterhead, Scotland, and headed for the Arctic. Her crew included a highly regarded captain, an illiterate but gifted first mate, and the usual roster of harpooners, sailors, and able-bodied seamen—but not the intended ship’s surgeon. That gentleman having been unexpectedly called away on family matters, a last-minute substitute was found, in the form of a middling third-year medical student making his maiden voyage: a young man by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was twenty when he left Peterhead and twenty-one when he returned. On Saturday, May 22nd, in the meticulous diary he kept during that journey, he wrote, “A heavy swell all day. I came of age today. Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole.” Funny indeed, for a man who would come to be associated with distinctly un-Arctic environments: the gas-lit glow of Victorian London, the famous chambers at 221B Baker Street, and—further afield, but not much—the gabled manors and foggy moors where Sherlock Holmes tracked bloody footprints and dogs failed to bark in the night.

Shortly after returning from the north, and long before writing any of the stories that made him famous, Conan Doyle told two tales about the Arctic—one fictional, the other putatively true. The first, in 1883, was “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” one of his earliest published short stories. In it, a young medical student serving as the surgeon on a whaling ship watches, first in disbelief and then in dread, as his captain goes mad. Although winter is closing in, the captain sails northward into the Arctic until his ship is stuck fast. Then, obeying a ghostly summons, he walks out alone to his death on the ice.

In addition to launching Conan Doyle’s writing career, “The Captain of the Pole-Star” marked his first contribution to a largely overlooked body of literature: nineteenth-century polar fiction. This unusual subgenre found a kind of epigraph in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great cautionary tale in verse, the 1798 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (“The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around.”) By the end, it included works by many of the greatest writers of the era, or of any era: Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens. Almost invariably, the poles appear in these works as the place where nature reveals its horrifying indifference to humanity; where humanity itself falls away, leaving men to descend into madness and violence; above all, where the dream of universal mastery goes catastrophically awry.

That ominous vision bears virtually no resemblance to Conan Doyle’s second account of the Arctic. The same year that he published “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” he gave a speech at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, in England, on the subject of polar exploration. This time, the search for the North Pole was “a challenge to human daring,” those who conducted it were men of “indomitable pluck, wonderful self-abnegation, and devotion,” and the Arctic itself was “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man.”

Conan Doyle was not alone in being of two minds about the Arctic. From antiquity onward, our stories about the poles have themselves been polar: either the ends of the earth are precious, glorious, and ours for the taking or they are desolate, unattainable, and deadly. For most of history, both narratives were marginal, as distant from the mainstream of culture as the poles are from the metropole. That changed for the first time at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Arctic, then still largely undiscovered, captured the imagination and fuelled the ambition of the Western world.

In the next hundred years, ships setting out from northern nations—and especially, from England—regularly turned their prows toward the Pole. Some of them went, as Conan Doyle’s expedition had, for the whales, a single one of which could fetch more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s money. Others went in pursuit of the Northwest Passage: a shorter water route between Europe and Asia whose discovery, it was hoped, would dramatically accelerate global trade. Still others went for the glory of obtaining “farthest north”—in contemporaneous parlance, the highest latitude yet reached by man. In all cases, the stories told by those who returned (and, more grimly, the fates, known or unknown, of those who did not) helped create an enormous appetite for polar adventure. Writing in 1853 in Household Words, the popular weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens, the journalist Henry Morley opined, “There are no tales of risk and enterprise in which we English, men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor, become interested so completely, as in the tales that come from the North Pole.”

Those beloved tales had begun to ebb from memory by the beginning of the twentieth century, as the Arctic gradually lost its political and cultural stakes. Soon the West turned its attention elsewhere: to industrialization and mass production, to the Great War and the Second World War, to rail and to air and eventually to space, that frontierless frontier. For almost a hundred years, the pull of the polar lands went slack, in life as well as in literature. Only in our own time have stories about the Far North started to matter again, owing to a twist no Victorian reader, writer, or explorer could ever have foreseen.

Sometime around 330 B.C., a Greek geographer and explorer by the name of Pytheas left what is now the city of Marseilles and set sail for the Far North. No one knows exactly what landmass he reached—possibly Iceland, possibly the Faroe Islands, possibly Greenland. Whatever it was, it lay six days north of England and one day south of what Pytheas described (per later Greek geographers; his own writings did not survive) as a frozen ocean, a place that man could “neither sail nor walk.” At a time when Aristotle was still hanging out in the agora, Pytheas had discovered pack ice.

Pytheas called the place he encountered Thule, as in ultima Thule—the land beyond all known lands. That is one of three names the Greeks gave us for the Far North. The second is Arctic, from Arktikos—“of the great bear.” The reference was not to the polar bear, unknown in Europe until the eighteenth century, but to Ursa Major, the most prominent circumpolar constellation in the northern skies.

Whatever the original meaning, “far-away land full of big bears” turned out to be an apt description of the Arctic. But the third name the Greeks bestowed on the north was considerably less accurate—and considerably more important for the future of polar exploration. That name was Hyperborea: the region beyond the kingdom of Boreas, god of the north wind. Somewhere above his frozen domain, the Greeks believed, lay a land of peace and plenty, home to fertile soils, warm breezes, and the oldest, wisest, gentlest race on earth. “Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed / in their sacred blood,” the poet Pindar wrote of the Hyperboreans in the fifth century B.C. “Far from labor and battle they live.”