“Why are seals the most holy of animals? Because it is mentioned in the Apocalypse that at the last day an angel shall open six of them in heaven.” Arthur Conan Doyle recorded this joke in his private log on May 9, 1880, about two months into his voyage on the Hope, a whaling ship bound for Arctic waters. During the trip, he learned to hunt the seals and make tobacco pouches from their flippers. This was much more exciting than what he should have been doing: sitting exams in medicine at Edinburgh University. But one week before the Hope set sail, on the strength of a third-year student’s knowledge, he was offered the job of ship’s surgeon. He accepted, and left the exams for another year.



His log of the expedition is now published for the first time, with a full facsimile (worthwhile not least for Conan Doyle’s whimsical illustrations), a collection of his later writings about the Arctic, including the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Black Peter,” and wide-ranging notes by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower, who also edited Conan Doyle’s letters. As they argue in their introduction, the five-month trip was a formative experience for the twenty-year-old Conan Doyle, on the threshold of manhood, a medical career, and literary acclaim. (His first short story had been published the previous year.) “I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth,” he later wrote, but “I came off it a powerful, well-grown man.”

In books by and about Arthur Conan Doyle, all roads lead to Holmes, and this book is, not at all regrettably, no exception. The question it poses is: did this voyage help to make Conan Doyle the writer who produced the Sherlock Holmes stories? The editors’ answer is yes. In their introduction, they remind us that, by the time of the expedition, Conan Doyle had attended the Edinburgh University lectures of Dr. Joseph Bell, widely considered the inspiration for the character of Holmes. His use of his Arctic experience in 1883 in the story “The Captain of the Pole-star,” they suggest, shows how the trip “fired his imagination.”

Yet it is difficult to agree with their more ambitious assertion that “from there, Sherlock Holmes was but a matter of time.” The first reason is that, although the log is full of keen observations and biographical gold-dust, its writer is a long way from maturity. He had no pretensions that it was anything more than a record of his time on the ship, and his entries rarely look beyond that day’s events. The few times that he tried to write something self-consciously literary, he struggled to see it through. “I began a poem on tobacco which I think is not bad,” he wrote in his log—but then: “I never can finish them. Ce n’est que la dernière qui comte.” (It is only the final result that counts.) Thankfully those verses do not survive. Among the few poems he completed were “villainous parodies” of the then-popular, now-forgotten ballads of Jean Ingelow, and this quatrain, rhyming the Latin name for a whale:

Balaena mystractus!

Balaena mysticetus!

If we were animalculae

You wouldn’t take long to eat us.