Tales of Blue Water: Arthur Conan Doyle
Details
In 1880, a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the "first real outstanding adventure" of his life: taking a berth as ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the SS Hope. The experience provided powerful fuel for Doyle's growing ambitions as a writer. Even his early works, which "must have been written with an icicle" while aboard the whaler (to borrow Melville's phrase), displayed the art of the genius storyteller. He would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in his writing adventures.
"Tales of Blue Water" is the name for a collection of Doyle's nautically-themed short stories. The collection is equally imbued with horror and supernatural elements, swept with an understated Romanticism in the elegant tradition of Melville, Shelley, and Coleridge.
Doyle's most celebrated ghost story, "The Captain of the Pole-Star," was first published in 1883 and frequently reprinted throughout his life. The story is narrated through the journal of a young ship's doctor on a polar whaling voyage who observes and charts the ominous progression of the weather and the captain's tormented mind as he navigates his way into dangerous ice floes.
"J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement" is a fictionalised version of the story of the Mary Celeste, a ship found mysteriously abandoned and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. Doyle's fiction was soon accepted as fact and created a worldwide sensation of intrigue about the mysterious ghost ship.
For this Meetup, we will read Doyle's "Tales of Blue Water," which includes:
- The Striped Chest
- The Captain of the Polestar
- The Fiend of the Cooperage
- Jelland's Voyage
- J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement
- That Little Square Box
These stories can be found in the second half of Dealings of Captain Sharkey and Other Pirates, here:
- Kindle
- Google books
- Gutenberg
- Librivox 3h 30m
Content Warning: some stories may contain racism and racial slurs.
Supplemental:
- The Captain of the Polestar (CBS Radio Mystery Theater, 1978)
- The Captain of the Polestar (BBC, 2003)
- The Phantom Ship (1935, based on the Mary Celeste)
- Doings of Doyle, podcast
Extracts:
- "the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses." (Moby-Dick, 42)
- "Not a little terrified at the sight, superstitious Jarl more than insinuated that the craft must be a gold-huntress, haunted. But I told him, that if such were the case, we must board her, come gold or goblins. In reality, however, I began to think that she must have been abandoned by her crew; or else, that from sickness, those on board were incapable of managing her." (Mardi, 1.14)
- "He felt that what he had always before considered the solid land of veritable reality, was now being audaciously encroached upon by bannered armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in his soul, as from flotillas of specter-boats." (Pierre, 3.2)
This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.