Arthur Conan Doyle, Whaler: For Doyle the game was figuratively always afoot. At one point, however, it was literally a-fin

Posted Saturday morning, August 22, 2020.

“Lowering Boats”: Detail from a 1927 illustration by Clifford Warren Ashley (1881-1947).  New Bedford Whaling Museum, via Wikimedia.

All his life, from childhood into old age, Arthur Conan Doyle was as bold and adventurous as his literary creations and fictional dual alter egos Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. For him the game was always afoot. At one time the game was literally game, as in animals to be hunted, and those animals were not afoot but a-fin! As an impecunious twenty-two-year old med student, Doyle took time off from his studies to earn tuition money by signing on as a ship’s doctor aboard a whaler bound for the Arctic. He had a, um, whale of time. Oh, and about poisoning himself: he did that as part of a research experiment he was doing on the effects of a pain relief medicine derived from a toxic plant...

Many dangers awaited Arthur at sea in the Arctic. Frequently he even found himself in the water. He fell off the slippery decks or icy floes often enough that the sardonic captain nicknamed him the “Great American Diver,” after the fishing bird known in North America as the common loon. As the medical man and an educated young gentleman, he was not expected to participate in the hunts. Eager for adventure and fond of blood sports, however, he rowed out to whales in impossibly tiny tossing boats, and looked a dying whale in the eye. He bludgeoned and skinned seals and shot walrus. He sent occasional reports home to his mother, telling her more details than most mothers would want to know, as if teasing her with the dangers and risks of this work he did not have to do---but which he embraced. Piercing cold, strangely lit nights, and alien creatures crept into his imagination. He had proved himself with common men and officers, had faced the cold and the darkness and grown stronger. The Arctic cowed him no more than the poison with which he had dosed him the year before.

---from “Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes” by Michael Sims.

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Related adventure in the life of Conan Doyle: Arthur Conan Doyle's Edinburgh: "Ambition and artistry were in the very air..."