Ice, Whales and Ghosts

 Two fun facts about Arthur Conan Doyle:

1. In 1880, not long after finishing his medical training, Conan Doyle served as surgeon on the whaling vessel Hope. Young and eager for adventure, he also directly participated in whale and seal hunts.

2. Conan Doyle was a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and considered Poe to be a major influence on his later writing. Whenever Conan Doyle dipped his pen into gothic horror, you can see this. This is a good thing--by the time Conan Doyle found his own voice as a writer, he could be influenced without being imitative and thus turn out some awesome stories.

You can definitely see Poe's shadow in the short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star," first published in the January 1883 issue of Temple Bay magazine. It was afterwards anthologized a zillian times, most commonly in Conan Doyle's oft-reprinted short story collection The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Stories.

It's an early story and perhaps not quite as polished as his later stuff, but it's still a lot of fun to read. It obviously draws on Conan Doyle's own experience on a whaler, but effectively tosses in a ghost while effectively building a sense of tension and horror.

The narrator is the ship's doctor. We join the action with the ship trapped in ice and the crew soon going on half-rations. That's bad enough, but there is also the problem of a captain who might be insane and crewmen who keep claiming to see a strange figure wandering the ice near the ship. A few of the crew also claim to have heard unearthly screams.

The doctor is a rational man, so discounts this as superstition acting on the nerves of the crew. But the captain spends a lot of time starring out over the ice and seems to be waiting for someone. 

But then the doctor personally hears the screams: 

I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.

The next day, the captain... well, read the story yourself HERE. Take a young new writer with burgeoning talent, add in some E.A. Poe and the memory of a whaling voyage and you get a delightfully creepy short story out of the mix.