Some reflections on The Captain of the “Polestar”

In 1880 the future creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) left England on board the whaler “Hope” bound for the Arctic Circle, along with a crew of 50 sailors, half of them Scottish. Doyle, who was then a medical student at Edinburgh University, had signed on as a surgeon to earn a little money and gain professional experience – and, of course, in pursuit of adventure.

The eventful voyage of the Hope, which lasted 6 months, was the main source of inspiration for Doyle’s sea story The Captain of the “Polestar”, first published in 1883, in which the author draws on his personal experiences of seasoned harpooners and tough weather conditions in the Arctic. In this chilling story we recognize many of the elements, which were later to find their way into the adventures of the immortal detective and his loyal friend and biographer, Dr Watson: impending disaster, supernatural occurrences surrounded by a spooky atmosphere, a level-headed narrator, an eccentric main character at the mercy of his fickle moods, primitive superstition and false clues, cold reason and raving madness, tragedy and terror. But above all, the author demonstrates his talent for keeping the puzzled reader in suspense, inviting him to make his own deductions as he reads on.

The “Hope”, a steam-powered whaler of about 400 tons.

The story purports to be an extract from a journal written by a young student of medicine serving as a surgeon, in which he records events on a whaling vessel from day to day. The point of this narrative device is to add verisimilitude to a series of fantastic occurrences, i.e. to make them appear authentic: if the story had been told by one of the sailors, say to an old acquaintance over a pint of grog in a tavern, the reader might well have dismissed it with a smile. However, the fact that the narrator is an educated man voicing a sceptical attitude towards the traditional superstitions of sailors as well as recording his clinical observations of the captain’s peculiar conduct make him a reliable narrator.

In the beginning of the story the reader’s attention is drawn to the precarious situation of the vessel, which is stuck in the pack ice of the Arctic, 900 miles from the nearest settlement on the southern coast of Greenland. This, of course, immediately adds suspense to the story, encouraging the reader to think:”Will they make it?” or “They didn’t make it, that’s why we are presented with a journal which survived the tragedy.” However, as we read on it becomes clear that the dangerous position of the ship is merely a subplot, whereas the captain’s mental instability forms the centre of interest.

The ship’s doctor – Conan Doyle (third from left) on board the Hope, 1880).

Conan Doyle makes consistent use of the Scottish sailors’ superstitious beliefs to divert the reader’s attention from the main issue: the captain’s approaching madness.

For if silly old myths and legends hold sway over sailors, why shouldn’t they have a similar effect on a captain worrying about his ship stuck in the ice? Not until the end of the story do we realize that the sailors’ superstitious responses to the weird happenings around the ship are in fact relevant to the story. However, the captain’s final disappearance is not only the product of a deranged mind steeped in Scottish folklore, but the result of madness occasioned by shock and grief. This we learn from a note added by the narrator’s father, who lends further credibility to the story through his authority as a physician as well as the description of his son as “unimaginative” with “the strictest regard for veracity” – in addition to the independent statement of a colleague, who remembers “the circumstances of peculiar horror” relating to the death of the captain’s fiancé.

Doyle’s sophisticated narrative technique has fooled many readers into believing that his stories were simple accounts of facts. No wonder the Sherlock Holmes Museum in 221b Baker St. receives letters every day from people all over the world, asking the famous detective to solve their problems. Not to mention the amusing incident of a colonial magistrate at Gibraltar, who publicly denounced the narrator of one of Doyle’s short stories for claiming to have solved a real-life mystery which had left him baffled in the court-room - thus confusing facts with fiction. The mystery in question concerns the famous ghost ship Marie Celeste, which on Dec. 5 1872 appeared out of the blue off the west coast of Africa in perfect sailing condition without a soul on board. Needless to say, Doyle was delighted by the unintentional compliment thus paid him by the naïve magistrate.

As for Captain Craigie of the Polestar, his madness was no doubt partly inspired by Doyle’s painful experiences of his own father, who believed in faeries, and whose delusions caused by alcoholism eventually landed him in a lunatic asylum. However, Doyle himself became an ardent believer in spiritualism. Thus, the captain’s obsessions with the ghost of his sweetheart may be said to anticipate Doyle’s own reaction to the loss of his beloved younger brother during World War I, where the author used his second wife as a medium to establish contact with him. In fact, a keen interest in occult and supernatural phenomena as well as sceptical rationalism formed part of Doyle’s mental set up. Consequently, it might be argued that the captain of the Polestar and his surgeon represent opposing aspects of the author’s complex personality.

Following the tradition of classical ghost stories, Doyle ends The Captain of the “Polestar” with an element of something unresolved, introducing a second mystery, as it were. Thus, the reader is left speculating as to the precise circumstances of the death of the captain’s fiancé. Is it a case of rape followed by murder, or of madness – or infidelity – followed by suicide, - or…? However that may be, the author undoubtedly hints at some such tragedy, which was not at all uncommon among seafaring men of his times, who had no means of communicating with their sweethearts every day, and whose long separation from home often left their women unbalanced.

The only clues offered in connection with the fiancé are found in the narrator’s description of her portrait found in the captain’s cabin, in which he detects signs of “a curious mixture of character and weakness”, in addition to the final note which emphasizes her “singular beauty”. In short, a strong-willed, yet impressionable, and physically attractive young woman, whose magnetic influence on the captain survives her death, leaving him with the conviction that she is “out there” somewhere, beckoning him from the ice. As for clues to the captain’s enigmatic personality, the crew talks of an “assumed name” and “guilty conscience,” suggesting foul play on his part, thereby encouraging the reader to suspect that he may have killed the woman who haunts him in a fit of jealousy. However, this assumption – which is not shared by the narrator - turns out to be a “red herring,” since the note informs us that she died “during his absence at sea”.

As regards the structure of the story, the ending neatly conforms to the standard requirements of a denouement. However, if one is to talk of a surprise ending, a distinction must be made between what the reader suspects all along, i.e. that the captain is a victim of delusions involving the loss of someone dear to him, and the captain’s final reaction to these delusions, which certainly comes as a surprise. The surprise, of course, lies in the fact that an enlightened man of the age of science and progress behaves like a character straight out of a fairy tale. But if the full implication of the sailors’ superstitions is allowed to sink in, the reader shouldn’t really be surprised. For then it becomes apparent that Doyle employs two kinds of leads: the sailors’ “tall stories” of ghosts, whisperings etc., which throw the sceptical reader off the scent, and the implied myths of sirens and mermaids, which put him back on the right track, foreshadowing the captain’s ultimate fate.