The Glamour of the Arctic

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Now the albatross is an Antarctic bird, and it is quite unthinkable that this solitary specimen flapped its way from the other end of the earth. It was young, and possibly giddy, but quite incapable of a wild outburst of that sort. What is the alternative? It must have been a southern straggler from some breed of albatrosses farther north. But if there is a different fauna farther north, then there must be a climatic change there. Perhaps Kane was not so far wrong after all in his surmise of an open Polar sea. It may be that that flattening at the poles of the earth, which always seemed to my childhood’s imagination to have been caused by the finger and thumb of the Creator, when he held up this little planet before he set it spinning, has a greater influence on climate than we have yet ascribed to it. But if so, how simple would the task of our exploring ship become when a wind from the north had made a rift in the barrier!

There is little land to be seen during the seven months of a whaling-cruise. The strange solitary island of Jan Meyen may possibly be sighted, with its great snow-capped ex-volcano jutting up among the clouds. In the palmy days of the whale-fishing the Dutch had a boiling-station there, and now great stones with iron rings let into them and rusted anchors lie littered about in this absolute wilderness as a token of their former presence. Spitzbergen, too, with its black crags and its white glaciers, a dreadful looking place, may possibly be seen. I saw it myself, for the first and last time, in a sudden rift in the drifting wrack of a furious gale, and for me it stands as the very emblem of stern grandeur. And then towards the end of the season the whalers come south to the seventy-second degree, and try to bore in towards the coast of Greenland, in the south-eastern corner; and if you then, at the distance of eighty miles, catch the least glimpse of the loom of the cliffs, then, if you are anything of a dreamer, you will have plenty of food for dreams, for this is the very spot where one of the most interesting questions in the world is awaiting a solution.

Of course, it is a commonplace that when Iceland was one of the centres of civilization in Europe, the Icelanders budded off a colony upon Greenland, which throve and flourished, and produced sagas of its own, and waged war upon the Skraelings or Esquimaux, and generally sang and fought and drank in the bad old, full-blooded fashion. So prosperous did they become, that they built them a cathedral, and sent to Denmark for a bishop, there being no protection for local industries at that time. The bishop, however, was prevented from reaching his see by some sudden climatic change which brought the ice down between Iceland and Greenland, and from that day (it was in the fourteenth century) to this no one has penetrated that ice, nor has it ever been ascertained what became of that ancient city, or of its inhabitants. Have they preserved some singular civilization of their own, and are they still singing and drinking and fighting, and waiting for the bishop from over the seas? Or have they been destroyed by the hated Skraelings? Or have they, as is more likely, amalgamated with them, and produced a race of tow-headed, large-limbed Esquimaux? We must wait until some Nansen turns his steps in that direction before we can tell. At present it is one of those interesting historical questions, like the fate of those Vandals who were driven by Belisarius into the interior of Africa, which are better unsolved. When we know everything about this earth, the romance and the poetry will all have been wiped away from it. There is nothing so artistic as a haze.

There is a good deal which I had meant to say about bears, and about seals, and about sea-unicorns, and sword-fish, and all the interesting things which combine to throw that glamour over the Arctic; but, as the genial critic is fond of remarking, it has all been said very much better already. There is one side of the Arctic regions, however, which has never had due attention paid to it, and that is the medical and curative side. Davos Platz has shown what cold can do in consumption, but in the life-giving air of the Arctic Circle no noxious germ can live. The only illness of any consequence which ever attacks a whaler is an explosive bullet. It is a safe prophecy, that before many years are past, steam yachts will turn to the north every summer, with a cargo of the weak-chested, and people will understand that Nature’s ice-house is a more healthy place than her vapor-bath.

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1894 issue of McClure’s Magazine.