The Rime of the Pole-Star
The Rime of the Pole-Star is an article written by Dana Martin Batory published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 3, 1992).
This article explores "The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'" as a Gothic Arctic tale shaped by Conan Doyle's own whaling experiences and deeply influenced by Frankenstein and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It examines themes of spiritualism, death, and supernatural pursuit, suggesting the story fuses polar geography with poetic and mythic traditions.
The Rime of the Pole-Star
'The ice was here, the ice was there - The ice was all around...'
Illustration by Gustave Doré for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
Most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's early stories reach beyond our plane of existence into the nether land between life and death. The best of them, observed Charles Higham in The Adventures of Conan Doyle (1976), 'are poetic evocations of sexual obsession, stories about men who cannot accept the death of a loved one as final, who try to reach beyond the grave to enjoy sex in eternity.' Nowhere is this more true than in 'The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'', published in Temple Bar in 1883. The incidents detailed follow one another in kaleidoscopic variety, like the disjointed parts of a delirium or nightmare from which there is no escape.
One of its most chilling passages is worthy of Poe or Lovecraft. I followed them [the tracks] for a mile or maybe more,' says second mate Manson, and then running round a hummock I came right on to the top of it standing and waiting for me seemingly. I don't know what it was. It wasn't a bear, anyway. It was tall and white and straight, and if it wasn't a man nor a woman, I'll stake my davy it was something worse. I made for the ship as hard as I could run, and precious glad I was to find myself aboard. I signed articles to do my duty by the ship, and on the ship I'll stay, but you don't catch me on the ice again after sundown."
Conan Doyle was always interested in the bizarre. Though he had attended seances as early as 1879, his first serious contact with the paranormal dates back to 1880 when he attended a lecture at Birmingham. My only amusement lately, he wrote to his mother on 30 January, 1880, 'has been a couple of lectures. One was on Wale and Entracht — a soft affair. The other was capital: "Does Death end all?" by Cooke, the Bostom Monday lecturer. A very clever thing, indeed. Though not convincing to me...
In 1880 and for the next five years Conan Doyle observed psychic phenomena with sceptical curiosity, but with no thought of making any investigations of his own. There is a reference in 'The Captain of the Pole-Star' to Henry Slade, the famous medium who claimed to possess the gift of automatic writing: In discussing them [metempsychosis] we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to the impostures of Slade, upon which, to my surprise, he [Captain Craigie] warned me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty..." Clearly the Captain is to be seen as a spiritualist. Conan Doyle's readings in the field are evident as well: Pythagoras and the doctrine of metempsychosis. transmigration of the soul (where the soul passes into another man, an animal, or even a plant at death) is touched upon.
The geographical details for the story were gathered first hand from Conan Doyle's experiences on a whaler. In March 1880, at the tender age of twenty, he left Peterhead aboard the 600-ton steamer Hope as ship's surgeon. In 'The Captain of the Pole-Star' Conan Doyle nostalgically recalls his voyage to the Arctic through the eyes of the story's narrator. Dr John M'Alister Ray, Jr., ship's surgeon. The Gothic fantasy is written in the form of a ship's log: a variation of his own log detailing the seven month whaling and sealing expedition among the ice floes between Greenland and Spitsbergen.
The crew of the Hope was made up of fifty Scots and fifty Shetlanders under the command of Captain John Gray. Conan Doyle enjoyed the dazzle of the ice, the clear blue of the Arctic Ocean, and the danger. He also endured seven months of acute loneliness. which allowed plenty of time for personal introspection. He fondly remembered ship's steward Jack Lamb singing in his light tenor voice 'Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still' and 'Wait For Me at Heaven's Gate, Sweet Belle Mahone'. the songs filling the crew, in Conan Doyle's words, 'with a vague, sweet discontent. The titles of the songs are significant when the theme of the story is considered. The hardships of his fictional crew and captain are ones that Conan Doyle experienced himself. Even the personalities of the Scots crew members, who are recorded in his journals. are present in the story in veiled form.
The tale is written with a strong, almost poetic, intensity. The unearthly, alien environment is stressed, yet the reader is never allowed to forget that it is an environment of this earth. Such phrases as 'nothing but the great motionless ice-fields around us, with their weird hummocks and fantastic pinnacles', and a glorious sunset, which made the great fields of ice look like a lake of blood' reveal a man who experienced Nature at its rawest and knew how to use it to create a mood. Presented with the line... the stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you in all its gruesome reality,' the reader expects that unnatural happenings are to be ser in motion in this land of mystery.
Apparently Mary Shelley thought the same. The first and last chapters of her novel Frankenstein are set in the frozen northern seas. Polar explorer Robert Walton, bent on tearing out the North Pole's hidden secrets, pushes his crew and ship ever farther into that arid world. Here he rescues Victor Frankenstein, hears his uncanny narrative, and is a witness to the deaths of Victor and the Monster at the hands of the elements.
The link between the two stories is clear. Consider the following passage from Frankenstein: 'The ice cracked behind us, and was driven with force towards the north; a breeze sprung from the west, and on the 11th [of September] the passage towards the south became perfectly free. When the sailors saw this, and that their return to their native country was apparently assured, a shout of tumultuous joy broke from them, loud and long-continued. On the same day Victor Frankenstein dies, and the novel, to all intents and purposes, ends. While Shelley's story ends on the 11th of September, Conan Doyle's begins then: September 11th Lat. 810 41 N.; 2 E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice-fields. One horror ends on 11 September, and another begins.
The parallels do not stop here. In Frankenstein, Walton writes the following to his sister:
- I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny. This morning ... I was roused by half a dozen of the sailors who demanded admission into the cabin. They entered, and their leader addressed me. He told me that he and his companions had been chosen by the other sailors to come in deputation to me... We were immured in ice and should probably never escape: but they feared that if, as was possible, the ice should dissipate, and a free passage be opened, I should be rash enough to continue my voyage and lead them into fresh dangers after they might happily have surmounted this. They insisted. therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise that if the vessel should be freed I would instantly direct my course southward.
Similarly, Captain Craigie's crew in The Captain of the Pole-Star have been pushed almost to their limit. Dr Ray writes:
- It is late in the season, and the nights are beginning to reappear There is considerable discontent among the crew, many of whom are anxious to get back home... As yet their displeasure is only signified by sullen countenances and black looks, but I heard from the second mate this afternoon that they contemplated sending a deputation to the captain to explain their grievance... A captain takes a great responsibility upon himself when he risks his vessel under such circumstances. No whaler has ever remained in these latitudes till so advanced a period of the year.
Just as the last acts in Victor Frankenstein's life are played out in the pure white world of the Arctic ice packs, so are those of Captain Craigie. Sure it is," says Dr Ray, that Captain Nicholas Craigie had met with no painful end, for there was a bright smile upon his blue pinched features, and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim world that lies beyond the grave.'
Black supernatural forces surface in this world of months-long daylight. Both works show all too clearly that horrors do not have to lurk in gloom; that evil does not shun the daylight. In a world of near perpetual light the darkness of the grave yawns all the same. It is a white death that overtakes both Victor Frankenstein and Captain Craigie.
Conan Doyle's story also shares its poetic atmosphere with Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner':
- And now there came both mist and snow,
- And it grew wondrous cold;
- And ice, mast-high, came floating by
- As green as emerald.
- The ice was here, the ice was there,
- The ice was all around;
- It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
- Like noises in a swound!
These verses could well describe Conan Doyle's feelings towards the geography and atmosphere of the North Pole.
Coleridge based his poem on the old superstition that the ocean around the South Pole has a spirit watching over it. This spirit loves the albatross, thereby making it a scared bird, and an element of magic is introduced into the poem by the supernatural qualities of the albatross. This magic is also present in the unearthly quality of the setting. The Ancient Mariner kills the albatross, angering the Polar Spirit, who places a curse on the Mariner and causes the death of the crew after they have blamed the Mariner for their misfortunes.
Captain Craigie, who is described as being 'fey', is also a man cursed by fate and crew. ... shortly after leaving Shetland,' reports Dr Ray, 'the men at the wheel used to complain that they heard plaintive cries and screams in the wake of the ship, as if something were following it and were unable to overtake it.'
The suffering of the Ancient Mariner is not merely physical, but spiritual - likewise Captain Craigie. 'He has told me several times,' writes Ray, 'that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him...' The Captain sleeps badly, is given to occasional dark moods, courts death in every possible manner, and sometimes questions his own sanity.
A strange spirit pursues the Pole-Star. 'Manson swears the ship is haunted; and that he would not stay in her a day if he had any other place to go.' Compare this to the following passage from Coleridge's poem:
- And some in dreams assured were
- Of the spirit that plagued us so;
- Nine fathom deep he had followed us
- From the land of mist and snow.
Suspense is built up gradually in the story. Manson reports sounds like a bairn crying and sometimes like a wench in pain.' He confesses that ... we both saw a sort of white figure moving across the ice field in the same direction that we had heard the cries. The crew is understandably frightened. Besides facing the grim prospect of being marooned in the Arctic ice packs they must endure the company of an evil apparition. The Captain's responses are queer. As Dr Ray tells it:
- He was staring out over the ice with an expression in which horror, surprise. and something approaching to joy were contending for the mastery. You see her you must see her! There still! Flying from me, by God, flying from me - and gone!... It was the glass that showed her to me, and then the eyes of love - the eyes of love.
The neurotic Captain breaks under the tremendous strain, impelled by a will stronger than his own. One night a vision appears to him:
- [it] seemed to be a wreath of mist, blown swiftly in a line with the ship. It was a dim nebulous body, devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it... "Coming, lass, coming." cried the skipper, in a voice of unfathomable tenderness and compassion, like one who soothes a beloved one by some favour long looked for, and as pleasant to bestow as to receive... He held out his hands as if to clasp it, and so ran into the darkness with outstretched arms and loving words.
A female spirit as deadly as Conan Doyle's also appears in Coleridge's poem:
- Her lips were red, her looks were free.
- Her locks were yellow as gold;
- Her skin was white as leprosy.
- The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she.
- Who thicks man's blood with cold.
When the Captain is finally located by the rescue expedition a shape is seen to rise from the frozen body: ... many of my companions averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe.'
There may also be some significance in the theme of betrothal and marriage which runs in the background of Coleridge's poem and Conan Doyle's story. The Ancient Mariner tells his story to a wedding guest while in the background the wedding feast is going on. The motive for the haunting of Captain Craigie is ascribed to one important incident: during his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror. It is clearly implied that the 'polar' spirit is the Captain's dead love, who has been pleading with him in a manner unintelligible to the crew. When Dr Ray enters the Captain's cabin to inventory the contents he notices that the young girl's portrait had been cut out of its frame, as with a knife, and was gone. That the girl was capable of such actions had been indicated in the portrait. That anyone in the short space of nineteen years of existence could develop such strength of will as was stamped upon her face seemed to me at the time to be well-nigh incredible."
One of the questions not answered in the story is whether it is Craigie's love beckoning to him, or a deadly delusion created by a succubus or banshee. A succubus is an evil spirit that assumes the shape of a female for the purpose of having intercourse with a man. Most of the primitive saints were tempted by such devils. On sighting the nebulous shape on one occasion the Captain was heard to say But a little time, love but a little time.' And Dr Ray, observing Craigie's actions just before the Captain leaps from the deck, described him as 'a man keeping a tryst. We also must bear in mind that the Captain died with a smile on his face. Death would not obstruct their sexual union.
A banshee is also a female spirit, one who is supposed to warn families of the approaching death of a member, generally by wailing under the window of the house (ship?) occupied by the person who is to die a day or so later. The cry of the 'bogie' haunting the Pole-Star is described by Ray. It culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul... Grief, unutterable grief, seemed to be expressed in it, and a great longing, and yet through it all there was an occasional wild note of exultation.'
The banshee is also related to Old Nick, the harbinger of death and carrier of souls to the other world. Interestingly enough, the name is derived from Nikker, an old Teutonic term for a water sprite whose appearance was supposed by sailors to foretell death. This aspect fits in well with Coleridge's Polar Spirit, and with the spirit haunting the Pole-Star: one of the ship's crew members observes, 'something uncanny has been flitting round the ship all night."
From all of the above it is apparent that the ship's name has a double meaning. The Polestar, or North Star, has guided mariners through dangerous waters for hundreds of years. No matter where one may be in the northern hemisphere, north may be found by referring to the Polestar. But a Polestar for the soul does not exist — Captain Craigie knows position geographically, but not spiritually. He must find his way through the darkness of his mind and soul, unguided, and pray for the best. It is up to the reader to decide if his fate was good or bad.
This article was first published in Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 4, December 1985.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
