The Glamour of the Arctic

A. Conan Doyle wrote The Glamour of the Arctic. The writer says that the whale-fishers of Peterhead leave home at the end of February, before the first shoots are above the ground, and return in September, when only the stubble remains. The text recalls a time when the Greenland seas were harried by the ships of many nations, when the Basques and the Biscayens were the great fishers of whales.

The text says that Nature, while depriving this unwieldy mass of blubber of any weapons, has given it in compensation a highly intelligent brain, and that it is beyond dispute that the whale entirely understands the mechanism of his own capture. The writer says there was the whale in the air, its tail curved just as a trout’s is in jumping, and that the catch was very thickly covered with a red, crablike parasite, about the size of a shilling. The text asks whether a group of people were destroyed by the hated Skraelings or, as is more likely, amalgamated with them to produce a race of tow-headed, large-limbed Esquimaux.