1. Kirsty A. MacDonald (2011) ‘“This Desolate and Appalling Landscape”: The Journey North in Contemporary Scottish Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 13.2, 37–48, p. 47.
2. Peter Davidson (2005) The Idea of North (London: Reaktion), p. 21.
3. When Diamond reaches the Arctic, for instance, he finds himself in a daz-zlingly beautiful ice cave, but simultaneously is forced to watch the North Wind dissolve into light, an experience that films him with ‘terror’. George MacDonald (2001) At the Back of the North Wind (London: Everyman’s Library), p. 102.
4. Arthur Conan Doyle [1914?] The Captain of the Pole-Star (London: Hodder), p. 22. The ship’s name may come from an earlier Scottish novel, R.M. Ballantyne’s 1859 The World of Ice, which similarly describes an ice-locked ship.
5. Doyle is notably more pleased with the Arctic in the diaries he kept during the 1880 expedition that inspired the story. In one of the final entries, he writes: ‘Who says thou art cold and inhospitable, my poor icefields? I have known you in calm and in storm and I say you are genial and kindly. There is a quaint grim humour in your bobbing bergs with their fantastic shapes’. Arthur Conan Doyle (2012) ‘Dangerous Work’: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, ed. Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (London: British Library), p. 294.