📍Devon House 136In the nineteenth century, Scotland dominated British Arctic whaling, and the country’s medical schools supplied many of the surgeons who sailed on these ships. This talk introduces their largely unpublished personal diaries which offer rare insights into cultural encounters along journeys towards and within the whaling grounds. By reading this body of travel-writing through a literary-critical lens, I suggest that surgeons used gothic frameworks and motifs to depict Scottish archipelagos as alienating spaces of temporal unease and otherness. In doing so, these writers anticipated the landscapes of the ‘High North’ and complex interactions with Inuit communities. Whaling surgeons often recast imperialist tropes as they engaged with wider discourses about Britain’s ‘Celtic fringes’. Their first-hand accounts reveal unstable parallels between Inuit, Shetlanders, Orcadians, and Highlanders, as well as other ‘tribal’ peoples. These texts diverge, therefore, from prevailing Victorian representations of the Arctic as a tabula rasa – ‘pure’, ‘clean’, ‘white’, and ‘empty’ – instead revealing as a key space for anxieties about belonging and borders, self and other in the period.

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