The Captain of the Pole-Star

The ship's surgeon opens his locket to show the captain the girl he means to marry, and the captain comes out of his chair, screaming. Their whaler is frozen fast above the Arctic Circle, the one lane of open water behind her closing a little more each day, twenty days of biscuit left. At night the crew hear something on the floe, a cry that begins like a child and climbs into something else. The captain hears it too. He keeps his cabin locked, sweeps the empty horizon through his glass for hours, and asks the surgeon, quite pleasantly, what the first symptoms of madness are.

Written by a twenty-three-year-old who had sailed as a whaler's surgeon himself, years before the detective stories that made his name.