The year was 1880 and for young medical student Arthur Conan Doyle, the offer to join a “whaling cruise” to the Arctic, in return for wages of two pounds ten a month plus three shillings a ton for “oil money” was too exciting to possibly turn down.

This cruise, however, would be far from the kind of cruise today’s whale seeking nature lovers might enjoy.

For although the Sherlock Holmes creator would indeed come face to face with some of the world’s most glorious marine mammals, his Arctic adventure was to mercilessly hunt them to exhaustion and kill them.

He was just 20 at the time, a third-year medical student at Edinburgh University and Scotland’s whaling industry had already helped to seriously deplete whale stocks in the waters between Greenland and Spitzbergen.

Before long, attention would switch to Antarctica, with some species hunted to near extinction before the killing would end.

Peterhead whaling vessels, The Hope and the Eclipse, were the last two clinging to an Arctic whaling industry which, Conan Doyle noted in his 1897 article ‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’, was once “so flourishing that it could support a fleet of a hundred sail”.

Once in the Arctic as The Hope’s ship’s surgeon, there would be fabulous sights to see – and see killed – and, as he more than once slipped on ice and plunged into the deadly cold water, the constant threat of illness, accident and death.

“It is brutal work,” he wrote, “though not more brutal than that which goes into supply every dinner-table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the ice-fields under the peaceful silence of the blue Arctic sky, did seem a horrible intrusion.”

Eventually the huge whaling industry which kept the wheels of Scotland’s industry turning, would vanish, with little to show it ever existed.

Brutal as it is, that grim history is now to be explored in a major new exhibition at the Scottish Maritime Museum, from the violence that saw millions of whales slaughtered, to the men who diced with death to earn a living from it.

Combining history, science, photography and art, the exhibition, entitled ‘All mortal greatness is but disease’ – a line from Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ - focuses on Scotland’s involvement in the industry, the impact on whale numbers, and whaling today which still takes place in some countries.

Now considered to be among the cruellest and most gruesome endeavours inflicted upon the natural world, industrial whaling pushed some species almost to extinction: in the Antarctic alone, nearly 1.6 million whales were killed between 1900-1960.

Because of the brutality involved – with whales butchered on board massive factory vessels that swam with innards and blood – the exhibition carries a ‘content warning’ to visitors.

However according to curator Miriam Matthews, the story of Scotland’s role in whaling had such a massive impact that it can’t be overlooked.

“Whaling was normal, it was important to life and industry at the time and contributed to many technological advances.

“How we understand whaling today is not how it was understood at the time - it’s important that we place it in context of history.

“For some, it was a way of seeing the world and making a fortune doing it,” she adds. “And they were doing this because it was the only means of earning money.

“It was very profitable – in one season they could make enough money to buy a house twice over or start a business.”

Though subsistence whaling dates back to the Neolithic period, the history of Scottish whaling began a thousand years ago when Vikings hunted whales in the North Atlantic.

However, industrialisation in the mid-19th century sparked a dramatic increase in the demand for whale oil, used for lubricating machinery, lighting and heating.

In Dundee, the largest jute producer in the world, the oil was a vital part of the process of softening jute fibres.

While whale by-products, which included medicinal items like soap, perfume, whalebone corsets and parasols, became essential to newly industrial urban societies.

Scores of vessels set out from the Scottish whaling ports of Dundee, Leith and the Shetlands to hunt blues, humpbacks, seis and southern right whales and seals, often in unpredictable weather, violent seas and desolate locations.

Conan Doyle’s mishaps – one while skinning a seal when he lost his footing and plunged into the ice – were bad enough, with the deadly cold sea capable of causing death within minutes.

Others told horrific stories of whaling vessels trapped in ice for weeks, dreadful accidents, illness and the constant stench.

On board whaling ships, there was the thrill of the chase followed by the brutal slaughter and processing of carcasses, with the blubber stripped in a process described as akin to ‘peeling a banana’.

A whale the size of a railway carriage could be deconstructed in just twenty minutes.

Whale numbers were already seriously depleted by Conan Doyle’s outing. Noting that a whale could fetch up to £3000, he wrote: “The number of the creatures is diminishing.

“In 1880, Capt. Gray calculated that there were probably not more than 300 of them left alive in the whole expanse of the Greenland seas, an area of thousands of square miles.

“How few there are is shown by the fact that he recognised individuals amongst those which we chased.”

As numbers fell, whalers moved south, eventually using huge factory vessels equipped with electric and explosive harpoons and sonar to track their prey and working from the distant whaling station island of South Georgia.

The scale was immense: some vessels extended the length of one and a half football fields (170 metres long), where crews of up to 4,000 men could catch, butcher and process 200 whales a day. Many also included their own meat and oil processing plants.

By the mid-20th century, Leith based Christian Salvesen Company’s two whaling ships Southern Harvester and Southern Venturer were equipped with an onboard hangar, housing a Westland Whirlwind helicopter used for whale spotting.

Miriam says that although the sector knew of the impact on whale populations and supported research which would become an invaluable resource for conservationists, their key focus was on finding new ways to enable whales to repopulate, so they could continue their work.

It would not be until the early 1980s and following mounting pressure from groups like Save The Whale, that a global moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted, bringing it to an end in Scotland.

The exhibition includes 1960s images from South Georgia island which show various stages of whale hunting, and a film by filmmaker and musician Jolene Crawford featuring her great uncle who worked as a whaler on the island.

While a new piece of textile work by artist Caroline Hack inspired by old navigation charts and imagery of whaling scenes, also features.

According to Miriam, there may be modern lessons to be learned from Scotland’s historic whaling links.

“The plight of the whale and the 1970s campaign to save it may be seen as a reflection of today’s environmental campaigns, she adds.

“Governments chose to consciously continue to exploit these animals - it reflects the climate crisis today; even when we know devastation we were causing, we carry on for profit.

“The worry is that we are seeing history repeating itself.”

‘All mortal greatness is but disease’, at The Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine opens on Friday 18 November.