In his autobiography, he wrote: I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded. He was not wrong. But Conan Doyle was also a Victorian with a twist, a man of tensions and contradictions. He was fascinated by travel, exploration, invention, and indeed all things modern and technological; yet at the same time very traditional, voicing support for values such as chivalry, duty, constancy, and honour. By the time of his death he was a celebrity, achieving worldwide fame for his creation of the rationalist, scientific super-detective Sherlock Holmes; but his later decades were taken up with advocacy of the new religion of Spiritualism, in which he became a devoted believer.

    Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird cries out at sea, slashed fishermen's nets, glimpses of a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to pearl-dive for him but fails. On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian patients. The Indians revere him as a God but Zurita has a hunch that the God on land and the devil in the sea have something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery. As action shifts from the bottom of the sea to the Spaniard's schooner The Jellyfish and back again, with interludes in sun-drenched Buenos Aires and countryside, the mystery of Ichthyander the sea-devil is unfolded before the reader in a narrative as gripping as it informative.

    This edition removes the technical appendices. the historical sections on previous attempts to penetrate the fiedl, and the detailed account of the Eskimos. The record of the journey, however, remains intact.