26Note that “head-keeper” (as well as “fly-paper,” hyphenated in the Strand Magazine and American texts, and “hen pheasants,” hyphenated in the Strand Magazine) must be counted as two words for the code to be decipherable.
27A barque (known today as a bark) is a three-masted vessel with fore and main masts square-rigged. Richard W. Clarke, in “On the Nomenclature of Watson’s Ships,” theorises that this particular barque was not actually named Gloria Scott, but that Watson assigned her the name in writing up the story—that, in fact, Gloria Scott, Norah Creina (a ship mentioned in “The Resident Patient”), and Sophy Anderson (the ship mentioned in “The Five Orange Pips”) were all women from Watson’s past, to whom the tender-hearted doctor paid tribute.
28No apparent relation to Percy Armitage of “The Speckled Band.”
29In the seventeenth century, even convicts who had committed minor offenses were “transported” to America to work seven-year sentences for the Virginia Company, recounts Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore; but after the colonies gained their independence, that practice was no longer feasible. The territory of Australia begin receiving convicts in 1788, when eleven ships carrying over seven hundred male and female prisoners landed at Botany Bay, to work for either the government or for private employers. For the next several decades, convicts poured into eastern Australian colonies such as the one on the island of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). In 1850, reports Hughes, just as efforts to abolish the policy were bearing fruit, “the embryo colony of Western Australia announced . . . that it would like some convicts too.” In all, some 150,000 convicts were sent to eastern Australia and another 10,000 to western Australia until the practice was done away with in 1868. (See also “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” note 14.)
Working conditions for convicts in Australia were not, by all accounts, unduly harsh. Yet those opposed to the policy saw the provision of free labour to private citizens as tantamount to slavery, and for the young James Armitrage, the prospect of being exiled to possible hard labour in an unknown land must have seemed like grim punishment indeed. He must have felt like young Simon Taylor, who wrote to his father from shipboard in 1841:
The distant shores of England strikes from Sight
and all shores seem dark that once was pure and Bright,
But now a convict dooms me for a time
To suffer hardships in a forein clime
Farewell a long farewell to my own my native Land
O would to God that i was free upon thy Strugling Strand.
30The Crimean War (1853–1856) pitted Russia against the allied forces of Great Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Causes of the war included Russia’s desire to protect Slav Christians living under Turkish rule, as well as a Russian-French dispute over who had rightful guardianship over the holy places in Palestine. Mismanagement on both sides was endemic; one famous example could be seen at Balaclava, where, after initial allied success against Russian forces, a British commander received bungled orders and led his light cavalry brigade straight into a heavily defended valley. Two-thirds of his 673 men were killed or wounded, but the members of the doomed cavalry fought with desperate courage, leading one Russian officer to refer to them with dumbfounded admiration as “valiant lunatics.” Tennyson immortalized the event in his 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” (Balaclava is also famed for providing the name of the woolen knit cap favoured by mountain climbers, skiers, and bank robbers.)
Nonetheless, key allied victories and Austria’s threatened alliance with Great Britain and France forced Russia to abandon its Sevastopol fortress and sign the Treaty of Paris in 1856. The Crimean War severely weakened the relationship between Austria and Russia, lessened Russian influence in Europe, and made a hero of Florence Nightingale, who organised the military hospitals in Turkey. (Treatment of the troops was appalling—there were more casualties caused by disease, such as dysentery and cholera, than by warfare.) It was also a war avidly followed by the British public, which was suddenly in the unprecedented position of being able to “witness” military action through the dispatches of journalist William Howard Russell, reporting in The Times. “Never before,” says A. N. Wilson, “had the public heard such candid, or such immediate, descriptions of the reality of war, the bungling as well as the heroism, the horrible deaths by disease, as well as the bloody consequences of battle.”
31The dating of “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” is in many ways a paradigm of the problems of the chronologists (see Chronological Table). If 1855 was “thirty years ago,” then Trevor’s account was rendered in 1885. But according to A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson first met a few years after Watson joined the army in 1878. Clearly Trevor, whose story is being listened to by the undergraduate Sherlock Holmes, could not have written his account several years after Holmes and Watson met. Either “the year ’55, when the Crimean War was at its height,” is wrong, or the “thirty years” is wrong. Consider:
1.The “thirty year and more” since Hudson said he last saw Trevor coincides with Trevor’s own recollection of events having occurred “thirty years ago.”
2.Trevor senior was “a fine, robust old man” at the time of his meeting with Holmes; he celebrated his twenty-third birthday on board the ship sailing from Falmouth. This corroborates the passing of at least thirty years.
3.If Holmes was born around 1854 (so that he was “about sixty” in 1914, as recorded in “His Last Bow”) and the younger Victor Trevor was his contemporary, Victor must have been born at around the same time. Trevor senior states he had returned to England “more than twenty years” ago, married, and had a son. Because “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” must be dated before 1880 or 1881 (the latest date for A Study in Scarlet), “more than twenty years ago” puts the date of the return in the mid-1850s. This would make Trevor’s age about the same as Holmes’s and supports the veracity of the “more than twenty years ago.”
4.Later in the story, Trevor refers to making his way to the “diggings”; if he were referring to the Australian gold diggings, those did not commence until 1851, and so he could not have been there “thirty years ago.” See note 48, below.
5.Although several chronologists, having been misled by false information that transportation to Australia ended in 1846, attempt to show that Trevor’s sailing could not have occurred as late as 1855, the true history of the convict transportation system (see note 29, above) belies that effort and is of no help in verifying or disproving old Trevor’s story.
What is one to make of this contradictory data? The problem seems insuperable.
32The forerunner of the clipper ship was the Baltimore clipper, a light, quick coastal schooner used by the U.S. Navy to run blockades against British merchant ships in the War of 1812. From this evolved the true clipper (or Yankee clipper), a long, slim, fast-sailing vessel with billowing sails on three masts. Some of the fastest clippers were built between 1850 and 1856, a period that saw many high-profile races as the quest for speed grew ever more intense. For the United States, shorter travelling times were paramount in the stampede to California during the Gold Rush (the Flying Cloud, launched in 1851, broke records when it sailed from New York City to San Francisco in eighty-nine days); for Britain, fierce competition in the Chinese tea and opium trades meant that the swiftest clippers would never be idle—particularly if they could bring home the first tea of the season. Britain’s most famous clipper, the beautifully designed Cutty Sark, was launched in 1869, but by then vast improvements in steamships meant that the heyday of clipper ships was effectively over.
33Holmes came to the aid of one Major Prendergast in connection with the Tankerville Club scandal (“The Five Orange Pips”), but whether he is related to the criminal here is unknown.
34Some $1,250,000—a fantastic sum for the time, almost $22 million in current purchasing power.
35Money.
36The cap at the top of the mast.
37As any child who has heard the story of Pa
ul Revere might know (“The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!”), the British army uniform has, throughout history, featured red as its dominant colour. According to The Thin Red Line: Uniforms of the British Army between 1751 and 1914, during this period of time the soldiers would have worn—in addition to red coats—dark caps with chin straps and black trousers with yellow stripes down the outside seams. In the Crimean War itself, many traditional trappings such as plumes, epaulettes, and gloves were temporarily set aside.
38In sailing to Australia, the ship would have crossed the English Channel, sailed past Brest (at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay), and on around Spain, passing the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, and continued on around Africa and Cape Horn or southwest to Rio, southeast to Cape Town, and around Cape of Good Hope. Most commercial clipper runs from England to Australia sailed from Liverpool to Melbourne. The Marco Polo, billed as “the fastest ship in the world,” generally made the trip in about seventy-two days; its sister ship, Lightning, was clocked at about 500 kilometers per day for a seven-day period. A straight run from Falmouth to the southern edge of the Bay of Biscay (La Coruña, Spain) is about 1,000 kilometers; therefore we may infer that the voyage had lasted three or four days at this point in Trevor’s account.
39The American edition text reads, “There he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic . . .”
40Salt beef.
41“Lat. 15°” means 15° north, according to the title of Trevor’s narrative; this would mean that the ship foundered virtually in the middle of the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. See note 43, below.
42The rope attached to the bow.
43The location that Trevor gives here fails to correspond even remotely to that given for his ship’s supposed sinking, leading readers to wonder which statement is the incorrect one. According to Ernst Bloomfield Zeisler’s calculations, in his Baker Street Chronology, assuming that the position of the shipwreck is given accurately, Cape Verde would be only some 140 miles north of there and the African coast some 150 miles east. If, instead, Trevor and his party were indeed 500 miles south of the Islands and 700 miles west of Africa, then the ship had presumbaly been somewhere around 10° N., 24° W. Note, however, that Prendergast does not actually say that the Gloria Scott was at N. 15° W. 25°, only that the castaways would claim that the shipwreck occurred there. This was poor thinking by Prendergast, for a glance at a chart would have shown that if in fact the shipwreck were there, the crew could have easily put in at the Cape Verde Islands.
44A reasonable destination given Trevor’s stated position; Sierra Leone is just south of Guinea on the west coast of Africa.
45A term denoting a distance from which only the sails and mast of a ship are visible, the hull of the ship being hidden by the curvature of the earth.
46Why did Hudson have an opinion? Could it be that he was not “a young seaman” but one of the “dozen convicts”? It seems unlikely that as Hudson and perhaps a few others were blown into the water, they were discussing exactly what happened.
47H. W. Bell, who concludes that Trevor’s entire tale was fictional, finds it inconceivable that the captain of the Hotspur would not have closely questioned the nine castaways. If they had really told the skimpy “cover” story suggested by Prendergast, such interrogation would have quickly led to the discovery and arrest of the mutineers. That it did not is one more piece of evidence discrediting the tale. See note 50, below.
48The “diggings” undoubtedly refers to the gold diggings in and around Bathurst and other neighbouring Australian locales. (See “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” for more on the Ballarat gold rush.) Gold was not discovered in Australia until February 1851, and by 1854 the “boom” was largely over, with Melbourne and other cities suffering severe depressions. It is difficult to square these facts with the dates provided by Trevor, unless the “prosperity” he and Evans found was not from gold but other endeavours. However, the reference to the “diggings” makes nonsense of any efforts to place Trevor in Australia before 1851. See note 31, above.
49Why would Hudson threaten exposure when he was plainly equally guilty? (“The crew are [Prendergast’s partner’s], body and soul. He could buy ’em . . . and he did it before ever they signed on.”) Did he have so little to lose that he thought blackmail worth the risk?
50Although Holmes may have been taken in by Trevor’s tale, H. W. Bell, for one, after reviewing all of the inconsistencies of place and date in Trevor’s tale, cannot believe it. That said, he contends that the tale spun by Trevor, “a man of little culture,” would have been very close to the truth, for why else would a man confess to embezzlement, transportation, and mutiny except in an effort to conceal even more heinous crimes? Bell proposes that Trevor, “Beddoes,” and Hudson were perpetrators in an affair involving piracy, murder of the crew, and scuttling of the Gloria Scott. The former two abandoned or crossed Hudson and kept his share of the loot; the revelation that Hudson, presumed dead, “was alive and out for revenge,” Bell argues, “would be ample reason for Trevor to have ‘gone about in fear of some personal attack’ ” (as the young Holmes cannily observed upon first meeting Trevor senior).
51Also spelled Tarai, a region of northern India and southern Nepal running parallel to the lower Himalayan ranges. Reflecting its name, which means “moist land,” the area comprises subtropical flatlands—in stark contrast to the mountainous terrain of much of the rest of Nepal—covered by forests and field. The Encyclopædia Brittanica (11th Ed.) proclaimed, “Everywhere it is most unhealthy, and inhabited only by tribes who seem proof against malaria.”
52Several writers suggest that the discrepancies in dates and the similarity of the story to “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” support the view that the events of “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” never occurred and were simply fabricated by Watson, perhaps to console himself after Holmes’s “death” or for financial gain.
THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL1
“The Musgrave Ritual” is one of the most famous “treasure-map” cases of all time. T. S. Eliot, in his great play Murder in the Cathedral, borrows deliberately from it, and the recitation of the Ritual itself has become a rite of The Baker Street Irregulars annual dinner. Set, as is “The ‘Gloria Scott,’ ” in the pre-Watson years, it tells of another case brought to Holmes by a college classmate. As in “The ‘Gloria Scott,’ ” Holmes unconsciously reveals his youthful naivete, for it appears unlikely that his verdict of “accidental death” may be sustained. The story’s frame, recorded by Dr. Watson, also teases us with several unpublished cases and reveals Holmes the decorator, as he draws a large “V. R.” on the apartment wall with gunshots!
AN ANOMALY WHICH often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges,2 and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R.3 done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics, which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish, or in even less desirable plac
es. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them;4 for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs,5 the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy, during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that as he had finished pasting extracts into his commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor, and squatting down upon a stool in front of it he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.
“There are cases enough here, Watson,” said he, looking at me with mischievous eyes. “I think that if you knew all that I have in this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting others in.”
“These are the records of your early work, then?” I asked. “I have often wished that I had notes of those cases.”
“Yes, my boy; these were all done prematurely, before my biographer had come to glorify me.”6 He lifted bundle after bundle in a tender, caressing sort of way. “They are not all successes, Watson,” said he. “But there are some pretty little problems among them. Here’s the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry,7 the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch,8 as well as a full account of Ricoletti9 of the club foot, and his abominable wife.10 And here—ah, now! this really is something a little recherché.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 71
