I could not believe my eyes. As I stood agog, a foreign timbered voice cried up to me, ‘Mr Stamford?’ I nodded my response. ‘First stop Amsterdam.’
I will never forget that voyage. All that I had learnt of anatomy went overboard — in more ways than one. My heart was in my boots, my stomach was in my throat, my head between my knees, and my sea legs were still to be fashioned.
After a day of pitching and tossing, rolling and yawing my spirit had all but left me. My breakfast had long gone. The cook, an apparition of oil, jocularity and individual aroma, prepared one of his ‘specials’ for me. Bacon has never been my favourite meat, and streaky back my least favourite cut. The medicine did not work. After several hours I managed to get a grip on myself and make the first steps in time with the movement of the ship. This gave me confidence to go on deck.
I staggered to the rail and looked over the side. Breathing deeply I felt my strength returning. A seagull flew inches from my ear and I looked up. Momentarily I took my hands from the rail and paid no attention to the rhythm of the ship. The horny hand of a Dutch sailor held on to my collar. ‘No yet, Surgeon. Ve may haf need of you, ja.’ He smiled at me and was gone about his business. A near miss, I thought.
I tried to take my bearings. So this was the North Sea. It was green and grey, stippled with dirty spray. Its salt was on my lips and in my eyes. Surely I had not wept. Octavian at Actium and Nelson just about everywhere had been seasick. The company might be impeccable but the nausea was still the same. I concentrated on the sea. It made me worse. The depths were solid grey moving in one direction, the surface was lifeless green moving in a counter direction. The foam flicked and sprayed at all angles. The movements of the grey and green had a rhythm all their own, sometimes largo, sometimes staccato, but whether slow or fast it was impossible to follow them. My head throbbed with the efforts; my eyes felt as though they had crossed and recrossed. I closed my eyes to escape this torture — yet still my mind’s eye grappled with the problem of the conflicting rhythms. The tighter I screwed my eyes, the more my head pounded. My legs were no longer my own. The wind chilled me. The sea beckoned me, a cruel siren already acclaiming her victory. My feet slipped beneath me, but my hands gripped the rails. I tried to breath with regularity. I felt as though a forty-man scrum was on my chest. My head started to nod in the first stages of lost consciousness. The netting held me on deck, but for how long? The pulsing rhythm of the grey-green was calling me down.
‘That was a bad moment, Mr Stamford,’ said a solemn voice. Solemn out of striving to make itself understood in a language not its own — its natural note seemed cheerful.
I looked around me. ‘Where am I? What happened?’ my voice feebly inquired; my throat parched and sore with its savage usage.
‘The crew’s quarters. It is eight of your clock, in the evening,’ replied the voice.
My head could not limp a reply. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. ‘Not to worry. Even Octavian at Actium had his Agrippa, and your Nelson had his Hardy.’
I tried a witty response. It came out, ‘Grr-ar-gh-grr.’
‘You must have missed the company’s wire. We were scheduled to go up the coast to Newcastle and you would meet a boat for Hamburg. As it is we go instead via Amsterdam. The North Sea is the worst part. The Baltic is not so bad — usually.’
So that was my first day at sea. It was an experience that I have never forgotten, and was never allowed to forget in future whenever I met Hans Rugler and his brother, Carel.
There is much to tell but little that is of any real consequence from the point of view of Holmes and Watson. I will therefore only sketch my travels but bring into sharper relief those incidents which will create some thread of continuity for my dealings with Holmes.
You don’t need me to tell you about Rembrandt’s town on the Amstel with its canals, barges, gables and raffish life mixed with stolid respectability. Suffice to say that I was charmed by it immediately. The Rugler brothers took me to various places that only sailors go and I learnt about the Far East and met Malays, Indonesians and natives of lands that I had never even heard of. What impressed me most was how the natives seemed to mix. The rather heavy, ruddy Dutch and the dark, finely boned Asiatics made beautiful half-breeds — a term which none resented. I started to learn the patois of the sea although it never became second nature to me.
After several days we set off for Hamburg and another set of experiences all of which were dwarfed by the enormity of my ship, the Pompadour. It had four masts and enough sail to cover half a dozen rugger pitches. The final provisioning and setting in of cargo had been finished that morning and we left on the next tide.
The captain was a German, Dieter Netzer. He was a wonderful man. A giant but truly gentle. He could do anything from haircuts to surgery, from fiddle playing to being judge and jury. He was that rare creature — a master of all trades. I asked him why they needed a surgeon as he seemed more than capable from what others had told me. He shrugged his massive shoulders (I would have to teach him rugby, I thought) and said that it was part of his company’s regulations to have a proper surgeon so a proper surgeon they must have. Like so many of his race he stuck by the rule book most methodically. The new apprentice sailors would be grateful for this for he was a very thorough teacher and none dared cross such a strong man. Within a week, sailors from a dozen races, including myself, had learnt all the different names of the ropes, rigging and tackle in German and English.
Captain Netzer seemed to take a shine to me when I climbed up some rigging to bring a boy down after he had got caught up in some ropes and broken his ankle. That evening we chatted over a pipe and he gave me some of his mixture which soon had me coughing, much to his delight. ‘That will put hairs on your chest, yah,’ he chatted good humouredly. By the time we reached Valpariso we were firm friends.
Our journey round the Horn was not as fearsome as that first day in the North Sea, and the Pacific lived up to the name that Magellen had given it until we reached the mouth of the harbour when a real gale blew up. It was here that the captain showed his skill at the helm and brought us safely in without any assistance from the small lead ‘tug’ boats. Quite an achievement, I can tell you.
My original plan was to sail from Valpariso to Melbourne but I fell in with some Americans and decided to try my luck with them, which resulted in my going to San Francisco and Drake’s Bay. The plaque was still in place then, I think it’s lost now. Fisherman’s Wharf and the Barbary Coast were pretty wild places where you could find yourself crimped and on your way to some unknown destination as a deckhand if you did not keep your wits about you. Fortunately the old shellbacks I knew had a ship already lined up for Yokohama.
Crossing the Pacific was not without event and landfalls were very welcome. Yokohama was even more welcome. I would often watch the fishermen in the harbour with their trained cormorants diving for a catch. What beautiful birds they were. At Yokohama I met up with my next English ship, an English mail boat which travelled the seas like a small ‘Flying Dutchman’ never stopping anywhere for long. Hong Kong and Singapore were my next ports of call, and in the latter I enjoyed great hospitality because my name tended to be confused with that of Sir Stamford Raffles and I was presumed a relative despite my not too great denials. Next came Rangoon, Bangkok and Calcutta.
It was during this voyage that I had some trouble and was obliged to change my name and dye my hair in order to escape. It was a private operation for a rich Chinese. It failed and he wanted my head in compensation. Not a pleasant experience.
I was still unnerved as I reached Calcutta and so decided to keep to my new name of Surgeon Stewart.
It was here that I decided to look up one of Holmes’s few old friends and so I took a small steamer up the Ganges to the Terai.
The Terai is a fairly flat land between the Ganges and the Himalayan foothills. It used to be rather marshy, overgrown with long coarse grass and infested with malaria. It was very much a frontier area then, n
ot much populated or properly cultivated, but every so often one would come across some beautifully terraced areas that some enterprising planter had cut out in order to grow tea.
At the club in Pilibit after having been going up river for some two weeks I came across a large figure who looked sombre as he read a newspaper a year out of date. He had lost much of his hair and seemed prey to depression despite his full red cheeks.
‘New member?’ he asked cordially, if stiffly.
‘No, but I have some more recent newspapers than the one you have been reading.’ Among Englishmen in the tropics newspapers were often more precious than gold. He smiled and held out his hand.
‘Trevor’s the name. Got a plantation a few days away.’
I could not believe my luck. It had been so easy as though we had been infallibly drawn together. I introduced myself and before long the name of Sherlock Holmes came up in conversation. The name was like a magic formula, and in minutes we were chatting as though we had known each other for years. Later he took me to his plantation, the most isolated of them all actually, part of the Himalayan foothills themselves. It was then that he told me the story of the Matilda Briggs. Even thousands of miles away from Baker Street in a land trodden only by a handful of Englishmen, Sherlock Holmes was a profound presence.
When Trevor’s tea had been loaded I took the steamer back to the delta where I boarded — the Matilda Briggs. It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I did so and I kept an eagle eye out for rats. My plan was to go to Bombay and pick up a clipper, and thus return to England via the Cape. However, before I had reached that great city I had fallen in love and jumped ship. Her name was Kerala, the nearest place on Earth to the Garden of Eden or Paradise. Lush palms undulated next to perfect blue seas. All the trees were laden with the riches of succulent fruit. The winds from the sea wafted ashore and the rains kept everything fresh. Trade in spices was a source of great wealth particularly at the British-administered Tellicherry. My skills as a surgeon were called on by the many races and religions who lived together in complete harmony. Before twelve months were over I was on my way to becoming a wealthy man. I made some investments and they prospered, but my main source of income was with my surgeon’s knife. I still called myself Stewart just in case my Chinese enemy should hear of me again and come after me. Unfortunately for me he did and I had to make my escape in the dead of night with very few possessions in my haste. I then went to Bombay. I took the mail steamer back to England again, working my way as a ship’s surgeon.
It was on this trip that I met a nurse named Carolyn Foggarty. Apparently she had come over with a large group of unattached eligible young ladies in the autumn, whose prime concern was to find a husband in the British community — military or civilian — in India. This was called by the military in particular the ‘Fishing Fleet’. Those who were not able to find suitable matches returned to England in the spring and were cruelly labelled the ‘Returned Empties’. Carolyn told me that several, including herself, had made the trip more than once and tended to be bitter at the many whispered barbs of humour. She had been sent by her father who was a mill owner in Lancashire. He wanted her to find a suitable husband which meant to him one who had good business connections on the sub-continent so that he could expand his operations there. There was talk of some brothers on Trincamalee, but that’s another story. As she was a rather spirited girl she did not take kindly to her father’s manipulations of her future happiness and so tended to resist her suitors. This resistance included flattening her vowels, dropping her aitches and emphazising her above-average height.
Carolyn told me of her desire to nurse and of her work at the hospital for the poor in Bombay. She so wanted to do something useful with her life. Her father would have said that that meant being a dutiful daughter and doing as she was told so that he could become a millionaire and in time a peer of the realm. Her interpretation begged to differ.
Despite the disparity of our appearances, she tall and thin, myself short and stocky, we felt relaxed in each other’s company. Before long we sought each other out. By the time we reached the Canal we had become inseparable. At Port Said as the topees were ritually thrown overboard by those who were returning to England for the last time, we became engaged and at the other end of the Mediterranean our engagement ended as the captain married us in the shadow of the Rock.
By the time we eventually arrived in Liverpool word had reached Carolyn’s father. To say that he was displeased that his designs had been thwarted and his daughter married to a penniless, unqualified ship’s surgeon would be to misunderstand the temper of a Lancashire entrepreneur of the late nineteenth century. After some harsh words in which my newly acquired nautical vocabulary enabled me to trade as good as I received from my industrial critic, Mr Foggarty came grudgingly to admit the legality of our union.
He even attempted to draw me into his employ as I was a ‘man of the world’ in his eyes. Unfortunately for him my eyes were on Liverpool’s university which as a part of the centre of trade for West Africa as well as the many parts of the British Empire had interested itself in the problems of that area. West Africa was indeed the White Man’s Grave. It took a higher toll of British life than even the unhygienic slums of the great metropolitan centres of the Motherland. Thus my wife and I studied there until we became qualified and began our work to find a cure for the ills of that part of the Empire.
We lived in West Africa for eight years and had three children of our own, but countless adopted darker-skinned children thronged to our makeshift surgery and the care of my wife in particular. The Negro must be the most ingenuous, spontaneously warm person in the world. In England Carolyn and I were the ‘Magnets’, i.e. the opposites that had attracted. In Africa our attraction was somehow more heartfelt although my wife’s rather awkward inelegance made us all laugh at times. This she took with such good grace that all loved her even more. It was as though she were trapped in a body which so inadequately expressed her inner beauty. She would sometimes see herself as a woman of mystery and intrigue with assignations awaiting her on the Orient Express, or as a Bohemian artist in Montmartre, or as an intrepid explorer — the first woman to enter Mecca or sail around the world single-handed. All who met her grew to love her. Her singing around the campfire was more enthusiastic than polished but everyone’s face shone with delight nonetheless.
But I lose myself. I am writing of Holmes, Watson and that spear carrier Stamford. Carolyn was last to see me when she returned to Liverpool one winter (1890 to be precise, as though precision matters with such a timeless thing as this) to visit her father who was ill. I remained to look after our work in Africa. The father recovered, but Carolyn, now unused to English winters, contracted pneumonia and lies forever in a quiet English field that is now designated as part of the ‘green belt’. I believe that there are plans to build what is called an ‘A’ road through that ‘green belt’ now. So much for designations.
I intended to return home, but travel then took so long that it was pointless. I comforted myself with grog and work, the latter proved a greater antidote to sorrow than the former until I realized that I would never find a cure for the diseases that I wished to conquer with my primitive equipment. Grog then became my solace and my torture.
M’twali, a man of great dignity and wisdom, told me to leave Africa because I was destroying not only myself but my wife’s work as well. ‘Go to that Paradise of which you speak when you have had your many drinks,’ he advised.
Several months later I was kissing the sands of Kerala as my three children looked on in embarrassment. Yet ‘In Arcadia, ego’ proved to be the story of my earthly Paradise as my three children — James, Andrew and Felicity Carolyn — succumbed to the climate (how ironic!) and lack of a mother’s love. That must appear fanciful now, with Fleming’s penicillin as the cure-all, but then we knew little more than the local witch doctors. The only difference was that we wore white coats and washed our hands before as well as after an oper
ation.
No challenge was too great for me now. I sought out Kuru in Guinea and like the three topers in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, I found him under a tree with his friend Death. Perhaps my year in the tropics saved me, or possibly I was too pickled in Naval preservative to be fully affected, but that dreadful disease of the nerves killed all around me but left me to my life sentence.
Despite my wild behaviour and unkempt look, for some reason I remained popular with hard-drinking planters and eccentric missionaries. A Liverpool accent might have a very bad effect on my humour when I was in my cups but my surgeon’s hand remained as steady as ever. However, I was game for anything and eventually got shipwrecked and washed ashore in China.
All that visibly remained of my past life was my reefer jacket that I had first worn so proudly as I had stepped upon the Stour that day in 1881. It was then that I started thinking of Holmes, dead in the Reichenbach Falls perhaps, but not forgotten. I took to opium, cocaine when available. For Holmes the latter had eased his boredom, for me it blotted out my memories. I was addicted. I will leave my other tales . . .
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