‘“And six, that on being informed by the writer that Inspector Scott believed he knew who was responsible for these crimes, the Colonel lay in wait for Inspector Scott and shot him dead.
‘“Colonel Caddage denied all knowledge of these matters. Mr Holmes then informed him that he was in possession of proof that Elihu Williams had, in his dying moments, left clear evidence that he knew Colonel Caddage to be the originator of the crimes in which Williams had been involved. This proof he explained to the Colonel, establishing it by producing a photograph taken at the scene of Williams’ death on the order of Inspector Scott.
‘“Colonel Caddage then abused Mr Holmes and attacked him with a sabre. Mr Holmes defended himself and a fight ensued in which no one else present had any opportunity to intervene. Eventually Mr Holmes found himself at the Colonel’s mercy and it was evident that Colonel Caddage intended to kill Mr Holmes before all of us. Fortunately, we were joined at that point by Mr Peter Collins, a guest of Lord Backwater, who had come in search of Mr Holmes. With commendable promptness he snatched up one of the Colonel’s practice pistols and shot at Colonel Caddage, thereby, in my submission, saving Mr Holmes’ life. Dr Watson gave medical assistance to Colonel Caddage, but he expired shortly afterwards.”’
He stopped and walked over to where Colonel Caddage lay. Stooping, he turned back the Colonel’s cuffs. He straightened up, jotted something in his pocket-book and rejoined us.
‘Pardon me, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes – “Upon the Colonel’s death I examined his body and saw for myself that he bore old tattooing in the form of patterns which I understand to be characteristic of those worn by members of a former secret society at Norfolk Island. These indicated to me that he had sworn a treasonable oath under the Mutiny Act of 1797 and had, most probably, engaged in common law offences of conspiracy.
‘“The events herein described took place in my presence and hearing and that of my constable, the Colonel’s manservant and Dr Watson. I have asked all present to sign this record to certify that it meets their recollection of events. In a more detailed report I shall explain Mr Holmes’ proof of Williams’ information. I recommend that no action should be taken against any surviving participant.”’
He looked at our silent faces. ‘I regret,’ he said, ‘that I have had to simplify your very clever deductions in this matter, Mr Holmes, but it seemed to me that my report should not be over-complicated by unnecessary detail.’
‘Oh, entirely, Superintendent,’ said Holmes. ‘If that is your professional assessment of the situation I am sure that none of us here would disagree.’
‘That,’ said the Superintendent, ‘is my considered opinion. I told you, I believe, that Inspector Scott was a personal friend of mine. I thank you both – you, Mr Holmes, and you, Mr Collins – that you have brought his murderer to justice and that I was present to see it. Now, if there is nothing further, gentlemen, I shall be grateful if you will sign this record and then I must be about clearing this matter up and informing my superiors.’
As we rode away Holmes thanked Connors. ‘That was,’ he said, ‘a very pretty piece of shooting, but you put yourself at a fearful risk. How did you come to be there?’
‘In conversation with Lord Backwater he mentioned where you had gone. I recognised the name, of course, and was determined to see you challenge him. When the moment arose it was no trouble to take one of his own pistols and down him. If Superintendent Thorpe had been less reasonable I should not have objected. I had done my duty by Jim.’
‘But why did Scott wish to consult me?’ I enquired.
‘Watson,’ sighed Holmes, ‘as I explained to the late Colonel Caddage, Scott had realised, as I should have done much earlier, that it was most probably when he reported to Caddage that Williams intended to talk that Caddage decided to murder his former associate. He merely wished to confirm that you, he, Arnold and Caddage were the only persons who knew.’
‘I see,’ I said, ‘and all my “brilliance” about the music was wasted.’
‘There you are wrong, Watson,’ said my friend. ‘I admit that I broke my own rules and assumed that the corrupt Lieutenant at Norfolk Island had nothing to do with recent events. When collecting data one should take account of all available information, without making previous decisions as to relevance. Then it occurred to me that a connection between Norfolk Island, Hong Kong and England might be a soldier, but by then you had drawn my attention to the correct solution of Williams’ clue. A little research in the Army Lists confirmed Williams’ information, and Williams’ clue I could use to threaten Caddage without invoking the testimony of an escaped convict illegally returned to England.’
As we made our way home by train on the next day, Holmes remarked, ‘A singular case, Watson, that led from rural England to the Old Hell in the Pacific.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least the System is over now.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but the harm that it did will continue to work. Now the Australians are busy putting the shadow of the System behind them, Van Diemen’s Land has a new name, but it will come back to haunt them and us. One day Australia will rise to nationhood and, when she does, is it not possible that she will remember the cruelties of her childhood and seek to turn against her parent? I should not be surprised. The Americans fought a war with us for far less.’
A last footnote to the Backwater case caught my eye in the following morning’s paper, which recorded that Chief Constable Caddage had died as the result of an accident with a pistol in his gun-room. I passed it to Holmes. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘wishes to be discreet, but then, you and I are never anything else.’
So it is that in thirty years I have mentioned, but never before detailed, the service that Sherlock Holmes did for Lord Backwater.
Author’s Notes
As with the previous manuscripts which I have edited for publication (Sherlock Holmes and the Railway Maniac, Sherlock Holmes and the Devil’s Grail), I have made such checks as I can on the authenticity of the document. No one possesses an indisputable sample of John Watson’s handwriting, though the writing of the manuscript matches the most likely specimens. His habit of blending real and imaginary names (and, quite possibly, altering dates) does not help. Where I have been able to check statements of fact, they make sense, and there is, towards the end, one item which strongly suggests that the document is indeed of Watson’s creation.
It is only right that I should record my gratitude here to Robert Hughes. His fact-filled, pithy, perceptive and witty history of the System,The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987; Pan Books, 1988), has been of enormous value to me in checking out details of transportation.
CHAPTER ONE
The initial problem is almost always the same – who was the client and where was the action? In two published references to this case Watson tells us only that, at a later date, Lord Backwater trained racehorses in Hampshire. Now there is (and was) no such title, and no such place as Backwater, in Hampshire or anywhere else in England. That this story does not take place in Hampshire is proved by the arrival from Paddington and the fact that Backwater lay beyond Swindon. If I were forced to guess I would suggest Gloucestershire or Somerset.
Back to chapter one
CHAPTER THREE
That Holmes knew so much about tattoos will be no surprise to those who have read Baring Gould’s A Biography of Mr Sherlock Holmes: The World’s First Consulting Detective (Hart-Davis, 1962; Panther, 1975), where it is recorded that Holmes had privately published his monograph ‘Upon Tattoo Marks’ in 1878 and that it included “one of the first scholarly examinations of the pigments used extensively by Japanese and Chinese artists.”
The “fox chase” to which Watson refers was the ultimate glory of the seaport tattooist’s art – a fox hunt in full cry and full colour, men, horses and hounds, sweeping down from the shoulders across the back, in pursuit of a fox whose brush could be seen disappearing into the only available earth. I believe that the last we
arer of it discovered in England was, in fact, an Admiral, throwing, maybe, further doubt on Lombroso’s opinion that tattoos are a mark of criminality.
The ‘EVER’ and ‘NEVER’ tattoos are still to be seen among older convicts, though they probably adopted them from old crime novels without a real knowledge of their significance. The ‘gang mark’ under the pad of the left thumb seemed to be a Scottish practice and was still to be seen in the 1960s.
Back to chapter three
CHAPTER FIVE
The first novel written by a transported convict was Ralph Rashleigh by Giacomo de Rosenberg, almost certainly the penname of James Rogers, a convict clerk transported for blackmail. Although fiction, the book is closely based on episodes in the lives of the writer and other convicts.
Rogers was, for a while, playwright and producer for a convict drama group, and describes how the lack of suitable woods and skills drove them to construct musical instruments from tin. John Bunyan (before the Lord told him that the violin was an instrument of the Devil) was both a blacksmith and a fiddler. Lacking the wherewithal to buy an instrument, he produced one in wrought iron which, I believe, still survives.
More remarkable than Williams’ instrument is Holmes’ ability to play it straight away, for it was ‘back-strung’, that is strung for a left-handed player. Any right-handed player will recognise how extremely skilful Holmes’ feat was.
The sad, slow melody was an Irish rebel song from the 1798 Rebellion, known as ‘Boolavogue’ or ‘Father Murphy’s Air’. In Australia it attached itself to a song called ‘Moreton Bay’ or ‘The Convicts’ Lament on the Death of Captian Logan’. Logan was the sadistic Commandant of the Moreton Bay Station (where Brisbane now stands) and was killed by aborigines while out hunting in 1830. Forty-nine years later, when the bushranger Ned Kelly addressed his ‘Jerilderie Letter’ to the people of Australia, he paraphrased the song:
Port McQuarrie Toweringabbie Norfolk Island and Emu Plains
and in those places of tyranny and condemnation
many a blooming Irish man rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke
were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains.
Back to chapter five
CHAPTER EIGHT
The peepshow was an extremely popular forerunner of the mobile cinema and appeared at British fairs for many years. It was usually a long box with viewing apertures along its sides. Inside, the operator constructed with coloured papers, scenes of popular drama, celebrated crimes, etc., lit by lamps. A penny (or in poor districts, a pin) enabled one to stand at a viewing window and be amazed by the splendour of the scene. The father of Lord George Sanger, the circus manager, operated a peepshow for many years.
Back to chapter eight
CHAPTER NINE
The anti-machine riots that swept the South-West in 1831 caused a panic-stricken government to appoint a Special Commission of Judges to sit at Winchester. Although no one had been harmed by the rioters (the only death was of a bystander, shot by a nervous soldier), the Commission issued five hundred transportation and one hundred death sentences, most of which were later commuted to transportation. Among those actually hanged was a nineteen-year-old called Cook, who had broken the hat of Mr Baring, the banker. Hampshire legend says that the snow never lies on Cook’s grave.
With the American War of Independence, the practice of shipping convicts to America had to end. For a few years, as the expanding industrial cities swelled the crime rate, the prisons filled up and overflowed into the ‘hulks’ – dismasted ships moored at almost every port and used as additional prisons. Once transportation to Australia began the hulks continued in use as assembly prisons.
Back to chapter nine
CHAPTER TEN
The route to Van Diemen’s Land described is the usual one – down the Atlantic to Rio, then across to pass round the Cape of Good Hope and east to Australia. With no Suez or Panama Canals it was the best way to take advantage of prevailing winds, even so it was a sixteen-thousand mile voyage and took months. The First Fleet in 1788 called at Cape Town as well.
The term “hoof” appears in Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld, supported by testimony from an Old Bailey trial in 1833 to explain its meaning as “a person of unnatural propensities”. Partridge does not give it the dignity of being the first recorded instance of rhyming slang (that honour he gives to “lord of the manor = tanner” a few years later), but the modern English rhyming slang is ‘iron = iron hoof = poof’ and the Australian is ‘horse’s hoof’. The term “night cocky” is definitely rhyming slang, ‘cocky = cockatoo = screw’, and must have developed in the System, though it is still in use in Britain. The more modern equivalent is ‘kanga = kangaroo = screw’, brought to us by the Convicts’ Revenge – Aussie soap operas.
An illustration of the fearsome security fence at Eagle-hawk Neck appears in Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore.
The ritual of the Ring is different from that described by Marcus Clarke in His Natural Life though the chant is the same. Clarke interviewed survivors of Norfolk Island about the Ring, but they were very unwilling to talk about it. Nowhere else have I seen it suggested that the Ring operated outside Norfolk Island, but it cannot be proved that it did not.
Back to chapter ten
CHAPTER TWELVE
The reference to Port Arthur sending messages to Hobart in an hour must mean the semaphore-type signalling system that was established at Port Arthur with ‘repeater stations’ all the way to Hobart, so that escaping convicts would be outrun by the news. Similar systems had been in use in Britain for many years, particularly to carry urgent news from the Channel ports to London. Many Telegraph Hills in England owe their names to these devices.
Pearce the man-eater was a real character. Transported from Ireland for stealing shoes, he was first assigned as a servant, but kept absconding, stealing and boozing. When flogging failed he was sent to Macquarie Harbour. There, in September 1822, he was one of eight convicts who stole a boat and escaped. They intended to cross Van Diemen’s Land to the River Derwent, steal a schooner and sail home out of Hobart. As they floundered through the forested mountains the weather turned to sleet and their rations ran out. One of their number was killed for food, prompting two to turn back. Kennelly and Brown, the two dropouts, were recaptured but died within days. After twenty-five days the escapers reached the plains and there another man was killed for food. Eventually only Pearce and a man called Greenhill were left, Greenhill carrying the only weapon, an axe. For two days and nights they watched each other like hawks, until Pearce succeeded in killing Greenhill. Shortly after, he reached the Derwent and, after a variety of adventures, became one of a team of bush-rangers. They were all captured in January 1823, but when Pearce dictated his grim story to a clergyman nobody believed it – they thought he was covering for friends still on the run and simply shipped him back to Macquarie Harbour. He certainly didn’t tell his story there, because in October he bolted again, in company with a man called Owen. Within days Owen was dead and partly eaten and Pearce was captured. This time the evidence of Owen’s remains convinced the authorities. Pearce was hanged and his body handed over to anatomists. His skull was preserved and is still on display in the American Academy of Natural Sciences. Pearce was the best-known but not the only convict bolter who took to cannibalism.
From Lord Backwater’s description of the striped beast, it sounds as if he encountered the rarest of Tasmania’s native animals, the Tasmanian Tiger. Although one has never been captured, filmed or photographed, it has been sighted often enough for zoologists to accept that it not only did, but does exist.
As far as I know, no boys from Point Puer are recorded as having escaped across the Neck, and the circumstances of Lord Backwater and his foster-brother mean that they would not have been so recorded. Nevertheless, when Marcus Clarke embarked upon his epic novel of the System, His Natural Life, in the 1870s, he included an episode involving two orphans attempting to escape from Point Puer. Unable
to escape and unwilling to return, they decide on suicide and what follows is the finest of all Victorian tear-jerking scenes:
‘Will it hurt much, Tommy?’ said Billy, who was not so courageous.
‘Not so much as a whipping.’
‘I’m afraid! Oh, Tom, it’s so deep! Don’t leave me, Tom!’
The bigger baby took his little handkerchief from his neck, and with it bound his left hand to his companion’s right.
‘Now I can’t leave you.’
‘What was it the Lady that kissed us said, Tommy?’
‘Lord have pity on them two fatherless children!’ repeated Tommy.
‘Let’s say it, Tom.’
And so the two babies knelt down on the brink of the cliff, and raising the bound hands together, looked up at the sky, and said, ‘Lord have pity on us two fatherless children!’ And then they kissed each other and did it.
Robert Hughes records that the publication of Clarke’s book brought tourists to Port Arthur, most of whom wanted to see the spot where this fictitious event occurred, but one has to wonder if Clarke, whose researches were formidable, had not come across a version of Lord Backwater’s story and amended it for his audience.
Back to chapter twelve
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
All of the security precautions mentioned were in force at Hobart. Every departing vessel was searched by police and soldiers and sulphur-candles burned below decks to smoke out stowaways. If an escaper was found on board, the master and every member of the crew were fined a month’s pay. Conversely, if an informer caused the capture of an escapee he was rewarded with a month’s pay and given the right to take his discharge from the vessel.
Yerba Bueno, where Lord Backwater landed in California, shortly became better known as San Francisco.
The Fenian escape to which he refers occurred only ten years before the date of the present narrative. The last convict transport, the Hugoumont, sailed from Portland in 1868, carrying, among others, sixty Irish rebels convicted in the previous year’s Fenian revolt. It was the boast of the Fenian Brotherhood that, whatever the English did to captured Fenians, the Brotherhood would come to their aid. For years they planned to strike a blow against the System. Using couriers between Ireland, England, America and Australia, the Brotherhood arranged the purchase of a whaling-ship, the Catalpa, in New England and sailed her into Australian waters on what seemed to be a genuine whaling trip. Her captain had orders to lie off Fremantle until six prisoners could escape from a road gang. Just as the American ship picked up the convicts, a British steamer, the Georgette, appeared, loaded with Marines, and fired a shot across Catalpa’s bows. Caught in British waters by a faster vessel Catalpa’s master hoisted the Stars and Stripes and tried to bluff his way out, but the Georgette came on. Then, when it seemed that capture was inevitable, Georgette fell back. She had been coaling in Fremantle when news of the escape reached her and had set out without completing. After burning her wooden fittings she finally ran out of steam and had to let Catalpa go.
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