1 “The Devil’s Foot” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1910. The manuscript is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
2 A recurrence, June Thomson suggests, of the toll of Holmes’s “workaholism” recorded in “The Reigate Squires.”
3 Watson must refer here to Holmes’s drug habit, from which Watson reported weaning him in “The Missing Three-Quarter.” He there stated, however, that “I was well aware that the [drug] fiend was not dead but sleeping,” and that Holmes’s cure was not permanent—the sleep was “a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’s ascetic face.” Earle F. Walbridge interprets the phrase differently, suggesting that Holmes’s “indiscretions” consisted of over-indulgence in oysters, which Walbridge terms “one of Holmes’s little weaknesses” (mentioning his indulgence of Athelney Jones in The Sign of Four and his babbling of oysters in “The Dying Detective”).
4 Charles Thomas, writing as “Percy Trevelyan,” in Mr. Holmes in Cornwall identifies Agar as the cousin of the Agar-Robartes family, chief landowners of the parish of Mullion. He suggests that Dr. Agar specifically directed Holmes to travel to Poldhu, thinking that his cousins might be of assistance and that the ozone-laden air of Cornwall would have “therapeutic values.”
5 This street in London’s Cavendish Square was associated almost exclusively with medical practices; in “The Resident Patient,” Dr. Percy Trevelyan mentions having set up shop in the area (see “The Resident Patient,” note 9).
6 Watson never published this case.
7 The word is “should” in the Strand Magazine text, perhaps a significant difference in light of subsequent events.
8 On December 12, 1901, the world’s first transatlantic radio transmission (consisting of three Morse code dots, or the letter “S”) was sent from Poldhu, Cornwall, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where it was received by the Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi (1874– 1937). See “His Last Bow,” note 22. There is no actual Poldhu Bay, but there is a Poldhu Cove in Mounts Bay.
9 Watson means the southern extremity, according to Philip Weller, although, as Weller points out, Poldhu Cove in fact lies four miles off Lizard Point, the true southernmost point of the peninsula (as well as the southernmost point in England).
10 Located at the point where the English Channel meets the Atlantic Ocean, the area of sheltered Mounts Bay provided the setting for W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s 1879 operetta The Pirates of Penzance. The town of Penzance, overlooking Mounts Bay, was subjected to occasional Mediterranean pirate raids up until the eighteenth century.
11 The part of the shore that is sheltered from the wind.
12 Cornish was a member of the Brythonic, or British, subfamily of the Celtic language, spoken by the Britons during the time of Julius Caesar. The other British languages include Breton and Welsh, both of which are still in use. The earliest recorded examples of Cornish date back to the tenth century A.D., and while the language was spoken by residents of Cornwall, it died out completely in the eighteenth century.
13 The Semitic language of Chaldean, better known as Aramaic, resembles Hebrew, Syriac, and Phoenician. After Aramaeans brought the language with them to Syria in the seventh century B.C., it became the common language of the Fertile Crescent and for a time served as the official language of the Persian empire. In the sixth century B.C., Aramaic supplanted Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews, although Hebrew remained in use for religious and government functions. Jesus Christ and his apostles were said to have spoken Aramaic—portions of the Old Testament and the Jewish prayer for the dead, known as the kaddish and still used in contemporary Jewish liturgy, are written in the language—and it was widely spoken in Palestine and Syria until the sixth century A.D., when Arabic became the dominant language.
14 The Phoenicians were the ancient Semitic inhabitants of what is now Lebanon, and were known for their extensive trading and colonisation ventures. Their travels took them as far away as England, probably during the first millennium B.C., although the trading may have ceased when Phoenicia became a mere province of the Persian Empire after 539 B.C. According to Bernard Davies, writing in “The Ancient Cornish Language,” if Holmes indeed asserted the linguistic theory that Watson attributes to him, he must also have known that that theory was not original. “The briefest study of the subject would have shown,” remarks Davies, “that it had been around for a very long while—certainly since Renaissance times.” However, linguistic studies in the early nineteenth century by scholars such as Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, and fairy-tale collector Jakob Grimm subsequently showed that the sources of the Cornish language were many members of the Indo-European family of languages, including ancient Celtic, Latin, Greek, Russian, and ancient Sanskrit. While Holmes may well have been interested in the history of the language, then, Watson must have misunderstood Holmes to have asserted the idea of a single Chaldean source.
15 Charles Thomas identifies Mr. Roundhay as the Reverend James Henry Scholefield of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Vicar of Mullion in 1897.
16 There is indeed a prominent stone cross on the moor, just north of Predannack Wartha.
17 This is simply wrong, according to Pamela Bruxner; there is no stone cross on the moor a mile away in any direction from the coastline of the Bay. “Mr. Roundhay was of course in an agitated state of mind at the time, and Watson’s notes, as we know, were not always models of accuracy.”
18 Bob Jones, in “A Missed Clue in The Devil’s Foot,” points out that this is a lie, which Holmes should have recognised immediately. Whist is a game played by two teams of two, seated opposite each other. If George had been Mortimer’s partner, then Brenda and Owen would have been seated opposite each other, not next to each other, as is described.
19 “Flower-pots” in the English first edition.
20 In the English book text (but not the Strand Magazine or American book text), the word is “Celts.” Although Celts are persons of Celtic ancestry, based on the context Holmes is more likely referring to celts, which are prehistoric stone tools ground into wedge- or chisel-like shapes.
21 Charles Thomas suggests that Sterndale is the nephew of Richard Lemon Lander (1804–1834) of Truro, Cornwall, a pioneering explorer of West Africa. On an 1830–1831 expedition, he discovered the source of the Niger River in the Bight of Benin. He was killed by tribesmen on an 1832–1834 trading expedition up the Niger.
22 Several other great explorers of Africa may have inspired Sterndale to choose that continent as his travelling grounds. The famed David Livingstone (1813–1873), for example, was a Scottish missionary whose thirty-year African odyssey started in South Africa as a member of the London Missionary Society in 1841. His part in the discovery of Lake Ngami in 1849 earned him a gold medal from the British National Geographic Society. In 1853, saying, “I shall open up a path into the interior, or perish,” Livingstone set off with a small party of Africans, reaching Luanda after a gruelling six-month expedition. Making his way homeward along the Zambezi River, Livingstone discovered Victoria Falls in 1855 and became a hero in Britain, having inspired public curiosity about the uncharted wilds of Africa. Named British consul at Quelimane, he returned to Africa in 1857 to explore the Zambezi region in 1857–1863; but his determination to uncover the source of the Nile brought Livingstone his greatest celebrity. Arriving in Africa in 1866, Livingstone discovered Lake Mweru and Lake Bangweulu before reaching Nyangwe, farther west in Africa than any European had ever travelled. Illness forced Livingstone to return to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and it was there that Henry Stanley—a New York Herald reporter sent to find the missing explorer and bring him food and medicine—came upon him on November 10, 1871, and uttered the immortal words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley joined him on a journey to Unyanyembe but was unable to persuade Livingstone to leave the continent. Livingstone pressed onward, still seeking the source of the Nile. He died in 1873 in the village of Chitam
bo, in what is now Zambia, and was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey—although his heart remained behind in Africa, having been removed by his African servants and buried in the soil there.
Far more successful in locating the source of the Nile was John Speke (1827–1864), who with Sir Richard Burton discovered Lake Tanganyika in February 1858. Journeying on alone, Speke reached the lake believed to be the legendary source of the Nile on July 30. He named it Lake Victoria and was honoured by the National Geographic Society for his efforts. Burton disputed Speke’s claim, but Speke, on a return journey to Lake Victoria in 1862, was able to identify the Nile’s exit from the lake at the spot he named Ripon Falls. Speke was killed by his own gun on a hunting expedition in 1864.
The African hunter-adventurer was a popular subject of books as well, such as the works of H. Rider Haggard, recording the tales of Allan Quatermain, the hero of fourteen books including King Solomon’s Mines (1885)—the latter one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century. Quatermain, the quintessential “Great White Adventurer,” became the subject of numerous films, and, most recently, has been revealed by writer Alan Moore to have been a member of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, an alliance of secret agents probably formed by Mycroft Holmes.
23 Venton or Venten or Fenten (variant spellings) Arriance is noted on period maps as a residence one mile southwest of Poldhu Cove.
24 A hand-lamp with a tall standard, or stem.
25 In a letter headed “Tregennis and Poe,” Stephen Saxe suggests that the murderer in “The Devil’s Foot” must have derived his idea for the murder from reading Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), in which the murderer committed his crime with a poisoned candle, just as the murderer in that story got the idea from reading some French memoirs.
26 Watson apparently forgets this episode over the course of the following decade, considering that in “The Three Garridebs” (published in 1920) he writes, “For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”
27 Watson had, after all, been warned of this trait of Holmes’s. Stamford, as recorded in the first chapter of A Study in Scarlet, told Watson, “I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness.”
28 Bob Jones, who has earlier pointed out that the seated positions of the Tregennises do not match with the purported details of the whist game—that is, that if George and Mortimer had been partners, then Brenda and Owen should have been seated across from one another—surmises that Mortimer may have seen the difficulty of claiming that Brenda, his actual partner, had faced the window and seen a possible intruder. Using a dead woman to divert suspicion from himself may have seemed like questionable strategy, and therefore Mortimer turned George into his false witness instead. “Mortimer would know that, although George was alive, in his demented condition he couldn’t testify at the inquest,” Jones decides. Watson’s own testimony as to the speed of working of the devil’s foot root is evidence, Jones argues, that the three would not have had time to reseat themselves. But Holmes himself notes that the dispersion of the smoke up the chimney would have slowed the effect of the drug. Who is to say that the Tregennises did not re-seat themselves to play a three-handed card game?
29 See “The Abbey Grange,” note 12, for a discussion of contemporary divorce laws.
30 By the time of publication of “The Devil’s Foot,” the waiting of Arthur Conan Doyle for his love Jean Leckie had ended, albeit more happily (see the Foreword to this edition). Conan Doyle’s first wife died in 1906, and he and Jean, whom he had met and loved passionately but platonically since 1897, were married in 1907. “The Devil’s Foot” was published only a few weeks after the birth of their son Adrian.
31 “This excitable clergyman fails to strike me as a likely recipient of Brenda Tregennis and Dr. Sterndale’s confidences,” writes Pamela Bruxner; “one can’t help wondering whether they ever regretted it. One is also curious as to the wording of the telegram sent by the vicar to recall Sterndale from his journey; if it was couched in the same sort of terms as his remarks to Holmes, what on earth did the local post office make of it?”
32 The capital of Hungary since 1361, the hilly town of Buda was home to many of the palaces and villas of the landed gentry. In 1873, Buda joined with the city of Pest to form Budapest. Although the nineteenth century saw Pest flourish as a commercial and industrial center, Buda still housed several government and university buildings, one of which may have contained the laboratory that Sterndale mentions here.
33 George B. Koelle, writing in 1959 (in his masterful “Poisons in the Canon”), shortly after the discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, expresses the hope that a compound similar to the synthetic drug might be found in some unidentified root and thus the mystery of the “devil’s foot root” be finally solved. However, scholars seem no closer today than in 1959 to a definitive identification. F. A. Allen, M.P.S., in “Devilish Drugs, Part One” proposes an unknown member of the rauwolfia species, which, in at least one known variety, produces nightmares among its undesirable possible side-effects. There could be, he suggests, a “secret and nightmare-enhanced African species.”
In “Radix Pedis Diabolis: A Speculative Identification,” Verner Andersen nominates the Calabar bean, the dried seed of the Central African Physostigma venenosum, as the culprit. As early as 1855, after self- experimentation, Robert Christison published a paper on the seeds and their toxic effects, and the Calabar bean was known to be used in connection with the “poison-water ordeal” (see note 34, below). This nomination is seconded by James G. Ravin, M.D., in “The Devil’s-Foot Root Identified: Eserine,” who describes the drug called eserine, now known to be derived from the Calabar bean.
Peter Cooper, F.P.S. (“The Devil’s Foot: An Excursion into Holmesian Toxicology”) makes a case for muavi or moavi, a Kiswahili name (Erythrophleum guineense), a “well-documented ordeal drug of the Congo region.” In a letter to the Pharmaceutical Journal, Dr. Varro E. Tyler, dean and professor of pharmacognosy at Purdue University, prefers niando (Alchornea floribunda), a native plant used by Congolese as an intoxicant, as causing effects closer to Watson’s description. Without naming a candidate, Robert S. Ennis speculates (“Devil’s Foot or Angel Dust?”) that the drug may have been an early and natural form of P.C.P., a manufactured drug with many effects similar to the devil’s foot root. Marina Stajic, Ph.D., a toxicologist, in “However Improbable . . . ,” makes the interesting suggestion that the toxic substance in question was devil’s claw root, in itself a harmless herb, which had been infected with ergot, a hallucinogen-containing fungus.
In short, although there are numerous candidates, no definitive identification has been made. Indeed, John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, suggests that Watson may have intentionally misdescribed the drug out of a sense of responsibility to suppress its use.
34 The “poison-water ordeal” was a method of criminal judgement used in some parts of Africa. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.) describes it thus: “The accused, with solemn ceremony and invocation, drinks freely of [the poison]; if it nauseates him and he throws it up he is triumphantly acquitted, but if he becomes dizzy he is guilty, and the assembly fall on him, pelt him with stones, and even drag him over the rocks till he is dead. . . .” Britannica lists the mbundu root, the Calabar bean (see note 33, above), and the tangena nut (Tanghinia veneniflua) as the drugs used for this purpose.
35 The Ubangi or Ubanghi, also known as the Mubangi, Mobangi, or Oubangui, is a river in central Africa, the chief northern tributary of the Congo. In 1897, the Ubangi and the Mbomu formed the frontier between Belgian Congo and French Congo.
36 Because there was no urgency to the timing of the murders, Rex Stout finds it incredible that �
��the murderer would not have postponed his deed until Dr. Sterndale was in the middle of the ocean—or, better still, buried in Central Africa.” In light of Tregennis’s evident shrewdness, then, one must conclude that either he was badly misinformed about the date of Sterndale’s departure or the sailing was unexpectedly delayed.
37 Ah, the innocence of those days before Surgeon General warnings!
38 Holmes may turn a blind eye to Sterndale’s form of vigilante justice, but Rex Stout, for one, does not. Recognising that Holmes cares little about being an accessory to murder, Stout asks, “[B]ut what of the moral issue? Is the lyncher to be excused if the lynchee had in fact offended?” At least Watson, Stout imagines, “lifts an eye-brow as Sterndale raises his giant figure, bows gravely, and walks from the arbor.”
39 D. Martin Dakin, amazed that Sterndale would carry gravel from his own cottage grounds, asks, “Was he trying to make it easy for Holmes?”
HIS LAST BOW1
In the tale entitled “His Last Bow,” we learn of Holmes’s undercover service in the Great War. Conan Doyle reported that while touring the front lines in 1916, he was asked what Holmes was doing for his country. Out of ignorance, he answered, “He is too old to serve.” Happily, that was not so. Like only one other story in the Canon, “The Mazarin Stone,” “His Last Bow” is written in the third person, not as a Watsonian narrative, raising questions about its authorship. Scholars generally agree that it is Watson’s work—otherwise, it seems unlikely that Watson would have included it in the collection under his preface. Because Watson was not present for much of the action of the episode, he may have felt more comfortable adopting an “omniscient” point of view. Here we learn details of Holmes’s retirement and his celebrated beekeeping, and there are hints of Watson’s retirement as well. The tale is a sentimental favourite of many readers, and the 1940s Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce echoed its patriotic themes. Published in 1917, before the end of World War I, Holmes’s vision of a beneficial “east wind coming” (that is, a wind that would blow over England from the Continent) expressed the hopes of the millions of people around the world who wished for peace.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 74