by David Marcum
“‘What are we to do, then?’ I asked.
“‘What do you think?’ said he. ‘We’ll make the coats of some of these soldiers redder than ever the tailor did.’
“‘But they are armed,’ said I.
“‘And so shall we be, my boy. There’s a brace of pistols for every mother’s son of us, and if we can’t carry this ship, with the crew at our back, it’s time we were all sent to a young misses’ boarding-school. You speak to your mate upon the left to-night, and see if he is to be trusted.
“I did so, and found my other neighbor to be a young fellow in much the same position as myself, whose crime had been forgery. His name was Evans, but he afterwards changed it, like myself, and his is now a rich and prosperous man in the south of England. He was ready enough to join the conspiracy, as the only means of saving ourselves, and before we had crossed the Bay there were only two of the prisoners who were not in the secret. One of these was of weak mind, and we did not dare to trust him, and the other was suffering from jaundice, and could not be of any use to us.
“From the beginning there was really nothing to prevent us from taking possession of the ship. The crew were a set of ruffians, specially picked for the job. The sham chaplain came into our cells to exhort us, carrying a black bag, supposed to be full of tracts, and so often did he come that by the third day we had each stowed away at the foot of our beds a file, a brace of pistols, a pound of powder, and twenty slugs. Two of the warders were agents of Prendergast, and the second mate was his right-hand man. The captain, the two mates, two warders, Lieutenant Martin, his eighteen soldiers, and the doctor were all that we had against us. Yet, safe as it was, we determined to neglect no precaution, and to make our attack suddenly by night. It came, however, more quickly than we expected, and in this way.
“One evening, about the third week after our start, the doctor had come down to see one of the prisoners who was ill, and putting his hand down on the bottom of his bunk he felt the outline of the pistols. If he had been silent he might have blown the whole thing, but he was a nervous little chap, so he gave a cry of surprise and turned so pale that the man knew what was up in an instant and seized him. He was gagged before he could give the alarm, and tied down upon the bed. He had unlocked the door that led to the deck, and we were through it in a rush. The two sentries were shot down, and so was a corporal who came running to see what was the matter. There were two more soldiers at the door of the state-room, and their muskets seemed not to be loaded, for they never fired upon us, and they were shot while trying to fix their bayonets. Then we rushed on into the captain’s cabin, but as we pushed open the door there was an explosion from within, and there he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic which was pinned upon the table, while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand at his elbow. The two mates had both been seized by the crew, and the whole business seemed to be settled.
“The chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.”
“The state-room was next the cabin, and we flocked in there and flopped down on the settees, all speaking together, for we were just mad with the feeling that we were free once more. There were lockers all round, and Wilson, the sham chaplain, knocked one of them in, and pulled out a dozen of brown sherry. We cracked off the necks of the bottles, poured the stuff out into tumblers, and were just tossing them off, when in an instant without warning there came the roar of muskets in our ears, and the saloon was so full of smoke that we could not see across the table. When it cleared again the place was a shambles. Wilson and eight others were wriggling on the top of each other on the floor, and the blood and the brown sherry on that table turn me sick now when I think of it. We were so cowed by the sight that I think we should have given the job up if had not been for Prendergast. He bellowed like a bull and rushed for the door with all that were left alive at his heels. Out we ran, and there on the poop were the lieutenant and ten of his men. The swing skylights above the saloon table had been a bit open, and they had fired on us through the slit. We got on them before they could load, and they stood to it like men, but we had the upper hand of them, and in five minutes it was all over. My God! Was there ever a slaughter-house like that ship! Prendergast was like a raging devil, and he picked the soldiers up as if they had been children and threw them overboard alive or dead. There was one sergeant that was horribly wounded and yet kept on swimming for a surprising time, until some one in mercy blew out his brains. When the fighting was over there was no one left of our enemies except just the warders, the mates, and the doctor.
“It was over them that the great quarrel arose. There were many of us who were glad enough to win back our freedom, and yet who had no wish to have murder on our souls. It was one thing to knock the soldiers over with their muskets in their hands, and it was another to stand by while men were being killed in cold blood. Eight of us, five convicts and three sailors, said that we would not see it done. But there was no moving Prendergast and those who were with him. Our only chance of safety lay in making a clean job of it, said he, and he would not leave a tongue with power to wag in a witness-box. It nearly came to our sharing the fate of the prisoners, but at last he said that if we wished we might take a boat and go. We jumped at the offer, for we were already sick of these bloodthirsty doings, and we saw that there would be worse before it was done. We were given a suit of sailor togs each, a barrel of water, two casks, one of junk and one of biscuits, and a compass. Prendergast threw us over a chart, told us that we were shipwrecked mariners whose ship had foundered in Lat. 15° and Long. 25° west, and then cut the painter and let us go.
“And now I come to the most surprising part of my story, my dear son. The seamen had hauled the fore-yard aback during the rising, but now as we left them they brought it square again, and as there was a light wind from the north and east the bark began to draw slowly away from us. Our boat lay, rising and falling, upon the long, smooth rollers, and Evans and I, who were the most educated of the party, were sitting in the sheets working out our position and planning what coast we should make for. It was a nice question, for the Cape de Verds were about five-hundred miles to the north of us, and the African coast about seven-hundred to the east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to the north, we thought that Sierra Leone might be best, and turned our head in that direction, the bark being at that time nearly hull down on our starboard quarter. Suddenly as we looked at her we saw a dense black cloud of smoke shoot up from her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon the sky line. A few seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our ears, and as the smoke thinned away there was no sign left of the Gloria Scott. In an instant we swept the boat’s head round again and pulled with all our strength for the place where the haze still trailing over the water marked the scene of this catastrophe.
“It was a long hour before we reached it, and at first we feared that we had come too late to save any one. A splintered boat and a number of crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the waves showed us where the vessel had foundered, but there was no sign of life, and we had turned away in despair when we heard a cry for help, and saw at some distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying stretched across it. When we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to be a young seaman of the name of Hudson, who was so burned and exhausted that he could give us no account of what had happened until the following morning.
“We pulled him aboard the boat.”
“It seemed that after we had left, Prendergast and his gang had proceeded to put to death the five remaining prisoners. The two warders had been shot and thrown overboard, and so also had the third mate. Prendergast then descended into the ‘tween-decks and with his own hands cut the throat of the unfortunate surgeon. There only remained the first mate, who was a bold and active man. When he saw the convict approaching him with the bloody knife in his hand he kicked off his bonds, which he had somehow contrived to loosen, and rushing down the deck he plunged into the after-hold. A dozen convicts, who descended
wit their pistols in search of him, found him with a match-box in his hand seated beside an open powder-barrel, which was one of a hundred carried on board, and swearing that he would blow all hands up if he were in any way molested. An instant later the explosion occurred, though Hudson thought it was caused by the misdirected bullet of one of the convicts rather than the mate’s match. Be the cause what it may, it was the end of the Gloria Scott and of the rabble who held command of her.
“Such, in a few words, my dear boy, is the history of this terrible business in which I was involved. Next day we were picked up by the brig Hotspur, bound for Australia, whose captain found no difficulty in believing that we were the survivors of a passenger ship which had foundered. The transport ship Gloria Scott was set down by the Admiralty as being lost at sea, and no word has ever leaked out as to her true fate. After an excellent voyage the Hotspur landed us at Sydney, where Evans and I changed our names and made our way to the diggings, where, among the crowds who were gathered from all nations, we had no difficulty in losing our former identities. The rest I need not relate. We prospered, we traveled, we came back as rich colonials to England, and we bought country estates. For more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives, and we hoped that our past was forever buried. Imagine, then, my feelings when in the seaman who came to us I recognized instantly the man who had been picked off the wreck. He had tracked us down somehow, and had set himself to live upon our fears. You will understand now how it was that I strove to keep the peace with him, and you will in some measure sympathize with me in the fears which fill me, now that he has gone from me to his other victim with threats upon his tongue.’
“Underneath is written in a hand so shaky as to be hardly legible, ‘Beddoes writes in cipher to say H. has told all. Sweet Lord, have mercy on our souls!’
“That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and I think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one. The good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on which the letter of warning was written. They both disappeared utterly and completely. No complaint had been lodged with the police, so that Beddoes had mistaken a threat for a deed. Hudson had been seen lurking about, and it was believed by the police that he had done away with Beddoes and had fled. For myself I believe that the truth was exactly the opposite. I think that it is most probable that Beddoes, pushed to desperation and believing himself to have been already betrayed, had revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from the country with as much money as he could lay his hands on. Those are the facts of the case, Doctor, and if they are of any use to your collection, I am sure that they are very heartily at your service.”
The Affair of the Aluminium Crutch
by S. Subramanian
“Yes, my boy, these were all done prematurely before my biographer had come to glorify me.” 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, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife.”
– Sherlock Holmes, “The Musgrave Ritual”
I have recorded elsewhere, (in accounts under the headings, respectively, of “The Gloria Scott” and “The Musgrave Ritual”,) two remarkable cases of mystery and revelation in which my friend Sherlock Holmes was involved, and which are early pointers to those extraordinary powers of analytical acuity and deductive power that were to be the hallmark of his subsequent illustrious career in the art and science of criminal investigation. What I am about to record is a third such case, which is less a study in violent crime, in comparison with the other two cases, than it is an amusing and instructive tale of logic and inference. The case pertains to an event in the last year of Holmes’s student days. The event, of course, happened long before his biographer appeared on the scene, and it is by dint of some strenuous excavation that I have finally succeeded in obtaining a complete and coherent account of the case which he once tantalizingly referred to as “the singular affair of the aluminium crutch”.
Given Sherlock Holmes’s frequent lapses into moody taciturnity, and his generally eccentric and unpredictable habits of conversation, I have had to depend upon other sources in order to obtain a reasonably self-contained record of the affair. I am indebted, in particular, to one of Holmes’s fellow-students from his University days whom Holmes has referred to, from time to time, in scattered recollections of his youth: This person was involved in, and indeed became a beneficiary of, the circumstances surrounding the event. I refer to the Reverend Samuel Cranshaw, whom I tracked down to the Parsonage of St. Peter’s Church in the pretty little hill-station of Kodaikanal, nestled in the Western Ghats of Madras Province in Southern India. He has obliged me with a detailed account of the case, written in response to my request, some years after the event.
What follows is Cranshaw’s lengthy appendix to his letter to me, which arrived a fortnight ago, post-marked 19th July, 1919. I may add that I have since shared it with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who has offered his grudging approval of the record, in these words, conveyed to me in a post-card dispatched from his secluded retreat in the Sussex Downs:
“I suppose I should be grateful to both you and Cranshaw for bringing this early case of mine to public light, though it goes without saying that neither Boswell has displayed the slightest compunction over betraying his Johnson for the more earthy appeal of the sensational and the romantic.”
The Reverend Samuel Cranshaw’s Statement
For five years now, I have been the Pastor in charge of St. Peter’s, a beautiful little church built on the extreme edge of a cliff in the small hill-town of Kodaikanal, located at an elevation of about seven-thousand feet, in that part of the mountain range known as the Western Ghats, which traverses South-Eastern India. I am attached to one of the many Missions of the Church of England, and I cater to a small congregation, comprised mainly of our own people who came to India in order to assist with the civil administration of the Empire’s most prized colony, and decided to stay on at the conclusion of their careers. There are also a few native Christian members of the Church, and we endeavour, as a community, and after our modest fashion, to spread the faith among the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, and to help with their educational and health needs.
Rambling through Kodaikanal, one encounters quaint little cottages, (occupied by missionaries or civil service pensioners,) with names such as “Sunnyvale” and “Claverack” and “Bide-a-Wee”, all reminders of home. I often sit of an evening on the stone bench of the Parsonage, which yields a spectacular view of the valley beneath, including the spire of the Sacred Heart Chapel built by the Jesuits in the village of Shembagannur, or I contemplate, on the horizon, the noble brow of Mount Perumal which, when it is covered by clouds, furnishes an unfailing forecast of rain in Kodaikanal. In these vistas of valleys and forests and hills and clouds, it is very easy to lose oneself in fond recollections of home.
The sense of home was brought even closer to me last week with the arrival of a letter from England, written by Dr. John H. Watson, who has done so much to bring to the world’s attention the exploits of its foremost consulting detective (now retired) – Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Dr. Watson has somehow unearthed the fact that I was a fellow-student of Sherlock Holmes in our University days, and he would like me to furnish an account of an early case, which he refers to as “the singular affair of the aluminium crutch”, and which occurred in the precincts of the College, when Holmes and I were students together. I am glad for this opportunity to recollect the past, and to shed some light on an early phase of Sherlock Holmes’s remarkable career of detection. I must, howev
er, hasten to declare: ‘caveat lector’, for I have no literary pretensions, and I must beg the reader of this piece to put up with my many deficiencies as a writer.
In the days of my undergraduate career, a majority of students graduating from the Varsity ended up in the clergy, or in the diplomatic services, or as educated members of the landed gentry, living off their rents or their inherited wealth. I myself was a student of very limited means, destined for the cloth, and subsisting on scholarships which threatened to run out in the course of my third year of training in Theology. These were hard and uncertain times to live through, and particularly difficult to countenance when one lives in the midst of aristocrats and noblemen who had neither the practical knowledge nor the moral imagination to empathize with the fate of poorer students such as myself. One largely suffered in silence, while hoping for the best. One of only two fellow-students in whom I confided my anxieties was a chap called Sherlock Holmes.
This Holmes was, by any conventional standards, a queer bird. He was a Natural Sciences student, with a special interest in chemistry. A long, exceedingly thin individual with an impressive hawk-nosed profile and deep sunken eyes, he could be found training hard as a fencer and a boxer when he wasn’t messing about amidst the stinks and fumes of the laboratory. He was also, as I learnt, a formidable exponent of the single-stick art of self-defence. He gave the impression of being a reserved solitary, a man who largely kept himself to himself, and avoided human company if he could at all help it. Many thought him to be arrogant and haughty, but when once you came to know him, as I did in course of time, you realized that he was the way he was largely for reasons of being given to an introspective and reflective way of life, of a certain order of self-sufficiency rather than conceit, and of a considerable measure of natural shyness.