On the Zoological Enigmas of The Adventure of the Speckled Band

 

Sherlock Holmes afficionados, myself included, cannot help but become hooked to the Sherlockian Game. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created such a tantalizing tease of clues throughout the canon, often contradictory ones, that it has become something of a frustrating fascination to chronicle the canon.

            The Red-Headed League, the first short story featuring Holmes and Watson, can be said to be the starting point as it offers a conflicting timeline within the narrative. Fans, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, have come up with their own adjustments to this and other points (most notably Wisteria Lodge which is dated as having taken place between the death of Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem and Watson finding out his friend was alive and well and in hiding).  

 But now I am on to a new game which has received far less attention, at most just a passing note at the discrepancy in an annotated edition. The story in question is The Adventure of the Speckled Band one of the best of the Sherlock Holmes short stories. Doyle himself ranked it amongst his very favorites. The story involves two twin sisters, left after their mother’s death, to live with their abusive step-father Dr. Grimesby Roylott in his family manor. Roylott lost his fortune over a murder charge while stationed in India. Upon his return to England he brings with him a passion for acquiring Indian wildlife for his menagerie. However, his choices are odd representatives of the local fauna; namely a cheetah, a baboon and, finally, a venomous snake, the titular Speckled Band.

The easiest to explain is the cheetah. Sadly, the Asiatic cheetah was extirpated from India by the mid-20^th century through hunting and, as the story illustrates, royalty abducting cubs to raise for hunting smaller animals or simply as a status symbol. Reintroduction efforts have been stalled and now the subspecies survives only in isolated areas of Iran. However, in 1883, when the story is set, cheetahs were still to be found in the subcontinent and, being easily domesticated, it was not an illogical choice for a British doctor’s pet.

The baboon presents a bigger problem. The range of wild baboons does not extend further east than the Arabian Peninsula. A number of explanations can be given. Either the baboon was bred n captivity and shipped from India or a primate native India, such as the stump-tailed macaque was shipped instead and labeled, through ignorance, as a baboon. It is easy for Holmes and Watson to have misidentified the animal, as neither is trained in zoology (Holmes famously described by Watson as deficient in his knowledge of subjects outside the necessity of his profession) who, after all, see it but briefly in the dark after having been told a baboon was on the premises. But a professed connoisseur of India’s animals like Dr. Roylott was unlikely to be so deceived. However, it is important to note that Roylott himself never refers to the animal as a baboon. Rather, it is his stepdaughter, Helen Stoner, who mentions her patron keeping a baboon. The story never indicates she had much recollection of India and it is doubtful she had much knowledge of its native fauna. It is not hard to imagine that she misidentified a native primate as a baboon.

 Finally, there is the snake which is never identified in the narrative but several clues have tantalized readers. It has a quick acting venom, is of a tawny color with markings, a climber and (one theorizes) native to India. Holmes identifies it as a “swamp adder” but the only adder native to India, the puff adder, fails on all counts to match the description of the snake in question. The most likely candidate seems to be the Indian cobra which checks all the boxes with its fast acting venom, climbing agility and all the right colorations. One snag remains, cobras are arguably the most distinct species of snake and the least likely to be misidentified. Then again, it is only called an “adder” by Sherlock Holmes, a brilliant mind but by all accounts a very poor naturalist.