Reconstruction
of the likely appearance of the Indian swamp adder, aka the speckled band (©
Tim Morris)
According to a number of Sherlockian scholars, today, 6 January, is Sherlock Holmes's birthday - so it seemed a very appropriate day upon which to present the following ShukerNature investigation of mine.
During his
numerous cases, the famous if fictitious consulting detective Sherlock Holmes,
created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, encountered a number of extraordinary
creatures – the hound of the Baskervilles, the giant rat of Sumatra (click here for my ShukerNature article re this monstrous rodent), an unknown
species of worm that sent its observer insane, and an exceptionally venomous,
enigmatic Indian serpent referred to obliquely by one of its victims as the
speckled band. But does the latter snake truly exist, and, if so, what is it?
HOW
SHERLOCK HOLMES DEFEATED THE SPECKLED BAND
First appearing in February 1892 within the
Strand Magazine as a stand-alone Sherlock Holmes short story, 'The
Adventure of the Speckled Band' is one of twelve that were then collected
together and republished later that same year within a compilation volume
entitled 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'. (It was also adapted by Conan
Doyle into a stage play called The Stoner Case, with the production opening
at London’s Adelphi Theatre in June 1910.)
This particular story
tells of how Dr Grimesby Roylott, a very aggressive medical doctor heavily in
debt but with two heiress step-daughters, murdered one of them, Julia Stoner,
using a most ingenious, undetectable modus operandi that he was now also secretly
attempting to use upon his other step-daughter, Helen Stoner. If successful, he
would retain all of their money. Although Helen does not realise that her own
life is in imminent danger, she feels sufficiently disturbed by the mysterious
death of her sister, who was heard to cry out "It was the band! The
speckled band!" immediately before dying, to engage Sherlock Holmes to
investigate.
Holmes,
Watson, and Helen Stoner, depicted by Sidney Paget
Assisted by his
faithful companion Dr Watson, it is Holmes who then discovers that Roylott had
murdered Julia (and was now seeking to do the same to Helen) using an
exceedingly venomous species of Indian snake referred to by Holmes as a swamp
adder, whose blotch-patterned body was the speckled band that the doomed
Julia's last words had succinctly described.
Sherlock
Holmes striking out at the swamp adder, depicted by Sidney Paget
Happily, after
hiding in Helen's bedroom they are able to thwart the deadly serpent, which,
angered by Holmes's attack upon it with a cane, swiftly flees from whence it
had come - back into the bedroom of its owner, Roylott. When Holmes and Watson then
enter Roylott's room, they find him dead, with what looks at first like a
speckled band wrapped around his head. Upon cautious, closer inspection,
however, this proves to be the swamp adder, which in its enraged, still-agitated
state had turned upon Roylott, killing him with a single lethal, fast-acting bite.
Waxwork
of Dr Grimesby Roylott with swamp adder around his head, at London's
Sherlock Holmes Museum (public
domain, from Wikipedia)
THE
INDIAN SWAMP ADDER – IN SEARCH OF AN IDENTITY
In the story,
the swamp adder was referred to by Holmes as "the deadliest snake in India", but what
exactly is a swamp adder? No known species of snake in India – or anywhere
else, for that matter - is ever referred to by that particular name. Unfortunately,
however, the story contains only the sparsest of morphological and behavioural details
concerning this enigmatic serpent.
Its body is
yellow, patterned with brownish speckles, and probably around 1 m long but
fairly slender if it resembles a band and can wrap itself around a man's head.
Its own head is squat and diamond-shaped, and its neck is puffed. Its hiss is
said to be "a very gentle, soothing sound, like that of a small jet of
steam escaping continually from a kettle", but according to Holmes its
venom is so toxic that it kills in 10 seconds. Yet its fangs apparently leave
such tiny, inconspicuous puncture wounds when it bites its victim that they
were not noticed by the coroner who examined Julia Stoner's body. For according
to a statement made by her sister Helen to Holmes, no marks had been found upon
Jane by the coroner.
Down through the
years, this intriguing reptilian mystery has engaged the attention of many
scholars, of Sherlockian and herpetological expertise alike, with a number of
different identities proposed for the perplexing Indian swamp adder.
IS
THE SWAMP ADDER TRULY A SPECIES OF VIPER?
The most popular
identity is the very venomous tic polonga or Russell's viper Daboia russelii,
a large terrestrial species found throughout the Indian subcontinent. Due in no
small way to its frequent proximity to human habitation, this infamous species
is responsible for more deaths and incidents involving snake-bite than any
other venomous snake in the entire region. Up to 1.66 m long, its relatively
slender, brown-blotched, yellow-tan body does recall the 'speckled band'
description for the mystifying swamp adder. Also, as its triangular head is
distinct from its neck, when viewed at certain angles its head and the
beginning of its neck can collectively yield a diamond shape.
Russell's
viper (© gupt_sumeet/Wikipedia)
However, like
that of all vipers, this species' venom is haemotoxic, which is relatively
slow-acting compared to the much more rapid-acting neurotoxin produced by
elapids. And far from being gentle and soothing in sound, its hiss is famously
loud – among the loudest hisses produced by any species of snake. In addition,
its preferred habit is dry, grassy, open terrain; it actively avoids humid,
swampy, marshy areas. Clearly, therefore, the Russell's viper is unlikely ever
to be referred to as a swamp adder.
Saw-scaled
viper depicted in a painting from 1878
Two other
viperid candidates that have also been proposed on occasion are the Indian
saw-scaled viper Echis carinatus (also known as the little Indian viper)
and the temple viper Tropidolaemus wagleri. However, the former species does
not exceed 80 cm (and only rarely exceeds 60 cm), and does not possess either
the speckled patterning or the diamond-shaped head of the swamp viper. Also, it
is an inhabitant of dry, rocky terrain, not humid swamps. As for the temple
viper: this pit viper species is bigger than the saw-scaled viper, with females
growing up to 1 m long. It also exhibits a range of colour and pattern
variations, but none of them includes that of the swamp adder. And, crucially,
it is not native to India anyway (its
distribution being confined to southeastern Asia).
Temple
viper, green variety (© Bonvallite/Wikipedia)
Neither is the
African puff adder Bitis arietans, yet this too has been suggested by
some as a putative swamp adder. Quite apart from its fundamental zoogeographical
difference, however, the puff adder is renowned for the loudness (as opposed to
the gentleness) of its hiss, and for the savagery of its bite, whose fangs can
cause severe physical trauma in addition to their envenoming effects. This is a
very far cry from the very inconspicuous puncture marks attributed to the swamp
adder.
Puff
adder ready to strike
Another
exclusively African species that has been considered is the rhinoceros viper Bitis
nasicornis, named after its instantly noticeable horn-like scales on the
end of its nose – features conspicuous only by their absence in the swamp
adder's description!
Rhinoceros
viper (© Dawson/Wikipedia)
Exit the puff
adder and the rhinoceros viper.
COBRAS,
BOAS, AND OTHER UNLIKELY SWAMP ADDER EXPLANATIONS
The common
Indian cobra Naja naja is a much-touted elapid candidate for the swamp
adder's identity, particularly by the late Richard Lancelyn Green and certain
other Sherlockian scholars and devotees. Certainly, its neurotoxin would act
more swiftly than the haemotoxin of any viper or adder. Nevertheless, it is
difficult to conceive how so familiar and distinctive a snake as this one,
perhaps the best known serpent species in all of India, could possibly be one
and the same as the mysterious swamp adder. True, the latter's puffed neck may
be an allusion to the cobra's hood (or at least a cobra-reminiscent neck
expansion), but the Indian cobra lacks the characteristic speckled patterning
of the swamp adder, and its head is not diamond-shaped. In fact, it looks
nothing remotely like any type of adder or viper.
Indian
cobras and snake charmers, depicted in a lithograph from 1890
Even more
implausible ophidian identities that have been raised at one time or another
include the decidedly non-venomous, non-Asian boa constrictor Boa
constrictor; the extremely venomous but irrefutably Australian taipan Oxyuranus
scutellatus; and a species of krait.
Fundamental zoogeographical differences
aside, the boa constrictor notion no doubt stems from a suggestion that Conan
Doyle was inspired to write his story having read a story entitled 'Called on
by a Boa Constrictor: A West African Adventure', which had appeared in Cassell’s
Saturday Journal, published in February 1891. Staying in a ramshackle cabin
belonging to a Portuguese trader, the narrator reveals his horror at being
woken by a massive snake dangling over him. Paralysed by fear, he cannot cry
out, but he spots a bell hanging off a beam within reach. Although the cord to
ring it has rotted away, the narrator discloses how he manages to summon help
by hitting it with a stick.
Nor is this the only link between the
speckled band mystery and a species of constricting snake. In his stage production of this story, The Stoner Case,
Conan Doyle cast an African rock python Python sebae as the speckled
band. Unfortunately, this particular snake did not excel in the role. Conan
Doyle later wrote:
"We had a fine rock boa [sic] to play the title-rôle, a
snake which was the pride of my heart, so one can imagine my disgust when I saw
that one critic ended his disparaging review by the words, "The crisis
of the play was produced by the appearance of a palpably artificial
serpent." I was inclined to offer him a goodly sum if he would
undertake to go to bed with it."
As for a krait:
it is true that certain species are Indian, all are venomous (some extremely
so), and they may be encountered in damp areas. However, they differ
dramatically from the speckle-patterned swamp adder with its squat
diamond-shaped head by virtue of their boldly striped markings and their sleek,
slender head.
Banded
krait, depicted in a painting from 1878
Kraits are also
extremely timid, often preferring to conceal their head amid their coils, drawing
attention away from it by vigorously twitching their tail instead, thus readily
contrasting with the swamp adder's active, undisguised aggression.
Of course, there
is the remote, but not impossible, prospect that the swamp adder is not a snake
at all...
WHEN
IS A SNAKE NOT A SNAKE? WHEN IT'S A LEGLESS LIZARD?
Certainly, there
are various peculiar behavioural characteristics claimed for the swamp adder
that cause problems when attempting to reconcile it with any species of snake.
In 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band', the swamp adder reaches its victim, Julia
Stoner, by crawling through a ventilation shaft linking her bedroom with that
of her murderous step-father Roylott next door, and then down a rope pull
hanging directly over the bed in which she is sleeping. After it has bitten
her, the snake crawls up the rope again and back through the shaft, in response
to Roylott (in his bedroom) having alerted it by whistling to it!
First and
foremost: unless it were an exceptionally adept arboreal species, would the
swamp adder be able to climb up a vertical length of rope? And secondly: as
snakes are famously insensitive aurally to airborne vibrations, how could it
possibly be able to hear Roylott's whistling?
Consequently,
there has been speculation that the swamp adder is not a snake at all, but
conceivably a legless or near-legless species of lizard, belonging to the skink
family. There are indeed several species of skink fitting this description, and
which therefore do appear remarkably serpentine on first glance, especially to
non-specialist observers. Some such lizards, moreover are native to India.
Chalcides
chalcides, a near-limbless skink
And skinks,
unlike snakes, can definitely hear airborne vibrations. Whether they are adept
at climbing up and down vertical ropes is another matter, but in any case this
otherwise ingenious non-ophidian identity is fatally scuppered by the
incontestable fact that skinks are entirely non-venomous. Consequently, if a
skink bit someone, they would not be poisoned by it.
The only
sensible conclusion that can be drawn from this article's analysis of the
varied candidates on offer is that the swamp adder is an entirely fictitious,
invented creature that Conan Doyle created specifically in order to supply his
story with a supremely formidable reptilian opponent for pitting against
Sherlock Holmes – an ophidian Moriarty, no less. Aspects of its appearance may
well have been inspired by real snakes, such as the Russell's viper's body
colouration and markings, and the rapid action of the cobra's neurotoxin, but
the swamp adder has no basis in reality as a valid, discrete species in its own
right.
Russell's
viper, depicted in a drawing from 1878
However, this is
not quite the end of this literary serpent's identity crisis. There is still
one more identity to consider, the most astonishing of all – not only because
of its particular nature but also because of where (and how) it appeared within
the scientific literature.
SWAMP
ADDER AND MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM – ONE AND THE SAME CREATURE?
In a previous ShukerNature
article (click here), I documented an
extraordinary mystery beast said to inhabit the Gobi Desert and known as
the Mongolian death worm. According to the nomads inhabiting this vast expanse
of sand, the death worm can spit forth a deadly, corrosive venom, and can also
kill instantly if touched by a mechanism that sounds uncannily like
electrocution. No specimen of this reputedly lethal animal has ever been made
available for scientific analysis, and it may well simply be folkloric, or even
if genuine merely a harmless amphisbaenian or similar reptile whose murderous
talents owe more to local superstition than to physiological capability.
Reconstruction
of the likely appearance of the Mongolian death worm (© Ivan Mackerle)
In 1956,
however, the death worm was sensationally linked to the swamp adder as the
latter's bona fide identity. Not only that, it was even given a formal
scientific name. The publication in which all of this appeared was a very
comprehensive 238-page monograph of the lizard family Helodermatidae, which
houses those two famously venomous New World species, the
Gila monster Heloderma suspectum and the beaded lizard H. horridum.
Published in no less august a scientific journal than the Bulletin of the
American Museum of Natural History, and entitled 'The Gila Monster and Its
Allies', it was authored by renowned herpetologists Drs Charles M. Bogert and
Rafael Martín Del Campo, and as would be expected from such authors writing in
such a journal, the paper was totally scientific and serious throughout – or
was it?
Tucked away on
pages 206-209, in a section entitled 'Hybrid Origin', was a mind-boggling claim
that according to a paper by snake authority Dr Laurence M. Klauber, a hybrid
creature had been successfully produced in a laboratory in Calcutta, India, by
crossbreeding cobras with Gila monsters! Not only that, some of these
astounding hybrids had subsequently escaped, with various of their descendants
yielding the allegedly highly venomous Indian lizard called the bis-cobra (featured
in a forthcoming book of mine), and other descendants yielding the Mongolian
death worm in the Gobi Desert!
Moreover, and
equally dramatic, this selfsame hybrid was also claimed to be the identity of
the swamp adder in Conan Doyle's Speckled Band story. A quadrupedal lizard with
the venomous potency of a cobra would, in the opinion of Klauber, reconcile all
of the problems faced when attempting to identify the swamp adder with any of
the more traditional identities that have been proposed.
Accordingly, in
their monograph Bogert and Martín Del Campo put forward an official binomial
name for this hybrid, which was clearly now breeding true and therefore, they
felt, fully deserved one. They dubbed it Sampoderma allergorhaihorhai –
'Sampoderma' combining 'samp' (a Hindustani name for 'snake') and the Gila
monster's generic name, Heloderma; and 'allergorhaihorhai' being a name
applied by the Gobi nomads to the death worm. They even included an ideogram of
the hybrid's appearance.
Ideogram
of Sampoderma allergorhaihorhai (© Derry Bogert/Bulletin of the
American Museum of Natural History - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
Needless to say,
however, the concept of successful hybridisation between a cobra and a Gila
monster is so outlandish that there was clearly more – or less – to the claims
of Bogert and Martín Del Campo than met the eye, as a closer study of this
particular section of their monograph soon revealed. (Moreover, the bis-cobra
is also a red herring, figuratively if not taxonomically, because in reality it
is a harmless varanid that superstitious folklore has conferred all manner of
venomous traits upon.) For although Klauber was indeed a real-life
herpetological authority and his paper regarding the hybrid also existed, it
had not been published in any scientific journal but instead within an issue
from 1948 of the Baker Street Journal.
This was a
periodical devoted entirely to the fictional world contained within the stories
of Sherlock Holmes, and included much imaginative and entertaining but entirely
theoretical speculation and extrapolation regarding various aspects of these
stories' plots, characters, etc. And indeed, in his paper Klauber refers to
Holmes, Watson, and the nefarious Dr Roylott as real persons, naming Roylott as
the creator of the cobra x Gila monster hybrid. In short, it was all entirely
tongue-in-cheek, not to be taken in any way seriously.
As this is
instantly apparent from reading Klauber's paper, why, therefore, had Bogert and
Martín Del Campo included the fictitious hybrid in a sober, ostensibly factual
manner within their otherwise entirely literal, highly authoritative monograph?
According to Daniel D. Beck writing in his own major work, Biology of Gila
Monsters and Beaded Lizards (2004), it was a prank by Bogert that was meant
to poke fun at one of his "stodgy" colleagues at the American Museum of Natural
History.
Beaded
lizards – closest living relative of the Gila monster
Whatever the
reason, there is no doubt at all that equating it even in jest with the
Mongolian death worm yielded for the dreaded Indian swamp adder (aka the
speckled band) an identity so extraordinary that even the great Sherlock Holmes
himself may well have been hard-pressed to deduce it!
Sherlock
Holmes, depicted by Sidney Paget
NB - all non-credited illustrations included in this ShukerNature article are (to the best of my knowledge) in the public domain.
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