Snake Bite (28 page)

Believe it or not, the disfiguring disease suffered by Mr Arrhenius is real. I wouldn’t dare make up something that bizarre. It’s called
argyria
, and you can
look it up on the internet and even see pictures of people who suffer from it. More and more people nowadays are taking silver to try and ward off diseases, so
argyria
might well be
something that’s on the increase.

The USS
Monocacy
was a real American warship that was stationed in the Far East in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It did travel up the Yangtze River on a mapping expedition at around the
time that I’ve set this book (actually, I may have fudged it by a year or two, for the sake of the plot). The ship was built in 1864, and remained in service until 1903, when she was sold to
a Japanese businessman. Henry Francis Bryan was her captain for a few years. He went on to become the Governor of Samoa.

What else? The animals that Sherlock comes across during his adventures on the Yangtze River are real ones – the Yangtze River Dolphin (or
Baiji
) and the Yangtze River Alligator.
The
Baiji
is in terminal decline at the moment, thanks to fishing and to pollution in the river. It may even be extinct. Oh, and a note for true Sherlockians here – the
Gloria
Scott
in this story is not the same one as mentioned in the Arthur Conan Doyle story ‘The Adventure of the
Gloria Scott
’. That boat was sunk in 1855 on its way to Australia.
No, this is a different
Gloria Scott
. Why is it a different
Gloria Scott
? The simple answer is because I wanted to call it by the name of another ship mentioned in Conan
Doyle’s stories – the
Matilda Briggs
– but I remembered the wrong name, and by the time I noticed that I had remembered the wrong name it was too late to change it.
It’s as simple (and as stupid) as that.

A note on Chinese pronunciation, while I’m here. And Chinese names as well. In Sherlock’s time, the way that Chinese sounds were converted to English was known as the Wade-Giles
system (the Chinese language has sounds in it which don’t occur in English). It was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador to China who published the first Chinese textbook in
English in 1867. The system was refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles (hence Wade-Giles). The Wade-Giles system was replaced with the Pinyin system in the 1950s. The problem is that the two
systems can give quite different results from the same Chinese word. For instance, the city known as Peking in the Wade-Giles system suddenly became Beijing in the Pinyin system (you can see that
they sound similar, but they aren’t the same). Similarly, Mao Tse-tung, who controlled China between 1949 and 1976, suddenly became Mao Zedong. I’ve largely used the Wade-Giles system
in this book, rather than the Pinyin system, because it’s the one Sherlock and Cameron Mackenzie would have been familiar with. This does, unfortunately, give some of the names of the Chinese
characters (Wu Chung, Wu Fung-Yi) an old-fashioned sound (Wu Chung would be Wu Zhong in the Pinyin system, while Wu Fung-Yi would have been the rather similar Wu Feng-Yi). Chinese names have the
surname first, by the way, so while Sherlock
Holmes
is the son of Siger
Holmes
,
Wu
Fung-Yi is the son of
Wu
Chung. (Chinese women of the time typically kept their own
names, which is why Tsi Huen doesn’t have a Wu anywhere.) All clear? (You might be tested on this later.) In an earlier book I talked a little bit about money in Victorian England. In China
of the late Imperial period (which is when this book is set) the Emperor maintained a silver and a copper currency system. The copper coins were called
cash
(although funnily enough that
probably isn’t where we get the word ‘cash’ from). The silver system had several coins: the
tael
, the
mace
, the
candareen
and the
li
. (If you ever find
yourself in late Imperial China, remember that 1
tael
= 10
mace
= 100
candareens
= 1,000
li
– a decimal system.)

So, where does all this leave us? Well, Sherlock has to get home, of course. He will undoubtedly have all kinds of adventures on the way (I think he will probably end up in Japan for several
months, and maybe India), but those stories may never be told – or not told by me, at any rate. I think that the next book – the sixth one – will take place back in England, and I
think it will involve the Paradol Chamber again (and perhaps mark the reappearance of a particular villain from previous stories). One thing is for sure, though – when Sherlock gets home he
will be older and wiser, and a lot sadder.

First published 2012 by Macmillan Children’s Books

This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan Children’s Books
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-76599-3 EPUB

Copyright © Andrew Lane 2012

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