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What mistakes did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle make in The Sign of Four?
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made several mistakes in The Sign of Four. He inaccurately depicted the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands, describing them in racist terms and falsely portraying them as cannibals. Additionally, the Andaman Islanders did not use poison blow darts, a detail incorrectly attributed to the character Tonga. Doyle also erred in the continuity of Dr. Watson's war wound location and the rightful ownership of a treasure, reflecting unconscious biases of his time.
Identifying errors in the Sherlock Holmes corpus is a well-established fan activity. Arthur Conan Doyle read widely to find obscure information that Holmes was likely to know and use in his investigations. Holmes himself was portrayed as widely read, and he is fond of quoting both classics and popular works of the day.
In The Sign of Four, the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal play a prominent role, both as the place of origin of the character Tonga, an indigenous Andaman person, and for its role as a British penal colony where Major Morstan and Major Sholto had been stationed and Jonathan Small had done time. While the bare-bones description of the islands themselves, which Dr. Watson finds in a newly published gazeteer, are accurate, the description of the indigenous people (“aborigines”) is both inaccurate and, as many modern critics have noted, extremely racist.
They are naturally...
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hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features.
The gazetteer also describes them as cannibals. As discussed by Sita Venkateswar in 2004, British occupation had included substantial research on indigenous customs, which produced written descriptions and many photographs, which were published in England and so would have been available to Doyle. The physical proportions shown do not indicate any “distortions” in head size or features. British observers often found their tattoos unappealing, and some islanders apparently practiced scarification. Although they criticize many of the peoples’ customs, cannibalism is not mentioned.
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One error Holmes made in The Sign of the Four concerns Tonga. Tonga, the small native from the Andaman islands near India, uses poison blow darts to kill people in the mystery. However, in reality the Andaman Islanders did not use poison blow darts.
Another mistake is that the treasure of jewels and pearls that Holmes helps recover for Mary Morstan never really belonged to her father. It belonged to an Indian Rajah who tried to put it into the safekeeping of the British, but was robbed. The jewels should have rightfully been returned to him.
These errors emerge from unconscious racism, which shows a tendency to lump the behavior of all native peoples together, and wouldn't stop to think about distinctions in weaponry. Further, for years the British had been used to thinking of India and its possession as "theirs," so it would have been normal to assume an Indian treasure should rightfully fall to a Britisher.
Doyle uttered a couple of inaccuracies in The Sign of Four. These are generally explained, by critics and Doyle himself, as the oversights of rapidity of thought and execution and a consequent inattentiveness to detail at odd moments. Doyle admits in his Memories and Adventures that his readers would point out the lapses in memory for details that occurred in his various books.
The boldest inaccuracy is that in A Study in Scarlet (1887) Watson's war wound is in the shoulder, "at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, ...," whereas in The Sign of Four (1890), a later work, his war injury is in the leg:
I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion's quiet and didactic manner. I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg. I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before, and, though it did not prevent me from walking, it ached wearily at every change of the weather.
Another inaccuracy relates to Sherlock Holmes' infamous addiction, remembering that at that point in history, drugs had not reached the level of harm and destruction at which they reside today. Holmes use of cocaine had been established, yet in The Sign of Four, Watson surprises us with asking if Holmes is using one of two drugs:
Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
"Which is it to-day?" I asked,—"morphine or cocaine?"
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. ....