‘A long stretch on shore’: Why a short halt in Colombo left a deep impression on Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes, is universally known and acclaimed. But not every reader or fan of the Sherlock Holmes books would likely be aware of the personal religious and spiritual beliefs of the genius behind them. At a time when such views were, at least publicly, frowned upon in British society, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began to become very vocal about spiritualism – the belief that living people can communicate with those who are dead.

When Conan Doyle began writing his serialised essays titled The Wanderings of a Spiritualist in 1921, he was in Ceylon. The essays would be compiled into a book a few months later. “I write these lines with a pad upon my knee, heaving upon the long roll of the Indian Ocean, just one shade greyer, lining the Eastern skyline,” Doyle wrote in the introduction.

The prolific writer came to the Emerald Island twice – on his way to and back from Britain to Australia. He was invited by what he called “spiritual bodies” to visit Australia in 1920.

Doyle wrote:

I had spent some never-to-be-forgotten days with the Australian troops at the very crisis of the war. My heart was much with them. If my message could indeed bring consolation to bruised hearts and to bewildered minds – and I had boxes full of letters to show that it did – then to whom should I carry it rather than to those who had fought so splendidly and lost so heavily in the common cause?

At that time, Doyle had spent over three years speaking across Britain about spiritualism almost five days a week. On many occasions, the venues were full. “I have no eloquence and make profession of none, but I am audible and I say no more than I mean and can prove, so that my audiences felt that it was indeed truth so far as I could see it, which I conveyed,” he wrote.

When Doyle gave these talks, he was often ridiculed by members of the press as well as Jesuits, Evangelicals and other Christians.

“The long voyage presented attractions, even if there was hard work at the end of it,” he wrote. His agent in Australia agreed to look after the extra expenses associated with taking two sons, a daughter, a maid and a secretary on the tour.

“The lectures would be numerous, controversies severe, the weather at its hottest, and my own age over 60,” Doyle added.

The great writer’s sense of humour shines through in his descriptions of the places he saw on the journey. For instance, he described Gibraltar as “that strange crag, Arabic by name, African in type, Spanish by right and British by might”. He even suggested that Britain was better off trading Gibraltar to Spain for Ceuta, a Spanish city on the North African coast, bordering Morocco. The city is now a major entry point for migrants and refugees looking to enter Europe. Contemporary Britons would probably break into a cold sweat imagining the city being a part of the United Kingdom!

Doyle gave a talk on spiritualism on the ship SS Naldera. After the steamer crossed Crete, the writer scheduled a small lecture in a room. “Some 200 of the passengers, with the Bishop of Kwang-Si, turned up, and a better audience one could not wish, though the acoustic properties of the saloon were abominable,” he said. It pleased him that his audience included “Parsees, Hindoos, Japanese and Mohammedans”.

Before the ship reached Port Said, all of Doyle’s books on spiritualism were lent to other passengers, many of whom took him aside and questioned him. Word of his first talk spread across the ship, and second-class passengers approached him to address them on this interesting topic. “Monsoon and swell and drifting rain in the Indian Ocean,” Doyle wrote as the ship approached Bombay. “We heard that ‘thresh of the deep sea rain’, of which Kipling sings.”

He seemed to be an admirer of the British Empire and believed that Bombay and Calcutta would be invaded by Pashtoon tribesmen if the British pulled out! Doyle, however, expressed genuine affection for the colonised people of the subcontinent that he met on board. “The ship seemed lonely when our Indian friends were gone, for indeed, the pick of the company went with them,” he said. “Several pleased me by assuring me as they left that their views of life had been changed since they came on board the Naldera.”

The writer got off in Bombay and enjoyed what little he saw of the city before boarding the steamship for its next port of call – Colombo.

With the memory of the First World War still very fresh, Doyle took note of anything connected with the horrible conflict. Earlier on his voyage, he came across reminders of the aftermath of the war in the French port of Marseilles. “I saw converted German merchant ships, with names like ‘Burgomeister Müller’, in the harbour, and railway trucks with ‘Mainz-Cöln’ still marked upon their flanks – part of the captured loot,” he wrote. “Germany, that name of terror, how short is the time since we watched well-nigh all-powerful, mighty on land, dangerous on the sea, conquering the world with your commerce and threatening it with your arms!”

The first thing Doyle noted in Colombo was the HMS Highflyer. Considered a hero of the war, if the warship could have talked, she would have told Doyle about how she destroyed the large auxiliary cruiser SMS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in the legendary Battle of Rio de Oro on the coast of northwestern Africa in 1914.

The spiritualist writer said passengers on the Naldera looked upon the Highflyer “with the reverence which everybody and everything which did well in the war deserve from us – a saucy, rakish, speedy craft”.

Other ships in the Colombo harbour were flying yellow quarantine flags. Precautionary measures against the bubonic plague were still in place in Colombo at that time. It took 18 years after the outbreak of the plague in India in 1896 for it to reach Ceylon, despite the proximity between the countries and freedom of movement between them.

In January 1914, Sea Street in the Pettah area, which is adjacent to the harbour, was the first place in Colombo where the plague was detected. There were a total of 383 recorded deaths attributed to the plague in 1914. The number of deaths fell to 128 in 1915. By the time Doyle arrived in Colombo, the fear of the epidemic had abated among the public and the authorities alike.

The Naldera’s captain confided in Doyle that the flying of these quarantine flags “was a recognised way of saying ‘no visitors’ and did not necessarily bear any pathological meaning.”

The steamship had an almost two-day halt in Colombo, which Doyle said gave his party “a long stretch on shore”. His wife and he spent one night at the Galle Face Hotel, where the author’s photo is proudly displayed on the wall of the Traveller’s Bar. How many employees of the bar or the prestigious hotel would even know that Doyle said it had “preposterous charges”? These, he maintained, were “partly compensated for by the glorious rollers which break upon the beach outside”. The hotel, with its ocean views, mostly uninterrupted by the Port City project, is still one of the best places for high tea, an English tradition that is warmly embraced by Sri Lankans long after the sun has set on the Raj.

“I was interested in the afternoon by a native conjurer giving us what was practically a private performance of the mangotree trick,” he wrote. “He did it so admirably that I can well understand those who think it is an occult process. I watched the man narrowly, and believed that I solved the little mystery, though even now I cannot be sure.”

Few things made up as much a part of the stereotypes of India, and by extension Ceylon, as this manoeuvre. This was the trick of converting a mango seed to a grown mango plant.

As a believer in the occult, Doyle paid very close attention to the demonstration of the trick, much in the way Sherlock Holmes would have in a story. The author described the whole process with fine precision:

In doing it he began by laying several objects out in a casual way while hunting in his bag for his mango seed. These were small odds and ends including a little rag doll, very rudely fashioned, about six or eight inches long. One got accustomed to the presence of these things and ceased to remark them. He showed the seed and passed it for examination, a sort of Brazil nut. He then laid it among some loose earth, poured some water on it, covered it with a handkerchief upon his own side, and crooned over it. In about a minute, he exhibited the same, or another seed, the capsule burst, and a light green leaf protruding. I took it in my hands, and it was a certainly a real bursting mango seed, but clearly it had been palmed and substituted for the other. He then buried it again and kept raising the handkerchief upon his own side, and scrabbling about with his long brown fingers underneath its cover. Then he suddenly whisked off the handkerchief and there was the plant, a foot or so high, with thick foliage and blossoms, its root well planted in the earth. It was very startling.

Like Sherlock Holmes would have, Doyle did have an explanation for the whole trick:

My explanation is that by a miracle of packing the whole of the plant had been compressed into the rag doll, or little cloth cylinder already mentioned. The scrabbling of the hands under the cloth was to smooth out the leaves after it was freed from this covering. I observed that the leaves were still rather crumpled, and that there were dark specs of fungi which would not be there if the plant were straight from nature’s manufactory. But it was wonderfully well done when you consider that the man was squatting in our midst, we standing in a semi-circle around him, with no adventitious aid whatever.

This trick seems to have vanished from the shores of contemporary Sri Lanka, though in the southern Indian state of Kerala, magician Shamsudheen Cherpulassery has gained a fair bit of popularity for performing it. He, fortunately, doesn’t have to deal with the scepticism (and genius) of Doyle.

Excerpted with permission from Colombo: Port of Call, Ajay Kamalakaran, Penguin Random House India.