"One in Every Port, or

'Dock' Watson's Secret Passion"

"If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on . . . ." — Sherlock Holmes, "A Case of Identity"

Queer things were going on in London, all right. I think I knew it from the very first time I read IDEN. With men throwing their false teeth at their wives, and detectives fantasizing about playing Tinker Bell you can't help but agree with Sherlock Holmes. Victorian London was a very,queer place. Or was it?

"There is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace," Holmes said in that story as well, but I think he may have had it the wrong way around. Perhaps it was just in the vicinity of the Master that there was nothing so commonplace as the unnatural. The rest of London's citizens-those whose lives did not come into contact with that of Sherlock Holmes-may have led perfectly ordinary, dull, workaday existences. Go to the fish market, sell some fish, stop at the pub, and go home. Go to the brewery, load beer barrels on wagons, stop by the pub, and go home. That sort of thing. Truly commonplace folk didn't throw their false teeth at anybody, or sit around dreaming about flitting about the London skies holding hands with their doctor friend.

But as any reader of the Canon knows, the life of Sherlock Holmes was full of unnatural, everyday occurrences. Welfare clubs for red-haired men . . . swamp adders and hounds from Hell . . . women who dress up like young men, and young men who dress up like old women . . . and Dr. Watson. Yes, especially Dr. Watson. Now there was a very queer fellow if ever I saw one.

I'm not speaking here of the wives, the wounds, or the occasional lack of wit. The matter which strikes me queerest about the doctor is his ship fetish. You heard me right; when it comes to seagoing vessels, Watson's full deck had been shuffled a few too many times.

Many learned Sherlockians are familiar with Richard V. Clarke's theory that Watson named the ships in his tales after women he had known — Gloria Scott, Matilda Briggs, Alicia, etc. The women were the important thing. Naming ships after them was just his way of paying tribute to their fond memory. Right? But notice this passage from IDEN:

"As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons entered to announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself loomed behind his small black figure like a full-sailed merchant-man behind a tiny pilot boat."

The imagery is none too flattering on the surface, and not in the least bit feminine. Yet, somehow, in his own queer fashion, I get a feeling as though Dr. Watson is paying Miss Sutherland his highest compliment. It's definitely not normal for a man to first look at a young woman and think of a ship, but was the doctor truly normal? A little too much enteric fever on his way back from the war perhaps?

It seems the doctor likes to think of ships in feminine terms. Mention the names Alicia, Esmeralda, May, or Sophy, and you can bet he's probably not going to think of a woman first. And those ships in the Canon that don't bear female names — what do you think Sigmund Freud would have thought of Conqueror, Hotspur, or Sea Unicorn? You know what he would have thought!

Dr. Freud would probably have liked to have spent a little time with the denizens of 221B Baker Street, you can bet, and it wouldn't have been just to study Holmes's cocaine habit.

While other Victorian fellows were reading such stuff as A Man with a Maid, we find Watson in FIVE getting thoroughly involved in "one of Clark Russell's fine sea stories." And when the doctor actually does board a boat, as he did in SIGN, look out! "With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing," he writes, telling also of how the engines sounded like "a great metallic heart" as they pursued the "dainty Aurora," another boat, of course.

It would not surprise me at all if Victorian shipping records are discovered one day with the names Mary Morstan, Violet Hunter, or even Irene Adler listed upon them. If Watson didn't name his ships after women, then maybe he named his women after ships.

Yes, queer things were going on in London in those days . . .

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, August 1988)