These reflections were motivated by this recent audio performance of "Jelland's Voyage" by Greg Wagland:
Conan Doyle's story "Jelland's Voyage" (1892) can be read here.
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The first half of the 1890s saw Conan Doyle at the fecund zenith of fiction output. In late 1892 Harper's published one of his best horror stories, "Lot No. 249," as well as "Jelland's Voyage." (The same months also saw the publication of "Silver Blaze" and "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.")
"Jelland's Voyage" is not horror or mystery per se. There are no detectives, no bowmen, no Napoleonic cavalry officers or prize fighters. There are no tyro surgeons, no airmen, pirates, or monomaniacal scientists.
What the story does have is financial malfeasance. It also has a popular fiction snapshot of a brief period in European colonialism's economic penetration of Japan.
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"Jelland's Voyage" begins in merriment: the clubby camaraderie and postprandial good humor of Victorian merchant princes sailing to the Yellow Sea.
They all turn to one of their number, perhaps the merriest, who has a funny (in both senses
of the word) story to tell:
"Well," said our Anglo-Jap as we all drew up our chairs round the smoking-room fire, "it's an old tale out yonder, and may have spilt over into print for all I know. I don't want to turn this club-room into a chestnut stall, but it is a long way to the Yellow Sea, and it is just as likely that none of you have ever heard of the yawl Matilda, and of what happened to Henry Jelland and Willy McEvoy aboard of her.
"The middle of the sixties was a stirring time out in Japan. That was just after the Simonosaki bombardment, and before the Daimio affair. There was a Tory party and there was a Liberal party among the natives, and the question that they were wrangling over was whether the throats of the foreigners should be cut or not. I tell you all, politics have been tame to me since then. If you lived in a treaty port, you were bound to wake up and take an interest in them. And to make it better, the outsider had no way of knowing how the game was going. If the opposition won it would not be a newspaper paragraph that would tell him of it, but a good old Tory in a suit of chain mail, with a sword in each hand, would drop in and let him know all about it in a single upper cut.
"Of course it makes men reckless when they are living on the edge of a volcano like that. Just at first they are very jumpy, and then there comes a time when they learn to enjoy life while they have it. I tell you, there's nothing makes life so beautiful as when the shadow of death begins to fall across it. Time is too precious to be dawdled away then, and a man lives every minute of it. That was the way with us in Yokohama. There were many European places of business which had to go on running, and the men who worked them made the place lively for seven nights in the week.
"One of the heads of the European colony was Randolph Moore, the big export merchant. His offices were in Yokohama, but he spent a good deal of his time at his house up in Jeddo, which had only just been opened to the trade. In his absence he used to leave his affairs in the hands of his head clerk, Jelland, whom he knew to be a man of great energy and resolution. But energy and resolution are two-edged things, you know, and when they are used against you you don't appreciate them so much....
As a reader who prefers the fiction of 1880-1940, and particularly the period's short fiction, club stories are always a treat. Wodehouse's Mulliner tales, the reports of members of Buchan's Runagates Club always satisfy. So do the one-offs: F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth'' (1894) begins so modestly, with such a tone of civility, given what is to come:
Somebody asked for the cigars. We had talked long, and the conversation was beginning to languish; the tobacco smoke had got into the heavy curtains, the wine had got into those brains which were liable to become heavy, and it was already perfectly evident that, unless somebody did something to rouse our oppressed spirits, the meeting would soon come to its natural conclusion, and we, the guests, would speedily go home to bed, and most certainly to sleep. No one had said anything very remarkable; it may be that no one had anything very remarkable to say. Jones had given us every particular of his last hunting adventure in Yorkshire. Mr. Tompkins, of Boston, had explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. Signor Tombola had endeavoured to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled the average modern torpedo, carefully planned, constructed with all the skill of the greatest European arsenals, but, when constructed, destined to be directed by feeble hands into a region where it must undoubtedly explode, unseen, unfeared, and unheard, into the illimitable wastes of political chaos....
My suspicion (theory is too strong a word) is that the club story and its distancing appurtenances were developed and systematized in the era of mass popular fiction to sugar the pill of strange and grotesque subject matter for the reader.
At the start of "Jelland's Voyage" Conan Doyle is almost whimsical. The genre of colonial morals going to pot begins here as for the reader's amusement.
"It was gambling that set Jelland wrong. He was a little dark-eyed fellow with black curly hair—more than three-quarters Celt, I should imagine. Every night in the week you would see him in the same place, on the left-hand side of the croupier at Matheson's rouge et noir table. For a long time he won, and lived in better style than his employer. And then came a turn of luck, and he began to lose so that at the end of a single week his partner and he were stone broke, without a dollar to their names.
"This partner was a clerk in the employ of the same firm—a tall, straw-haired young Englishman called McEvoy. He was a good boy enough at the start, but he was clay in the hands of Jelland, who fashioned him into a kind of weak model of himself. They were for ever on the prowl together, but it was Jelland who led and McEvoy who followed. Lynch and I and one or two others tried to show the youngster that he could come to no good along that line, and when we were talking to him we could win him round easily enough, but five minutes of Jelland would swing him back again. It may have been animal magnetism or what you like, but the little man could pull the big one along like a sixty-foot tug in front of a full-rigged ship. Even when they had lost all their money they would still take their places at the table and look on with shining eyes when any one else was raking in the stamps.
"But one evening they could keep out of it no longer. Red had turned up sixteen times running, and it was more than Jelland could bear. He whispered to McEvoy, and then said a word to the croupier.
"'Certainly, Mr. Jelland; your cheque is as good as notes,' said he.
"Jelland scribbled a cheque and threw it on the black. The card was the king of hearts, and the croupier raked in the little bit of paper. Jelland grew angry, and McEvoy white. Another and a heavier cheque was written and thrown on the table. The card was the nine of diamonds. McEvoy leaned his head upon his hands and looked as if he would faint. 'By God!' growled Jelland, 'I won't be beat,' and he threw on a cheque that covered the other two. The card was the deuce of hearts. A few minutes later they were walking down the Bund, with the cool night-air playing upon their fevered faces.
"'Of course you know what this means,' said Jelland, lighting a cheroot; 'we'll have to transfer some of the office money to our current account. There's no occasion to make a fuss over it. Old Moore won't look over the books before Easter. If we have any luck, we can easily replace it before then.'
"'But if we have no luck?' faltered McEvoy.
"'Tut, man, we must take things as they come. You stick to me, and I'll stick to you, and we'll pull through together. You shall sign the cheques to-morrow night, and we shall see if your luck is better than mine.'
This self-deceiving is short-lived.
Jelland's next scheme, that they escape Yokohama and the law by sea, founders for lack of wind to power their yawl. A few sentences after that, Jelland has coolly killed McEvoy and himself.
Such tragedies are seldom without irony:
"....the storm broke—one of those short sudden squalls which are common in these seas. The Matilda heeled over, her sails bellied out, she plunged her lee-rail into a wave, and was off like a frightened deer. Jelland's body had jammed the helm, and she kept a course right before the wind, and fluttered away over the rising sea like a blown piece of paper. The [police launch] rowers worked frantically, but the yawl still drew ahead, and in five minutes it had plunged into the storm wrack never to be seen again by mortal eye. The boat put back, and reached Yokohama with the water washing half-way up to the thwarts.
"And that was how it came that the yawl Matilda, with a cargo of five thousand pounds and a crew of two dead young men, set sail across the Pacific Ocean. What the end of Jelland's voyage may have been no man knows. He may have foundered in that gale, or he may have been picked up by some canny merchantman, who stuck to the bullion and kept his mouth shut, or he may still be cruising in that vast waste of waters, blown north to the Behring Sea, or south to the Malay Islands. It's better to leave it unfinished than to spoil a true story by inventing a tag to it."
Conan Doyle appears satisfied to halt with delivery of cold facts.
In his 1908 preface to Round the Fire Stories, the author says the tales that "have been brought together.... are concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible—such tales as might well be read 'round the fire' upon a winter's night."
I reflect on that when thinking about the Matilda, perhaps still crewed and under sail on the ocean tonight.
Jay
19 November 2021
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