Immunity, Monstrosity, Savagery: Of Criminals and Cannibals

Ed Cohen has convincingly shown that, at the end of the nineteenth century, biological science absorbed the millennia-old trope of juridical immunity.Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas the older juridical immunity found in Roman law had made certain individuals exempt from the responsibilities of living in a community (with immunity being the inverse of community), the new biological immunity conceived of the human being as private property divorced from the ecologies surrounding it. Thus was also born the often militaristic language in which the immune system has since been rendered: how it “defends” the body and “attacks” intruders, thereby bringing the Darwinian struggle for life within the cellular milieu of the body. In the British imperial experience of the Andaman Islands, tropical and infectious diseases were the objective correlative through which the savagery or monstrosity of the colony was imagined.

Scholars like William McNeill, Alfred Crosby, and Jared Diamond have popularized the “virgin soil hypothesis,” the idea that certain Indigenous groups like the Native Americans, because of their ecological isolation from the diseases of the Old World, had undeveloped immune systems and were therefore especially susceptible to decimation from diseases like smallpox.Footnote ¹⁵ Indigenous scholars have taken issue with this essentializing theory, claiming that it overdetermines Native people’s nonimmunity while overlooking the very real violence to which they were subjected.Footnote ¹⁶ The virgin soil hypothesis thus becomes a form of what Patrick Brantlinger has called the mode of “proleptic elegy” in which Native peoples are often imagined: as vanished even before they are gone.Footnote ¹⁷ In relegating the responsibility for Indigenous people’s deaths to their own biological constitutions, the language of immunity perpetuates the narrative that the decimation of Native peoples is inevitable and absolves the colonizer of wrongdoing. In this way the discourse of biological (non)immunity buttresses the project of colonial impunity.

The virgin soil hypothesis, I suggest, is merely a biological counterpart of legal concepts that have historically been used as pretexts to dispossess Native peoples of their lands. For instance, John Locke’s idea of “uncultivated land”—that Native peoples were merely hunter-gatherers and did not practice agriculture, and that therefore they had no concept of private property—was instrumentalized for land theft in North America.Footnote ¹⁸ As Cristobal Silva shows, in colonial New England, epidemics that decimated the Indigenous populations were hailed as a “‘miraculous plague’ sent by God to ‘vacate’ New England prior to (and as an invitation for) the Puritan Migration.” The discourse of the “miraculous plague” therefore “blend[ed] medical, legal, and theological discourses to help justify the colonial project in New England by reorganizing the civil-law rhetoric of property rights around immunity and susceptibility to disease.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Australia, a similar concept of terra nullius was used for equally deleterious ends. That both the virgin soil hypothesis, on one hand, and the notion of uncultivated land, on the other, invoke the ground in various iterations (land, soil) is richly suggestive. But what’s more important is that Indigenous peoples were determined to be always in a state of nature, thus outside the law—the laws that allow “normal” humans in sovereign states to defend their bodies against disease and to defend their private property.

Michel Foucault had a word for the being that infringes both natural and human laws: the monster. In Abnormal, drawing on the work of his mentor Georges Canguilhem, Foucault argues that Roman law distinguished between two kinds of monstrosity: “that of deformity, disability, and deficiency (the deformed, disabled, and defective are called the portentum or the ostentum), and then the monster in the strict sense.”Footnote ²⁰ This “strict sense” refers to the infringement of not just natural law—which the disabled individual habitually performs—but “an interdiction of civil and religious or divine law. There is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law.”Footnote ²¹ In colonial discourse, the Indigenous subject, by embodying immunological deviance—both in terms of biological and legal-juridical immunity—embodies the monster.

The so-called monstrosity of the Native Andamanese islanders was further sensationalized by unsubstantiated claims that they were cannibals. By this token, too, they would satisfy Foucault’s criteria for monstrosity when he identifies “two figures of the monster—the monster from below and the monster from above, the cannibalistic monster represented above all by the figure of the people in revolt, and the incestuous monster represented above all by the figure of the king.”Footnote ²² In Foucault’s characterization of the “cannibalistic monster” as best represented by the people in revolt, he in fact brings together the two “others” that the British encountered on the Andamans Islands: the Indigenous islanders, on one hand, and the transported “criminals” and revolutionaries, on the other, many of whom were imprisoned on the islands following the 1857 Uprising. As Satadru Sen argues, after 1857 the British discourse of “savagery” and “treachery” about the Andamans encapsulated both the Native islanders and the mainland transportees—or, in my words, the cannibals and the criminals. “The Andamanese savage,” Sen writes, “was imagined in the shadow of a mainland, where the ‘Mutiny’ had generated a partially new discourse of the racial and sexual savagery of Indians who, in the penal colony, were counted as civilized natives.”Footnote ²³ Frederic Mouat, the British surgeon who was tasked with investigating the Andamans as a potential penal colony, had this to say about the comparison between these two categories of “monsters”: “There was something poetical in the retributive justice that thus rendered the crimes of an ancient race the means of reclaiming a fair and fertile tract of land from the neglect, the barbarity, and the atrocities of a more primitive, but scarcely less cruel and vindictive race, whose origin is yet involved in such a dark cloud of mystery.”Footnote ²⁴ The disciplining of the criminal monster therefore makes the way for the extermination of the cannibal one; conversely, the latter’s lack of biological immunity (death) makes way for the end of the former’s juridical immunity (legal retribution).

As we can see, a lengthy signifying chain characterizes Britain’s colonial others on the Andaman Islands: cannibals, savages, criminals, and traitors, all defined by monstrosity and varying degrees of immunity. However, Ross’s and Doyle’s romances of imperial immunity trouble any fine distinction between the civilized and the savage; the former are as monstrous as the latter. Those outside the bounds of sovereignty may be monstrous, but as Derrida shows in his reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the sovereign state is itself a monstrosity: “the state is a sort of robot, an animal monster, which, in the figure of man, or of man in the figure of the animal monster, is stronger, etc., than natural man.”Footnote ²⁵ In The Sign of the Four, there is a reason that the white criminal Jonathan Small is in cahoots with Tonga the Andamanese—the pair of them exemplify the criminal-cannibal linkage, with the criminal referring not to a mainland Indian but a white colonial; further, he is “small” to suggest his morphological similarity to the diminutive Tonga. Likewise, it is the character of Major John Sholto who shows his treachery by betraying his oath to Small—not the three Sikhs, as one would expect from the post-1857 discourse of Indian treachery and disloyalty. In The Child of Ocean, it is the castaway European John Vanburgh who is referred to by both the narrator and the shipwrecked woman Leda as, at different times, “the monster,” “the criminal,” and a possible “cannibal,” bringing together in one person the criminality of Jonathan Small and the cannibalism of Tonga. In the next section, I show how representations of “seasoning” in both novels differently imagine the connections between biological and legal immunities while also confounding any easy binaries between the civilized metropole and the savage colony.

Monstrous Spleens: Seasoning and Immunity in The Sign of the Four and The Child of Ocean

Before I analyze and compare the imperial immunities so central to these two novels, a little more contextualization of The Child of Ocean and its author are in order. This novel was not Ronald Ross’s first foray into literature—he had already established something of a reputation as a minor poet. He would go on to publish a collection of his poetic works—Philosophies—in 1910. As he notes in the preface to that collection, these “verses were written in India between the years 1881 and 1899, mostly during my researches on malaria.”Footnote ²⁶ He published the collection along with a textbook on malaria, those twin publications attesting to his belief that “art and science are the same, and efforts in both, however poor the result may be, are to be commended more than idleness.” Philosophies contains some poems that he wrote while in the Andamans, a series of anthropomorphized dialogues between “Ocean” and other natural entities. But perhaps the best known of Ross’s poems is “Indian Fevers,” written in Bangalore between 1890–93, in which he anticipates his world-changing discovery of malaria transmission a few years later:

When The Child of Ocean was published in 1889, some critics claimed that the work was an unsuccessful imitation of Victor Hugo, while others drew comparisons with Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Haggard’s She (1887). Given that no one in the literary world had heard of Ross before, one went so far as to wager that “Ronald Ross is probably a nom de plume, but, whoever the writer is, he has a touch of genius in him which, if properly disciplined, ought to make a considerable mark in the fiction of the day.”Footnote ²⁷ Many reviewers lauded Ross’s vivid descriptions of the Andamans’ geography and foliage. As one asserts, “Some of the descriptions of the coasts, with their rocky inlets and mysterious caves, are admirable.” However, the review continues to state that “others are assuredly extravagant in the very excess of their colouring, and the gruesomeness of some of the details of adventure is almost repulsive.” Elsewhere, the reviews express concern about the book’s suitability for children. The title of the book misled the publishers to release it “in the form and binding of a boy’s book,” but a reviewer warned that “a book more unsuited to boys and girls could hardly have been written.” Another critic alerts readers that the book “contains some incidents that may be objectionable to Mrs. Grundy,” such as the titular child-man’s nakedness while in the company of the shipwrecked woman. Evidently, Ross’s novel, while important to the nexus of literature, imperialism, and tropical medicine, was also quintessentially Victorian in its ability to elicit the reading public’s prudery.

It is unclear if Arthur Conan Doyle ever read Ross’s book and to what extent Sign of the Four’s setting in the Andamans was inspired by The Child of Ocean. The only evidence of correspondence between these two knighted physician-writers I have found is from the 1910s, when Doyle was in his spiritualist phase and unsuccessfully tried to convince Ross to conduct a psychic experiment. “You are always asking me to attend to psychic matters,” Ross bluntly replied in a letter from 1919, “but I am not competent and have no time…. How do you imagine that an old fellow of sixty-two can do this when he has to finish writing his memoirs and to bring out the completion of several mathematical works, not to mention masses of War Office malaria work and some great masterpieces in poetry?”Footnote ²⁸

Whether Ross and Doyle corresponded or even spoke informally on the Andamans is an open question, but their two romances both engage with the themes of civilization, savagery, and development. Jed Esty writes in Unseasonable Youth that modernist texts and imperial romances of the era effected a significant change in the genre of the bildungsroman through representations of “arrested development” in the colonies and the sabotaging of a linear timeline from childhood to adulthood. In The Child of Ocean, primitivism—especially of the Andamanese—is represented as childlike immaturity; Andamanese characters, because of their famously short stature, are mistaken for children, even as the titular “Child of Ocean” in Ross’s text, a European shipwrecked on the Andamans as a child, seems to remain a child because of his primitiveness. Furthermore, the malaria to which the Andamanese are thought to be immune figures as a contagion that could affect European or Indians and render them “savage.” Conversely, the Andamanese people’s being virgin soil to the infectious “diseases of civilization”—smallpox, cholera—reflects their own “unseasonable youth.”

The malaria so conspicuous in Doyle’s and Ross’s novels allows us to read Esty’s “unseasonability” in a new way. Esty defines unseasonability as “youth out of joint—endlessly adolescent or suddenly aged, sophomoric or progeriac, subject to what Nietzsche called with almost uncanny Eurocentric aptness the ‘tropical tempo’ that manifests a ‘fateful simultaneity of spring and autumn.’”Footnote ²⁹ But this “tropical tempo” of unseasonability might as well refer to the process of “seasoning” or acclimatizing to the tropical diseases of the colonies, especially malaria. Both the colonizers and the native Andamanese therefore could be said to forever dwell in an unseasonable youth, being virgin soils to different kinds of diseases.

Alphonse Laveran, the French medical officer who in 1881 discovered the malaria parasite while serving in Algeria, had notably racialized the enlarged spleens that result from one’s seasoning to malarial infection: “Hypertrophic cirrhosis of the spleen is constant,” he writes, “the spleen often acquires enormous dimensions, especially in individuals who have lived in unhealthy localities for a long time and who have taken little or no quinine sulphate; in Algeria, it is especially among the Arabs coming from unhealthy places and having never taken cinchona that I observed these monstrous spleens which occupy a whole half of the abdomen.”Footnote ³⁰ “Monstrous spleens” and other signs of seasoning are ubiquitous in both Doyle’s and Ross’s novels, yet they indicate not just the afflicted person’s biological monstrosity and immunity but also his juridical one.

Major John Sholto, one of the commanders in the Andaman Islands who betrays the titular “four”—Jonathan Small, Dost Akbar, Abdullah Khan, and Mahomet Singh—by breaking their pact and keeping the Agra treasure for himself, dies from malarial complications. His son Thaddeus Sholto tells Holmes and Dr. Watson that

That Major Sholto is suffering from relapsed malaria is obvious, as suggested by his spleen and the bottle of quinine next to his bed.

In the 1890s splenic growth came to be considered a symptom of not just malaria but of immune response against it. Scientists around the world continued to debate why the spleen increases so abundantly in size and what purpose it serves. The Lancet reported in 1892 that Italian scientists had found that “those [animals] in which the spleen had been extirpated were incapable of being rendered immune, this incapacity being permanent.”Footnote ³¹ An American physician from Cleveland wrote in 1895 that the spleen was thought to be the “birthplace of white blood cells. There are facts that point strongly to it as a possible agent in conferring immunity from certain diseases…. In all these diseases—malaria, typhoid fever, acute tuberculosis, as well as pneumonia and some other germ-diseases—the spleen is markedly enlarged, as if from over-stimulation in an effort to throw off the disease.”Footnote ³² But what distinguished malarial immunity from other forms of immunological responses was that it wasn’t immunity at all—the patient was liable to recurrent attacks of the fever. Unlike the immunity conferred by a first attack in diseases like smallpox, malaria was notorious for its tendency toward relapses. This “imperfect immunity” therefore renders Sholto susceptible to recurrent attacks of the fever, a fever that figures, in Yumna Siddiqi’s terms, as a return of the repressed; in fact, Jonathan Small’s threatening letter “from India,” indeed, Small himself, is an outbreak of malaria come home to roost. Malaria’s recurrent or intermittent nature suggests that Sholto could never outrun the people he betrayed and who have returned, like a fever, to claim their just rewards. And while Sholto’s betrayal of the four may not in itself constitute a crime, it is certainly characterized as an act of unforgivable treachery: a British commander breaks an oath made not just to Jonathan Small but also to three Sikh men. When they offered to make the pact with Small, Abdullah Khan specifically explains to him that they have told him about the treasure because “an oath is binding upon a Feringhee, and that we may trust you … the Sikh knows the Englishman, and the Englishman knows the Sikh” (134–35), indicating also the many Punjabi regiments who stayed loyal to the British during the Uprising. In breaking his oath to Small and the Sikhs, Major Sholto and his fatally enlarged spleen suggest that he is no longer the Englishman who keeps his word but someone who has degenerated into one of the “lying Hindu[s]” (135). Such an act of treachery deserves retributive justice.

When Holmes tells Small that by throwing the Agra treasure into the Thames he had “thwart[ed]” justice, the latter is indignant:

In Small’s tirade, “justice” and the law are clearly in nonalignment; while on the surface and from the imperial point of view, the Andamans represent a place where criminals and revolutionaries are “brought to justice,” for Small there is no justice in the “convict’s cell.” Also notice the ways in which Small characterizes his penal servitude in malarial terms: being “racked with ague” in the “fever-ridden swamp” for him means time served, immunity from further punishment acquired. But true justice can never be acquired in a space like the putatively savage Andamans—it can only ever be achieved back in the civilized metropole. As Holmes likewise says, Small “comes to England with the double idea of regaining what he would consider to be his rights and of having his revenge upon the man who had wronged him” (72). Small recognizes that the right to have “rights” is only recognized in the sovereign metropole, not in the lawless clearings or the prison of the Andamans. Ultimately, while malaria in the Andamans is imagined by Small as a tool of injustice, it becomes the instrument of justice in the metropole where it rightfully afflicts Sholto for his crime of “robb[ing] and befool[ing]” the four.

But as malaria in the metropole seems to bring Sholto to justice, unfortunately for Small, it doesn’t spare him either. Small is finally apprehended in a malarious setting curiously similar to the “fever-ridden swamp” of the Andamans: “It was a wild and desolate place, where the moon glimmered upon a wide expanse of marshland, with pools of stagnant water and beds of decaying vegetation” (114–15). Just as Conrad’s Marlow narrates the events of Heart of Darkness (1899) from the bank of the Thames, collapsing the distance and distinction between the metropolitan river and the Congo River, so does Holmes and Watson’s capture of Small suggest a similar boomerang effect. For both Sholto and Small, the malarial swamps of the Andamans return to haunt the banks of the Thames, with different results. They spell death for Sholto and a reconviction for Small, their situations illustrating that imperfect immunities to malaria also result in their inability to elude the forces of justice.

Sholto and Small’s imperfect immunities, both legal and biological, stage an interesting reversal of the infamous “Boot and Spleen” cases of the 1880s and 1890s on mainland India, particularly in Bengal and Assam. Historian Jordanna Bailkin has shown that in this period a loophole in the Indian penal code referred to as the “ruptured spleen defense” emerged to shield British colonials from convictions of murder following the death of an Indian employee or subordinate at their hands. The defense went that the British had no way of knowing if an Indian was constitutionally weak owing to an enlarged spleen caused by malaria, and that even the most “innocuous” violence against the latter—which would not be fatal for a healthy person—might inadvertently kill him. Thus, many British men killed their Indian servants with immunity from legal consequences. For instance, “[i]n 1880, a British airman named Fox struck and killed a punkha coolie who provoked him by working in a ‘lazy and inefficient’ manner. The judge held that because the coolie’s spleen was diseased, Fox could not have predicted the coolie’s death as a probable consequence of his act. He was to be treated as if the coolie had survived.”Footnote ³³ Whereas in the Boot and Spleen cases it is the Indians who die and the British who are rendered legally immune from criminal wrongdoing, a close reading of Doyle’s novel shows that it is British characters—Sholto and Small—who are rendered biologically susceptible and criminally liable.

Immunological seasoning is depicted as especially monstrous in Ronald Ross’s The Child of Ocean. Whereas in Doyle’s text malaria in the Andamans and the metropole seems to index laws and punishments of the state of society, Ross’s novel uses malaria as a way to think about the state of nature—or the law of the Andamanese jungle—and the encounter between colonial sovereignty and indigenous “savagery.”

The Child of Ocean is a typical Robinsonade. In his memoirs, Ross writes that at first he wanted his protagonist to be a convict or a “world-embittered philosopher whose soul was to be gradually softened by the music of nature around him.”Footnote ³⁴ Ultimately, Ross’s European castaway “became neither a convict nor a philosopher, but a child” who ends up on the islands after the pirate ship he is on capsizes. From the beginning of the novel, this castaway is only referred to as “the monster.”

Years after the first publication of his novel, Ross appended a prelude to explain how the “monster” came to be on the Andamans. The Black Eagle, a pirate ship with an American captain from Mississippi by the name of Bully Hayes, is attacked by Malay prahus on its way to Calcutta; everyone onboard is killed except for a boy named Sonny who had been rescued by the pirates from a previous shipwreck. After the attack by the Malays, Sonny finds himself marooned on one of the Andaman Islands and becomes the “monster.”

Ross links the castaway’s monstrousness to his nonage, harkening back to an old discourse that invoked the primitive as a monster and a child. For instance, George Lamming in his famous rejoinder to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “A Monster, a Child, a Slave,” writes that Caliban “is not a child of anything except Nature. To be a child of Nature, in this sense, is to be situated in Nature, to be identified with Nature.”Footnote ³⁵ In Ross’s novel, a woman named Leda Vanburgh is subsequently shipwrecked on the island and upon meeting the monster, embarks on a plan to bring him out of his state of nature and into civilization, first by renaming him John Vanburgh. Leda plays the Prospero to John’s Caliban.

Before he becomes John, the titular child of ocean is a source of dread and trepidation for the native Andamanese. He has found himself on a group of tiny islands twelve miles off the eastern coast of the Andamans. The Andamanese have heard of the monster, and three of them go to the “infested isle” on a reconnaissance trip, but only one returns to tell the tale of a “hideous face whose eyes stared at me, the face red, the eyes red.”Footnote ³⁶ When they go back to the isle to find out what happened to two of their peers, they find their corpses on the beach, “choked to death each by each hand of the demon.” Thereafter the Andamanese stay away from the “solitary lagoon” where the monster’s “crimes were committed.” “The infected island” becomes “untenanted by man: the savages had determined to desert it for good” (63).

It is curious that, even as Ross chose to make his protagonist not a convict but a shipwrecked child who grows to be a feral “monster,” his violence against the Andamanese is repeatedly referred to as criminal, not least because this particular uncontacted island of the Andaman archipelago, like the one in Robinson Crusoe, has no central jurisdiction or sovereignty. The monster’s “crimes” against the natives are also characterized in epidemic terms, bringing together criminological and infectious disease discourse. The narrator compares the monster’s violence to the “pains, fevers, ill-humours, crooked births, rottings of food, and sea-cramps” that visit them every now and then, except he is described as even more pernicious (56). Perhaps Ross is here signaling his awareness of the effects of colonization on the health and well-being of the Andamanese. In the years that he was stationed in the islands, from about 1886 to 1888, the Native population had been in precipitous decline. The administrative reports from those years often take an extremely bleak view of their chances for survival. For instance, the report of 1886–87 notes somewhat contradictorily that “the health of the Andamanese except for a severe epidemic of mumps in the month of September has been fairly good. The births are, however, much fewer than the deaths, and there is no doubt that the race is fast dwindling away.”Footnote ³⁷ The prospects for their survival were even more grim after the 1901 census, which reported that tribes “which were estimated to be between two and three hundred a few years ago are now estimated at between thirty and forty.”Footnote ³⁸

The “monster’s” violence in Ross’s novel on the Andamanese therefore allegorically represents their decimation owing to smallpox, measles, and other introduced infectious diseases. When Leda finds the skeleton of a slain person in one of the caves of the Andamans, she suspects John of having been the “murderer,” and she views the murder as both “the revelation of a human crime and the revelation of a crime of nature” (221). John is a monster because he infringes human and natural law. Indeed, the narrator characterizes this infringement in Darwinian terms: “Nowhere is the competition for life so keen as in the sea; and there are more crimes committed hourly in a drop of water than in a French revolution, a Sicilian vespers, an Indian mutiny” (222). Ross makes political revolutions, crime, and rebellions mere conflicts of the state of nature; his invocation of the Indian mutiny in relation to John’s epidemic “crimes” against the Andamanese blurs the distinction between his “crimes of nature” and the crimes committed by the rebellious “monsters” of 1857. While Doyle used the backdrop of the Mutiny to concoct the story of the Agra treasure and to dramatize the punishment of penal servitude in the Andaman Islands, Ross seems to invoke the “crimes” of the Mutiny to suggest that human affairs are no different from and no more spectacular than the routine “struggles for existence” we find in nature.

While the Andamanese succumb to the diseases of civilization that the monster may have brought to their shores, new Europeans or mainland Indians on the island acclimatize themselves more easily to the malaria that is endemic there. This disparity is often cast in terms of individual growth from childhood to adulthood, perpetuating the mythos of the savage as child. In Child of Ocean, the monster soon finds himself on the island with the shipwrecked Leda Vanburgh. Leda is at first frightened of him, thinking he might be either a ”criminal” or one of the “savages” because he speaks no language and is primitive in his ways, thereby reiterating the criminal/cannibal linkage I identified above. However, she soon realizes that he can’t be because “savages are black” while “he is tawny red” and comes to think that he must be a European castaway like herself (86, 64). She embarks on a mission to “improve” him, teaching him the language and manners, often comparing their situation to that of Crusoe and Friday—although there are similarities with Prospero and Caliban as well.

Leda adopts the monster as her brother, christening him John Vanburgh. But even as she tries to bring John out of his regression, her seasoning with malaria paradoxically suggests her own racial degeneration, on one hand, and her “growth” on the other. Leda repeatedly references her and John’s seasoning in dermatological terms: “Look, monster, my hands are getting as brown as yours” (105). The seasoning occurs inside the body as much as it does on the surface. Later in the novel, Leda “felt again a touch of the jungle fever. There was a pain and weight in her left side—common to all those who get ague—and she longed to get away from the dull, detested scenery of the lagoon” (249). Here Ross, like Doyle, gestures to the enlarged spleen in response to malarial seasoning. Leda’s increasing brownness and monstrously enlarged spleen, in terms of Laveran’s racializing discourse, show her seasoning to the island’s climate, perhaps becoming the monster that John used to be.

Leda’s enlarged spleen has different consequences than those for Sholto—it simultaneously shows her development of biological immunity to malaria and her ability to confer legal immunities as a sovereign. Indeed, when Leda recovers from her first fever, she forgives John for killing an unnamed Andamanese who has the misfortune of wandering onto their island. This forgiveness is a legal pardon; when she first arrives on the island, she declares, “I am a queen … and this is my country. The monster shall be my minister” (100). Having declared her “newly constituted sovereign[ty],” she decides whom to kill and whom to let live; in fact, the monstrous criminal is not only pardoned but becomes the sovereign’s deputy! Leda’s spleen, able to confer immunity on her from malaria, is also able to confer immunity to John from legal retribution. As we saw above, Foucault argues that monstrosity is determined not just by biological but also by juridical deviance—by breaking the laws of biology and the law as such. That the “monster shall be [Leda’s] minister” dramatizes the monstrosity of settler sovereignty that precedes the establishment of law and which continues to inflict with impunity those beyond the law: the “monstrous” natives.

My analysis has heretofore left unexplored the Andamanese characters themselves, but it should be remembered that concerns about malarial seasoning and degeneration of white subjects in these texts always have Native Andamanese as their referents. Jonathan Small’s associate Tonga is one of the most infamous references to Andamanese people in popular Victorian literature, but representations of Andamanese islanders were ubiquitous in the 1880s, especially as seen at the colonial and Indian exhibition of 1886.Footnote ³⁹ Doyle equates the malarial environment of the Andamans with the islanders tout court. As Small recalls at another moment in the text, the Andamans are “a dreary, fever-stricken place, and all beyond our little clearings was infested with wild cannibal natives, who were ready enough to blow a poisoned dart at us if they saw a chance” (144–45; my emphasis), equating the infestation of malarial parasites with the infestation of “cannibal natives” and perhaps anticipating Bartholomew Sholto’s death by Tonga’s poisoned dart. In other words, while John Sholto dies of malarial parasites, his son Bartholomew dies of a poisoned dart, both fatal substances emerging from the Andamans. This juxtaposition between malaria and the “poisoned darts” of the Andamanese in Doyle’s writing is telling. If I have been arguing that seasoning and immunity to malaria indexes legal and juridical immunities, then Andamanese poisons—in resisting the encroachments of the colonizers—also form part of this nexus of legal/biological immunity. As Arup Chatterjee argues, “tropical toxicology” had gained widespread interest in the Victorian era alongside tropical medicine.Footnote ⁴⁰ Hence, the language of immunity was associated not only with tropical diseases like malaria but also with tropical poisons or “toxins.” In fact, Paul Ehrlich—the father of immunology who was working at this time—would go on to formulate his theories of immunity in terms of “toxins” and “antitoxins.”Footnote ⁴¹

After their chase on the Thames, Small makes it safely to the bank of the Thames, but Tonga is shot by Holmes and Watson as soon as they see him reach for his bow and poisoned arrows. “[W]ith a kind of choking cough,” Tonga falls “sideways into the stream. [Watson] caught one glimpse of his venomous, menacing eyes amid the white swirl of the waters” (114). Tonga’s death by a “choking cough” is uncannily similar to the deaths of the Andamanese at the hands of Ross’s titular child of ocean, “choked to death each by each hand of the demon.” To Holmes and Watson, Tonga’s death may be the result of law enforcement and justice, but it is no less “demonic” than the “crimes” that John Vanburgh commits in the state of nature. In other words, Holmes and Watson—like the degenerated Small and John Vanburgh—are not any less “savage” than Tonga.Footnote ⁴² By pairing these “choking deaths” in the two novels—the deaths of Indigenous subjects by white hands, one in the metropole and one in the “savage” island—I ultimately render unstable any neat distinction between these two spaces in terms of their legal and juridical apparatuses. Murder is murder, whether sanctioned by law in the metropole or by the state of nature in the clearings of a remote island.