A Study in Sherlock

Our enormous steamship pushed on at full tilt, regardless of the weather. Holmes and I walked the deck and speculated on the true nature of our enigmatic invitation. Rather, I speculated, but Holmes maintained the irritating silence into which he often retreated when a case began. It was something between a boxer’s silent meditation before a match—among Holmes’s several skills was a mastery of the pugilist’s art—and a scientist’s cogitation on a natural phenomenon. Long before the ship steamed its way into New York harbor, I was grateful that its soulless speed would deliver me of the need to be with a man who neither spoke nor listened.

It was late afternoon when the crew tied the bow and stern to cleats, and stevedores hauled our steamer trunks from our cabin. We were on the main deck prepared to step down the gangplank to the new world. Captain Allen joined us, and he engaged a closed carriage to take us to a different dock. “Have either of you been to the United States before?” Allen asked.

“I have,” Holmes said. “In 1879 I traveled here with a Shakespeare company as Hamlet. I hope to play a less tragic part on this visit.”

When we arrived at the new jetty, we found that all the sailors there were in military uniform. They rapidly loaded our trunks aboard a much smaller craft, a Coast Guard vessel of some fifty feet in length, with a steam engine. Once we were aboard, the vessel was pushed from the dock, oriented itself due north, and began to move across the harbor. The air was hot and humid that afternoon, and I was grateful when the vessel began to lay on some speed. I came to understand from one of the crew that the purpose of the vessel was to outrun the craft of smugglers and other miscreants and bring them to a halt, so its speed was considerable. Before long we were out of the congested waters of the harbor and heading up the majestic Hudson River.

Much of the land along the river was wooded, but here and there on the shore we could see charming villages, most of them apparently supported by a combination of agriculture and light manufacturing. I could see growing fields of maize and other vegetables on the distant hillsides, but nearer the water were smokestacks and railroad tracks.

As I explored the Coast Guard cutter, I happened upon Allen and Holmes at the bow. “Excellent means of travel,” Holmes said, and Allen replied, “It’s not the usual way, but it was determined that a government vessel would not be suspected to be smuggling two Englishmen to Buffalo.”

“Is the secrecy warranted?” Holmes asked.

Allen said, “If all goes well, we may never know.”

“Indeed.”

We disembarked at a city called Albany. I found all of the names of British places in America—York, Albany, Rochester—disturbing in some fundamental way. It was like emerging from a wilderness trail and hearing that I had arrived at Charing Cross. But I said nothing. At Albany we were transferred to a railroad train, and moved on at still greater speed. We followed roughly the course of a narrow, straight waterway called the Erie Canal, which had for the past seventy years or so brought the natural resources and products of the western parts—lumber, produce, and so on—back to the ports like New York. I found the vastness of the place a bit unnerving. By the time we reached Buffalo we had gone more than the distance between London and Edinburgh, and not left the state of New York, one of forty-five states, and by no means the largest.