THE WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE

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Part VIII

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Brotherly Hatred: Moriarty at Reichenbach 

by Brett Fawcett

For many years now it’s been suspected that, in 1891, Sherlock Holmes grappled with the original Professor James Moriarty on the slippery slopes of Reichenbach Falls, left him for dead [1], and battled his younger brother for the rest of his career [2], although the elder of the two did survive and continue his criminal activities [3]. Is it possible, however, that this is an erroneous belief? After all, for three years it was firmly believed that Holmes and Moriarty had both drowned in that ghastly waterfall, and it was not until Dr. John H. Watson and his literary agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published "The Adventure of the Empty House" in 1903 that the public itself learned that Holmes was still alive, and still later when they learned that Moriarty himself was still breathing. Is it possible that other secrets have eluded us?

First of all, let’s consider the facts at hand. At the time when the Great Hiatus started, the snow in Switzerland, particularly in the Alps, was melting, and thus the mountainsides would be impossibly more slippery, and most miscellania provided by nature would have been washed into the great abyss into which the falls plummet. As well, the falls would be at their most powerful, with so much water to carry. In fact, if one has seen the falls themselves they realize how incredibly difficult it would be for two people with a burning hatred of each other such Holmes and Moriarty to fight without losing balance and being sucked into the angry torrent. We must also consider the complete implausibility of Holmes’ statement, both in his letter to Watson in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" and in his explanation to his Boswell in "The Adventure of the Empty House". Holmes claims that he sketched down "these few lines through the courtesy of Professor Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final discussion of those questions which lie between us". First off, we must remember that in their earlier conversation in Baker Street they did discuss everything that needed mention. They made it very clear how their continual battle would result and left no stone un-turned, no doubt aware that it would be their last opportunity to speak of such things.

Further, we must envision the scenario. These two figures had a loathing hatred of each other which had grown particularly hot in the last month. Moriarty sent three goons to kill Holmes and wounded him, Holmes had run his criminal organization which he had built over the years to the ground, Moriarty had set fire to his beloved rooms in Baker Street, Holmes criticized Moriarty’s "The Dynamics of an Asteroid" which had been painstaking to write, Moriarty had forced Holmes to abandon his possessions, etc. They may have been gentleman under more civilized and intelligent circumstances, such as the Baker Street confrontation, but beside the raging Reichenbach Falls after all this it’s preposterous to believe Moriarty would patiently let Holmes acknowledge to Watson what was about to occur, particularly since he was explaining to Watson how Scotland Yard would be able to convict his gang. Another thing we must consider is that Holmes managed to defeat Moriarty by using the Japanese style of wrestling, called baritsu; yet, it was Moriarty who taught him how to fence and kick-box, as well as other European and foreign-continental fighting skills. Admittedly, Holmes could have learned baritsu elsewhere, but it seems unlikely; he lived most of his life, outside of Hampshire, in London. If Moriarty did teach Holmes baritsu, than how possible is it that he could have defeated him with it? No doubt Moriarty knew all of Holmes’ strengths and weaknesses when it came to the sport and would use them against him. He was also a good decade or so older than him, and more experienced. It’s possible he was even better than Holmes at baritsu, or any other fighting method he chose to use. We must also remember that they were both tall men, and violently casting the other into the Falls would no doubt cause the thrower to slip in the mud and fall with him. As mentioned, all various miscellania would doubtless have been washed away, providing nothing for either to grasp onto during their plummet. How, then, could Holmes defeat him in a hand-to-hand battle with him, much less survive? Quite simply, he didn’t. It was someone else he killed at Reichenbach.

Who was it? We can immediately eliminate the second Professor Moriarty, as he was in London collecting the remains of his brother’s empire and putting them back together to form his own. In fact, he already had a scheme involving government documents underway with the assistance of black-mailer Eduardo Gambetti, brother-in-law of Charles Augustus Milverton [4], but was thwarted by Sherlock’s brother, Sigerson (although some suspect he was really Sherringford Holmes using the same alias his brother did during his Great Hiatus) [5]. Also, Holmes could hardly have made all those tracks himself without leaving tell-tale signs that it was only one man (or without falling into the Falls), eliminating the possibility that the entire fight itself was a ruse. Who, then? A henchman of Moriarty’s? Or was it really Moriarty himself, who actually survived the Falls? He did, after all, appear frequently after 1894. No, I don’t suspect it was either of these two. Moriarty would have sustained injuries rendering him paralyzed at best. Besides, there is further, more discriminating evidence which has previously remained obscure to the public. You see, Holmes actually retrieved the body of his opponent. It had been entombed in ice from the cold abyss into which he had fallen. As a trophy of his triumph, he saved the frozen corpse and buried it in a cave. Perhaps he was frozen before he died, you may suggest, and was thawed out at a later date. Ah, but in fact, his cryogenically preserved body sat there for centuries, and his DNA remained intact for centuries. You see, around 2199 a Parisian scientist by the name of Martin Fenwick located the body and drilled a hole through the ice to obtain a sample of his blood. [6] Using this, he cloned it’s producer, hoping that Moriarty would serve as his perfect slave who would help him obtain money; however, the slave overthrew his master and became a thorn in the side of 22nd century law. [7]

At this point, it’s obvious that SOMEONE was killed at Reichenbach. The fact that the new Moriarty looked nothing like either Professor Moriarty causes one to lean towards the henchman theory. He is tall, stands straight, has dark, heavy sideburns and a goatee, a barrel chest, and muscular arms. His personality should also be considered: He is brash, loud-mouthed, and even more openly arrogant than the two James’s. However, one must also consider that he displays the intelligence, pride, and criminal cunning of Moriarty. Surely, the Professor did send someone to fight with Holmes, not wanting to risk falling off the Falls himself, but one would think he would select someone expendable, with low intelligence and more brawn than brain, as opposed to someone as intelligent as himself. So who could possibly have given their lives in Switzerland? Who had the strength of an assassin but the intellect of a Moriarty? Well, who else BUT a Moriarty? Simply put, the self-centered Professor Moriarty sent his own elder brother, Colonel James Moriarty, to do his dirty work for him. [8] Let’s review the facts: Moriarty waited patiently, almost politely, for Holmes to write a good-bye letter to his best friend. Someone with such pent-up anger against him such as the original professor would leap upon him as stated above; however, no true military man would be dishonourable enough to take advantage of a man when he wasn’t looking, particularly a fellow Brit. Second of all, he would be more accustomed to boxing, as most soldiers would spend more time shooting than fighting hand-to-hand, and wouldn’t know what to do when confronted with a Japanese fighting method. In fact, he would probably be so clumsy when faced with it that it might even be possible (for someone of Holmes’ calibre) to simply push him into the Falls while threatening him with baritsu. It is much easier to imagine Holmes still standing on those slippery slopes after shoving Moriarty off than it is to picture him remaining on his feet after tossing him into the water. As well, not knowing Holmes very well, he wouldn’t know all of his strengths and weaknesses when it came to fighting, as his brother would. Finally, we must remember the lack of resemblance of the Moriarty clone to either of the brothers we have seen. His strong, powerful appearance would be customary of a war veteran, and, since the colonel was still a Wold Newton family member, he would have the criminal genius of his siblings which would be formidable even in the high-tech future.

Admittedly, there are some inconsistencies we must deal with. First of all, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s "The Suicide Club", he is portrayed as having a heavy stoop. It’s possible, however, that this was merely a disguise of his; perhaps he was assisting his brother in some criminal activity and assumed constant costume to hide his identity. We must also remember that it was he who threatened to sue Watson for libel when "The Adventure of the Final Problem" was going to be published. However, the engineer James Moriarty managed to pass himself off as one of his elder brothers; why not the other? Obviously wanting to convince the world that it was, in fact, the original professor who met his untimely demise at the Falls, he assumed the role of the real victim, Colonel Moriarty (whom he knew was dead) and met Watson once. He had no real intention of suing him, he simply did it so that Watson would mention to his readers that the colonel was still alive, defusing any theory that it had been the colonel who gave his life in Switzerland (and the time, they had no idea that either Holmes or Moriarty was still alive) and convincing them that it must have, indeed, been the first professor who was in that notorious ice block. But now, perhaps the truth will finally been un-veiled and another of Professor Moriarty’s schemes will be thwarted. [9]

NOTE: If you have any arguments against my theory or any evidence to back it up which I have missed, feel free to e-mail me and you will receive mention in my article. (To those in the former category: I will attempt to counter your arguments in the article. See if you can stump me!)

[1] See "The Adventure of the Final Problem" and "The Adventure of the Empty House", written by Watson and edited by Doyle.

[2] See "The Return of Moriarty" and "The Revenge of Moriarty" by John E. Gardner. (Note: These are highly fictionalized accounts, but the bare, skeletal details are accurate.)

[3] See "The Star of India" by Dr. John H. Watson, edited by Carole Bugge.

[4] See the upcoming article "The Bloated Idiots: The Fat Men of the Gut Family".

[5] See the 1976 Gene Wilder film "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother" and the novelization by Gilbert Pearlman. (Note: Although Wilder and Pearlman made the story into a comedic farce the case details and characters are fairly accurate.)

[6] How did Fenwick know where the frozen body was? He was a descendant of Sir George Fenwick, who was the victim of Professor Moriarty’s last scheme before Holmes ruined his career. Moriarty had hired a seductive hypnotist to put men in trances, so that they could be convinced that they had committed murders during their trance. Moriarty, using the evidence, would black-mail them. The case was recounted in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce film "The Woman in Green", and we know that its conclusion occurred at the opening of "The Final Problem" because we see the Holmes-Moriarty confrontation at Baker Street in it. George’s daughter, Maude Fenwick, had an illegitimate son, to whom she explained the case details, and it was passed on from generation to generation until reaching Martin Fenwick, who used his scientific abilities to locate the corpse and clone it.

[7] See the DIC animated series "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century".

[8] It’s true that, at a hundred years old and a wheel-chair-bound lunatic, Moriarty did claim that Holmes threw him off the Reichenbach Falls, where he sustained the injuries that paralyzed him. However, he was shown walking about after the Great Hiatus, and since he was clearly insane he perhaps believed that he had, in fact, lost his ability to walk in Switzerland. (The nurse who witnessed his death in an asylum sent a letter to Robert Bloch about it, and he published it as "The Dynamics of an Asteroid" in 1953. It is found in the Marvin Kaye collection "The Game is Afoot".) So where did he become paralyzed and lose his mind? In 1900, when he was finally captured by Holmes but escaped the gallows. Re-using his hypnotizing plot (chronicled in "The Woman in Green", see [6]), he was thwarted yet again by the Great Detective and was caught in a driver-less carriage which ran into the Thames, which terrified him, apparently until he was perpetually hysterical. His body was never discovered, so perhaps he swam to safety, or was discovered floating by a bystander, to whom he gave a false name in order to remain out of Scotland Yard’s grasp. This event was chronicled 90 years later in the TV movie "Hands of a Murderer", which aired in England as "Sherlock Holmes and the Prince of Crime".

[9] For an excellent resource of information on the Moriartys (including what scant little we know of the colonel), read Win Eckert’s great article "The Malevolent Moriartys, or, Whose Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?".

All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Brett Fawcett. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.

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Professor Moriarty and the British Secret Service

by Brett Fawcett

The year was 1876, and Queen Victoria was under increasing scrutiny from her society as the threat of foreign war heightened. She established "what, for want of better word, might be called her own ‘intelligence organisation’", based on the work of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Walsingham. However, in order to do so she would need to establish a resourceful, brilliant, and patriotic head of this system of intelligence agents. After some research, the choice seemed plain: Mycroft Holmes, whose younger brother, consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, deemed more intelligent than himself. Indeed, the previous year Mycroft had shown his usefulness when he, Sherlock, and the latter’s best friend, Victor Trevor, had managed to thwart a plan to overthrow the American government and replace it with the Confederation Government, controlled by the British. [1] Mycroft’s deft skill with paperwork and deduction made him a perfect choice for this position. However, they still had much to construct. Mycroft had spent the majority of his life in an office in Whitehall, and no government agent had any connections that would give the "British Intelligence" an edge over other governments. They were, initially, little more than another section of the government. However, Mycroft had envisioned it as being a vast, world-wide collection of spies with several different sections in itself. However, how could they achieve that?

Hoping to help establish several connections and obtain agents, Mycroft established a very eccentric, upper-class club on Pall Mall called the Diogenes Club, where speaking was prohibited save in special rooms. Secret meetings could be conducted there and connections could be made. Unfortunately, although they did establish relationships with several officials and carry out several meetings unattended, they only managed to develop a large operation of agents with nothing of interest to accomplish, as most of the club members were too refined to gain access to shady, underworld dealings, and no-one had any experience in espionage. The organisation was getting nowhere, until Mycroft determined that in order to fulfill the Queen’s expectations, they would need an empire which had already established, one that was exactly as Her Majesty envisioned: One with agents performing missions across the globe, a very secretive one whose sheer size was beyond any of its employees, and one with a single head. The head was an incredibly intelligent man with amazing mathematical ability, a planning, analytical mind, and a reputation among the streets of London that the British Government could never hope to achieve, a true godfather. The man, of course, was Professor James Moriarty, arch-enemy of Sherlock and the author of such treatises as "The Dynamics of an Asteroid". He had a naturally commanding and charismatic demeanor from his period as Captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus [2], and a burning hatred of the peers who had disowned him. He was the stump of a tree, and his agency was the roots, spreading across the world and draining it’s resources. His success in developing this underworld company could easily be attributed to his having no nobility of any sort, allowing him easy passageway throughout the streets, unlike the members of the Diogenes Club. But how would they get him to use this incredible criminal empire for their uses?

There was only one thinkable way. A method Moriarty himself was fond of: Blackmail.

Using his sleuthing abilities to their highest degree, he set out to prove that Moriarty was, in fact, "the organizer of half that is evil and all that is undetected in this great city", to say nothing of the world. Using Her Majesty’s annals, the records of Scotland Yard, and his and Sherlock’s connections, he probably spent years tracking Moriarty down in ways Sherlock never could, because he had government researchers as assistants. Even then, it proved remarkably difficult to obtain enough solid evidence against the professor, so it took some time for the confrontation to arrive. In that un-determined amount of time Moriarty’s gang grew more and more powerful and was constantly seeming more useful as they learned new tricks and accepted new members. The self-made success, Moriarty, was also controlling bars, brothels, opium dens, music halls, and restaurants, and had men constantly infiltrating foreign operations, as well as serving as double-agents. He seldom let a double-agent into his own camp, however, making him all the more invaluable as a leader. And, after an un-determined period of time, he had enough solid information to present with Moriarty at the Diogenes Club. Mycroft told the Professor that he would have him arrested and his agency dissolved, unless he helped them establish a Secret Service as large and elaborate as his own, only on the side of the law. He was to help them find agents, train the ones they had, help them make it a world-wide operation, and, to some extent, control them. He would also have to use his own organisation to further the BSS’ missions. If he agreed, he would be allowed to continue his own criminal activities alongside his government ones without threat from the Government, although no attempt would be made to prevent Scotland Yard or Sherlock Holmes from thwarting his plans or apprehending his men. Very reluctantly (and very fatefully), he agreed.

Moriarty taught the agents fighting abilities (just as he had taught them to Sherlock in boarding school [3] such as fencing, kick-boxing, and karate, how to decipher codes and how to write them, how to visually fool guards, how to disguise themselves, and how to wield weaponry. He also taught them all the tricks he had learned to help establish connections throughout the Continent and how to strike terror into the hearts of enemies. Being fair, he donated a quarter of his income to the BSS and taught them some secret passwords to convents and taverns so that they could pass more easily throughout them. The BSS got a good head start with Moriarty’s help and probably would never have achieved what they are today without him. Holding up his end of the bargain Mycroft destroyed the hard-earned evidence and left Moriarty to his illegal activities, including the John Clay robbery [4], the subsequent theft of the Bank of England plates, and the theft of the Conk-Singleton papers [5]. Many of these schemes were thwarted by an unwitting Sherlock, and often Moriarty would plead with Mycroft to grant him his brother’s life. He was never more infuriated than 1888, when Sherlock Holmes solved his most famous case that never found its way into the public eye. Prince Albert Victor Christian "Eddy" Edward had an illegitimate son with Annie Crook, a prostitute from the West End of London. The dull-witted prince’s reputation was in jeopardy as it was, and a scandal like that would prove most destructive. The BSS learned that several other whores in the district of Whitechapel knew about the child, and it was obviously necessary to eliminate them so as to keep the secret safe, and the only person who could learn exactly who they were and rid the world of them was, yet again, only Moriarty. Although he did manage to kill all the witnesses (and those who were suspected of knowing), Holmes still managed to solve the cases and prevent any more murders, although there were still suspects. Moriarty did take delight in the fact that Holmes was powerless to alert the public. [6]

However, even the Whitechapel murders were not Moriarty’s crowning (or most famous) achievement. That came in 1891, when he was forced to forge an alliance with his most hated enemy. Germans spies were multiplying rapidly, and a plot was being formulated. Clues as to what it was had leaked out, but incredible mathematical skill was required to link them, much less make anything of their plot. Naturally, Moriarty’s services were summoned again. However, although he did piece together some bits of the elaborate arithmetic puzzle he was still baffled as to their relevance or meaning. They knew that the Germans were communicating somehow from across the world, and were conveying the details of a scheme for war, no doubt related to the tense and on-going Great Game (one of the principal reasons the BSS was established at all). In order to gain more information (although initially not intending to dig too deep), Moriarty persuaded one of his former upper-class associates, Benjamin Barnett, as well as his wife, Cecily Perrine-Barnett, to do some traveling in Vienna, using their authority to learn as much related to the Game as possible, ostensibly on a vacation. It was there that they encountered Charles Summerdane, whose father was an agent of the British Secret Service stationed in Europe. On their trip, however, they accidentally stumbled right into the thick of a conspiracy involving the assassination of the Prince and Princess of Rumelia. Fortunately, they managed to save his life; unfortunately, this resulted in the capture of the Barnetts by the would-be assassins (who, ironically, appear to have no connection with them), as well as Summerdane’s apprehension by the police, falsely accused for the murders of both a duke and his beau. Not only was Moriarty pulled into the thick of the scheme, as he was the one responsible for the Barnetts' presence there, but Mycroft persuaded his brother and his loyal companion, Doctor John Hamish Watson, to head for the continent as well, apparently trying to locate the same secrets Moriarty was endeavouring to learn but secretly there to assist him from behind the scenes. It appears that Moriarty was fooled and fully believed that their shaky alliance formed in Europe was un-planned. [7] However, before they left England, Watson and Mycroft made arrangements to see the legendary psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, hoping to cure Sherlock of his drug habit. After the Great Game incident, they did visit Freud and Watson got a brief but fascinating look into Holmes’ past. Moriarty and Holmes, respectively, returned to England, but for all his experience gained he was none the wiser related to the German spy enigma. They determined it would be best if Moriarty himself went to collect the information and decipher it. However, Moriarty was not accustomed to performing espionage missions himself, as he usually sent others to do his work; he would need an experienced travelling companion with equal intellect. It appeared only one reluctant person was qualified: Sherlock Holmes, the man with whom Moriarty had been "forced to work with by circumstance". Many arrangements would have to be made for the mission (and alliance) to be successful. Both Holmes and Moriarty would have to forge their deaths and make it so everyone they knew sincerely believed they were dead, including Watson and Moriarty’s crime ring. It would be best, they decided, if the two appeared to have killed each other: Criminals would become lazier, crime lords competing against Moriarty would become more prominent and thus easier to out-smart, and Scotland Yard would no doubt increase the quality of their investigations. There were, of course, disadvantages. For example, Moriarty had arranged that Colonel Moran, his right-hand lieutenant, would always be following and guarding him from afar whenever he went into a dangerous personal mission. (Moran, of course, was unaware of his employer’s double life as head of the BSS.) As well, it pained Holmes to play his dear friend Watson like this. Also to be taken into account was Moriarty’s vast criminal kingdom, which was great only because it was organized: Without a head, it would separate and cause great trouble. It was determined that a new head would have to be appointed, and that he would also need to assume the role as head of the BSS. One person was qualified for it, someone almost as intelligent as the Professor and with perhaps as much sophistication and charm. Naturally, this person was also a Wold Newton family member, and was also a Moriarty family member. It was the Professor’s insanely jealous younger brother, also named James Moriarty. Although his intelligence was almost equal to his brother’s, he had been working as a station master in Western England (as mentioned by Holmes in "The Valley of Fear"). The younger James’ appearance was strikingly different from that of the Professor, with the exception of his oscillating, reptilian head. According to bodyguard, Albert William Spear, he "was not unusually tall, around five feet ten inches", "not of bulky build, but you would call him slim rather than thin", his "eyes were bright, far from being sunken", whose "head was topped by a generous mane of well-barbered hair, graying at the temples in a distinguished fashion" and whose "complexion was certainly not pale; rather it was that of a man who has spent a generous amount of time in the sun, not deeply browned, but certainly tanned" (no doubt from his work as an engineer). Another difference from his elder brother is that, despite the shifting head, he was still an expert at disguise who was particularly skilled at passing himself off as obese. There had been some bad blood between the two brothers since their childhood, but young James was summoned to the Diogenes Club and the proposition was made. Moriarty eagerly accepted the role, and further preparations were made. The aftermath of those preparations are common knowledge to the world thanks to Watson and his literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle.

There were two problems, however, both people. One was Moriarty’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Moran, who would serve as his bodyguard wherever he went. He would doubtless be witnessing the meeting between Holmes and Moriarty and shoot them both with an air-gun. There was enough motive: Moran had been disgruntled against Holmes since their first meeting in 1873 in Dublin [9], and he probably believed that if Moriarty died, he would take over as head of his empire (not knowing that his younger brother had already filled that slot). The other was Moriarty’s elder brother, the oldest of the three James Moriarty’s, the colonel. He was a problem because Moriarty’s position had to be lost and he would have to abandon his seat at the head of his organisation. To do so, he would have to destroy all records of his previous criminal activities. Most people with power who knew of this were dead, but there was one glaring exception, and that was the colonel, who had assisted his brother on the Nautilus. However, Mycroft and Moriarty’s combined brilliance easily thought of a solution. It would cost the Professor his elder brother, but although he was attempting to "go straight" he was still callous and wasn’t above putting power above of human beings. The plan was that the colonel was to attack Holmes in Switzerland (in Moran’s view) and Holmes was to kill him. This killed two birds with one stone for several reasons. First of all, it would ensure that Holmes was physically tuned, as he would need to be in the upcoming mission. Further, it would not only benefit Moriarty, but the entire government, as they needed to eliminate all nobilities who knew of Moriarty’s history who were not working for the BSS. Thirdly, the colonel bore enough of a resemblance to his brother that from a distance Moran could easily make the desired mistake. Finally, it was also decided that if the mission did end before either of their death’s Holmes would be the one who returned to society while Moriarty would remain dead in the public eyes, and if the corpse should somehow be discovered, in all likelihood the public would make the same mistake they hoped Moran would (although the discovery of his body was unlikely). And so, the following steps were carried out: Holmes set fire to his own rooms at 221B Baker Street, but, in case he would be inclined to return, he extinguished it before it could accomplish significant damage. Holmes went on a period of slight fasting, becoming thinner and paler so as to look like he was tense and nervous. Moriarty told his men to take special care to hide from the law, as he wanted Scotland Yard to believe that Holmes had captured them all, and explained that he was going off to kill Holmes in the continent and would be returning. Holmes went to visit Watson, and Moriarty sent an agent (whom Holmes was expecting) to attack Holmes with a bludgeon. Of course, Holmes was anticipating the rough, so he was able to subdue him and turn him over to the police, to further convince them that Holmes and Moriarty were still at each other’s throats; to make it seem authentic, Holmes allowed the agent to burst some of his knuckles, which he showed to Watson. At this point, all was ready, and Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and Moran (separately, in respective pairs) left England by train, and on the way to Switzerland both the masterminds managed to convince their travelling companions that they were attempting to out-wit the other, to the point where Holmes forced Watson to send their luggage to France by train. They arrived at the Reichenbach Falls, where arrangements had already been made with a hotel manager by the name of Steiler for Holmes and Watson to stay in one of his rooms. Moriarty sent Moran up to a mountain to watch Holmes from afar, claiming that where Holmes would tread was a good estimate, and that he was to shoot him once he was alone, unless the possibility was unlikely. Holmes and Watson went up to the Falls, well within Moran’s view, and Watson returned to the hotel when he read a note written by Steiler (who later denied it). Moran was preparing to shoot Holmes (who was intending to go on to his meeting place, where he and Moriarty were to rendezvous) when suddenly the colonel arrived. He had been told by his brother that the man he would see was a traitor to England and an enemy of the British Army, and that he had a hatred and bias against all it’s veterans. Naturally, the Moriarty temper kicked in and he attacked Holmes for all he was worth. Startled but still in tune, Holmes had a brief fight with the colonel, which was difficult, even for Holmes, but still successful in every respect. Colonel James Moriarty drowned in the Reichenbach Falls, Moran was deceived, and the rest was as Holmes described it: He climbed up the mountain, avoiding Moriarty’s rocks, and eventually encountered Moriarty. They proceeded to leave for Germany, where they deciphered the code and managed to prevent the outbreak of a world war. However, near the end of the adventure, for fear related to Moriarty’s loyalty, Mycroft had concluded that the only way to secure England’s safety was to have the Professor executed. Holmes protested and managed to convince Mycroft that Moriarty still had his uses. He never learned until late after the affair that Holmes had saved his life, but when he did a mutual respect for Holmes grew inside Moriarty. [10] After the German matter went into other hands, Moriarty received a new mission Holmes inspired in Mycroft to assign.

While Holmes was travelling and Moriarty was studying, the junior James (or, as he came to be known, the second Professor Moriarty) was already on a roll. Although he was not allowed to literally assume his elder brother’s role as head of the criminal organisation until Holmes returned in three years, he was already establishing his own crime gang which he intended to merge with the original Moriarty gang once he was allowed to take control of it. Within less than a year of being a crime lord (doubtless a result of Wold Newton genes) Moriarty was already involved in a government scheme where he purloined scrolls from the queen while assisted by Charles Augustus Milverton’s half-brother, Eduardo Gambetti. However intelligent he was, he was still inexperienced, and was bested by Holmes’ hot-tempered younger brother, Sigerson Holmes. He was also excited when he became head of the BSS, and his reaction was very similar to his elder brother’s initial response: He took advantage of his position by committing several crimes and out-smarting the police (Holmes not being available). Also like his elder brother Moriarty eventually matured and began graduating closer to a more law-abiding leader. Assisting him in his rapidly increasing crime ring was the love of his life, whom he met in the 1880’s. That woman was the notorious Katherine Koluchy, former lover of Norman Head and the passionate beau of the second Professor Moriarty. The original Professor was distrusting and almost intimidated by Koluchy, for fear that she might gain enough power to overthrow him, and thus her opinions of him were quite similar. She had already bore the second Professor’s son, Dominick Medina-Moriarty, and was to bear more, who would carry on the notorious family legacy. [Editor's note: The speculation regarding Koluchy, Dominick Medina is derived from Rick Lai's The Secret History of Captain Nemo.] She was the leader of the fear-striking Brotherhood of Seven Kings, and lured several men into it with her beauty, which is probably why the first Professor was nervous about her potential of taking over his organisation-which she had always wanted, and was delighted to now. Their activities in the following three years will be explored more deeply in a further treatise, but we do know where the original Professor was: In India. His flair for impersonating others and hiding things was being put to good use, and his new assignment was to befuddle scholars by cranking out false (or highly fictionalized) documents about Sherlock Holmes’ adventures, as well as his own. They had both accomplished enough for the BSS that research would invariably start, and they needed to throw the researchers as far off course as possible. One of the manuscripts he created was the Maybrick Diary, in which a fictional psychopath named James Maybrick confessed to being Jack the Ripper and proceeded to explain how he committed the murders. Another was discovered by Michael Dibdin and published as "The Last Sherlock Holmes Story", in which Sherlock Holmes WAS Jack the Ripper. One of his greatest works, fooling even Holmes’ grand-nephew, Ellery Queen, was "A Study in Terror". It was an intellectual treat, a trivia book of sorts, but the conclusion the reader arrived at was fictional. Under the guise of developing new criminal activity (which Holmes thwarted), Moriarty was carried out a harmless task which would prove infuriatingly frustrating several years later. It was in India that one of the oddest collaborations of all time occurred: Moriarty and Watson. Moriarty wanted his manuscripts to be fictitious but entertaining, and was secretly very fond of Watson’s stories. He requested for several of Watson’s personal manuscripts, so that he could allow the entertainment to remain intact (for future scholars) but still add enough fiction to confound those doing research. Watson agreed, and as a result many true stories are dismissed as false, among them "The Seven Per Cent Solution" (the fiction being the subplot about Moriarty being a harmless, neurotic innocent). We’ll take a slight detour from the flow of history to examine Moriarty’s pre-Great Hiatus empire.

Although he successfully managed to hide his hidden profession from countless members of his organisation (including, apparently, his right-hand lieutenant, Colonel John Sebastian Moran), there were a few who were aware that their activities were manipulated by the British Government, either deliberately through the Professor or accidentally. Those who did were given code names that were distortions or variants on the name "Mycroft". For example, in "The Valley of Fear", Sherlock Holmes lists his contact within the Moriarty ring as "Porlock". Porlock admitted to Holmes "that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city". Obviously, Moriarty had a way of safely managing to carry his agents throughout the city un-detected. Holmes did manage to bribe him into giving him slight hints of information, probably because of Moriarty’s light pay. However, the Professor did manage to learn of Porlock’s betrayal, and pretended not to suspect anything while he was mailing Holmes a code. However, he did manage to de-cipher it and afterwards had Porlock disposed of. However, Holmes still received (and solved) the code. (This occurred before 1891.) The other agent we know of is James August Winter, an American from Chicago. He had one encounter with Holmes and Watson, and during that encounter he shot the biographer in the thigh, inducing the Great Detective to assault Winter and display one of his few moments of true emotion. Fortunately, since the bullet only grazed Watson, Holmes spared Winter’s life, although he did give him a nasty bump on the head. While in the United States, we know that he shot three men to death, and was released from prison through "political influence". Holmes also said in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" that if one of Moriarty’s agents may be caught, "money is found for his bail or his defense", and he obviously had Mycroft Holmes on his side during Winter’s prosecution. The alias that he used was "Morecroft", but it was not the only one he adapted. He also used very "super-criminal"-esque names, such as Killer Evans and The Face. In 1895, his gunshot murder of Counterfeiter Roger Prescott resulted in six years imprisoned until he was released in 1901 on a "technicality". After his release, he assumed the role of a lawyer named John Garrideb in order to try to Nathan Garrideb (the current owner of Prescott’s former home) away from his house so as to get at some of Prescott’s machinery. However, he made the foolish mistake of consulting Sherlock Holmes, who saw through his plan and thwarted it. Watson and Doyle published the story as "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs".[11]

Supposedly, Winter so convinced himself of the existence of these fictitious family members that he eventually went insane, and was living in a nursing-home in Brixton. This in itself sounds quite implausible, as he had endured the mental training of the BSS and was too realistic, blunt, and hard to be daunted by his own creations who were nothing more than names. Whether Holmes suspected that his insanity was forged or not remains unknown, but he deceived the public into thinking that he was now harmless and under custody. In fact, he never set foot in any institution near Brixton. He had, in fact, adopted another alias, one he had used previously- namely, The Face. While performing espionage work for Moriarty’s personal purposes, he had adapted that name based on his near-flawless ability to adapt a new identity. After his murder of Roger Prescott, he intended to abandon it and perhaps assume a new criminal facade, but was persuaded to as part of one of the government’s experiments, namely cryogenic preservation. They needed him to test the very crude method of preservation (ice block) on one of their agents by luring him into a secret lair where a tentative chamber is contained and entomb him in it. Who would fill this guinea-pig-esque niche? One name immediately came to mind. It was someone Winter (as The Face) had clashed with frequently in the past, to the point that they considered each other arch-enemies. A product of his Edwardian time, with a stiff upper lip and a tendency to be a little too prim at times, making him expendable as the BSS needed tougher and less politically correct agents, but who was still competent enough that they may be inclined to revive him at a later time. The agent in question was the aristocratic Adam de Vere Llewellyn Adamant, sword-fighting gentleman, and Winter didn’t hesitate to comply. The ice block technique seemed to work fine, but unfortunately the cube was lost, and for six decades no-one was sure whether Adamant was alive or dead. We will return to Winter later.

Meanwhile, the second Professor Moriarty and Katherine Koluchy were everything the first Professor feared of the later. They were ambitious, intelligent, intimidating, and almost naturally powerful. Koluchy, finding Norman Head in London, taunted him and attempted to involve him in her further criminal schemes. It failed, and he later chronicled his adventures, which were published by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace in 1899 under the title "The Brotherhood of Seven Kings". (Head, ironically, who the one who accidentally lead Koluchy to meet Moriarty.) However, in 1897, while the second Professor (who had not taken long to become a don) was out "doing business", as it were, the police (perhaps with Holmes’ help) discovered their lair, while Koluchy was present. In the ensuing gunfight, a fire was started, which enabled Koluchy to escape through a secret ventilation duct. She didn’t shield her eyes from the flames, however, and although she escaped it resulted in her complete blindness. However, this did not daunt her criminal mind or power, and she simply adapted the alias of the Blind Spinner and, with her son, Dominick Medina-Moriarty, she continued to dominate over European crime. [Editor's note: Again, see Rick Lai's The Secret History of Captain Nemo.] Unknown to both, however, the second Professor had received new orders from the BSS. It had become apparent to all concerned that Martians were landing on the earth, intending to overthrow it, and Mycroft had developed a clever, if risky, plan that would require several years to prove successful, but if it did the world would be a safer place. Of course, Moriarty would have to deceive his family, but in the long run it would prove necessary. Moriarty convinced Koluchy to establish a cult with him, a cult called The Circle of Life which was convinced that humanity was an inferior species that needed Communist dictating. Naturally, the arrogant Koluchy agreed, and The Circle of Life was born. What was it’s purpose? In time, in time. Sometime near the end of the 19th century, the first Professor Moriarty had completed his mission and returned to London, intending to settle down and live a peaceful life, now that his brother was controlling the BSS and the European criminal empire and he could put his past behind him. Unfortunately, he forgot one thing: The meddlesome Scotland Yard detectives. Having no connection with the BSS, they had no idea that Moriarty had "gone straight", and, as he was acting like a civilian, he was remarkably easy to track down. They immediately arrested him and tried him, but the controversy prevented the BSS from interfering with the trial without public scrutiny. Thus, they had to let him be sentenced to death. Infuriated at his betrayal, Moriarty escaped the gallows in 1900 and vowed to avenge himself. He contacted several of his old agents in the government and arranged and elaborate scheme of revenge involving hypnotism, ancient Indian traditions, and, of course, murder. Mycroft, reacting quickly, immediately re-arranged several files without informing anyone so as to confuse Moriarty; however, in a subtle touch, the Professor kidnapped and drugged his former colleague. However, Sherlock, recognizing aspects of the scheme from an earlier plot of Moriarty’s [12] and managed to thwart his plan. In order to do so, however, he had to forge his own death, and at his funeral he trapped Moriarty. Of course, Moriarty was prepared to turn the tables, and he hand-cuffed Holmes in a cab, where he accompanied him to a river where he intended to dispose of him. On the way, Holmes managed to escape from the cuffs, shoot the driver, and leap from the carriage just as it crashed into the water. Moriarty, however, was too late, and was in hysterics with fear as the cab hit the water [13] -so much so that he suffered amnesia.

Moriarty’s body was never discovered, and Holmes correctly suspected that his adversary had survived. Indeed he had, although he suffered physical and psychological damage. When he was discovered floating, he was paralyzed from the waste down and almost raving. The last things he remembered as he crashed were water and Sherlock Holmes grappling with him. His unstable mind immediately assumed that he was the Moriarty of Reichenbach, and believed that he had just fought with Sherlock Holmes and had been cast into the Falls, but had managed to survive, albeit with the loss of his leg’s use. He also remembered another fictional statement, that Holmes had run his entire organization to the ground. With this in mind, he vowed to take revenge on Holmes and re-build his criminal empire. His rescuer was a German named Siegfried, who harboured contempt for all mankind. He had often admired the stories of the only man Sherlock Holmes considered an equal and was delighted to work with his idol. Siegfried was from an upper-class family and was descended from the founders of Siegfried, Germany, and thus was a valuable ally in re-creating his former criminal kingdom, which, in 36 years, stretched across the globe just as his original empire had. Because he wanted it to be synonymous with terror, Moriarty named it KAOS. He didn’t want people to think he was still alive, so he never actually revealed to the agents of KAOS his real name: Instead, he went by the alias of Mr. Big. Eventually, Siegfried had a son, Konrad, and Moriarty believed that Siegfried could train him to be an apt leader. With this in mind, he retired, still wheelchair-bound, to a home. In the year 1936, a century old, Moriarty began having delusions about fighting with Holmes in Switzerland. He began babbling on to him, ranting and raving about deductions, intelligence, and "The Dynamics of an Asteroid". Despite this, his intelligence remained intact, and he even sent letters to Albert Einstein. Near the anniversary of his birth, however, he began to slip in and out of comas which became increasingly longer and more threatening, until he finally slipped into one which had convinced several doctors that he had died, and no medical attempt was made to save him. [14]  He probably would have died, if it had not been for one man: Basil Exposition. But, again, let’s take a slight detour a couple of decades. In the year 1901, a year after Moriarty’s memory loss, the Second Professor Moriarty and Katherine Koluchy, the Blind Spinner, forged (in more ways than one) an alliance with invading Martians, whom they ostensibly believed were superior beings to humans who deserved to rule the world. In fact, only the cult members themselves believed that statement, and even more deception lay in their leaders. Koluchy wanted to overthrow the Martians from inside after they conquered the world, and although Moriarty agreed with her in private, in secret, he was planning to do so long before they took over Earth. You see, it was part of his new assignment: To rid the world of "alien scum" and prove to the world that they don’t exist. In order to do so, he would have to learn as much about them as he could, and what better way than to infiltrate them through deception? The Martian invasion was supposedly thwarted by Holmes and Watson; however, in reality (and unknown to them) Moriarty was actually sabotaging the mission from inside, enabling the detective duo an easier triumph. Of course, Koluchy never learned of this, and the Martians' defeat supposedly drove Moriarty and Koluchy to devote the rest of their lives to disproving the existence of Martians, out of shame, despite the fact that they only controlled the Circle of Life from afar. In fact, this was just the mission unfolding. [15] What is true is that the cult changed it’s name to Krafthaus and began eradicating traces of alien species. In reality, he was only warming up for his long-run mission.

Sherlock Holmes had also received a new assignment. In 1903, only 49 years of age, he retired from his successful practice in London to live on the Sussex Downs, where he kept bees. This was furthering the previous year’s experiment related to cryogenic preservation. Although the frozen ice technique appeared to work on Adamant it was very un-professional and risky. Recently, new information had come to light: By properly segregating the queen bee, honey could be derived which prevented aging. Holmes’ analytical mind was selected to perform the experiments, while taking occasional breaks to perform an espionage mission (such as the capture of the German spy Von Bork in "His Last Bow"). However, even Holmes was getting older and more weary, and he often longed for the intrigue of fighting crime, which resulted in some lackluster work-that is, until 1915 when he first met Mary Russell. [16] She was a brilliant young American half Holmes’ age, but he still took her on as his apprentice so as to have an equally intelligent mind assisting him. When she grew old enough Holmes also took her on as his bride, and the couple were soon easily able to find the perfect elixir formula. However, not only would a human being be able to survive frozen in it, but one could also consume it and not only stop aging, but, to some extent, reverse it. He shared this formula with Watson, their children, and Mycroft. His mission was successful, to an incredible degree: He had accomplished remarkably more than they had even hoped. Now, the greatest agents of the BSS would serve their country for countless years without growing old, and fearless leaders would be able to govern them for years to come. This formula was shared with the second Professor Moriarty, as well. Of course, Moriarty was believed dead for eleven years now. Supposedly, in the first decade of the 20th century he had been doing everything he could to prove extra-terrestrial existence on Earth as mere fiction, to the point where, in 1908, he had captured a Martian weapon to murder an invader. His conquest was halted, however, by Holmes, Watson, and Professor Challenger, and he had to forge his death to escape. [17] He then adapted the alias of Edward Lumley and his Krafthaus organisation schemes were exposed by politician Edward Leithen in 1910, which caused him to have a heart attack in the middle of the night, killing him. [18] In fact, he was only re-assigned that night, to America. It was there that he established a new organisation made up of men and women who abandoned their entire identities to don a black suit and spend the rest of their lives killing aliens, giving those who witnessed an alien attack amnesia, and generally keeping the world safe. Moriarty was given the alias of Agent Z, and those who worked for the "MIB" (Men in Black) each had their own individual code letter. Many tried for this position, but only the most qualified achieved it. [19] Moriarty, from a distance, controlled (and, in fact, still controls) everything related to extra-terrestrial landing, and is, in secret, the man behind the X-Files. [20] It should be noted that, when it was determined that the MIB would have to devote their entire lives to working for the government, Moriarty suggested that they abduct physically apt children and train them from youth. The idea was turned down, but Moriarty nonetheless kidnapped Holmes’ son, Scott Regis Adler, from his mother, Holmes’ lover, Irene, in 1902, ostensibly (as was usually the case) out of revenge. Fortunately, Holmes and Irene managed to save the child [21], but young Scott harboured deep contempt for his father from then on, believing that he was kidnapped because of his heritage, and at first devoted his life to being Holmes’ exact opposite, and proceeded to adapt the alias of Redlock Regis (a distortion of his father’s name and his own middle name) and travelled for several years. [22]

Back to the first Professor in 1936. The BSS had, at first, been hesitant to pair up men and women in their spy organisations, but the womanizing James Bond had proved that romantic involvement did not daunt a good spy’s ability. However, they decided it would be best if a new section were started for male-female teams, and a proper commanding officer would need to be appointed. Basil Exposition seemed a natural choice. Educated and intelligent but young and liberal, Exposition was cheerful, laid back, and could keep up his friendly demeanor in any situation. He was assigned as temporary head of The Ministry, which employed several odd connections and means of travelling. In response to the increasing threat of KAOS, Exposition started a lower branch of The Ministry called CONTROL (which was not supplied with the Royal Jelly formula). The nursing home where Moriarty had "died" was located near Exposition’s headquarters, and he had been assigned with keeping track of the Professor’s status. Exposition quickly had Moriarty rushed into private hospitals, and he was treated with the greatest doctors available. For years, he was pumped with Royal Jelly, and surgeons operated on him for countless hours and sometimes days on end. He was constantly on life support and was wavering on the line between death and life for many years, but his Wold Newton genetics eventually pulled him through and once he recovered the recovery was remarkably full. Not only had his memory returned, but he could also remember actually losing his memory and his subsequent creation of KAOS. Regretting the past 40 years, he pleaded with Sir Henry Merrivale (the current M) [23] for a redemption by becoming a new head of a branch of the BSS. What is truly ironic is that Moriarty, who originally only controlled the BSS because he was blackmailed, was truly remorseful for his behaviour. In response, Merrivale made him the new co-head of The Ministry, giving him the alias of Mother. However, while glancing over government records, another brilliant idea occurred to him. He made some inquiries and learned that an aging Katherine Koluchy, apparently still using the Blind Spinner identity, was still controlling their old organization, now called THRUSH. Moriarty tracked her down and convinced the aging starlet that he was her old lover. He said that he had adapted the position of the head of The Ministry, and that it was ultimately more satisfying than crime. He asked Koluchy to join him, so that they could live together forever. An aging and weary Koluchy was fooled by his soothing words and voice that was very similar to his brother’s, and agreed. She became the co-commander of The Ministry, given the alias of Father, and was fed copious amounts of Royal Jelly until she was nearly as young and beautiful as before. Ironically, both Mother and Father had a disability: Moriarty was in a wheelchair and Father was blind. They continued like this for 30 years and probably would for many more years if it were not for James Winter.

After freezing Adamant, Winter had become a full-time BSS agent, as his identity was now shattered in the public eye. He had moved to Scotland and discovered his true calling of science experiments, and had proved remarkably good with cloning and weather experiments, so much that he was knighted Sir August DeWynter. However, his experiments were deemed too potentially dangerous, and he resigned from the Service in anger. He proceeded to perform several private experiments which eventually resulted in the perfection of a weather machine, which could control the climate, temperature, and humidity of the world. At first, he privately serviced wealthy customers with the use of his machine through his corporation, Wonderland Weather. Eventually, though, it became powerful enough to control the weather of the entire earth, and he realized that he could now use it to wreak revenge on those who shunned his experiments. He also dug around some files, and to his smug satisfaction, he learned of the BSS’ deception of Katherine Koluchy. Father was informed of this, and they formed a secret alliance against The Ministry. DeWynter formed a small crime gang which used the un-threatening outfits of multi-coloured teddy bears. Father supplied him with inside information, and they conspired against a woman who had succeeded DeWynter, to some extent: Emma Knight, whose husband, a pilot by the name of Peel, had vanished. They made a malevolent clone of her and sent her to wreak havoc, expecting her to be arrested. Two things, however, were not anticipated. One, DeWynter fell in love with Mrs. Peel, and second of all, Emma and John Steed, The Ministry’s top agent, fell in love. Together, they unearthed the conspiracy, killed Koluchy and the clone on a hot-air balloon, destroyed the weather machine, and, according to Steed’s account, killed DeWynter on a metal bridge over a flood. A wild storm was raging, and DeWynter and Steed were in a fierce duel. Steed’s story was depicted in the 1997 film re-enactment, but it was someone inaccurate. According to Steed’s claim, he impaled Sir August, who was then carried by a bolt of lightning up the wall and than dropped into the raging waters. Either Steed did wound DeWynter and mistook it for impaling him in the darkness, or he was merely exaggerating out of pride. Also, instead of being hit by it, a bolt of lightning struck close to DeWynter, startling him and causing him to fall off; again, it is unsure whether Steed was intentionally fabricating that snippet of information. Regardless, DeWynter managed to stay afloat long enough for the floods to drain, and when they did, it became obvious that his reputation was destroyed and the only path he could seek was a life of crime. Collecting what remained of his fortune and crime gang, he resumed the alias of The Face and began to continue his original way of life, claiming that he had been in age suspension for sixty years. For the next three years, he became an incredibly intimidating presence on the streets, and in 1967, after Scott Luthor (using the alias of Dr. Evil) was launched into space, he was considered to take over his organisation. He probably would have, in fact, if construction workers had not happened upon the frozen Adam Adamant and thawed him out. Working with Georgina Jones, he managed to defeat The Face yet again, and he was un-employed and on the run. [24] He remembered a man he had met at a meeting of potential leaders of Dr. Evil’s gang: Konrad Siegfried, who, working under the current Mr. Big (a midget), wanted to combine Luthor’s crime ring with KAOS. He contacted Siegfried and was hired, and worked for KAOS for the next 40 years. It’s possible that he may have held the position of Mr. Big, and may have encountered the legendary Agent 86 of CONTROL. His talents did not diminish with age; in fact, he was skilled enough to infiltrate the Impossible Missions Force, kidnap their current leader, Jim Phelps, and impersonate him. KAOS no doubt would have overthrown the IMF had it not been for Phelps’ successor, Ethan Hunt.

Lengthy as this article is, it only scratches the surface of the potential information. It is based largely on speculations based on the facts at hand, which I have attempted to connect. Moriarty’s "personal journals", for example, were written by his bodyguard, A.B. Spear, who based much of the book’s content on stories which were told to him, such as the involvement of Irene Adler and the meddling of Jack the Ripper in their criminal organisation. However, all the scenes which take place in Moriarty’s hideaway are true, as Spear was a witness to them. These three books were given to John Gardner by Spear’s grandson, and the first two have been published as "The Return of Moriarty" and "The Revenge of Moriarty", the un-published one being tentatively entitled "The Redemption of Moriarty". There are also un-limited possibilities given to us by Sherlock’s discovery of the Royal Jelly formula, which I have taken full advantage of. More information I have unearthed remains to be shared, and shared it shall be in further articles I am currently working on. Please contact me for any further information or queries.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE SEE BRAD MENGEL’S EXCELLENT ARTICLE "KEEPING SECRETS: A SPECULATIVE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE". FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE FAMILIES OF MYCROFT, SHERLOCK, AND MORIARTY, PLEASE SEE BRAD MENGEL’S INCREDIBLY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE "WATCHING THE DETECTIVES: THE FAMILY TREE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES" AND WIN ECKERT’S EQUALLY INFORMATIVE "THE MALEVOLENT MORIARTYS, or, WHO’S GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD WHEN I’M GONE?"

1- See "Enter the Lion: A Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes". It should be noted that Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright were either lying, misled, or assuming that Mycroft had died once they discovered his lost manuscript, when in reality he was still very much alive, thanks to the Royal Jelly formula. It should also be noted that one of the principal agents in Sir Francis’ organisation was Mycroft’s ancestor, Charles Holmes, whom the queen knighted for his outstanding services (see "The Strange Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Hilary Bailey). It’s possible that his heritage may have been another reason Mycroft was given this position.

2- See, among other documents, "The Other Log of Phileas Fogg", by Philip José Farmer.

3- See William S. Baring-Gould’s "Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street" and the 1985 film and novelization "Young Sherlock Holmes" depicting Moriarty teaching young Sherlock. He also served as his tutor (see Michael Kurland’s "The Infernal Device").

4- See the Watson-Conan Doyle story "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League".

5- All of these adventures were turned into comedies, the first being adapted as the 1988 film "Without a Clue" where Holmes’ and Watson’s positions were reversed, the second being turned into a brief play by John Dickson Carr titled "The Adventure of the Conk-Singleton Papers", and the third being turned into a farce by Gene Wilder in the 1975 film "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother". (It should be noted that Moriarty in the last film is depicted as overweight, graying, and a little shorter than medium height, indicating that the second Professor was using his "fat" disguise.) However, if one gets past the humour the case details are fairly accurate in all three satires.

6- I am currently working on two articles related to "Leather Apron". The first, "The Calm Before the Storm", is a more in-depth chronicle of Moriarty’s preparation and execution of the Whitechapel murders. The other, "Spirit of Darkness", recounts the history of the entity responsible for the brutality of Jack the Ripper, whom the USS Enterprise encountered at least twice: Redjac.

7- The events of this adventure were collected and recounted by Michael Kurland (who also unearthed Moriarty adventures such as "The Infernal Device") as "The Great Game". It appears that Kurland was also fooled into thinking that their meeting and alliance was accidental and un-scripted. During the events of this case he encountered Gottfried Kaspar, a member of the illustrious "Gut" family, whose history is recorded in the upcoming article "The Bloated Idiots: The Fat Men of the Gut Family". Barnett was one of several nobles Moriarty knew and persuaded into helping him; another will be revealed in "The Calm Before the Storm".

8- See Win Eckert’s excellent article "The Malevolent Moriartys, or, Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?"

9- See "The Adventure of the Kildare Street Club", by John H. Watson, M.D., edited by Peter Tremayne and featured in Mike Ashley’s anthology "The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures". Moran was disgruntled because a young Holmes had busted Moran for little more than petty theft - a striking contrast to what he would later be guilty of. Tremayne has also discovered several manuscripts about Count Dracula and A. J. Raffles (see Brad Mengel’s excellent "The Incredible Raffles Clan").

10- Holmes later discovered the colonel’s body, which was preserved in ice, and buried it in a cave. The body remained frozen for centuries until Martin Fenwick took a DNA sample from the corpse and cloned it. The clone Moriarty did battle with a recently resurrected Sherlock Holmes in the years 2103-2104 (see my article, "Brotherly Hatred: Moriarty at Reichenbach" and the upcoming "The Cryogenics of a Crime-Solver: The History of the Frozen Sherlock Holmes", as well as the DIC animated series "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century"). Holmes recorded a fairly accurate (as far as I can determine) account of his adventures during the Great Hiatus in his personal jottings, which were discovered by Michael Hardwick and published as "Sherlock Holmes: My Life and Crimes". However, it is obvious that Holmes knew that his scrawlings would someday be published (unless Hardwick edited them), which is why he omitted certain names from his past. Also, although the accounts of his adventures in Germany with Moriarty are relatively accurate he makes a false claim that he was, for the most part, with Moriarty during his mathematical research, when in reality he was only with him in 1893 and 1894. For the first two years, he was doing exploration as a Norwegian named Sigerson, and under that alias he met Irene Adler and fathered John Hamish Adler (Nero Wolfe, Auguste Lupa) and Scott Regis Adler (Redlock Regis, Marko Vukcic) by her. It appears that Irene may also be a member of the BSS, a possibility which will be explored in "Irene Adler and the British Secret Service". Other fiction Holmes invents includes a story where Moran, who is truly the only remaining agent of Moriarty, murders his former employer with his air-gun, as well as a meeting between Holmes and a naive Von Herder (who is not acknowledged as Moriarty’s uncle). One scene which is fairly accurate is that in which Holmes persuades Mycroft to spare Moriarty, but he used two points. One was depicted in the book (the test of the submarines), the other (which is revealed later in this article) is omitted. It should also be noted that it appears Holmes was not lying when he said that Watson’s published account of the incident was as true as the good doctor believed.

11- It appears than Nathan Prescott (who used the alias of Waldron) may have been indirectly working for the BSS and learned of it, as no motive is given for Winter’s murder of him. However, we can be reasonably sure that Winter and Prescott were both agents of Professor Moriarty and that Winter disposed of him after learning he had done something. With all of his notes, why would anyone want him dead? In any event, apparently he was clumsy (a trait which frequently showed up in his career) and was arrested, but eventually Moriarty managed to bail him out (as was usually the case). We must also note that the plot is remarkably similar to a previous plot of Moriarty’s, the John Clay case related to "the red-headed league". Perhaps Moriarty was fond of re-using methods, or perhaps out of criminal ideas. After all, as Holmes said, "Everything comes in circles-even Professor Moriarty."

12- The events of the earlier scheme (pre-Great Hiatus) were depicted in the 1946 Basil Rathbone film "The Woman in Green", although the 40’s setting was fictional. Also, Moriarty actually survived his fall from the high building, although he probably did hit the cobblestone streets, his Wold Newton genes prevented serious damage.

13- See the TV movie "Hands of a Murderer", also known as "Sherlock Holmes and the Prince of Crime".

14- The nurse attending Moriarty sent a letter to horror writer Robert Bloch about Moriarty, which he published as "The Dynamics of an Asteroid". It should be noted that the writer of the letter, like the attending doctors, believed that Moriarty had died.

15- See "The Second War of the Worlds" by George H. Smith.

16- Whether or not Mary was of Wold Newton descent remains to be seen; however, she was closely related to Inspector Russell of Scotland Yard (see the TV series "Orson Welles Tales from the Black Museum") and the twin sisters Erica and Emily Russell, the grand-children of Marshall Matt Dillon and Kitty Russell. Erica was the mother of Frank Cannon (see the TV series "Cannon") and Emily was the mother of twin boys, Jason McCabe (see the TV series "Jake and the Fatman") and Edward McCall (see the TV series "The Equalizer"). McCall was sent to live in Scotland at birth, where he was given the name David Callan (see the TV series "Callan"). McCabe was his sponsor to move to the USA, and he changed his last name to sound more like McCabe when he was employed by The Company (the CIA). See also Tom Kane’s upcoming article "No Mission Too Impossible". Russell recorded her adventures, and they were located and published by Laurie King.

17- See the Eternity Comics mini-series "The Case of the Missing Martian". It should be noted that Sigmund Freud was acknowledged as a acquaintance of Holmes, but their meeting has been dismissed as fiction thanks to the first Professor’s deft fictionalizing of the events of their meeting.

18- Leithen recounted his story to John Buchan, who published it as "The Power-House".

19- For more information on the MIB see the 1997 and 2002 motion pictures, as well as the animated series and the comic books.

20- Further inquiries into Moriarty’s quest to eliminate aliens and convince the world that we are alone will be further explored in my upcoming article "The Voice in the Dessert". It’s obvious that he formed a shaky alliance with other alien beings, as some of their technology has been shared. In 1968, a race of aliens from a dead planet landed on earth which would have posed little threat to his organisation of inter-galactic police had they not been spotted landing by an innocent David Vincent. As it turns out, what initially proved problematic was actually an incredible gain for the MIB.

21- See the 1976 TV-movie "Sherlock Holmes in New York" and novel edited by R.D. Benson.

22- See the novel "The Adamantine Sherlock Holmes" by Alexander Jack, using the pseudonym of Hapi. During his adventures he fathered Avalokiteshvara Melas, son of Devi Melas and grand-son of Mr. Melas, who met Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes in the Watson-Doyle effort "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter". Like his father, Avalokiteshvara was fond of travelling and in Siberia fathered Robert Goren, who became a police detective (see "Law and Order: Criminal Intent"). Eventually, Regis decided to settle down from travelling, particularly after learning his skill of cooking. He adapted the new alias of Marko Vukcic after the name of a painter his father once met (see the short story "The Adventure of the Old Russian Woman" in Marvin Kaye’s anthology "The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes") and opened a restraint. He proceeded to have several children, including the aforementioned Cannon, McCabe, and McCall, as well as Michael Wiseman (see the TV series "Now and Again") and Archie Goodwin. Goodwin was the assistant of his uncle, Nero Wolfe (see Rex Stout’s stories) and was related to the McGee family, including Travis McGee (see the stories by John D. McDonald) and Marybeth McGee, whose marriage to Arthur Conan (not to be confused with the literary agent) resulted in the birth of Mary Conan, who married Robert Sherlock Holmes, grandson of Sherlock (see Cass Lewis’ "Dead Man’s Confession").

23- Sir Henry Merrivale was the nephew of Mycroft Holmes through his aunt Dorothy. Among other Wold Newtonian family members, Sherlock Holmes encountered Merrivale in "The Adventure of the Peerless Peer". Another nephew whom Mycroft employed and was possibly a commanding officer was Bancroft Pons (see Lyndon Parker’s "Solar Pons" stories published by August Derleth and Basil Cooper), and the descendants of Mycroft’s nephew, Fetlock Jones, among them David Jones (who was employed by The United Nations Department of Experiment and Research Systems Established at Atlantis), Colonel Jones (who became invisible after an accident), his brother, Thaddeus Jones (both the sons of Samuel Jones), and his daughter, Georgina Jones. The heads of the BSS have tended to have names with the letter M (Moriarty, Mycroft, Merrivale, his successor, Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, his successor, Barbara Mawdsley) and thus that is their code letter.

24- See the TV series "Adam Adamant Lives!" It should be noted that crime lord Margo Kane is a member of the Solomon Kane family line.

All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Brett Fawcett. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.

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Editor's note: From The Original Wold Newton Universe Crossover Chronology, by Win Eckert:

January 1977 - Restin Dane ("The Rook") makes his first trip into the past, using his Time Castle, or  Rook (The Man Whom Time Forgot!, by Bill DuBay and Luis Bermejo, in Eerie  number 82, March 1977). Dane's first quest is a trip to 1836 to attempt to save his great-great-grandfather, Parrish Dane, at the Alamo. Although he fails in this endeavor, he does manage to save a young boy, who turns out to be his great-grandfather, Bishop Dane. On his next trip to the past, Restin Dane once again rescues his great-grandfather, this time in the year 1874, and brings Bishop Dane to live in the present. In the first issue of The Rook, it is revealed that Restin Dane is the grandson of the original Time Traveler (Adam Dane) from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine; in the same issue, the genealogical relationships are revised to make Restin the great-great-grandson of Bishop, rather than the great-grandson. Thus, Bishop Dane is the grandfather of Adam Dane. The Rook series poses some genealogical contradictions with the Wold Newton Family genealogy. For the following discussion, it would be helpful to first refer to Philip José Farmer's The Fabulous Family Tree of Doc Savage, which can be found here.

According to Mr. Farmer, the original Time Traveler was a Wold Newton Family member (Bruce Clarke Wildman). Reviewing the genealogical connections, if Adam Dane and Bruce Clarke Wildman are the same person, this would mean that Bishop Dane and Sir John Clarke Wildman, M.D. (Bruce Clarke Wildman's grandfather), are one and the same. Given Bishop Dane's documented history as an American West gunfighter, this seems unlikely. It is even more unlikely since Sir John Clarke Wildman died in 1843 in an explosion while attempting to transmute lead into gold. It is also difficult to reconcile Bishop Dane's wife with Sir John Clarke Wildman's wife, Mathiette de Pierson, granddaughter of Lord Tiverton. Fortunately, Dennis Hager has conducted further research and cleared up these mysteries....

 

The Great Danes

by Dennis Hager

At some point early in human history, alien beings (or some freak accident) produced the first true immortal being. This immortal has been known as Quarb and Evan MacQuarb (Eerie #97) and Clarence Gaffney (L. Sprague De Camp's "The Gnarly Man"). Possibly he was even Vandal Savage (the DC comic villain). Among his first offspring were XauXaz and his two brothers (Philip José Farmer's NINE stories) and possibly the other members of the Nine as well.

[Note: XauXaz and his two brothers may possibly be the three Armstrong brothers chronicled in the Valiant comic series: THE ETERNAL WARRIOR, ARCHER AND ARMSTRONG, and TIMEWALKER. The Armstrongs are more benevolent (or at least kindly) than the Xaz but that may only be the result of the particular writers who have chronicled their stories. Then again, some people change over time.]

Anyway, the point is that Quarb produced offspring and every once in awhile he produced descendents who exhibited usual abilities or extraordinary intelligence. And, like his Xaz offspring, he tended to monitor (and possibly breed) certain bloodlines.

One such group were the Danes. The latest recorded dalliance was with Elisa McDane, the only daughter of widower Murdoch McDane of Lochcarron, Scotland. Passing himself off as a Scot nobleman, Quarb impregnated her in 1764 (Eerie #97). Although she was frightened by his scientific achievements (which were mistaken for sorcery), Elisa ultimately refused his marriage proposal on the grounds of his promiscuity and utter callousness regarding women.

Her only son Deven was born later that year. He married a Lorna (possibly Lorna Doone?) and they moved to Pawcatuck, Connecticut, where they had Parrish in 1792. Parrish Dane, a farmer, migrated to Scarbro, Virginia with his wife Zenobia ——————. She died some point after Bishop Dane was born on January 11, 1822 (again Eerie #97).

Parrish Dane and his young son were both volunteer fighters at the Alamo. Parrish died fighting and young Bishop survived only by the intervention of his great-great-grandson Restin Clarke Wildman (a.k.a. Restin Dane or the Rook) (Eerie #82).

Bishop Dane grew up to be a notorious tracker, bounty-hunter, and mercenary. His prowess with his guns was legendary. He married Amelia —————— who lived in Philadelphia with their son Castle Dane. Bishop kept them there due to his dangerous lifestyle out West but he made infrequent visits home. The last of these was in 1852 when Amelia was gunned down by some of Bishop's enemies (Rook #10).

Broken-hearted and torn with grief, Bishop left his son at an orphanage and rode away, shamed by the knowledge he had inadvertently caused his wife's death. He continued his gunfighting career until he was fatally wounded in 1874 by Gat Hawkins, another time-travelling survivor of the Alamo. He was rescued once again by his descendent Restin (Eerie #82-84) and eventually returned with him to the 1970s, along with two saloon girls, Katherine "Katie" McCall and January Boone.

Although Restin and January initially dated, he wound up with Katie and they had a long romance together. Katie, however, was tormented with the mistaken belief she was barren; and, when confronted with knowledge of Restin's future offspring, she left him and returned to 1874. There she met and married Restin's ancestor Castle who had briefly enjoyed a career as a "robin hood" outlaw known as Kid Castle. They had SEVERAL children including, supposedly, The Time Traveler of H. G. Well's novel (Rook #11).

Well, not quite.

MY theory is that one of their children was Louise Dane better, known as "Weena", the WIFE of Adam Bruce Clarke Wildman (Rook #3). Wildman was a man fascinated by time. By 1892 he had made TWO successive journeys to the far future, the first of which was fictionalized by his friend, Herbert George Wells. Wells, in memory of his friend, chose to let Wildman's name go unmentioned. The others who attended his miraculous return and heard his fantastic adventure were less kind. One of these (possibly the notorious James Filby) gossiped freely and resulted in a notorious scandal for the Wildman clan.

For Adam, the results were inconsequential. By this time he had returned to the far future to help the Eloi stave off the attacks of the Morlocks. But the rest of his family were not so lucky. Alexander Clarke Wildman (Adam's brother), for example, emigrated to the United States, creating a scandal of his own. He married a distant relative of Wilder clan, had three sons and a daughter, and mined for gold up in Canada. He eventually struck it rich but abandoned his family in New York (whether he divorced his wife or not is unknown).

Alexander's children were Almonzo, Royal, and Pearly Boy. His only daughter by his first marriage was Eliza Jane. Almonzo eventually married Laura Ingalls of Walnut Grove. (In the "real" world, their story is retold in the "Little House" books. In Wold Newton Universe, their lives parallel the TV show, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE).

Alexander later married May Renfrew (sister of Mountie Douglas Renfrew) and had one daughter, Patricia. He died in Lester Dent's novel, BRAND OF THE WEREWOLF. Patricia or "Pat" enjoyed a healthy career as an adventuress. She eventually entered into a stormy relationship with James Anthony Caliban whose adventures were chronicled as "Jim Anthony" and who later served as a stand-in for her famous cousin "Doc Savage" when he disappeared in the late 1940s.

(Patricia eventually married another adventurer, Captain Rex Hazzard, cousin of one Johnny Hazard and descended from the Hazards of John Jakes' novels. Their only daughter Patricia Hazzard appears as "Trish Wilde" in Farmer's NINE novels. She had a daughter Pamela by Doc Caliban which she left to be raised by her mother. Pamela's career as an adventuress was briefly documented in DC Comics' DOC SAVAGE series.)

But back to the Danes!!

Adam's family was rocked by the scandal. His wife Weena eventually "passed on" (in Rook #3 that meant passed on into the future to help her husband restart the human race) and their only son Richard was left to be raised by his mother's relatives. They may or may not have legally changed his name to Dane, but the chroniclers of the Dane family (perhaps yielding to lawsuits) never mention any connections to the Wildman line.

Richard Dane, abandoned as a baby by his parents, went grew up to be a brilliant and long-lived diplomat. He served as American ambassador to over a dozen Indonesian nations and was almost 80 when he was killed in the civil war in Cambodia in the 1960s (Rook #3).

His son Restin grew up to be a brilliant inventor, scientist, and adventurer, specializing in both robotics and time travel. As a boy he was fascinated by Wells' novel (never knowing his own connection with the Time Traveler until well into adulthood). His knack for time travel even surprised Quarb who had intended Restin to find and use his grandfather's own plans. ("Once again, I have underestimated the lad's acumen," Quarb mused. "He is one of the few of my progeny who has not been an abysmal disappointment to me.")

Restin initially hoped to meet all of his ancestors but stopped when his first foray failed to save his ancestor Parrish. A second journey did save the life of great-great-grandfather Bishop (actually the second time he saved his life) but the harrowing experience convinced him to confine his adventures to more general past (and future). Hence, he never knew he was sleeping with his own great-grandmother Katie.

After Katie's return to the past, Restin became obsessed with her. He eventually married a Katie look-alike, possibly a clone (it was within his scientific genius) and settled down into politics. The couple had a daughter Coral in early 1990s.

[Here the Rook's history as documented in Rook #7-9 may be blending into the timeline that produced Khan's eugenic wars.]

As the end of the 20th century approached, the world began to reach what Robert Heinlein once called "The Crazy Years," a time of intense war and cultural madness. Fearing for his wife and daughter, Restin relocated them to an emergency outpost on Jupiter's moon Io in 1995.

War War III came and went in 1996. America elected a ruthless war hero, General Alexander Martinson Tavyl (better known as "The Devil"). Tavyl specialized in select breeding, sterilization, and death camps. Dissidents were thrown into incinerators to produce fuel and electricity. The only man who spoke out against him in Congress was the senior senator of Arizona, Restin Dane.

In 2001 Restin and his still-living ancestor Bishop started a minor revolt, attempting to free as many as possible from Tavyl's death camps. The revolt ended in a siege on the Dane Manor where both Restin and Bishop perished. Only one survivor, a boy named William, survived using Restin's time-travel device (paralleling Bishop's own rescue at the Alamo).

In 2011 as her mother lay dying Coral Dane began to look for her father. Not finding him in the "present" she journeyed back to 1981 (Rook #7) and all but shanghaied him. Restin and Bishop arrived in 2011 just as Katie II died (the documented encounter is either a homage or a rip-off to the old Flash Gordon storyline "Zarkov's Daughter" by the late Dan Barry). From there they became entangled in the civil war which resulted in the overthrow of Tavyl (Rook #7-9).

Coral Dane returned to the past with her father and ancestor and had a VERY brief career as an adventurer (Rook #10-14). Since people in the WNU cannot exist simultaneously, she eventually returned to the future before Restin and his wife would procreate. Possibly Coral had more adventures with her adopted brother and potential lover William Dane ("Billy Rook").

As for Restin Dane, his fate is known but the in-between years are still a mystery. The Rook's last documented adventure was in the early 1980s. [The so-called adventure with Vampirella as published by Harris cannot be real as Vampirella (at least the Warren version) met up with the Rook several times, notably in Eerie #95 and #130.]

Like Dr. Who, is the Rook still out there somewhere, immortally young, having wild adventures, and vanquishing evil with his great-great-grandfather by his side?

Only time will tell.

NOTES:

(1) As Castle and Katie had several children, much of the Dane lineage is still unknown.  My only other suggestion, is that one eventually changed his name to DAIN and became the subject of Hammett's novel, THE DAIN CURSE.

(2) If you accept Restin Dane in the Wold Newton Universe, that may incorporate the timelines and characters of the cohesive parts of the Warren Universe. These include Pantha and Fleur and The Spirit (all of whom met up with Vampirella in Vampirella #50), the barbarian warrior Dax (who crossed paths with the Danes in Eerie #120, the damned zombies Spook and Coffin, the alien PI, the Franksteinish monster Child, and the futures of Mac Tavish, Zud Kamish, Shreck, Darklon the Mystic, Exterminators I and II, and Hunters I, II, and possibly III.

An elderly Shreck (who battled radiation-spawned werewolves) showed up in the original Hunter storyline (Eerie #52-57). The last of the Exterminator robots (Eerie #60, 63, and #64) was introduced in the Hunter II series (Eerie #67-68 and #70-73), and a time-traveling Darklon the Mystic (Eerie #76, 79-80, 84, and 100) aided Hunter in Eerie #121 (which also revealed Darklon himself was a descendent of Hunter). It is also rumored that the mutations of Hunter's time period began not with the generation of Shreck but with Eerie's Hyde-25 or "Jackass" storyline (though I cannot readily find the specific reference anymore). Space adventurer Zud Kamish, a contemporary of Darklon, occasionally made references to another adventurer, Mac Tavish.

The big tie-in, though, is Eerie #130 where an old enemy of Vampirella recruited an army of time-lost characters to battle her, Pantha, Van Helsing, and the Danes. The army consisted of Shreck, Child, Exterminator I, Hunter I, and Dax. Briefly appearing as well were Coffin, Spook, Mac Tavish, Hunter II, and Darklon. The instrument to break the bonds of time was a necklace containing the essence of another character, PI, whose species also cameos in the Darklon-Hunter tale in Eerie #121.

I leave it to far more scholarly minds to work out the timelines for all these characters and how their time periods interact with the known Wold Newton Universe.

All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Dennis Hager. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.

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FU MANCHU VS. CTHULHU

by  Rick Lai

          In a series of stories published in Weird Tales,  August Derleth (1909-1971) refashioned the artificial mythology of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) into a framework that has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos.  Lovecraft had created a background for his tales that was based on the premise that various alien races from other planets had colonized Earth before the evolution of human beings.   Eventually, these alien masters of Earth went into a state of hibernation, but legends of them persisted among various human cults that worshipped these primordial beings as gods.   Most prominent of these deified extra-terrestrials was Cthulhu, a giant sea creature that was lying in a sort of suspended animation in the depths of the Pacific.  The ultimate horror suggested in Lovecraft's writings is that these ancient beings would re-emerge to devour mankind.   While Lovecraft described various conflicting rivalries and alliances between his different alien life forms, Derleth imposed a system of classification that placed Cthulhu and most of Lovecraft's creations into a huge alliance of evil.   To act as a counterweight to these evil entities, Derleth created the Elder Gods, a group of apparently benevolent beings from the Orion constellation.    These Elder Gods were credited with exiling Cthulhu and his allies to Earth and other planets.  Various human beings became pawns in the struggle between the Elder Gods and Cthulhu.   If you read very carefully two of Derleth's stories, “Something in Wood” and “The Lair of the Star-Spawn,” you will find hints that Dr. Fu Manchu, the malevolent master criminal created by Sax Rohmer (1883-1959),  played a role in this cosmic struggle.

          Derleth was clearly fond of Fu Manchu.   In a series of short stories about Solar Pons, a fictional detective whose adventures were set in the 1920's and 1930's, Derleth had Fu Manchu make three appearances.  The stories featuring Rohmer's creation were "The Adventure of the Camberwell Beauty" from The Return of Solar Pons (Mycroft and Moran, 1958),  "The Adventure of the Praed Street Irregulars" from The Reminiscences of Solar Pons (Mycroft and Moran, 1961),  and "The Adventure of the Seven Sisters" from The Chronicles of Solar Pons  (Mycroft and Moran,  1973).

          One of Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories was "Something in Wood" (Weird Tales, March 1948), a tale that was later reprinted in The Mask of Cthulhu (Arkham House, 1958).   The plot of this story need not concern us, but one of the characters did make reference to these unusual happenings:

          "I could tell you things---about what happened in Innsmouth when the government took over that time in 1928 and all those explosions took place out at Devil Reef; about what happened in Limehouse, London, back in 1911; about the disappearance of Professor Shrewsbury over in Arkham not so many years ago---There are still pockets of secret worship right here in Massachusetts, I know, and they are all over the world."  

           The  Innsmouth reference tied into one of Lovecraft's most famous supernatural tales, "The Shadow over Innsmouth," which was first published as a slim book in 1936 by Visionary Press, and Professor Shrewsbury's disappearance was explained in Derleth's "The House on Curwen Street" (first published as “The Trail of Cthulhu” in Weird Tales, March 1944), but the Limehouse reference is rather curious because that district of London was frequently the headquarters of Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu.  Neither Lovecraft nor Derleth set any of their other stories in Limehouse.  Of course, there were other  writers Weird Tales writers  who either contributed to the Mythos, or had their own myth-patterns subsumed into the Mythos by Lovecraft or Derleth.    Of those writers, only Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) utilized Limehouse as a setting.   Howard's Skull-Face (serialized in Weird Tales  during October, November and December, 1929) featured an evil genius, Kathulos, who was clearly inspired by  Fu Manchu.   Like Rohmer's creation, Kathulos made his criminal base in Limehouse.   The similarity between the names Kathulos and Cthulhu was noted by Lovecraft and Howard in their correspondence.   As a result, the name Kathulos was briefly mentioned into two Mythos stories, Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in the Darkness" (Weird Tales, August 1931) and Howard's own "Dig Me No Grave"  (Weird Tales, February 1937).

          Despite a peripheral connection between the Cthulhu Mythos and Howard's Limehouse denizen, the 1911 reference in Derleth's "Something in Wood" can’t apply to Skull-Face.    The activates of Kathulos  clearly transpired in the 1920's.  The hero of Skull-Face, Stephen Costigan, was an American veteran of World War I who had been residing in England for some years after the war concluded.

          Derleth did have another Limehouse reference in the previously cited “The House on Curwen Street.”   The story briefly mentioned “the London scholar Follexon, who shortly after he announced himself as on the trail of important disclosures relative to certain ancient survivals in the East Indies, was inexplicably drowned in the Thames off Limehouse.”  As pointed out by Joséph Wrzos in his notes for the Derleth collection, In Lovecraft’s Shadow: the Cthulhu Mythos Stories of August Derleth (Mycroft and Moran, 1998), the 1911 reference from “Something in Wood” could be tied into Follexon’s death.  However, Derleth gave no indication of the year when Follexon’s demise occurred.  

          The 1911 reference is rather curious since this would seem to be the year in which the first Fu Manchu book, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), probably transpired.   For the chronological issues raised in Rohmer's series, the reader is advised to consult Cay Van Ash's "A Question of Time" in The Rohmer Review  #17 (August 1977).   Although multiple misdeeds were committed in Limehouse in the course of  The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,  none of them would seem to have any bearing on the Mythos.   If the reference in Derleth's "Something in Wood" was intended to connect Fu Manchu to the Mythos, then there must have been some unrecorded activities involving the criminal mastermind in Limehouse during 1911.

          This whole question of a possible connection between Fu Manchu and Cthulhu becomes even more complicated when an examination is made of  "The Lair of the Star-Spawn" (Weird Tales,  August 1932), a story, which Derleth wrote with Mark Schorer (1908-1977).   The story has been reprinted in a collection of all the Derleth-Schorer collaborations, Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People (Arkham House, 1966), and in Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (Fedogan and Bremer, 1992), an anthology edited by Robert M.  Price. The story also can be found inside In Lovecraft’s Shadow: the Cthulhu Mythos Stories of August Derleth. "The Lair of the Star-Spawn" featured a character, Dr. Fo-Lan, who was heavily influenced by Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu.    

          "The Lair of the Star-Spawn" supposedly transpired "almost three decades ago."   Since Derleth and Schroer wrote this story in the summer of 1931, it would seem to be set around 1902.  The story's narrator was Eric Marsh, the sole survivor of an American expedition to Burma.  All the other members of the expedition were massacred by the Tcho-Tcho people, a dwarfish race that lived in the interior of Burma. Marsh found himself a prisoner in Alaozar, the lost city of the Tcho-Tcho people.  There Marsh discovered a mysterious Oriental who claimed to be a captive in Alaozar.   The man was apparently Chinese. He was slightly over six feet tall and "already well past middle-age."  He wore a black gown and skull-cap.   This man gave Marsh the impression of being a doctor.    The following exchange occurred between Marsh and the other man:

          "....'Doctor,'  I said, 'you remind me of a certain dead man.'

           His eyes gazed kindly at me; then he looked away, closing his eyes dreamily.  "I had not hope that anyone might remember," he murmured.  'Yet....of whom do I remind you, Eric Marsh?'

          'Of Doctor Fo-Lan, who was murdered at his home in Peiping a few years ago.'    

          He nodded almost imperceptibly.   'Doctor Fo-Lan was not murdered, Eric Marsh.  His brother was left there in his stead, but he was kidnapped and taken from the world.  I am Doctor Fo-Lan.'"       

          Doctor Fo-Lan was apparently a world-renowned scholar.   He claimed to have been kidnapped by the Tcho-Tcho people three years earlier.   He had allegedly been forced to help the denizens of Alaozar search in the caverns of the city for Lloigor and Zhar,  extra-terrestrial beings worshipped by the Tcho-Tcho people as gods.  Lloigor and Zhar, tentacled monstrosities also known as the Twin Obscenities, were allies of Cthulhu.   Together with various subservient alien beings,   Lloigor and Zhar had been imprisoned by the Elder Gods beneath Alaozar eons ago.  The Tcho-Tcho people had been seeking for centuries to unleash Lloigor and Zhar on mankind.  

          Through telepathy, Doctor Fo-Lan was able to contact the Elder Gods.  When the Tcho-Tcho people succeeded in releasing Lloigor, Zhar and their alien hordes, the Elder Gods arrived to smite them.  Fo-Lan escaped with Marsh as an incredible cosmic battle ensured. 

          Ten days later, an "aviator" flew from India over the site of the battle in Burma.  One would assume that the aviator was using a balloon since the story transpired slightly before the invention of the airplane.   He observed the ruins of a city and the rotting corpses of gigantic green-black creatures unknown to science.  These remains apparently belonged to the alien minions of Lloigor and Zhar.  The Twin Obscenities were not destroyed because they are mentioned as dwelling on the star Arcturus in two later stories by Derleth,  "The Sandwin Compact" (November 1940) and "The Dweller in Darkness" (November 1944).   It could be assumed that the Elder Gods had removed Lloigor and Zhar from Earth and re-imprisoned them on Arcturus.

          Fo-Lan and Marsh arrived in the village of Bangka in the Chinese province of Shan-si.  Although a Tokyo newspaper announced the return of Doctor Fo-Lan to the world with much fanfare, the Asian scholar became a recluse in Bangka.   Eric March returned to the United States where he died in unrecorded circumstances shortly after preparing an account of his awesome experiences in Burma.

          Fo-Lan's description could fit Fu Manchu.   Sax Rohmer's mastermind was the same height, dressed in similar garments, and would have been about the same general age in 1902.  Although numerous illustrators adorn Fu Manchu's face with a mustache, he was as clean-shaven as Fo-Lan in Rohmer's novels.

          We could speculate that Fo-Lan and Fu Manchu were different names utilized by the same character.   In Rohmer's The Mask of Fu Manchu  (1932), a novel whose events were chronologically placed by Cay Van Ash in 1930, Fu Manchu claimed to have visited Burma nearly thirty years ago.  This reference would mean that Fu was in Burma around 1902, the time of the events of "The Lair of the Star-Spawn."   In Burma, Fu Manchu discovered rare orchids that would eventually yield an immortality elixir.  The Tcho-Tcho people seemed to possess some secret of immortality because their leader, E-poh, was reputed to be seven thousand years old (1).   Perhaps the Tcho-Tcho people had utilized the species of orchid that Fu Manchu found in Burma.   Fu Manchu also demonstrated some ability to utilize telepathy for hypnotic purposes in Rohmer's novels.   This ability would not be too different from Fo-Lan's usage of telepathy to contact the Elder Gods.

          There are obstacles to the theory that Fu Manchu and Fo-Lan are the same man.   Fo-Lan had claimed that he was the prisoner of the Tcho-Tcho people for three years.   He would have been residing in Alaozar during 1899-1902.    Fu's persecution of a British missionary in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1916) strongly suggested that the infamous mastermind had participated in the Boxer Rebellion (1900), a violent insurrection by Chinese nationalists against foreigners residing in their country.    Fu Manchu is an impossible name, and the master criminal's chief antagonist, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, noted that the British government had been unable to trace Fu Manchu's origins in 1911 during the events of The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.  Smith would have little difficulty tracing Fu Manchu's antecedents if a Tokyo newspaper had identified him as a Dr. Fo-Lan who had mysteriously reappeared after supposedly being dead for three years.   There were no suggestions in Rohmer's novels that Fu lived for any lengthy period of time in Peiping (Beijing).  It was strongly suggested that he had spent most of his time in the distant Chinese province of Honan.  

          Fo-Lan's story of being held captive for three years also has a large credibility problem.  It seemed highly unlikely that the Tcho-Tcho people could have kidnapped a noted scientist from Peiping and carried him all the way to Burma.  The Tcho-Tcho people displayed an astonishing ignorance of the outside world.   For example, they were ignorant of firearms.  Fo-Lan could have originally gone willingly to Alaozar as an ally of the Tcho-Tcho people, and then turned against them when he learned the true nature of the beings they threatened to summon forth.

          Here is a theory.    In the 1890's, Fu Manchu was based in Honan.  He had a half-brother, Fo-Lan, who lived in Peiping.  The two half-brothers greatly resembled each other. In fact, their family connection was a closely guarded secret (2). In Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, February 1928), it was mentioned that the leaders of the Cthulhu cult were a group of immortal high priests in the mountains of China (3).  In 1899, these priests of Cthulhu asked Fu Manchu to join their order.  At this time, the super-criminal was using another alias than the one by which Nayland Smith would later known him.  Because he was preparing the groundwork for the Boxer Rebellion, Fu refused.   The priests of Cthulhu sent an assassin to murder Fu Manchu, but mistook Fo-Lan for his half-brother and slew him instead.  In 1900, Fu participated in the Boxer Rebellion.   In 1902, Fu made contact with the Tcho-Tcho people. At this time, Fu sought to establish dominion over various ancient cults such as the Thugs of India. The Tcho-Tcho people were vaguely allied with the priests of Cthulhu.  He pretended to be Fo-Lan, and claimed that the assassin had actually slain an unimportant half-brother. As Dr. Fo-Lan, Fu Manchu claimed that he was now willing to serve the cause of Cthulhu.    He entered Alaozar as a prospective ally of the Tcho-Tcho people. His real purpose was to gain control over the Tcho-Tcho people and their cult that worshipped entities from beyond the stars.   He hoped to break the Tcho-Tcho people away from their alliance with the Cthulhu cult and entice them to join the Si-Fan, a confederation of various cults that he had been organizing since the failure of the Boxer  Rebellion.  He also hoped to use the Tcho-Tcho people to avenge himself on the leaders of the Cthulhu cult responsible for his half-brother’s death.  He soon discovered that Lloigor and Zhar were forces that could not be manipulated by any mortal man for personal gain.   Therefore, he concluded  that Alaozar and the Tcho-Tcho people needed to be destroyed.   The tools chosen by Fu Manchu for his plan of destruction were the Elder Gods.    

          Fu Manchu did not fully take Eric Marsh into his confidence.   The American could not be trusted with the true reasons that had brought the sinister savant to Alaozar.  Fu erected a wall of half-truths to disguise his real motives and history.  Besides using his alias of Fo-Lan,  Fu lied to Marsh about the length of his stay in Alaozar, the origins of his dealing with the Tcho-Tcho people, and the true identity of the man slain in his place during 1899.  Under the cover of his Fo-Lan identity, Fu pretended to retire as a recluse.  He soon returned to his nefarious activities around the world.  

          While escaping from Alaozar, Fu Manchu took with him certain orchids.  He believed that these plants were somehow used in an elixir that permitted E-poh to live for seven thousand years.   Around 1929, Fu Manchu would extract from these orchids an elixir for his own usage.

          Eric Marsh died under vague circumstances shortly after returning to the United States.  It is possible that the Cthulhu cult had him murdered as revenge for his role in the defeat of Lloigor and Zhar.    Perhaps the Cthulhu cult also discovered Fu Manchu's presence in Limehouse during 1911.  Recognizing him as the former Fo-Lan,  the cult sought his demise. Maybe this conflict also involved the scholar Follexon.  An unrecorded battle transpired which was the basis for the reference in Derleth's "Something in Wood."   Considering that Fu Manchu was still alive in the 1950's, there can be little doubt who emerged the victor.

          There is another possible participant in the conflict between Fu Manchu and the Tcho-Tcho people.  His name is Dr. Anton Zarnak, an occult detective whose exploits were first chronicled by Lin Carter, and subsequently continued by Robert M. Price, C. J. Henderson, Joséph S. Pulver and other writers.  The adventures of this remarkable investigator can be found in the anthology Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak Supernatural Sleuth (Marietta Publishing, 2002).  In Lin Carter’s “Perchance to Dream,” Zarnak made this utterance: “To quote an old adversary rather imprecisely, I have a doctorate in medicine from Edinburgh, a doctorate in theology from Heidelberg, a doctorate in psychology from Vienna, and a doctorate in metaphysics from Miskatonic; my guests usually address me as Dr. Zarnak.” The “old adversary” was Fu Manchu.   According to The Bride of Fu Manchu (1933),  Fu had doctorates from four universities.  He was also identified as a Doctor of Philosophy as well as a Doctor of Medicine. In Emperor Fu Manchu (1959), three of the universities are identified: Heidelberg, the  Sorbonne and Edinburgh.  Since Fu cited these universities when he felt his skill as a surgeon was challenged by a subordinate, it is likely that he studied medicine and science at all three. The unnamed fourth university must be where he studied philosophy. Although Fu never made a speech like Zarnak’s in Rohmer’s novel, his cinematic counterpart (played by Boris Karloff in the 1932 movie version of The Mask of Fu Manchu) did:  “ I am a Doctor of  Philosophy from Edinburgh, I am a Doctor of Law from Christ College,  I am a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard; my friends have the courtesy to call me Doctor.”  Although the degrees cited in the speech are contradictory to those mentioned in Rohmer’s novels, the real Fu could have uttered a more accurate variation of these remarks that Zarnak overheard.  Zarnak sometimes lived in California, and he could have repeated his knowledge of Fu Manchu to a Hollywood screenwriter.

          In Robert  M. Price’s “Dope War of the Black Tong,” Dr . Zarnak professed that he had once reigned over the Tcho-Tcho people.  In fact, his adoption of the Zarnak name came from an earlier alias of “Zhar-Nak, mouthpiece of Zhar.” Zarnak was a benevolent scholar allied with the Elder Gods.  There can be no doubt that he tried to wean the Tcho-Tcho people away from evil practices by pretending to revere Lloigor and Zhar.  Zarnak was overthrown by E-poh, and consequently forced to flee Burma.

          Since E-poh  was seven thousand years old, and Zarnak’s past is a vast mystery, it is possible that their power struggle happened centuries ago.  On the other hand, Zarnak could have been ruling the Tcho-Tcho people when Fu Manchu stumbled upon them.  Perhaps Fu Manchu helped E-poh overthrow Zarnak only to learn that the Tcho-Tcho chieftan had his own ambitions to release the Great Old Ones.  Did  Fu Manchu and Zarnak attended Heidelberg or Edinburgh together? Did they meet in Limehouse during 1911?  These questions remain unanswered.

NOTES

1. In Lin Carter’s “The Descent into the Abyss: The History of the Sorcerer Haon-Dor.”, a Tcho-Tcho leader named E-poh lived in ancient Hyperborea.  The story can be found in Robert M. Price’s anthology, The Book of Eibon (Chaosium, 2002).  This can’t be the same E-poh since Hyperborea existed anywhere from 10,000 to 750,000 years before Christ.  The Hyperborean E-poh must be an earlier Tcho-Tcho leader with the same name as the ruler encountered by Eric Marsh. 
2. According to Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973, revised in 1975), Fu Manchu (born in 1840) was the illegitimate son of Sir William Clayton and Ling Ju Hai, the green-eyed daughter of a half-Chinese merchant and a Manchurian princess.  William met Ling Ju Hai went he was sent to rescue her father from persecution by the ruler of Annam (modern Vietnam).  My researches have uncovered that Mr. Farmer was misled by Clayton’s memoirs.  In his rescue mission, Clayton enlisted the assistance of Dirk Struan (1798-1841), a Scottish merchant whose life was documented in James Clavell’s Tai-Pan (1966).  Ling Ju Hai slept with both Clayton and Struan, but the father of her son was the latter.  From Stuan, Fu Manchu not only inherited green eyes, but also a strong belief in maintaining one’s word and a vindictive disposition.  Ling Ju Hai lied about the identity of her son’s father in order to protect Struan from her father’s retribution.  Since the father of Ling Ju Hai sent assassins after him, Clayton mistakenly believed that he had impregnated her. Since Struan also fathered a half-Chinese son, Gordon Chen, in Tai-Pan, the real Dr. Fo-Lan must also have been another of the merchant’s illegitimate children.  Fu Manchu, Gordon Chen and Fo-Lan shared the same father, but had different mothers.
3. In Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Bear Bites,” a story included in Nameless Cults (Chaosium, 2001), the cult of Cthulhu were said to be major power in China. The priests of this cult, who were also identified as adherents of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth, were ruled by a Black Lama based in Mongolia.  In “The Black Bear Bites,” an unscrupulous Western adventurer impersonated the Black Lama for his own gain. The genuine Black Lama of Mongolia appeared in Howard’s “The Return of the Sorcerer,” an incomplete story published in Bicentennial Tribute to Robert E. Howard (George. T. Hamilton, 1976) and reprinted in The “New Howard Reader #3 (November 1998). It was speculated by Daniel Harms in the first edition of Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (Chaosium, 1994) that the Chinese priests mentioned by Lovecraft could be the same group as the Kuen-Yuin, the Chinese sorcerers from Robert W. Chambers’ “The Maker of Moons,” a short story published in the 1896 book of the same name.  However, the entry for “Kuen-Yuin” containing such speculation is missing from the second edition of  Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (1998).       

All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Rick Lai. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.

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John Carter: Torn from Phoenician Dreams

Part One: An Examination Into the Theories that John Carter was
Phra the Phoenician and Norman of Torn

by Dennis E. Power and Dr. Peter Coogan

Section 1: An overview of Phra's account

Richard Lupoff initiated our exploration of Phra, although perhaps inadvertently, through his Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, a well researched work on the literary influences of Edgar Rice Burroughs. While researching possible topics for his doctoral dissertation Dr. Coogan began an in-depth study into the literary influences of Edgar Rice Burroughs, intending to delve further into the subject than Lupoff had. In the course of his research Dr. Coogan read The Adventures of Phra the Phoenician because of Lupoff's assertion that Edwin Arnold's Phra the Phoenician directly inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter. One passage in Phra sent a cold chill down his spine as remembered something he had read just a few years prior. While working on a master's degree in Arthurian Literature at the University of Wales in Bangor, he came across a medieval manuscript that translated as The Sleeping Saint of St. Olaf's Monastery. The manuscript described how the Archbishop of Canterbury Baldwin had blessed the bones of an unknown saint in this Monastery, and in a few short years the Saint's body had transformed into uncorrupted flesh and blood. The unknown saint slept from 1190 until he was physically transported to heaven in 1346. Dr. Coogan suddenly realized that the manuscript of the sleeping saint he had read years before had been about Phra!

Re-reading Lupoff's Master of Adventure he was struck by Lupoff's offhand statement, "And Phra the Phoenician is John Carter." This simple statement inspired Dr. Peter Coogan.

He went on a short sabbatical seeking out the schools where Burroughs had attended and seeking access to the Burroughs archive. This access was granted and the trail led to other archives of papers to which the ordinary researcher would not be granted access. Due to Dr. Coogan's grandfather's connection to the wealthy and generous Lamont Cranston, he was given access to various correspondence and allowed to make notes but not to borrow or photocopy. He uncovered the truth of the relationship between Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter and their intermediary M. N. Carter. M. N. Carter proved to be a gold mine of research. He had found his doctoral topic. Yet for unknown reasons this topic was rejected by his doctoral committee and Dr. Coogan was forced to choose another less incendiary yet still controversial topic, which he subsequently pursued at Michigan State University.

The fruits of his research into the career of M. N. Carter did not go unused however and a small part of it was used in the article "John Carter IS Phra the Phoenician."

When I contacted him with some of the information I had made from an exploration of diaries, court records, account books and military records of the Carters of Virginia we agreed to share information. The result is a series of articles on Phra the Phoenician/John Carter and his sometimes astounding influence on history, legend and myth.

In JOHN CARTER IS PHRA THE PHOENICIAN!  Dr. Peter Coogan has made a strong case that John Carter was Phra the Phoenician. In The Arms of Tarzan Philip José Farmer also made the claim that John Carter was Norman of Torn. Dr. Coogan states "This speculation does not contradict Philip José Farmer’s assertion that Carter is Norman of Torn. Phra could have been Norman."(1)

Unfortunately there does seem to be a contradiction with Mr. Farmer's theory that John Carter was Norman of Torn. The crux of at hand is that in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel The Outlaw of Torn, The Outlaw is the actually Richard Plantagenet, son of Henry III, King of England and Eleanor of Provence. In the novel, Richard is stolen away by one of the King's servitors, Sir Jules de Vac a master swordsman, for an imagined insult. He raises the child to be an outlaw and to hate the Plantagenet kings. So the child grows up to be the infamous outlaw Norman of Torn.

In Philip José Farmer's Tarzan Alive, it is postulated that Norman was a natural son of Henry III of England. This is to say he was an illegitimate child of Henry by an unknown woman. The reason Farmer may have proposed this was because historically Richard Plantagenet died at the age of nine and was interred in Westminster Abbey.

Therefore according to Farmer, Norman of Torn's name could have been Richard and he could have been a Plantagenet, but he was probably not the Richard Plantagenet who was child of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence.

The important thing to remember is that Henry III and Eleanor identified Norman of Torn as Richard Plantagenet. So how did they recognize their toddler child who had grown into a large and fearsome warrior? Richard and Norman both bore a lily shaped birthmark. Had there also not been some family resemblance this probably would have been considered an odd coincidence or some sort of enchantment.

In his essay on the Arms of Tarzan, Philip José Farmer also speculated that the Outlaw of Torn was also the man who became known as John Carter of Virginia and Barsoom:

We know that Henry III finally became aware that the famous, or infamous, outlaw was his long-lost son, Richard. But Henry died in 1272, and his son, Edward I, called Long shanks, was, though a very good king for those days, proud, jealous, and suspicious. His younger brother Richard, too popular with the common people, would have been forced to flee on a trumped-up charge of treason (nothing rare in those days). By then Bertrade de Montfort his wife, had died, probably in childbirth or of disease, very common causes of fatality then. Richard would have taken a pseudonym again, that of John Caldwell, landless warrior. In the North of England he met old Baron Grebson. The baron had no male issue, and so, when his daughter fell in love with the stranger knight, he adopted him. This was nothing unusual; you will find similar examples throughout Burke's PEERAGE. The family name became Caldwell-Grebson, though the Caldwell was later dropped. Similar examples of this also abound in Burke.

John Caldwell could not use the same arms as the Outlaw of Torn, of course. So, instead of argent a falcon's wing sable, he used sable a torn or. That he chose the torn showed he could not resist an example of "canting arms," a heraldic pun. One, indeed, that proved as dangerous as might be expected. Edward I heard of the appearance from nowhere of a knight who bore a torn on his shield, and he investigated. The king's men ambushed John Caldwell, and though he slew five of them, he, too, died.

How can we be sure of this?

An obscure book on medieval witchcraft, published in the middle 1600's, describes the case of a knight who was, for reasons unknown to the writer, slain by Edward I's men in a northern county. When his body was laid out to be washed, his left breast was found to bear a violet lily-shaped birthmark. This was thought to be the mark of the devil. But we readers of THE OUTLAW OF TORN will recognize the true identity of the man suspected of witchcraft.

This theory could be wrong, of course. I propose an alternate to consider. You may have noticed the remarkable resemblance between the Outlaw and Tarzan. Both were tall, splendidly built, and extremely powerful men. (Anybody who can drive the point of a broadsword through chain mail into his opponent's heart is strong enough to crack the neck of a bull ape.) Both men had grey eyes. Both wore their hair in bangs across their foreheads. Neither knew the meaning of fear.

But the description of the Outlaw could also apply, except for a few minor points, to John Carter of Mars. What if the Outlaw did not die, as I first speculated, but had somehow defeated the aging process? What if, like Tarzan, he had stumbled across an elixir for immortality? During his wanderings in rural England, he came across a wizard or witch, actually a member of the old faith, who had a recipe for preventing degeneration of the body. If a witch doctor in modern Africa could have such, and give it to Tarzan, then a priest of an outlawed religion in the Middle Ages could give such to the Outlaw of Torn.

Sometime during the following six centuries, the Outlaw suffered amnesia. This was either from a blow on the head (again recalling Tarzan, who suffered amnesia many times from blows on the head) or because loss of memory of early years is an unfortunate by-product of the elixir. Thus, on March 4, 1866, the Outlaw, a long-time resident of Virginia, an admitted victim of amnesia, left a cave in Arizona for the planet Mars. ERB called this man John Carter. Notice the J.C. I suggest that he may have been Richard Plantagenet, Norman of Torn, John Caldwell, and, finally, John Carter.

It is possible that John Caldwell was not killed, that he slew all of Edward's men, who actually numbered six, mangled the face of one tall corpse, and stained a violet lily mark on the corpse's left breast. And, once again, he disappeared into pseudonymity but gained immortality as the Warlord of Mars.

On the other hand we also have Dr. Coogan's theory that Phra the Phoenician was John Carter and may also have been Norman of Torn.

Although they seem exclusive, both theories may actually be correct, although not in all of their particulars.

Dr. Coogan summarizes the career of Phra thus:

Phra is a Phoenician merchant who sails to Britain on a trading mission during Julius Caesar's invasion of the island. Phra joins with the native Britons because he loves a red-haired slave girl, Blodwen, whom he bought from a pirate captain off the coast of Africa and later married, thus joining her tribe, the Veneti. Caesar defeats an alliance of British tribes, taking control of the island. Phra is taken prisoner, and escapes after being interrogated by Caesar. The druid priest, Dhuwallon, takes his uninjured return from capture for treason and denounces him as a spy. He meets his death on a druidic altar, but wakes four hundred years later in an underground cavern where he has evidently been laid to rest. The rest of the novel tells of his repeated 'deaths' and reawakenings at each point of Britain's fall to new invaders—Saxons, Normans, the French, etc. The novel ends in roughly 1586 with Phra writing the story of his life, 'dying friendless and alone.' He has been living in the manor house of Adam Faulkner, a recluse philosopher. When Phra and Faulkner's daughter Elizabeth declare their love for one another to her father, Emanuel the steward brings a silver bowl of wine to toast the loving couple. The jealous Emanuel has poisoned the wine. Elizabeth, Faulkner, and Phra all drink. The father and daughter die quickly, but Phra keeps his strength and chases Emanuel over a cliff to his death. Fading, Phra locks himself and his book in his "secret den," a small cell in a wall of the manor house's turret. There he dies, seeing a vision of his beloved Blodwen. The novel closes with Phra proclaiming, "My princess, my wife, has come near and touched my hand, and at that touch the mantle of life falls from me! Blodwen! I come, I come!"(2)

Although it could be argued that Phra may have been born long before this we also have some textual evidence in Phra the Phoenician that pinpoint that Phra was born around this time. He mentions that on his first voyage as a Phoenician merchant trader his ship was stuffed with bales of purple cloth from his father's vats. So even if he did not recall the particulars of his childhood chances are that if his father was still alive when Phra began voyaging he could not have been very ancient.

How long Phra was a sea-faring trader we can only speculate. He is not certain himself: "On this voyage (or it may be on some others that followed, now merged into the associations of the first) we traded east and west with adventure and success." He recalls sailing to Heliopolis bartering stuffs for gold dust and ivory, at another time he took Trinacrian wine and oranges to Ostia, and then they sailed along the Achaen islands with corn and olives. He recalled running across a ship ravaged by pirates near the Achaen islands and some time later another pirate ship that had been destroyed by a Roman Trireme.

On one voyage his ship put to shore for water, and they discovered a pirate ship already in the inlet. His ship was a large one and the pirates gave Phra and his crew no trouble. The pirates had taken their captives and slaves ashore for an airing out. Phra noted a fiery red headed girl. Entranced, he asked her price. When the pirates named an exorbitant price, Phra's man slipped behind the pirate captain and slipped a noose around his neck. Phra had the pirate captain choked until he reduced the selling price to a reasonable amount.

The girl was Blodwen, the daughter of a chief of a coastal village in Britain. Some raiders had taken her from her village. The raiders had been attacked by pirates, who gave over Blodwen and the other captives to escape with their lives and ship. The pirates had intended to take her to Alexandria. As Phra sailed to Massilia, (modern Marseilles) he learned her tongue. From Massilia they went to Hispania and thence to Britain. Near Britain the ship was caught in a fierce storm and Blodwen offered to guide to them a safe cove.

The safe cove was Blodwen's home village. When Phra and his men landed the roles reverse, and they found that they were Blodwen's captives. Her father had died in the raid in which Blodwen was captured and Blodwen was now the princess. She granted Phra and his men their lives for having returned her home. She also bought Phra's goods and arranged for trade goods to be brought to Phra's ship. This took several months and Phra became her consort.

On the day Phra was prepared to leave his men deserted, stealing his ship and leaving him stranded in Britain. He remained as Blodwen's consort.

For a few years Phra lived among the Britons. He married Blodwen and together they had one child. Phra was present at one of the landings of Caesar in either 55 or 56 BC. Because of a misunderstanding, possibly a willful misunderstanding by Blodwn's kinsmen Dhuwallon, Phra was seen as working with the Romans against Blodwen's people. Offered up as a sacrifice, hewas wounded unto death by a bronze adz to the back of the neck. Phra slept until 408 AD. He awoke in a cavern.(4)

He shortly discovered after awakening that he had slept some three hundred years but quickly adapted to the new era. He became a guardsman for a lady of Romano-British nobility and was present during the withdrawal of Roman legions from Rome in 410.

During a battling retreat with the barbarian Northmen, Phra was betrayed by the Lady Electra for spurning her love. While Phra and his current lady love Numidea were crossing a rapid stream the guide rope was cut, sending Phra and Numidea tumbling into the rapid waters. They were sent cascading down river. Although Phra strove mightily to save themboth, Numidea drowned before he was able to reach a safe landing. Some friendly fisher folk gathered about him. He expired shortly after Numidea had.

Phra next awakened in 1066 and found himself in the hut of a hermit. According to the hermit cleric, Bretwalda Alfred (Alfred the Great, 847-899) had found him insensate in a fisherman's hut. Supposedly Phra had been asleep in this fisherman's hut for generations after having being dragged from the sea by fishermen's nets. Alfred the Great ordered Phra to be taken to Canterbury. According the hermit, Phra had been kept in Canterbury until being moved to his hut just a few months prior to his awakening.

Phra was told that the Saxon invaders had in fact become the goodly rulers of England. Just two days after this awakening in 1066, Phra saw and heard Harold, the current King of England, and Phra had no trouble understanding the King's vernacular speech. A few days later Phra later spoke directly with William the Conqueror and also had no trouble conversing with him. Phra later demonstrated a familiarity with Egyptian mythology and Norse mythology as well as tales from the Eddas, as demonstrated by his citing the dark deities of the Saxons (Mista, Skogula, Zernebock)

At the Battle of Hastings, Phra witnessed the death of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King of Britain. Phra married a Saxon noble woman, Editha, a daughter of Hardicanute, and spent 12 years as a Saxon lord in Voewode. They had two children, a boy and a girl. The Normans began a poll of their subjects, and their brutal method of counting angered Phra. Although he had a fleeting vision of driving out the Norman conquerors and placing Editha on the throne, he realized this smacked of fancy.(5) However his minor rebelliousness led to a Norman host descending upon his holdings. He and his family were forced to flee. They sought refuge inside St. Olaf's Monastery whose abbot was Editha's uncle. The clerics at first refused to admit them. So Phra prepared to meet the oncoming Norman attackers with his sword to give his wife and children time to flee. However in the nick of time, the monks opened the door and admitted Phra and his family. Although not wounded, Phra inexplicably fell into one of his centuries-long naps.

Phra awoke in a chapel in 1346. He had been found as a wrapped mummy placed on a shelf by St. Baldwin and worshipped as a saint. He once again had no trouble understanding the monks as they spoke among themselves. He walked in on a feast while the monks were inebriated and was pleased at the shock he caused. Near the monastery he found a small chapel where a marble statue representing his wife and the two children stood.

Devastated by this discovery, he wandered the countryside, dependent on the charity of others to provide him food and clothing. After wandering aimlessly, or so it would appear, Phra happened upon a particular spot where he found a fortune in jewels scattered in a brook.

Once again Phra made a rapid acculturation to his new surroundings and was able to fit into to this highly structured medieval society as a member of the lesser nobility, using his newfound wealth to purchase armor and become a landless knight. As a guest at the castle of Oswaldton he found himself infatuated with the eldest daughter, Alianora, yet it was Isobel, the youngest, who fell in love with him. Alianora rejected his troth, and he decided to journey to France to lend his sword arm to King Edward III. A friend of Isobel's named Flamaucoer accompanied him. Phra fought at Crecy. He met King Edward and the Black Prince Edward and ate dinner with them. Among the discussion at the table was the miraculous translation of the holy relic at St. Olaf's, which meant that body had been missed.

In France, Phra realized that he was in love with Isobel and decided to court her by letter. Flamaucoer scoffed at this idea.

In the battle of Crecy, Phra defeated the High Constable of France in single combat. Flamaucoer took a charge meant for Phra and was speared. It was revealed that Flamaucoer was Isobel in disguise. Once again Phra had lost his love. He was pledged to recount the tale of her demise to her family. King Edward allowed him to leave but charged him to also take a note to the Queen. His ship tossed in storm he was thrown overboard. By coincidence he landed at the spot where he had first landed a thousand years before. Phra states he was "weary and tired" as he climbed into a burial crypt to sleep. The crypt's massive stone door had been propped open by small keystone. The intensity of the storm and Phra's brushing against the key stone as he crawled inside the crypt were enough to loosen the door stopper. The massive crypt door closed and sealed Phra inside.

Phra was awakened and freed of his confinement by two grave robbers. Despite exhibiting the usual symptom of a long sleep-extremely stiff muscles-he seemed unaware that a great deal of time had passed. He made his way to London and managed to see the Queen, who was amused to see him. This was Queen Elizabeth, who took his message from King Edward III as great wit. He soon discovered it was the year 1586.

Upon the road to London, Phra had met an old fellow and had enjoyed his company. After his audience with the Queen, Phra sought out his casual companion, the older man invited him to be his guest at his home. The elderly man was Adam Faulkner, a great scholar. His estate had become downtrodden as he devoted all of his energies towards his great work, the creation of a mechanical marvel.

Adam Faulkner had a young daughter whom Phra fell in love with, provoking the great jealousy of the Faulkners' Spanish servitor, Emmanuel Marcena. Adam Faulkner's great work was a mechanical marvel that turned out to be monstrosity. It was a steam driven automation that nearly killed Phra and Faulkner. Phra destroyed it and was attacked by Faulkner. Faulkner regained his senses and agreed to the courtship of Phra and Elizabeth.

Phra began to write his memoirs. At their wedding feast, Phra and Elizabeth drank poisoned wine served to them by the jealous Marcena. Elizabeth perished. Phra was affected but was still strong enough to kill the Spanish servant. He was certain he would die from this poison, despite having survived near decapitation and drowning twice.(6)

Feeling the growing blackness upon him, Phra hid himself and his manuscript in a secret den in the thickness of the great walls of Faulkner Manor. He continued to write as his eyesight grew blurry and as visions of his lost loves swam before his eyes. Blodwen appeared before him staring directly into his eyes, she took his hand and as his last words state "at that touch the mantle of life falls from me! Blodwen! Blodwen! I come, I come!"

Section 2: Examining Phra as Norman of Torn and John Carter

The story of Phra is a memoir written in his own hand and edited by Edwin Arnold. Although an interesting story as taken by itself, a careful reading of the narrative also raises many questions. The narrative as it stands was either drastically altered with entire sections being excised by Edwin Arnold to fit his motif of Phra awakening whenever England was threatened by a new invasion or else Phra only wrote what he knew, what he remembered.

Although this may not be solid evidence for Arnold's innocence, it should be noted that Phra awakened in 1586, which was two years before the Spanish Armada attempted to invade England and was soundly defeated. Had Arnold been altering text to suit the invasion motif, he certainly would have had Phra involved in the fight against the Spanish rather than become involved with a mad scientist and his beautiful daughter.

Half of the recorded times after Phra entered hibernation he awoke in a different location than he had laid down to rest. Although Arnold states that the body had been moved about by clerics of one type or another, this could merely be Phra's explanation of why he awoke in a different place than he went to sleep, creating a logical explanation for the inexplicable. Although I do not doubt that the sleeping body was moved, I will dispute that it was done so for the time periods that Phra believes.

Each time he awoke from a protracted sleep he exhibited great muscular stiffness that took a couple of hours to alleviate, yet each time he seemed unaware that a great deal of time had passed. However he should have noted that the language and speech patterns had changed.

For his final recorded hibernation, he probably did not enter the tomb in 1346 but much later.

Despite having a recorded "waking" life of approximately fifteen years, Phra continually seems about thirty, the age when he was first "killed" There are constant references to his youthfulness. He may have been a young looking thirty who could appear more mature or more youthful when he wished.

Although we cannot know exactly what caused his immortality, we can make a few speculations; a druidic elixir slipped to him by his wife Blodwen prior to his sacrifice, or that it was the interrupted sacrificial ceremony that kept his soul in limbo, as it were, or perhaps he had an innate immortality through inheritance.(7)

While Phra experienced muscle "stiffness and soreness" after his extended periods of sleep, he did not appear at first glance to experience anything like the muscular atrophy that occurs in patients who suffer from comas of only months. This may be a sign that his body was kept in a sort of peak condition by his regenerative ability. His muscles had atrophied to some extent, but once he was conscious and mobile and all of his bodily functions had ceased their hibernative mode, the regenerative nature of his immorality became fully active and quickly repaired the damage to his muscles. This rapid healing, though, did cause him a great deal of discomfort. It is this regenerative factor that plays a factor in explaining one of the main discrepancies which would seem to preclude Phra the Phoenician from having been John Carter, from Phra having been Norman of Torn, or Norman of Torn from having been John Carter.

First let's deal with Phra as Norman of Torn. There are at least three main points that would seem to preclude this theory.

1. Norman of Torn's career takes place during one of Phra's extended sleeps.

2. Norman of Torn was "proven" to be Richard Plantagenet with a distinctive birthmark.

3. Phra had darker hair than Norman did, and he also bore a large tattoo that covered his back and chest.

The career of Norman of Torn took place between 1240 to 1280, although the main activity of Burroughs' novel is 1243 to 1267. According to Burroughs, Norman was Richard Plantagenet, the son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. He was kidnapped at the age of three by Sir Jules de Vac., although according to historical records Richard Plantagenet was born about 1247, died at the age of nine, and was interred in Westminster Abbey in 1256. Burroughs has his birth placed at about 1240. Was this merely a mistake? According to Burroughs in the prologue to The Outlaw of Torn, the true story of Richard had been covered up.

The Richard Plantagenet of The Outlaw of Torn then seems to be a Richard who had disappeared from the historical record. Henry III and Eleanor did have a child born in 1240; this was Margaret, who would become the Queen of Scotland. Burroughs' Richard seems to have been her twin who was assassinated at the age of three and thrown into the Thames. In 1247 when Henry and Eleanor had another boy, they named him Richard, perhaps in honor of their missing babe. Yet this was not an auspicious name, for this child also died at an early age and was interred in Westminster Abbey. That Burroughs' Richard was a different Richard from the known historical Richard can be seen by this phrase in The Outlaw of Torn, "but nowhere was there any sign or trace of Prince Richard, second son of Henry III of England."

According to historical records the Princes born to Henry III were, in order, Edward b. 1239, Edmund b. 1245, Richard b. 1247, John, b. 1250, William b. 1252 and Henry b. 1256. As can be seen the historical Richard was the third son rather than the second son of Henry III. However Burroughs' Richard, who was born in 1240 would indeed have been the second son and the youngest Prince in 1243 having predated and pre-deceased the arrival of Edmund. While it is odd that this earlier Richard did not make it into the historical record, as Burroughs has stated the incident was covered up. Possibly all scant records of the Richard Plantagenet born in 1240 were expunged by order of his devious older brother Edward.

So establishing that Burroughs' Richard Plantagenet was not the Richard Plantagenet of historical record would seem to make the argument that Phra the Phoenician could not have been Norman, the Outlaw of Torn, indisputable. Burroughs' Richard Plantagenet was indeed the Outlaw of Torn but so was Phra the Phoenician.

Burroughs never knew about this, just as he may have not known about John Carter being either Phra or Norman.

Burroughs firmly believed that the Outlaw of Torn was Richard Plantagenet. Richard Plantagenet was indeed stolen away by de Vac, raised speaking French, tutored in arms and weapons training, taught to hate the English with the Plantagenet's held in the greatest enmity, and was launched upon a career as an outlaw Baron in an unlicensed, ruined castle.(8) By the time Norman was fifteen he was indeed a great fighter, having once slain three men, including one named Greystoke, in single combat. Yet in the early days of his outlawry he met someone who was destined to be the greatest swordsman of two worlds.

As de Vac and Norman traversed the woods one morning in Norman's eighteenth year, they came upon a knight in rusted armor and tattered clothing sleeping in a covered bower. Norman prodded him with his sword, which proved to be a fatal mistake. The knight lurched to his feet with a scream of fury (9) and launched himself at Norman, who defended himself with good account but soon faltered under the onslaught. De Vac joined in the fray and was astounded that the man was able to defend against two great swordsmen. De Vac landed a blow against the head of the strange knight, throwing him off balance, and by happenstance driving the point of the stranger's broadsword through Norman's gorget and into his throat.

Seeing his work of years ended in one single blow, de Vac spun around to decapitate the senseless stranger. He was forced to turn aside his blade at the last second so that it plunged into the dirt next to the man. What he had seen astounded him beyond belief. The stranger knight bore a great deal of resemblance to Richard Plantagenet, Norman of Torn, enough so that they could be as brothers. De Vac wondered if this were one of Henry III's by-blows or, more fantastically, some type of changeling. With his initial scheme ruined, de Vac thought of several more, all of which were dependent on the stranger's cooperation. De Vac bound the unconscious stranger tightly. De Vac stripped Norman of his armor and placed him in the grove of tree where the strange knight had lain.

The strange knight awoke after several hours and in a peculiar state. He claimed to remember nothing of himself, not his name, identity, or past. De Vac wondered if it were the clout on the head or just providence smiling upon him. De Vac fixed the man a draught of herbal tea, which was supposed to aid in healing his head wound but actually kept the man in a stupor. De Vac thought of a bold plan, one bolder than his previous plan. He took the unconscious man to a witch woman of the woods, one who knew the old arts of the druids. He paid the old woman for a supply of a potion to keep the stranger is a confused state, but the key to his plan was to have her tattoo a birthmark on the stranger's chest. After she had finished this task, he rewarded her with a swift and painless death.

Using the potion, de Vac convinced the amnesiac that he was Norman of Torn and provided him with Norman's history. Even after the stranger's head wound healed, the brainwashing held up. To his relief, de Vac discovered that the man was either a fast learner or was remembering skills and knowledge previously acquired. He learned French and skill at arms rapidly. The man appeared to be in his middle twenties, although at times he seemed older and at other times even younger.

After a sojourn of six months, de Vac and "Norman" returned to Torn Castle. De Vac explained the changes in Norman's behavior and personality as being the result of the head wound he had sustained.

It was in this period that Norman made the acquaintance and friendship of Father Claude, rather than earlier as Burroughs had stated. This Norman of Torn felt oddly comforted by the presence of the cleric.(10) Their friendship was sealed when Norman saved Father Claude from some ruffians. After their defeat these ruffians became the start of Norman's outlaw army, which grew rapidly over the next two years. De Vac discovered that his more mature Norman had much more charisma and innate understanding of military strategy than his predecessor. Norman preyed upon the King's men and followers as well as the rebel forces lead by Simon De Montfort.

The mysterious man that de Vac had found in the woods was of course Phra the Phoenician. It might be best to explain how he happened to be there, how he happened to look like Norman of Torn, a.k.a. Richard Plantagenet, and to clear up the main difference in his appearance and Norman of Torn's or for that matter John Carter's.

According to the account written by Phra and edited by Arnold, Phra had four major periods of sleep, most of which corresponded to times of a change of government or of a threat against England. These sleep periods were 43 BC to 408 AD—corresponding to the change from Celtic Britain to Romano-Britain; 410 to 1066—corresponding with the change from Saxon to Norman Britain; 1084-1346—corresponding with the loss of the French territories; and 1346 to 1586. In the last sleep one might have expected his reason for waking up would have to do with the troubles with the Spanish, but Phra remained uninvolved in this situation. These sleep periods were 451, 656, 262, and 240 years respectively. Except for the first one, every time that Phra went to sleep it was after suffering a tragic loss. The 1084 sleep seems inexplicable, because since according to his narrative he and his family were given shelter in the nick of time. Yet given his later discovery of a marble replica of his wife and his two children, it may be that he remembered the incident as he wished to remember it, not as it actually happened. It may be that Phra was unable to save his wife and children and saw them cut down before his eyes just as the monks relented and allowed them inside. Phra was saved, but his family was not. Unable to accept this reality, Phra went to sleep.

I believe that Phra and Arnold were correct and that Phra awoke whenever he somehow became aware of danger to England, his adopted homeland. But I also believe that Phra did not sleep for hundreds of years each time. His hibernations were much shorter, although he remained unaware of many of his periods of wakefulness. The first long sleep placed his body in a state of torpor, a hibernative healing trace in which he recovered from his near decapitation. His regeneration was probably delayed by the ministrations of his wife Blodwen, who moved his body and over the course of twenty years tattooed it with an elaborate and intricate depiction of her life.

It could be also that the location where he had been placed the cavern might have been sealed to prevent grave robbery. The lack of oxygen kept Phra in a state of suspended animation until the atmospheric conditions improved. When Phra awoke for the first time, his body was extremely stiff yet not completely atrophied, his head retained a ghastly scar, and his upper torso was covered with Blodwen's tattoo. These latter two physical traits could be determining factors arguing against the theories that Phra was Norman or John Carter.

As for the theory that Norman of Torn was John Carter, it should also be mentioned that according to Burroughs Norman had an odd-colored lily-shaped birthmark, which identified him as Richard Plantagenet. Philip José Farmer made mention of this in his theory that Norman was John Carter:

An obscure book on medieval witchcraft, published in the middle 1600's, describes the case of a knight who was, for reasons unknown to the writer, slain by Edward I's men in a northern county. When his body was laid out to be washed, his left breast was found to bear a violet lily-shaped birthmark. This was thought to be the mark of the devil. But we readers of THE OUTLAW OF TORN will recognize the true identity of the man suspected of witchcraft

It is possible that John Caldwell was not killed, that he slew all of Edward's men, who actually numbered six, mangled the face of one tall corpse, and stained a violet lily mark on the corpse's left breast. And, once again, he disappeared into pseudonymity but gained immortality as the Warlord of Mars.(11)

Yet such a thing would also preclude John Carter from having been Phra the Phoenician since in all the published accounts no mention is made of either a lily shaped birthmark or a multicolored tattoo that covered much of his upper torso. Such a large tattoo would have made Carter's appearance even more remarkable to the Barsoomians, and it certainly would have been remarked upon. Therefore we must speculate that John Carter never had the lily shaped birthmark or the all encompassing tattoo so far as Edgar Rice Burroughs or even John Carter himself knew.

Tattooing is an ancient art. The recently discover Alps "ice man" may have been tattooed. How it is done, the inks that are used, and a variety of other factors will determine how long a tattoo will remain. Modern tattoos are done with inks that require major surgery to remove or fade. Some cultures used a combination of scarification and dyeing, which also left rather permanent pictures. One may guess that the tattoo that was given to Phra by Blodwen, which lasted over four hundred years, was one would have required the most modern techniques of laser surgery to remove. When Phra was being bathed after his resurrection in A.D. 408, a scrubber rubbed him raw trying to remove the dirt. This factor and the fact that the tattooing was done over a twenty year period demonstrate that these markings were true tattooing and not just epidermal staining.

Yet Phra's huge tattoo is never mentioned again after first time he awoke, nor is the ghastly scar on the back of his neck.

What happened to them? The best explanation is that they simply faded away as many scars and some tattoos do over time.

Apparently during the periods when he slept this process of fading was slowed down, along with all of his other functions. It did not shut down completely, for in a four hundred year period his near decapitation healed from a deadly wound to a white, if ghastly, scar. But the tattoo was still quite vivid. Yet why would the scar and tattoo fade suddenly when they were still quite vivid after four hundred years? If we take the waking periods of Phra's life after reviving in 408, we can surmise he was awake for approximately two years from 408-410, twelve years from 1066-1084, half a year to ten months in 1346, and about the same period or slightly longer in 1586, roughly at total of fifteen years. Even with enhanced regenerative abilities, it probably would take longer than that for such a pervasive tattoo to fade so completely. Also to be considered is the fact that in the 1066 period, no one remarked on this tattoo, which probably means that it had already faded.

This tattoo is one of the factors that gives credence to the idea that there may have had periods when Phra was active and did not know about it. Exposure to sunlight over the course of many years is one of the methods by which an epidermal tattoo may fade, and Phra's regenerative factor, which kept him young for centuries, may have speeded the fading as his skin cells were replaced over the centuries. His initial long hibernation in the dark, airless cave would have preserved the tattoo, which argues for few—or more likely no—periods of waking between 48 BC and AD 408.

Phra's seeming facility with language and uncanny acculturation may be another clue to his experiencing periods of wakefulness that he was not aware of. When he awoke the first time, Rome was still in power in Britain and Latin was still the main language. While there may have been some cultural and technological changes, likely there were not so many much as to prevent him from adjusting to the new era within a few hours or days at the most.

However in the period between 410 and 1066, there had been great changes in culture and language. When Phra awoke he was able to speak with his clerical hermit host immediately, although it may very well have been that they spoke in Latin since that was still the language of the church. However two days later Phra was able to overhear a conversation between Harold the Great and Editha and understood it. Again although they could have been speaking Latin, it is more likely that they were speaking in the vernacular of their day, Anglo-Saxon. Even if Phra had been familiar with the old Saxon tongue from his days of defending Romano-Britain against their incursions, this was an entirely new language. Granted Phra and Arnold could have exaggerated either Phra's ability to understand and be understood or may have compressed the time frame, but a similar situation would occur twice more.

In 1346 when Phra awoke he was able to understand the conversations among the clerics at the church. Again they may have been speaking Latin, but since they were not on duty they were most likely speaking in their vernacular, Middle English. This is especially true when the clerics received a noble visitor, Lord Codrington, who would have definitely spoken to them in Middle English. The differences between Anglo-Saxon or Old English and Middle English are quite pronounced, comparable to those between German and one of the Scandinavian tongues. Further, awakening and wandering the countryside as a near mad man grieving for Editha and his two children, Phra had very little trouble understanding or being understood by the common folk.

There is also the clue that in his aimless wandering he managed to find a fortune in gems just lying on the ground near a stream. Considering the likelihood of this, one has to wonder if he actually found these gems or was unconsciously remembering where he had stashed a fortune in jewels.

Having found the jewels, he was able to buy his way into society, purchasing clothes, arms, and armor, which seemed to make him a wandering knight. All of this happened in the space of a few months. Without having to be taught it, he was intimately familiar with the ritualized and often complicated culture of medieval knighthood. Again it may not be so much that he learned rapidly but that he unconsciously remembered learned behaviors and knowledge from periods when he had been awake without knowledge of the those events.

Another great leap in Phra's life occurred from 1356 to 1586. Although it was a lesser period of hibernation, it was a large leap in terms of language and culture. The Dark Ages and Renaissance had come and gone. Middle English had transformed into Modern English, albeit Elizabethan Modern English. Once again Phra found himself able to freely converse and be understood; he was able to speak with ease to the grave robbers who freed him from the tomb in which he had accidentally sealed himself. Phra befriended Adam Faulkner on the road and was accepted by the older gentleman as a learned man of about his own station, which could only mean that Phra was able to intelligently converse with this scholar. Although Adam Faulkner would prove to be a bit absent minded, there was no indication that he found Phra's mannerisms or patterns of speech dated. Phra was also able to make his way to the court of the queen and freely converse there. Although he was thought to be either a madman or a fool because of the message he carried and his misunderstanding of royal politics, his speech was understood and his mannerisms seem acculturated to the time period.

I believe that Phra unconsciously used knowledge and mannerisms he acquired while being awake without his being aware of it. On the face of it this seems a bit ludicrous, but the explanation of how Phra could be awake and not remember having been so lies in Phra's psychological state.

Phra's first hibernation happened after he had received a near decapitating stroke. As stated earlier, we cannot be certain if his immortality was the result of some elixir he had received prior to taking part in this sacrificial rite, the interruption of the rite, something about the environment of his burial cave, an innate immortality, or a combination of all of these factors. Although this hibernation saved his life, it cost him his family. Upon waking and realizing that Blodwen and his children were long dead, Phra's loss and grief manifested themselves in an abrupt personality change. For a time he became a libertine, drinking and wenching until his money depleted itself.

Forced to find employment, he became a guardsman for a wealthy Roman noblewoman, Lady Electra. Lady Electra was enamored of Phra, but Phra had come to love Numidea, a slave girl. Despite Phra's rejection of Electra's advances, there seems to have been some attraction and admiration towards her. Had Numidea not been in the picture, things might have turned out quite differently. As it was however, his rejection of Lady Electra had tragic consequences. As they were fleeing from Saxon warriors, Lady Electra's party made their way across a swift and dangerous stream by use of a rope guide. Numidea fell into the river and Phra jumped into rescue her, although Lady Electra had forbade him to do so. As Phra and Numidea were making their way out the raging stream, Lady Electra cut the rope, sending the struggling pair tumbling into the rapids and washing them down stream, tumbling out of control. Phra managed to pull Numidea and himself to shore, but she had drowned in their passage through the waters. They were approached by some fisher folk; upon seeing his love had perished Phra fell into a dark and dreamless slumber.

There is a slight discrepancy in his account of falling asleep on shore after having swum there under his own power and the and the account of the hermit cleric, who met the revived Phra in 1066 that the fisher folk had dragged him from the river in their nets already slumbering. Although this could be merely two versions of the same story, it is also possible that they describe two different events. There was no mention of Phra's rather remarkable tattoo by the cleric who claimed to have scrubbed Phra's body clean of dirt and grime. Nor was there ever any mention of it by Editha, Phra's wife for twelve years. For our purposes, we speculate that the tattoo had disappeared by this time. As stated earlier, this would mean that Phra had spent a considerable period of time awake, probably decades, for his body to have sloughed off enough skin cells for the epidermal tattoo to have disappeared. There is also Phra's "instinctive" knowledge of Anglo-Saxon speech, seen in his understanding the speech between Harold and Editha and Phra's own conversation with Harold.

In 1084 Phra also went to a centuries-long hibernation, although apparently the danger to his family had passed. As argued earlier, perhaps his family had not been unscathed and this tragedy propelled him into another sleep period. Once again in 1346 Phra fell in love with a woman only to have her tragically die in his arms. He found himself once again sleeping for centuries. In 1586, he once again loved a young woman, Elizabeth Faulkner, and once again she was killed before his eyes. This death was the last straw, and although Phra had survived near decapitation, drowning, and possible suffocation, the poison administered by Emmanuel Marcena finished him off. Phra the Phoenician died in 1586, or at least his personality went permanently to sleep.

I believe that these periods of hibernation are a combination of true physical hibernation and also psychological hibernation. Phra seems to have suffered from a dissociative disorder that manifested itself in at least two, possibly three ways: dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, and possibly dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder).

Dissociative amnesia may be present when a person is unable to remember important personal information, which is usually associated with a traumatic event in their life. The loss of memory creates gaps in the individual's personal history.

Dissociative fugue may be present when a person impulsively wanders or travels away from home and upon arrival in a new location is unable to remember their past. The individual's personal identity is lost because they are confused about who they are. The travel from home generally occurs following a stressful event. The person in the fugue appears to be functioning normally to other people. However, after the fugue experience, the individual may not be able to recall what happened during the dissociative state. The condition is usually diagnosed when relatives find their lost family member living in another community with a new identity.

Dissociative identity disorder was formerly called "multiple personality disorder." When a person intermittently experiences two or more identities, they may have a dissociative identity disorder. While experiencing a new identity, a separate personality takes control, and the person is unable to remember important and personal information about themselves. Each personality has its own personal history and identity and takes on a totally separate name

The physical injuries that Phra sustained in addition to the great trauma of seeing his loved ones killed before his eyes caused him repeatedly to go into a hibernative sleep. The severity of the physical injury determined how long he slept. His psyche, however, was not as resilient as his physical body and the so the inner man slept much, much longer than the body.

Depending on Phra's physical state, a hibernation lasted anywhere from months to several years or decades. The first hibernation was the longest because of the time needed to heal injuries to the spinal column but also to regenerate brain tissue, which in normal human beings does not repair itself.

After Phra's body had healed, he awoke in a dissociative fugue with dissociative amnesia. He could not remember his identity or how he had come to his resting place, however he could remember other learned skills such as language. In this state he would assume a new name or identity. But in some most cases the basic personality of Phra would remain intact, albeit without the burden of his personal history. He might also have retained a general understanding of recent events, but his personal memories remained locked away. The names he used were either given to him by persons he met or were just adopted for various reasons. At times Phra would awaken with a form of dissociative identity disorder in which he self-created an identity composed of various components of his personality. Although this is not a classic form of the DID, recent studies have found that the disorder has many variant manifestations. This is all traceable to Phra's unwillingness to deal with the trauma of losing his loved ones.

It is important to remember that the story of Phra, as edited by Edwin Arnold, was taken from Phra's manuscript written in his own words as he remembered the events that had transpired. For the most part the events detailed in Phra's wake phases are quite accurate. Others, however, seem to be created. This is not to say that Phra was deliberately deceptive but rather was being self-deceptive and in doing so unwittingly deceived his audience.

The first such episode of self-deception occurred is when he awakened in 1066. Phra found himself inside a hermit's hut. The hermit explained that Phra had been pulled from a river in the nets of fishermen and had remained in a state of senselessness for six hundred years. He had lain on a shelf in the fisherman's tent from 410 to about 875 when Alfred the Great had him transferred to Canterbury. Phra then lay in Canterbury until 1066, when King Harold had him transferred to the hermit's hut for safekeeping.

Besides the discrepancy between the hermit's story of the fisher folk pulling the already sleeping Phra out of the river in their nets and Phra's version in which he swum to shore under his own power, the story of his being stuck on a fisherman's shelf for over four hundred years just does not ring true. Given human nature, at the very least he would have become an object of great curiosity. Moreover one wonders why the fisher folk would show him such great disrespect, keeping him stuffed away like an old heirloom. It may be that this was not the case, that this ignominious state can be traced to Phra's mental state at the time he began his hibernation in 410. Having failed to save Numidea, he was filled with despair and felt worthless, a person to be shunned. So in his recounting of these events, his memories were colored by his depressive state.

At the time of his supposed long hibernation, Britain was a mixture of faiths—the old Celtic faiths, the incursions of the Saxon Nordic mythos, and Christianity. Given Phra's handsome features, his eternal youth, and his uninterrupted slumber, it seems more likely that Phra would have been an object of veneration, either regarded as a god, a demigod, a mythic hero, an angel, or perhaps even a Prince of Faery. As will be seen in Part Two we will speculate he was thought to be all of these.

In his narrative Phra drops two hints that refer to events that occurred during his waking periods. In many cases persons suffering from dissociative amnesia are totally unaware of gaps in their personal histories as Phra seems to be. To Phra, he goes to sleep and each time wakes up centuries later. But as demonstrated the evidence of the faded tattoos and Phra's instantaneous facility with languages and culture, this uninterrupted hibernation is doubtful. People suffering from dissociative disorders will recognize inconsistencies in their memories or in some other aspects of their lives and will create plausible scenarios to ease the rising trauma that such memories cause. Phra did so when relating the story of being found in a fisherman's hunt by King Alfred and his subsequent transferals to Canterbury and the hermit's hut. While it is true that Phra eventually got over the trauma of losing his loved ones, there remained the hidden trauma of his inability to process this very trauma, which was destructive to his self image. It was far better for Phra to imagine that, instead of wandering about literally out of his mind, he had slept for centuries as he had done right after losing Blodwen.

It is important to remember that when we are talking about personalities and different identities, at the core they are all Phra.

As a mental defensive mechanism he self-induced amnesia and created a role for his conscious mind to assume. While the core Phra persona was buried in the subconscious providing necessary memories and knowledge for the new persona to survive and adapt to his new surroundings, the new surface identity was also unconsciously absorbing new knowledge and experiences, although he prevented himself from consciously acknowledging this process occurred. Gaps in Phra's memory are due to the psychological problem of disassociative personality. He could not deal with living and loving and losing mortal friends and family. Phra relates two conversations with the spirit of his dead wife Blodwen. While I will not dispute the possibility that these might be actual spiritual manifestations, I will however state that they could also be signs of deeper psychological problems than Phra exhibits in his narrative. Such hallucinations can also occur with a disassociative disorder.

We can reconstruct the series of events provided to us by Phra's own words, although they are a bit out of sequence from his recorded version and have at least two periods when he was awake and living as another personality.

After spending some time among the fishermen in suspended animation, Phra eventually awoke. Eventually he wound up with King Alfred. He probably fought alongside him at the Battle of Edington and may have taken part in the Battle of London. He eventually fell in combat and was placed in Canterbury. He probably had received a serious wound, which took decades to heal. Waking again, he became involved with King Harold as one of his confidants and fighting men. He may have been with the king when Harold and his brother conquered Wales. Phra was most probably with him when Harold was shipwrecked on the coast of Normandy. Phra was lost overboard in this shipwreck. It was there that Phra's was pulled to shore in a sleeping state. Harold had been forced to swear fealty to William of Normandy but received the news that his friend lived although in a coma. Returning to England, Harold had the sleeping Phra placed in the care of the hermit.

In the conversation between the old cleric and Phra, the older man is astonished that Phra does not know who Harold was and the recent history of the kingdom. If the hermit had been aware of Phra's centuries long sleep, then his astonishment at Phra's ignorance is quite puzzling. However if the history of Phra's sleeping on a shelf of a fisherman's hut for centuries was a fabrication, then this conversation makes a bit more sense. Phra created this tale to smooth over the inconsistencies in his memory. The hermit had likely told Phra how he had been found by fishermen and brought to this hut on the order of Harold. Phra eventually fleshed out the tale. Another telling point is that after Phra had awakened supposedly after centuries, the hermit made no effort to introduce Harold to this rather miraculous phenomenon. It is possible that the hermit knew that Harold was in the midst of a serious battle for his kingdom and for the sovereignty of Britain and did not wish to distract him the news that his friend had awakened but had become a raving madman. The hermit in fact made a concerted effort to keep Phra away from the King by sending him on an errand to find another army.

Purportedly after losing his wife and children in 1084, Phra slept until 1346. Again Phra's persona slept, but he likely went through another period of dissociative amnesia and fugue. It was during one of these periods that Jules de Vac convinced him that he was Norman of Torn. As I speculated de Vac used a potion to keep the amnesiac Phra in a state of confusion. De Vac's rather crude methods of brain washing probably would not have been successful had not Phra's need for an identity to fill the void of his amnesia also played a role. Even so, "Norman" began doubting many aspects of de Vac's story; primarily that de Vac was his father.

De Vac also had Phra tattooed once more, a tattoo that was supposed to be the birthmark of Richard Plantagenet. Again, although Philip José Farmer speculated that Norman was John Carter, John Carter so far as we know never had such a birthmark. Nor did he ever have a great tattoo such as Blodwen had given Phra. Clearly, the large tattoo had faded over the centuries of exposure to sunlight, which would be one of the reasons that John Carter was so bronzed. Therefore it would be very easy for a relatively smaller tattoo to have faded by the time Phra became John Carter.

De Vac's ploy of the tattooed birthmark would not have worked unless there had been a marked physical resemblance between Phra/Norman and the Plantagenets. Suffice it to say for now there was one as will be explained in part two. In fact, Phra was Norman's ancestor and the ancestor of all of the Plantagenet Kings, as will be explained in part two. In truth de Vac was not as confident of this ploy as he let on. De Vac only disclosed the information that Norman of Torn was in fact Richard Plantagenet when he was dying and it appeared as though Norman was dying as well. This was a last ditch ploy to inflict a wound on the Plantagents.

Despite the relatively happy ending at the end of The Outlaw of Torn wherein the Outlaw lives, marries the woman he loves, and is acknowledged by the Queen and King as their son, the true story of the Outlaw of Torn did not end altogether happily. Despite the private acknowledgement of Richard/Norman as their son, to acknowledge him publicly was not politically feasible. So far as the world knew, the only child named Richard Plantagenet that Henry III and Eleanor of Provence had ever recorded was born in 1247 and died in 1256. As Burroughs said, the story was suppressed by a Plantagenet king. Norman had caused too much strife and had led a rebellion against the crown. Too much blood had been shed for all to be forgiven.

A compromise was reached in which Norman ended his career as the Lord of Torn and was in turn removed from the list of outlaws. He married Bertholde de Monfort, but she died with a year in childbirth. After Bertholde died, Norman adopted the name John Caldwell (13)

Edward Longshanks, Henry III's eldest son, had never truly believed that Norman of Torn was his lost brother; it was he who had convinced his father that granting Norman amnesty and full acknowledgement as a prince would be unwise and he is the Plantagenet king to whom Burroughs refers. However Henry and his mother were overjoyed to have their lost son returned to them, so Edward kept silent and bid his time. So long as the upstart knight kept to his place and demanded nothing from the royal family, he was content to let him live. Shortly after Henry III died in 1272 and Edward Longshanks became Edward I of England, John Caldwell found himself outlawed once again.

Although outlawed, Norman of Torn—now John Caldwell—continued to have loyal friends. One of these was the second Baron of Grebson. John Caldwell married Alicia, the daughter of the Baron Grebson. Since Alicia was his only child, Grebson allowed the marriage only if Caldwell would add the Grebson name to his own. Being a landless outlaw, Caldwell agreed. On his new coat of arms, he added a golden spinning wheel, which was also known as a torn. This proved be too much for Edward, who had turned an otherwise blind eye to the pretender.

In 1280, Edward made dispatching Norman a priority and sent a team of assassins to kill him. In Tarzan Alive, Mr. Farmer asserted that Norman had died of wounds after defeating the five knights sent to kill him. A violet lily-shaped birthmark identified the corpse as the son of Henry III.

However in the "The Arms of Tarzan" he made this speculation, "It is possible that John Caldwell was not killed, that he slew all of Edward's men, who actually numbered six, mangled the face of one tall corpse, and stained a violet lily mark on the corpse's left breast."

He also states, "Sometime during the following six centuries, the Outlaw suffered amnesia. This was either from a blow on the head (again recalling Tarzan, who suffered amnesia many times from blows on the head) or because loss of memory of early years is an unfortunate by-product of the elixir. Thus, on March 4, 1866, the Outlaw, a long-time resident of Virginia, an admitted victim of amnesia, left a cave in Arizona for the planet Mars. ERB called this man John Carter. Notice the J.C. We suggest that he may have been Richard Plantagenet, Norman of Torn, John Caldwell, and, finally, John Carter."

We argue that Mr. Farmer was in fact closer to the mark in his first speculation. Norman did die after defeating his attackers, which is to say he sustained some serious wounds and from all appearances was as dead. In reality Norman was Phra, and because of the severity of his wounds he fell into one of his comatose healing sleeps. As Mr. Farmer speculated, Norman did acquire amnesia, but it was the self-induced amnesia that Phra often used to maintain his own fragile sanity.

Although Phra's initial healing period lasted four hundred years, as his body became accustomed to frequent periods of healing, the time period needed for a healing was shortened as time went on. It could also be that the wounds Norman sustained were more severe looking than actually life threatening.

Norman's friends and family arranged for him to have a Christian burial, despite his being outlawed. This was done in secret so that Edward would not go to the extreme of having Norman's corpse mutilated as a further sign of the royal displeasure as he later did with William Wallace's.(14)

Norman's body was hidden in St. Olaf's Abbey in the reliquary. He was hidden behind a relic, the mummified body of an unknown saint. He had been placed there because during his life Norman had been drawn to the abbey for reasons he could not explain and often prayed in the chapel. The actual relic, the unknown Saint's body, had been placed there by St. Baldwin.

Sometime in the next few years, Phra's body was discovered and thought to be the body of the saint, miraculously preserved. When Phra awoke in 1326, not remembering his waking periods, he believed that he had been placed there shortly after going to sleep in 1084.

After nearly drowning once more, Phra went to sleep in 1346 and awoke in 1586. He met Adam Faulkner, fell in love with his daughter Elizabeth, and saw his love killed as he had so often before. He withdrew to a secret den in the Faulkner manse with the narrative of his life, fully expecting to die. After this we know nothing more of Phra.

Given the striking parallels between the texts of Phra the Phoenician and A Princess of Mars and the other evidence cited at length above, we can now state with certainty that Phra the Phoenician IS John Carter!

Section 3: Examining the Carter Conundrum

How long did Phra sleep before awakening in the Faulkner manor with his most severe case of disassociative amnesia? The latest possible date would have to have been prior to 1705. As cited in Coogan, Phra the Phoenician IS John Carter,
 

He awoke once again in a dissociative fugue with dissociative amnesia. So far as we know he never again regained his memories of being Phra. (15)

Something unique occurred in that Phra's body does not have appeared to have gone into a hibernative state again until 1866. During this time a new persona was born, combining the personality traits of Phra with a new mental toughness; however, the final form of the dominant personality did not coalesce until the 1700s.

During this time we can only speculate that Phra—under a single guise or a series of guises—became a British soldier and joined the East India Company. The East India Company was also known as John Company, which was an Anglicized version of the nickname of the Dutch East India Company that had preceded the English version. It is perhaps appropriate that this emergent persona used a name that resonated with his new allegiance, he called himself John Carter. Carter is someone who carts, that is someone who carries or transports. So Phra chose the name Carter to indicate that this persona would carry him forward, that Phra would be a safe passenger inside Carter. These initials also hearkened back to John Caldwell.

As part of an exploratory group that became lost in the Himalayas, John Carter and his men were attacked by a mountain tribe and left for dead. John Carter and his party were rescued by monks of a nearby lamasery. However only John Carter survived his wounds, that he had done so without losing consciousness was remarkable to the monks, who saw this resilience as a sign of a man of great inner fortitude and mental discipline. Although a Westerner, they offered to teach him what knowledge he could learn. Upon seeing the unarmed- and sword-fighting styles of these monks, John Carter decided to stay with them for a decade or so. These little known techniques, some of which are now incorporated to the lesser forms of Kalaripayit and the Roaring Lion martial art tradition, helped John Carter in doing something that his preceding personas had failed to do—to keep from suffering serious harm despite living primarily as a warrior. These fighting techniques would also help John Carter become the best swordsman on two worlds.(16)

In addition to the martial arts, Carter also learned mental disciplines that helped him to discipline his emotions and to experience trauma without being overwhelmed by it. These mental disciplines allowed the John Carter persona to become the dominant personality—incorporating the personality traits of Phra but shutting away the Phra identity's emotional baggage along with all of Phra's personal memories. Any memories of not being John Carter were also shunted away. Although the John Carter persona may have experienced some episodes of amnesia, these were not a general amnesia in which the personality was lost but rather a specific amnesia that targeted John Carter's odd immortality and eternal youth. Since the origins of the immortality and the various episodes, in which he slept and awakened were all related to Phra, who wished to remain dead, these memories were walled off.

Carter does recollect, however, that he spent part of "his strange, wild life in all parts of the world." After leaving Tibet, John Carter rejoined the East India Company but was forced to move about every few years under a new identity as his youth became noticeable.

Yet because any investigative thought processes pertaining to the root cause of his immortality eventually led back the forbidden knowledge of Phra's existence, John Carter was oddly disinterested in how he had become immortal or even in his true origins. He states, "I am a very old man: how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more but I cannot tell because I have not aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood, so far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty."

Eventually, John Carter became a soldier protecting colonists in Virginia. It was here that after over a thousand years Phra finally put down permanent roots; he even went so far to retain the name John Carter for generations. It appears that John Carter married and became a family man and so desired to keep his memories of his family, by necessity he mentally acknowledged his immortality. He married into a Virginian dynasty that according to his "nephew" Edgar Rice Burroughs was cognizant of his immortality but kept it family secret.

There are two very well researched articles concerning The Carters of Virginia, John Carter's connection to this southern dynasty, and the identity of "Burroughs." These are The Mysterious Case of the Carters Or, How Hirohito Became Nick Carter's Aide by Todd Rutt & Arn McConnell and The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy by Jess Nevins.

Taking these articles in the chronological order in which they appeared, we will first deal with "The Mysterious Case of the Carters" by Rutt and McConnell.

Rutt and McConnell's candidate for John Carter was born in 1725.

In about 1725, a boy was born in Virginia by the name of John Carter. At the time, virtually the only Carters in that province were the descendants of the original John Carter through Robert "King" Carter. Ergo, it follows that the John Carter born in 1725 (fourth level) was the grandson of the King. From evidence that will be brought forth later, it would appear that the newborn Carter's sire was Charles Carter. This young child was named, obviously, after his father's grandfather. No one could have realized at the time that Edgar Rice Burroughs was to make the name of John Carter immortal in his famous Barsoom series. That Burroughs' John Carter was descended from the historical Carter is reinforced by Burroughs' description of the Barsoomian warlord. Time and Again it is impressed upon us that, above being an Earthman and an American, John Carter is a Virginian! A man that takes sm, uch fierce pride in his home state must surely have strong roots there, and it is to be remembered that the historical Carters, descended from John Carter I, were the original Virginian Carters.

In 1649, a distressed loyalist by the name of John Carter (first level on the family tree) moved his family from their ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, England, to the settlement of Corotoman, Virginia, in the New World.

Carter was a man dedicated to his mother country and his king, who became disgruntled when he saw the king's power being siphoned away by the rising democracy in England. He moved to America, where he felt he could be sure of his community's loyalty to their liege. Carter and his family prospered there in the Colonies. Within fourteen years, he and his wife had successfully established a plantation in Corotoman.

In 1860, according to Rutt and McConnell, John Carter married Margaret Butler, the sister of Rhett Butler. They had one child, Nicholas Carter. Rutt and McConnell diverge from Burroughs' account dramatically by speculating that it was in 1875 that John Carter went west to prospect for gold. They further speculate that James K. Powell was actually Rhett Butler. When he had gone west, according to Rutt and McConnell, John Carter left his son Nicholas in the care of his distant cousin Simpson Carter. Nicholas Carter grew up to be America's premier private investigator.

Jess Nevins' candidate for Burroughs' John Carter was, according to "The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy," born in 1800.

The second son of Jack Carter and Whitney Trout was John Carter. John (1800-1898) led an interesting life, as his biographer, Edgar Burroughs, has shown. Unfortunately for Burroughs and for future researchers, much of Carter’s early life is obscured because of Carter's "amnesia." No clear reasons are given for his amnesia, whether in his ten-volume (auto)biography or in those documents MN was able to uncover. Mr. P.J. Farmer has speculated that Carter somehow acquired an elixir of immortality similar to Tarzan's. MN's researches show this not to be true. However, if Carter's extraordinary longevity (more on which following) was derived from this formula, it might also explain the brain damage that Carter exhibited later in life. Carter apparently left home at an early age. He may have simply lived the life of a rich young Southern gentleman, but his references to his "only means of livelihood, fighting," and his description of himself as a "soldier of fortune" lead MN to believe that Carter may have sold his swords and guns freelance starting at a young age, perhaps as early as 1821. When he realized that he was not aging beyond the age of 30 is not known, nor is there any record of the reaction of those outside the family to his remarkable vitality and youthfulness. Those within the family had the example of John's brother as well as their father, Jack, and so most likely found it normal.

When the Civil War began John enlisted in the Confederate cavalry and by war's end had earned himself a commission as a Captain. John's memories of the war, however, do not seem to have been fond ones, and for good reason. He'd had to suffer through the heartache of the family schism between his eldest brother and the rest of the Carter family at the beginning of the war. (More on this following) In April 1865 had come the horrible news that the Union forces had sacked Richmond, and during its fall Carter Hall had been taken and razed, Jack and Nate Carter dying on its doorstep, swords in hand. And, finally, John had suffered through the defeat of the Confederacy during the war, something his fighting man's pride must have found intolerable.

At war's end he was, in his own words, "masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting, gone." He chose to go prospecting in the American Southwest.

What happened after that has been covered in volume one of Carter's (auto)biography, A Princess of Mars. Carter spent ten years fighting and then loving on Mars, returning to Earth in 1876. Once back he discovered that the gold strike he and his friend, Captain James K. Powell, had discovered had made him rich. More, the gold had helped restore the Carter family fortunes, and had led to Carter Hall being rebuilt by Ben Carter. We can only imagine the joy felt by Ben and John at their reunion, both undoubtedly having thought the other was dead. Ben most likely offered the use of Carter Hall to John, but John refused, for reasons of his own, and bought an estate on the Hudson River in New York state and settled down there. In 1886 he returned to Mars again, and his body was found in his house and interred in the Carter family mausoleum in Richmond. In 1898 he returned to Earth, summoned his nephew Walter to him, and gave Walter the manuscripts comprising volumes 2, 3, and 4 of his (auto)biography. Carter was then reinterred in the mausoleum and passed beyond the ken of his family.

An objection might be raised at this time that the genealogy related here does not entirely match the account given in The Gods of Mars. According to that book, Edgar Rice Burroughs himself was the narrator of the introductory frame of The Gods of Mars and was John Carter's nephew.

However, the facts of ERB's life are well known, and simply do not match up with the account given in Gods. John Carter is, as stated, a Virginian, as is the narrator of Gods; ERB was not a Virginian or even from the South, being a child of urban Chicago. John Carter refers to the narrator's "Uncle Ben;" neither of ERB's parents, George Tyler Burroughs and Mary Evaline Zieger Rice, had a brother named Ben. The narrator of Gods claims to have first met John Carter "nearly thirty-five years before." That statement was made in 1898, according to the internal chronology of Gods, meaning that ERB would have first met Carter in 1864. ERB was born on September 1, 1875, and in 1898 ERB was variously a soldier in the United States Army and the owner of a stationery store, his movements and personal history very well-recorded during this time. ERB simply cannot be the narrator of Gods.

That begs the question: Who, then, was the narrator of Gods, if it wasn’t Burroughs? The book, like all the Mars books, is credited to ERB, and the historical and literary textbooks record him as having been their author. We are left with one of two alternatives. The first is that Burroughs fudged the facts in Gods, so that statements credited to Carter were never uttered by him. While theoretically possible, too many other facts from Gods and the other "Burroughs" Mars novels have been independently confirmed for us to casually dismiss these statements and impute deception to Burroughs without more proof than has been found.

The second possibility, and the one MN’s research has established as most likely being true, is that the narrator of Gods is Walter, the actual nephew of John Carter. As for why Walter did not publish Gods under his own name, we must conclude that some sort of arrangement existed between Burroughs and the Carters. Burroughs, after all, published the first chapter of John Carter’s (auto)biography, A Princess of Mars. Perhaps Walter, aware in 1911 that the Carters’ wealth was declining, sold the rights to Gods and the next two chapters to Burroughs?

The actual authorship of the Mars books–Carter’s (auto)biography–remains a mystery. (17)

Jack Carter is reported to have looked thirty years old until the day he died. It is indeed a shame that so much of his life is unknown, as his activities and the source of his extended vitality are interesting historical curiosities. If we do not accept the Shoemaker hypothesis (see Footnote 13 below) as the explanation for his own vitality and that of his children, then we are left to wonder what could have caused it. One line of discussion, advanced on ExtScience-L by Dr. Eckert of the Berlinischer Polytechnicum, focuses on the possibility of secondary exposure by Jack Carter to the radiation of the Wold Newton meteor, perhaps through a friendship with Sir Percy Blakeney or John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke. I thank Dr. Eckert for his permission to include this theory, as it constitutes a section of his forthcoming monograph, "Secondary and Tertiary Effects of `Exotic’ Radiation on Unshielded Humans, or, It Doesn’t Take A Spider Bite."

Both articles are painstakingly researched and yet they reached different conclusions. Why is this? When the Phra/John Carter personality coalesced, Carter realized that he did not age and became very facile at creating cover stories about his past. These were composed of half-truths, untruths, and complete fabrications. Also part of the problem lies with John Carter's own memories. Vivid memories of the past would have led back to the Phra core personality, back to the pain that Phra could not deal with the trauma of lost loves and the of weakness of spirit. To guard his sanity and to keep the Phra personality safe in his internal slumber, John Carter would deliberately misremember his own past.

Nevins and Rutt & McConnell are great researchers but they have overlooked three vital clues. First they overlook Carter's statement that he is a hundred years old, perhaps older, meaning that the earliest he could have been born was 1785, but also, it's unlikely that someone would make this statement if they were less than one hundred years. Second, John Carter's statement in Llana of Gathol, "Perhaps I am the materialization of some long dead warrior of another age" (51); third, the statement of Carter's nephew that his grandfather's great-grandfather was dandled upon John Carter's knee (Gods v). This statement means that John Carter is much older than his claimed age of at least one hundred. Coogan worked out Carter's possible age based upon this comment, starting with the narrator's statement that he was five years old a few months before the start of the Civil War:

If Burroughs was born in 1855 and generations are figured at 20 year intervals, then his father was born in 1835, his grandfather in 1815, his great-grandfather in 1795, his great-great grandfather in 1775, and is great-great-great grandfather (i.e. his grandfather's great grandfather) in 1765. If generations are figured at 30 year intervals, then with ERB born in 1855, his father in 1825, his grandfather in 1795, his great-grandfather 1765, his great-great-grandfather in 1735, and his great-great-great-grandfather, i.e. his grandfather’s great-grandfather, in 1705.

In "The Carter's of Virginia: a Tragedy" by Jess Nevins, the genealogy begins with the mysterious Jack Carter marrying Whitney Trout in 1799. The couple produces Nate, John and Simon, all born in 1800 over the span of three days. After Jack Carter left, Nate took over the running of the plantation and built Carter Hall. John and Simon left home at an early age. Jack Carter and Nate Carter died fighting when Carter Hall was sacked by Union forces in 1865.

These authors appear to have been taken in by misinformation orchestrated by both John Carter and his nephew. (19) What really happened was that Whitney died giving birth to twins or triplets. The last son was either fictitious or still born. When Nate was old enough to take things over Jack Carter left the estate in his hands. Sim had already left by then. Jack simply became John Carter and claimed to be the son of Jack and Whitney. Nevins alluded that Jack Carter was approximately 30 years old when he married Whitney Trout, this would work out to give him a supposed birthdate of 1769. Using a generational schema of 20 years, if we go back we get 1749, 1729, 1709, 1689, and 1669.

1729 is intriguing because this almost coincides with Rutt and McConnell statement that their candidate for John Carter was born about 1725. 1729 falls well within the twenty to thirty year generational scheme to give us a generational date of 1705, which is about when Carter's nephew's grandfather's great grandfather was born.

The 1669 date is also interesting because Rutt and McConnell also state that the original John Carter had a son born in 1663 six years prior to his death.

John Carter emigrated to America circa 1649 and "died" circa 1669. It is possible that he kept in contact with the family between 1669 and 1725 but wandered about the world or the Americas as a soldier. In about 1725 John Carter reacquainted with his descendents and had a family. He may have married back into the Carter family, into the Lee family which crosses over with the Carters, or perhaps even the Porter family. Because of John Carter's stronger persona, he was able to weather the tragic loss of watching his family age and eventually die without suffering the sleeping syndrome of Phra. He also appears to have taken numerous leaves of absence to fight in various wars. This strategy would have made it easier to deal with the loss of family members as they would age and die during these absences.

All three families were interrelated to some degree, so by this marriage John Carter became the uncle of "Burroughs" father (b. circa 1835) and so would be "Burroughs'" (b. 1855) great Uncle.

When John Carter's wife died, he probably went wandering again returning to fight in the Revolutionary War. In 1799 using the name Jack Carter he married Whitney Trout. She gave birth to Simon and Nathan.

When Nathan became of age in 1821, John Carter as Jack Carter wandered for a bit. Nevins purports that "Jack" Carter may have been at the Greek rebellion in 1821. This may be an important Wold-Newtonian event because Lord Byron, and William Clayton were also present in this rebellion.

According to Rutt and McConnell, their candidate for John Carter married in 1825. "John Carter married Sarah Carter of Virginia, a distant relative also descended from John Carter-1 and named after his third wife. Sarah bore John one son, George Fairfax Carter. P. Hopkinson Smith tells of George 50 years later in his book, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891)."

In 1843, acccording to Rutt and McConnell, Sarah Carter died. John Carter would have been getting notices for not having aged. With his son grown, John may have rejoined the Army circa 1845 or thereabouts.

Rutt and McConnell also claim that John Carter married Margaret Butler in 1860. This is not a chronological conflict.

After the close of the Civil War, John Carter came home to discover that his wife Margaret was dead. He then went to see his son Nathan. He discovered Carter Hall was being attacked by a band of renegades. During the fight Nathan Carter was killed, John took a serious but non-fatal wound, and Carter Hall was set afire. Nathan and John were left on the porch to be destroyed in the fire. John pulled Nathan's body off of the porch, and when he had recovered from his wound, buried his son. Since his sons were passing him in age, John Carter put out the story that Jack Carter, Nathan's father, had died in the blaze along with Nathan. He then claimed to be Nathan's brother John.(20)

John Carter's son Simon had gone North, as Nevins describes in his article. The conflict between Simon Carter and his relatives may have been as Jess Nevins described it, although it appears to have been more between the brothers than father and son.

Nevins' belief that Nicholas Carter was Simon's son seems to be more accurate than the Rutt assertion that Nick Carter was John Carter's son. Nevins' research asserts that Nick Carter was the nephew of John Carter. This conclusion doubtless stems from John Carter's post 1865 claims to have been the brother of Simon and Nathan Carter, when in reality he was their father. Nicholas Carter is actually the grandson of John Carter.

Not knowing the whereabouts of his son Simon and having his fortune and family destroyed, John Carter went west with James Powell to seek gold in 1866. Powell, besides being an army companion, may have been a brother-in-law married to another Butler sister.

In the winter of 1865 they located, but did not mine, an extremely rich gold-bearing quartz vein. Carter remained to watch the claim while Powell set off to register it and return with proper equipment and workers. Powell was attacked by Apaches and captured. John Carter rode into the Apache camp and rescued the body of his friend. Although the account by Burroughs does not mention him having been wounded, we can speculate that he received a bullet to a vital spot and went into shock. Extremely drowsy, he took shelter in a cavern and was overcome by a strange paralysis, which according to the narrative by Burroughs appears to have been caused by poisonous gas. He fought against this paralysis for several hours, and then with a click like the snapping of a steel wire he stood over his dead body. His new form however was naked. Walking out of the cavern, he spotted the planet of Mars, and having a momentary desire to travel there, he found himself flitting in that direction.

Examining this incident we will see that there is an inconsistency with the theory that the paralysis that John Carter experienced was caused by poisonous gas. If this is so, why wasn't the secondary body that he somehow created also affected? We know that this body was susceptible to asphyxiation as shown in the end of A Princess of Mars when John Carter dies of that very thing at the atmosphere plant of Barsoom.

In keeping with Phra's body going into a hibernative coma whenever he was "fatally" wounded, John Carter was probably unknowingly fatally injured by an Apache bullet and went into shock but did not feel the pain. The extreme drowsiness he felt was his body's attempt to go into a healing coma. Yet Carter fought going into the trance. He fought it with every fiber of his being, even as his body slipped into a paralysis that was part of the coma he fought it. One can certainly understand why.

John Carter unconsciously realized that that if he allowed this trance to overcome his consciousness, there was a good chance that he would never wake up again. Phra's created personas never seemed to last more than one incarnation. If John Carter had allowed himself to fall into the trance, he might have indeed suffered the genuine death. One of the factors besides Carter's strong will that aided him in his struggle against falling into the trance may have been the remnants of Phra's persona. Phra had no desire to return to life and knew that if John Carter disappeared it was likely that he would once again be forced into consciousness. Aided by Phra, John Carter fought back with all of his might against the veil of sleep. In doing so he used the mental disciplines taught to him so many years ago in Tibet. Realizing that he could not stop the inevitable coma, Carter did the next best thing. He created a duplicate body and channeled his consciousness into it.

For many years the nature of John Carter's Barsoomian body has been debated. Most likely it was a mentally created doppelganger of his own body into which his consciousness was channeled. He however remained connected to his own body as if on a psychic rubber band, to be snapped back into the real body, as it were, when this duplicate perished. This duplicate body was flesh and blood, identical to his own body, but it was also a form of thought projection that he had learned from the Tibetans. The duplicate body was a tulpa. Although the Tibetan monks most likely learned to create tulpas on their own through sheer mental discipline, members of this sect may have had some contact with the ancient Barsoomians since the Lotharians of Mars also had the ability to create tulpas.

John Carter, in his tulpa form, lived and died after ten years on Barsoom. When the Tulpa perished, he found himself in back in his original body, which had recovered enough from its wounds for Carter to regain consciousness.

During the next ten years he strove to find some way to return to Barsoom and to Dejah Thoris, the woman who was his true love, the woman that who would live a thousand years with him. He was unsuccessful in this because he had not yet learned to physically teleport his body to Barsoom.

According to The Mysterious Case of the Carters, Rhett Butler left Scarlett in 1872. Despite their brilliant etymological deductions (21), I believe that Powell, while related to the Butlers and married to Butler's sister, was not one and the same with Rhett. Support for this conclusion can be found in Princess. Carter notes that Powell was "a mining engineer by education" -- which sounds like formal, university education which coupled with Powell's military career would mean that he was probably a graduate of West Point or the Virginia Military Institute. Also Powell was familiar with the country, which indicates that Powell had been out in Arizona previously. Carter's daughter by Dejah Thoris, Tara, suggests a possible connection between Carter and Butler in that Carter might have named his daughter after Scarlet O'Hara's plantation. Freed of his marital constraints, Rhett went west circa 1873 to discover if he could find out what had happened to his brothers-in-law.

In Phoenix, Arizona Territory, Carter encountered Rhett Butler, who had left Scarlett O'Hara in 1873. Butler was in the West seeking to enhance his fortune and also attempting to discover what had happened to his brother-in-laws, John Carter and James K. Powell. Butler insisted they go after the vein of gold that Carter and Powell had found and also to retrieve Powell's body, but Carter was reluctant. Carter did not wish to disturb the cavern in case that was his only means of returning to Barsoom and Dejah Thoris. Because of Carter's adamant refusal to help Rhett Butler, Butler went off on his own. Carter went after him, not so much to aid him but to physically prevent him from disturbing the cavern should he find it. Like James K. Powell before him, despite his having fought in the Civil War, Rhett Butler proved little match for a band of Apache warriors.

John found Rhett's mutilated body near the cavern. He buried Rhett Butler in the same cavern as James K. Powell.

It was after following Rhett Butler's reckless excursion and subsequent death that John Carter rediscovered his gold mine, which provided him with a great deal of wealth. Over the next few years he returned to his family in Virginia and stayed with them for a year. He also bought property in New York, perhaps having discovered the whereabouts of his son Simon.

In 1886, he saw Mars beckoning in the sky. John Carter had a sudden insight as to how he might be able to return to Barsoom. Using the Tibetan-taught mental disciplines again, he stopped his heart and kept it stopped. He may in fact have caused great damage to it so that he sustained a fatal internal wound. He felt the paralysis and the onset of death grip him; this was of course the healing coma to which his body was subject at such times. As before, he fought against this coma and was able to create another tulpa into which he channeled his consciousness. The cause of his death was declared to be heart failure by the doctor that who examined the still warm corpse.

As per his instructions, his body was removed to Virginia and placed in an open casket inside a tomb that could be opened only from the inside.

As revealed in the introduction to The Chessmen of Mars, John Carter would learn to enhance his psionic abilities through his association with Kar Komak, the ancient Lotharian. Among these skills would be the ability to create tulpas at will. He used these temporary mental constructs to keep in contact with his nephew M. N. Carter.

As to whether John Carter ever remembered being Phra the Phoenician, we do not know.

It may be that he did and that another will tell this epic story.

NOTES

1. Previously in Dennis Power's revised chronology of the Wold Newton Universe, the Aliens Among Us articles, and the Wold Wold West articles he speculated that Norman of Torn was a Capellean-Human hybrid.  More recent research has proven him wrong on this account .

2. John Carter is Phra the Phoenician.

3. This statement of Phra's that he does not remember much of his life before thirty years of age coincides with the statement of John Carter in A Princess of Mars, "I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago."

4. Wold-Newtonian researchers Rutt and McConnell offer some interesting speculations concerning caverns and suspended animation in Caves, Gas & The Great Transfer Theory

5. One can see here that the seeds of John Carter's personality are contained within Phra, but Phra was rather reactive than proactive in his personality. To Phra the idea of winning a kingdom by the power of his sword was mere fantasy; he did not yet have the force of personality to achieve this goal that as he would as John Carter.

6. The last awakening in 1586 is a bit odd in that Phra usually awakens just as an invading force threatens England. Yet despite waking up close to the time of the Spanish Armada, the problems with the Spanish were not featured in this episode, except symbolically in that his main nemesis was a Spaniard. Also featured was Adam Faulkner's mechanical monstrosity gone awry, so perhaps the real villain in either Phra's or Arnold's eyes was the industrial revolution that would forever alter England.

7.  One theory that has been proposed about John Carter was that he was in fact the immortal time-traveling Tarzan. While this theory holds it many attractions, especially given the similarity of the two men, it is also possible that Phra was a close descendent of Tarzan, possible a son or grandson. Another trait besides the immortality of John Carter that might point to him being a close descendent of Tarzan is Carter's musculature, which retained its enhanced strength and agility despite years on the lesser gravity of Barsoom. Whereas normal musculature would have atrophied, the mutated Wold-Newtonian derived musculature did not. This of course despite the fact that Phra was born before the Wold-Newton event took place, ah the wonders of time travel!

Other traits include John Carter's ability to block his mind from Barsoomian telepaths. Tarzan may have had a low level form of telepathy that he used unconsciously, which allowed him to understand better than most people the language of animals. John Carter was able to rapidly bond with Barsoomian animals and savages faster than most of the native Barsoomians. The final clue is John Carter's ability to travel through dimensions, something that Tarzan seems to been able to do also with little effort as he visited Pellucidar, Barsoom, Amator, Pal U Don, the African section of Lilliput, and various other dimensional realms that seemed to bleed over into Africa.

Another theory that has been proposed was that Carter was an immortal of the Highlander type. However since Highlander type immortals are sterile once their immorality has been switched on, this theory is not a probable one given that Phra had progeny after his first hibernation as did John Carter. This despite the fact that Highlander type immortals have also been known to hibernate.

8. Many such unlicensed castles were destroyed on the order of King Henry II, Richard Plantagenet's great-grandfather.

9. This scream of fury may in fact been one of great pain as sleep-stiff muscles were suddenly forced into use.

10. Possibly because in an earlier awakening as Phra he had awakened in the presence of a cleric.

11. The Arms of Tarzan.

12. According to the researches of Jess Nevins, the editor of A Princess of Mars and the narrator of the introductory frames of Gods of Mars and the other Martian novels was not Edgar Rice Burroughs but rather an actual nephew of John Carter. See The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy.

13. This change of name sis documented in The Arms of Tarzan. The adoption of this name may be significant considering Norman/Phra's recent loss. Caldwell means cold spring or stream, which he may have unconsciously adopted because somehow the death of Bertholde unconsciously reminded him of the loss of Numidea, who had drowned in a cold stream so many centuries past.

14. Phra's son John Caldwell continued the family tradition and became an outlaw. In explanation Farmer writes, "About all that remains to explain in the arms is the dexter supporter. Aside from its being green, it looks like the usual savage or woodman supporter. Actually, it represents the son of John Caldwell. After his father's supposed death, the son had to flee into the wilds of northern England to escape the King's officers. There he adopted a green costume and used a green-painted bow and green arrows. Because of these, he was known as The Green Archer or, sometimes, as The Green Baron. His legend was combined with that of Robert Fitzooth to create the Robin Hood legend." Farmer, "The Arms of Tarzan"

15. In Llana of Gathol, Carter says, "Perhaps I am the materialization of some dead warrior of another age" (book 1, chapter 13). This statement suggests that he might have begun to suspect or remember his past.

16. Information as to which belief system that these monks belong is unknown. Considering their mental and martial abilities, they may be the same ones who would later train Kent Allard, The Shadow. In Masters of Death, both The Shadow and his enemy Shiwan Khan create a tulpa, lending credence to this theory.

17. More information about MN can be had from Coogan's "Burroughing Beneath the Page" (forthcoming)

18. Dr. Peter Coogan had access to the Burroughs archives because his great-grandfather one of the Shadow's agents. The connection between John Carter and the Shadow will be shown shortly.

Dr. Coogan's researches uncovered a startling relationship between Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter's nephew Matthew Nicholas Carter, who sometimes went by the alias Matthew Nicholas. He may in fact be the mysterious M.N. who provided a mixture of accurate information and misinformation to Jess Nevins. Matthew Nicholas Carter was in fact the author of the various prologues, introductions, and prefaces common to Burroughs' novels. John Flint Roy outlines Carter's life in the closing chapter of A Guide to Barsoom, titled "'Edgar Rice Burroughs': A Brief Biographical Sketch."

Dr. Coogan ascertained Burroughs had a relationship with Carter's nephew similar to that of Arthur Conan-Doyle's relationship with Dr. Watson and reporter Edward Malone, the author of the Challenger stories. Carter's nephew is the source of most of the Burroughs' canon. Dr. Coogan's research is into Matthew Nicholas Carter's life is ongoing, and we should expect to see further revelations in the future that will clarify the relationship between Burroughs and Carter as well as previous research done on the "Burroughs" narrator.

19 . M.N. Carter had a tendency to put out false information. For a discussion of his personality, see Coogan's "Burroughing Beneath the Page" (forthcoming)

20. Both of his sons being twins had inherited a longevity that made them age much less than the norm. Although Nathan and Simon were over 65 years old they still looked in their thirties, so his claim to having been their brother would not have been as remarked upon had Nathan looked his actual age. Although Carter had many children over the ages, only a very few inherited any form of longevity, yet in the Virginia era within a short span of time three of his children and possibly a grandchild seem to have inherited some form of longevity. The simplest explanation for these seems to be inbreeding. His wife Whitney Smith Trout seems to be descended from John Carter; it was perhaps the reinforcement of the longevity genes that produced the long-lived Matthew, Nathan, and Simon Carter; especially given the similar form of longevity--extended youths and quick aging--that these three men experienced (see footnote 13 in The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy). Nicholas Carter, the son of Simon Carter, also seems to have inherited longevity from John Carter since he seems not to aged past twenty-five. This is one possible explanation for Nicholas Carter's longevity; the trait would have seemed to have been reduced in two generations, but Nicholas seemed to have possessed not only longevity but also stamina, enhanced recuperative powers, and super strength. Nicholas Carter's mother was Winifred Ludlow, the product of an afternoon of passion between Eugenia Ludlow and Jesse Clayton, the 4th Duke of Greystoke. As a result of Clayton's genes, Nicholas Carter was a member of the Wold Newton family proper. It is perhaps the combination of John Carter's genes and the inherited genetic mutation arising from the Wold Newton meteor strike that gave Nicholas Carter his anomalous gifts. It is also entirely possible, considering Nicholas' odd upbringing, that he was given a chemical elixir or exposed to some form of radiation that endowed him with beneficial mutations.

21. To support the idea that Butler and Powell were the same man, Rutt and McConnell write "Are Rhett Butler and James K. Powell one and the same? Remember, Butler's father and great-grandfather were both named James. His sister's middle initial was K. And Powell? The name Powell is derived from the Welsh surname of ap-Howell, meaning "eminent." Certainly the Butler family was one of the most eminent in Charleston. This is also the reason he gives Richmond instead of Charleston for "Powell's" home town. Were he to tell the truth there, many people would know who this "Powell" was meant to be. For those of you who doubt Butler's capability as a gold hunter, we refer you to GWTW, which tells us that he traveled to California during the 1849 gold rush

Select Sources

Arnold, Edwin. The Wondrous Adventures of Phra the Phoenician. New York: A.L. Burt,

At Health Inc. "Disassociative disorders." AtHealth.com Website. Jul. 2002. <http://www.athealth.com/Consumer/disorders/Dissociative.html

Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Mars. 1912. New York: Ballantine, 1963.

---. The Outlaw of Torn. 1914. New York: Ace Books, 1968.

Coogan, Peter. "John Carter is Phra the Phoenician!" The Wold Newton Universe. Ed. Win Eckert. 2001. <http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Articles5.htm#PHRA

Farmer, Philip José. "The Arms of Tarzan." Burroughs Bulletin. 22 (1971). The Wold Newton Universe. Ed. Win Eckert. 2001. <http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Farmer_articles.htm#ARMS

---. Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Sebastian Evans, revised by Charles W. Dunn. New York: Dutton, 1958.

"Monarchs of Britain." Britannia . 2000. <http://www.britannia.com/history/h6f.html

Nevins, Jess. "The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy." 1999

Roy, John Flint. A Guide to Barsoom: The Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs. New York: Ballantine, 1976.

Rutt, Todd & McConnell, Arn. "The Mysterious Case of the Carters Or How Hirohito Became Nick Carter's Aide," Wold Atlas vol.1, no.2, Spring, 1977

 

Next read Part Two: The Lives and Times of John Carter

All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the authors, Dennis E. Power and Peter Coogan. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.

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