Tamam Shud (4 page)

His age was estimated as ‘about fifty'. He had only three small scars on his body – no tattoos, barcode or other marks. The absence of tattoos is significant because most working men at that time had tattoos. My father had lots. I used to call him the illustrated man, from a Ray Bradbury story he gave me to read when I was eight. My father's first tattoo, a black cat was on his inner wrist, placed there when he was underage with a forged permission from his own father. There were two hula girls, one on each thigh. A full rigged ship on his arm. Jeannie (my mother's name) on his other arm. A swallow, the navy's good luck bird, which signifies land, and more on his chest. I thought they were bold and fascinating. As he grew old, the hair over the illustrations turned grey, making him look ancient and shamanic, blue lines visible through the silver fur.

The urge to decorate the body with ink has been with the male ever since poor Bronze Age Otzi, murdered on the way to Italy, his body only revealed when a glacier in the Otztal Alps melted. Any visit to a swimming pool in my youth yielded hours of tattoo watching. There is not a decorative mark on Somerton Man, however, and his ears were not pierced. Almost all sailors had a pierced ear, done when the seaman crossed the equatorial line, usually by the cook with a cork and a baling needle. Even my brother, who builds ships, has one pierced ear, as did my father. But officers usually did not have their ears pierced and Somerset Man's ears were pink and perfect. In my view, he was not a working-class man.

His neat hands bear this out. There were three small scars inside his left wrist, a curved one-inch scar inside his left elbow and a round mark, possibly from a boil, on his upper left forearm. Those scars on his left wrist confirm my belief that he was a seaman. I have seen them before.

Someone who wears an oilskin, standing in salt seaspray, gets the sleeve of his non-dominant hand wet and the sleeve then scrapes across his inside wrist, where the skin is thinner. Salt is a powerful abrasive. It produces scrapes, then sores and then scars. A cargo master on a ship, giving orders about stowage in heavy weather, might easily have such scars. Somerton Man was probably right handed because it is his left wrist that has what the fishermen call ‘gurry sores'.

I met many of my father's wharfie friends and a lot of them had been sailors. They used to gather in a cargo shed on the docks, which had been fitted out as a recreation room. I have always loved waterfronts. Apart from all their other fascinations they never sleep, and at that age, according to my mother, neither did I. So I used to tag along after my father, as unnoticed and accepted as a little dog, while the men played cards and gossiped. Yarned. Told stories. I would sit quietly in my chair with my orangeade, ears flapping, and I remembered it all. At eight years old I had a memory like a sponge. I could reproduce whole conversations and if I didn't understand them, I stored them for future reference. I learned primitive Greek in the same way, just by being around Greeks. It's like cooking rice by the absorption method, only where rice sucks in water I took in information. Voices. Accents. Clothes. Scents.

One old man, Harry, saw me looking at his wrist. It was the third time I had seen those white scars and I was curious. Harry explained that they were gurry sores and told me how he got them. Several other men had them too and they stripped back their sleeves to show me. The same Harry taught my father a very complex knot called a star knot and showed me his other scars – wide, flat bands across the palms of his hands. He said that as a boy he had been reefing topsails in a windjammer going around Cape Horn and his hands had frozen to the lines. He told
me he had been lucky and when I expressed surprise, he chuckled and said that if he hadn't been secured by his icy grasp, he would have fallen either into the sea or onto the deck and, thus, he would be dead. In those latitudes, he said, it wouldn't make much difference which one you hit. Deck or sea would be equally fatal.

It never occurred to me, not once, how privileged I was to hear those stories.

The other scars on Somerton Man meant nothing to the examiners and they don't mean a lot to me either, unless that boil mark was an injection scar. He was missing most of his back teeth and the remaining ones were stained from smoking. His hands and feet were smooth and well cared for. He had no bunions or callouses on his feet, even though he had forced them into wedge-shaped shoes. His nails were short and neat, cut and filed, not gnawed. His toenails had been neatly cut. His hair had been neatly cut. He was a fine presentable corpse.

The pathologist said that he had a ‘fine Britisher face' and my mother thinks he looks Baltic. But he also looks dead, which is not helpful. Physiognomy is not an exact science, despite Lombroso, or indeed a science at all. Anyone involved in the legal system has seen little angels who like nothing more than torturing their classmates, and ugly old men with hearts of pure gold. If there is an art to find the mind's construction in the face, we don't have it.

But as to Somerton Man's body and internal processes, there was a lot of information. Several doctors were involved in the investigation of the cause of death. The first was John Barkley Bennett, a legally qualified medical practitioner (or LQMP), who declared life extinct in the first place. Rigor was established and he thought that death had occurred within eight hours of his examination, at about 2 am.

By the time that John Matthew Dwyer LQMP saw Somerton Man, rigor was intense. The post-mortem lividity behind the ears and neck was deep, indicating that the body had not been moved. There was a patch of dried saliva on his cheek, which had run out of his mouth as he slumped to one side and the cigarette fell onto his lapel. Dwyer said that ‘His pupils were smaller and unusual, uneven in outline and about the same size. Certain drugs may be associated with a contraction in the pupils. Even barbiturates may do it, but it is by no means a distinguishing point.'

He added:

Sunburn marks were present up to the level of the crotch, and they were probably from the previous season. The fingers were cyanotic [bluish skin due to low levels of oxygen in the blood], there was sand in the hair but none in the nostrils or mouth. The scalp, skull and brain were
normal, except that small vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernable with congestion. There was congestion of the pharynx, and the gullet was covered with a whitening of the superficial layers of the mucosa with a patch of ulceration in the middle of it. The stomach was deeply congested, and there was a superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the second half of the duodenum continuing through the third part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.

Both kidneys were congested and the liver contained a great excess of blood. The heart was of normal size and normal in every way. It gave the impression that it was the heart of a man in good physical training. The reason why I say that is that the muscle was quite tough and firm. Both lungs were dark with congestion. The heart, if anything, was contracted.

The spleen was strikingly large and firm, about three times normal size.

The points to which I gave consideration in my summary was the acute gastric haemorrhage,
extensive congestion to the liver and spleen, and congestion to the brain.

There was food in the stomach. I would say that food had been in the stomach for up to three or four hours before death. It is difficult to give an opinion on that because if the person is in a state of anxiety, then digestion may be suspended.

I made microscopic examination of the diseases, and there is pigment in it, though I cannot say of which disease. It does not resemble malarial pigment, and I can only keep an open mind on the matter. The blood in the stomach suggested some irritant poison, but on the other hand nothing detectable in the food to my naked eye to make a finding, so I sent specimens of the stomach and its contents, blood and urine for analysis.

So far, what the learned doctor appears to be saying is that there was some poison present but that he observed no poisonous matter – leaves, herbs, toadstools, berries, dyes, ground glass – in the stomach contents. Those contents are interesting precisely because they are there. Irritant poisons, even alcohol, usually announce themselves by violent vomiting, until the person has thrown up the entire contents of their stomach and are just vomiting bile. One recalls the dreadful wines of one's youth
– I particularly have it in for Yalumba Autumn Brown Sherry but other contenders are Blackberry Nip, Cold Duck and a certain chianti derived from vines grown on the cold, polluted side of a Tuscan hill, which turned the lips purple. One starts throwing up and continues to eject liver, lights and everything one has eaten since primary school, including breast milk. Since Somerton Man had the remains of a pastie still in his tummy, there is no way he died of an ordinary irritant poison, not with all that starch and potato and pastry in his belly.

The final verdict was that he died of heart failure, which is like saying ‘he died because his heart stopped'. This was said to be caused by poison, whether self-administered or given with homicidal intent by another person or persons unknown could not be determined. Having said as much (or as little), the Coroner adjourned the inquest
sine die
– that is, for another day, when hopefully someone might be able to tell him something helpful.

Then again, suggested my learned friend and a senior scientist Vanessa Craigie – I have been boring my friends to death about Somerton Man for months – what about blue-ringed octopus or snake venom? Death, in fact, by natural causes?

What an interesting idea. Dad was always going on about Adelaide snakes and I unashamedly sponged on her for introductions. And got Nick Clemman, a senior scientist at The Threatened Fauna Project at the Department
of Sustainability and Environment and author of
A Field Guide to Reptiles and Frogs of
… Practically Everywhere. He has never met a scaly person he didn't like.

After outlining the problem and reading the documents, Nick said:

It is certainly plausible that a human-delivered puncture wound from a syringe/needle would remain undetected either amongst ‘abrasions', or actually be the source of a ‘boil scar' (especially if it was relatively fresh). Similarly, it is plausible that he may have accidentally put his hand down on a snake, or even attempted to catch or handle a snake he encountered (not recommended but people do such things). A ‘hot day and warm night' are precisely the conditions under which usually diurnal snakes become nocturnal. They have poor eyesight, and rely largely on chemoreception (a bit like an advanced ‘super' sense of smell), and are thus unfazed by darkness, instead using their flickering tongue to ‘see' at night. Although most folks assume that reptiles love hot weather, and think that the hotter it is the more likely it is that they are active, high temperatures rapidly kill reptiles, and on very hot days they will seek cooler shelters during the heat of the day, and become crepuscular or nocturnal.

So, even if not especially likely, it is not impossible that this person was strolling along the beach, went to sit, and put his hand on a snake. Only a year or two back a friend of mine who works for the council showed me pictures of a large Tiger Snake that was on the sand on St Kilda Beach; a relevant example of snakes occurring on an actual beach (not just in the dunes), and in a very urbanised area. Also, beach-washed, venomous sea snakes also turn up from time to time on the beaches of southern Australia.

The time of year is certainly spot-on for snakebite risk; the start of summer is a time when many snakes are very active. If the victim was fully clothed and wearing long trousers, this lessens the likelihood of snake envenomation after inadvertently stepping on a snake. I mention this because snakes are often active after dark on hot days/nights, and are easily stepped on in the dark, but as local elapid (or front fanged venomous) snakes have very short fangs, long trousers afford some protection from bites to the lower legs. It is not out of the question that fangs would effectively penetrate light trousers, but it does lessen the odds. Of course, it remains plausible that he may have been bitten elsewhere on the body.

And generally on Adelaide snakes he had the following to say:

The Eastern Brown is not the only contender that naturally occurs in that general area. A close cousin, the clumsily named Strap-snouted Brown Snake (
Pseudonaja aspidorhyncha
), and the Tiger Snake (
Notechis scutatus
) are also possible, and both have the (proven) bioarsenal to rapidly kill humans. The near-beach habitat described sounds just fine for both species of Brown Snake, and for Tigers too. But both will also show up in areas with little or virtually no remnant ‘bush'.

Venom works differently to poison. It usually needs to be injected or absorbed, rather than ingested. Ingested venom (provided it is not absorbed through a mouth wound) would likely be rapidly and effectively neutralised by saliva. Still, I can't see it becoming a popular condiment…

Re venom inhaled via cigarette or the like, I'm not 100 per cent sure, but my best guess is that it would not be fatal (again, it needs to enter the lymphatic or circulatory system to do its job as evolution intended). However, I am intrigued by what, if any, effects smoked venom would produce!

It is well within the bounds of possibility that any minor local/visible effects of envenomation could be overlooked post-mortem, especially back then, especially if there were other marks to ‘camouflage' localised effects, especially if the victim was quite hairy, especially if the examiner suspected other causes, or was hurried, etcetera. As discussed, bites like this from some elapid snakes can leave little or no trace at the site of the bite, even when the bite proves fatal. The neurotoxins common in elapid venom can cause rapid death by asphyxiation via, in layman's terms, preventing the brain's signals from telling the diaphragm to breathe. It is a (very) long shot, but it would be possible to use snake venom to murder someone (milked venom delivered via a hyperdermic needle, or something like that), but that seems quite ‘hollywood' to me…