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.