Letters From Watson: The Naval Treaty
Themes, Crimes, and Lies
For those of you tuning in to this reread without background knowledge this one is going to get esoteric, and for that I apologize. The primary mystery here is whether the cases known as The Second Stain and The Naval Treaty are, in a Watsonian perspective, fictionalized, and secondly it's whether they are fictionalized versions of the same case. (The Watsonian perspective, remember, is the game we play of attempting to make the timelines, scientific knowledge, and biographies of Holmes and Watson make sense as if they were real, historical people. From a Doylist perspective, Second Stain, published eleven years after this during ACD's reluctant revival of the franchise, is almost certainly a shortened remix of The Naval Treaty.) Fictionalization, Evidence:
National Importance, Exhibit A: Although names have been changed to protect the recognizable, neither Second Stain nor Naval Treaty is shy about connecting the case to a high ranking politician, or allowing a contemporary audience (or a wikipedia literate one) to draw relatively concrete conclusions about the contents of the lost documents. As I pointed out in A Scandal in Bohemia, this does not make a lot of sense if you assume any of the details such as the date or the "identity" of the fictionalized public figures are even close to accurate. A Watson whose first published short story referenced the obviously nonexistent "King of Bohemia" and fudged the year might feel confident that the safely married public figure in question, residing in a different country with a different primary language, would not bother him over the similarities and therefore confirm them, but I wouldn't assume the same lassez-faire idea would apply to the prime minister of his own country. I don't have the time or expertise to go into 1890's british laws and see if this would amount to some kind of libel, but I don't have to: Watson characterizes himself as a patriot, and has sympathy for the victims in both of his espionage stories. We can assume that enough of the details are fudged to give the innocent privacy and not reflect too badly or obviously on the public figures under whose watch these thefts (or whatever inspired these stories) took place.
Crowded timeline of Summer of 1888, Exhibit B: 1888 and 1889 are wild years no matter how you start your Holmesian chronology. Lots of cases happen and if you take Watson's word for the exact dates you run into contradictions. If one presumes that high profile cases are slightly fictionalized, (such as giving a date that's a year or two off), it makes the timeline much more manageable. Then there's the fact that Second Stain and Naval Treaty are recorded by Watson as occurring in the same month. "The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases [...] recorded in my notes under the headings of “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” and “The Adventure of the Tired Captain.”" -The opening paragraph of The Adventure of the Naval Treaty. Second Stain was written up much later, so when reading in publication order this is a lot less obvious than when reading in Baring-Gould’s chronology order. But even Baring-Gould apparently decided that two documents scandals in 1888 were too much, and ignored all text indications in order to place Second Stain in 1886.
Case so Nice We Wrote it Twice, Evidence:
Exhibit A, Case Structure: The particulars of the case are extremely similar: a young public servant charged with national security documents leaves them in an insecure location briefly and has them stolen by a trusted household member. The documents, although potentially ruinous, are not released to a foreign power because the would-be seller is separated from them almost immediately after hiding them away. The hiding place is a hollow in the floor of a room.
Exhibit B, Case List: At the beginning of The Naval Treaty, Watson lists Second Stain as taking place in the same month. Even with Watson's flattering description of both of Gascoyne-Cecil's expies and his sympathetic portrayal of the public officials in need of remedial document security courses, TWO major data breaches seems deeply careless, even if nothing comes of either. I think it's more probable that the case Watson originally named The Second Stain had very little to do with national security.
Exhibit C, publication date: The Second Stain was published 11 years after The Naval Treaty and 14 years after its alleged date of occurrence. (Year and decade that shall remain nameless my ass.) It's the final story of the second batch of short story publications (which were collected into the third book of short stories, The Return of Sherlock Holmes). Watson didn't publish again for four years: it's possible he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for publishable cases and decided it was time to revisit a case that he'd already told, or tape the interesting bits from multiple cases together.
Conclusion: I believe that both The Naval Treaty and The Second Stain are two different retellings of the same case, but both are changed a lot to make them both less identifiable, and more exciting. The incident that inspired both stories probably did not take place in early summer of 1888, if only because the easiest way of fudging the details of a case would be to definitively give the wrong year.
Additionally, it may be that certain details in The Second Stain were originally part of a case that had nothing to do with any top secret documents. The blackmail angle already present in that story would be sufficient for a case on their own, but the secret documents that Mrs. Hope squirreled away could have been deeply boring business documents, or deeply boring official government documents that nonetheless had no strategic value. If so, it's very possible for Watson to have swapped some details between the two cases: a prospective brother in law with no political knowledge might impulsively steal a document that was more embarrassing than strategic, such as an impolitic letter from a foreign official, in the hopes that it was valuable, while a career blackmailer might target the wife of a government official known to have access to military strategy documents. The victims in both cases come off as more sympathetic, and the danger to the country less severe, if the diligent young clerk has a breakdown over a clearly important military document, and the wife of a government official is blackmailed into handing over an angry letter from a foreign dignitary.
