Introduction: conceptualizing connections in global history

In 1910, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, a London resident of American descent, came under the suspicion of having murdered his wife. He managed to escape from London before Scotland Yard could get hold of him. Crippen and his companion, Ethel Le Neve, fled to Antwerp. There, they boarded a steamship to Montreal, Canada. Their sojourn on the steamer, however, did not go unnoticed and a curious transatlantic manhunt unfolded. The pursuit and eventual arrest of Dr Crippen and his companion were embedded in a plurality of global connections provided, for instance, by the ship or the wireless telegraph. This article uses the Crippen case to look at the anatomy of these interrelated connections and to better understand their historical significance. It ultimately aims at contributing to a profound conceptualization of connections in global history.

In the subtitle of his seminal 2004 work on The birth of the modern world, Christopher Bayly introduced a reference to global connections and comparisons that has since become a kind of informal description of what the field of global history is all about.Footnote ¹ Patrick O’Brien took it up in his prolegomenon to the first edition of the Journal of Global History two years later.Footnote ² More recently, Sebastian Conrad has described the purpose of the field in his German-language introduction to global history in the same vein.Footnote ³ Following these and other researchers’ suggestions, there seems to be a rough consensus in the field that global history should primarily concern itself with global connections and comparisons.

The two terms are fundamentally different in scope. For the historical sciences, comparison, be it global or not, is a method. It is an instrument of enquiry.Footnote ⁴ This leaves global or transregional connections as the principal objects of study of the field. Global history asks how such connections were created by historical actors and how they in turn influenced them in their actions and their perception of the world. Connections provide the building blocks for the phenomena of contact and exchange typically studied by historians in the field. It is a truism to state that some sort of connection is a precondition for all forms of exchange and interaction. When people, things, or ideas move, what they do is create a connection – sometimes fragile, sometimes more stable – between their origin(s) and their destination. In short, global history is interested in the significance of transregional connections in history.

Accordingly, connection as a term is in wide and prominent use in historical research. Connections are recognized as key elements in concepts such as transfers, entanglements, or contact zones, all of which have seen a fair share of theorizing in the last decades.Footnote ⁵ Often, however, the term is employed in a descriptive rather than an analytical manner and our conceptual understanding of transregional connections as the fundamental components of global exchange and interaction remains rudimentary. So far, too little attention has been given to a more systematic and conceptually informed evaluation of the term. What is a connection? And, even more importantly, what is a global or transregional connection? How do local and global connections differ analytically? How do connections become historically potent phenomena? Do connections have a time and a space of their own? And, building on this, where is their place in history? Finally, how do they relate to that which is connected? Issues such as these implicitly inform many studies in global history but have rarely been addressed in a systematic fashion.

This lack of a feasible conceptual approach is a consequence of our perspective on connections. We usually think of connections mainly in terms of the people, places, or things that they bring into touch with each other. In practice, we conceptualize connections from their endpoints. Rather than considering the connection itself, we think about that which is connected. It is there that we look for effects of contact and exchange. The connection itself is part of the picture but remains in the background. We see it as an intermediary in the sense of actor–network theory, an enabler that brings its endpoints in touch but does not create or transform meaning by itself.Footnote ⁶ In this article, I claim that this way of thinking about connections should be amended. In order to better gauge the historical significance of transregional connections, we will have to think of connections as mediators rather than mere intermediaries (to stay in the terminology of actor–network theory). For Bruno Latour, ‘Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.’Footnote ⁷ This is what connections always do. They do not merely bring their endpoints in contact; they interject themselves as mediators and thereby gain a strong bearing on that which is connected.

If we conceive of connections as mediators, we will have to recalibrate our analytical focus. We will have to look more directly at that which connects: that which happens in between, during the communication process, between the endpoints. Connections should be seen as historical phenomena in their own right. At the same time, however, we must not lose sight of that which is connected. An exclusive focus on the connection itself would derive it of its principal quality. Thus, we need to consider connections and that which is connected in tandem and in constant mutual reference. What is more, connections develop their historical significance in the plural. They become meaningful and gain their mediating potential in reference to or difference from other connections or disconnections. The electric telegraph will serve as a simple example here. Its important role in nineteenth-century processes of globalization can only be understood in contrast to existing global disconnections and in reference to other forms of connections such as letter writing. The new communicational quality of telegraphic connections developed in reference to and difference from other kinds of global connections.Footnote ⁸

Our conceptual understanding of the term ‘connection’ should bring all these points together. Global connections are mediators that themselves have an impact on that which is connected. The latter must not be mistaken for the connection itself. In order to identify mediating potential, connections and the connected need to be considered in tandem. Finally, connections exist in the plural and gain their mediating potential in relation to other forms of connections and disconnections. Such an integrated concept of connections will allow us to look at processes of exchange and interaction from a fresh perspective. As shall be seen in the following, alternative historical narratives will come to light and will enrich our understanding of a connected past.

Transit: ship passages as global connections

For the purpose of this article, the wider ramifications of such a reconceptualization will be demonstrated with the help of examples from maritime history. With its established focus on maritime trade and communication, the field carries great significance for global history approaches. Regional and transregional connections, most importantly in the form of ship passages, are key elements of study for maritime historians. Often, however, maritime history’s main focus has rested on the ends of the passage. It has been concerned with that which is connected, rather than with the connections themselves. For instance, the field has a long-standing interest in port cities as archetypical contact zones and melting pots.Footnote ⁹ They are seminal portals of global migration, trade, and intellectual exchange, and thus ideally suited to study what happens when different cultures get in touch. If one wants to widen this scope and incorporate port cities in a broader regional context, maritime history has introduced the notion of the seascape, which refers to a region connected across the sea.Footnote ¹⁰ Fernand Braudel’s idea of the Mediterranean world has provided inspiration here.Footnote ¹¹ In recent decades, the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean rim have also been studied from a similar perspective.Footnote ¹²

Both port cities and the seascapes that they are part of are products of myriad connections that originate or terminate there. This has, of course, been duly acknowledged in research.Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, the focus of such research has often remained on ocean littorals, on liminal spaces and contact zones that arise from transoceanic connections. Ship passages have for long been studied as enabling factors that bring A and B together, but rarely as arenas of study in themselves. Despite the defining role of global connections for the field, even in maritime history attention has concentrated on origin and destination, on the start and end of the process. In recent decades, however, maritime history has seen attempts to recalibrate its analytical focus. In several subfields – in particular in the context of studies on the maritime slave trade – more attention has been paid to the ship itself. Seaborne historical actors – sailors, pirates, or slaves – and their lives on board of a ship have slowly come to the fore.Footnote ¹⁴ These studies have identified the ship as a distinct historical environment and the passage as formative for the historical actors.

Ship passages have pronounced spatial and temporal dimensions defined by the space of the ship and the time of the passage. This makes it easier to see how the connection and that which is connected must not be confused or conflated. Even during the heyday of steam shipping, long-distance ship passages took time. In the late nineteenth century, a bundle of technological innovations had shortened the duration of a passage from, say, Europe to India dramatically. But passengers and crew still had to spend at least three to four weeks on board a steamship on this route before they would arrive at, for instance, Bombay. Although substantially shorter, crossing the Atlantic by steamer also took about ten days. This time on board was not ‘dead’ or ‘empty’, nor did people simply put their lives on ‘stand-by’.Footnote ¹⁵ Such assumptions merely reinforce a terracentric notion that the only meaningful history – with the exceptions of battles or mutinies – occurs on land. Rather, as passengers, steerage, and crew shared the confined space of the ship during transit, interaction and exchange became practically unavoidable. Regardless of class and station, shipboard bodies were exposed to new and often deeply uncomfortable experiences; social networks and even cultures were formed within the community of the ship, in many cases outliving the duration of the journey; isolated physically from land, ships became spaces of potential transgression as well as conformity.Footnote ¹⁶ Therefore, the space and time of the passage provide an arena of transit in which we can study the connection as a mediator.

Ship passages usually existed in reference to or difference from other forms of global connections and disconnections. Telegraph cables, for instance, often ran parallel to shipping routes. Railways linked port cities to the hinterland. Or, as in the case study explored in the following sections, the wireless ‘whispered’ across the ocean.Footnote ¹⁷ Ship passages were embedded in a plurality of connections. This becomes particularly tangible when we examine the different, and seemingly paradox, ways in which the people on board related to the world during such a passage. On the one hand, the ship, by the movement it provided for the people, goods, and information that it carried, created global connections. Ship passages were thus important constituents of globality and globalization. On the other hand, however, the ship was an isolated place during the open sea passage, its connection with the rest of the world thin and fragile. Before wireless technology became available on steamers, the only outside contact was short exchanges with other passing ships. And even with the advent of wireless telegraphy, the link to the world proved to be of low capacity and prone to different kinds of disturbances, as shall soon be seen below. Passengers and crew on long-distance ocean crossings thus created global connections by their movements, while at the same time their own contact to the outside world depended on a changing combination of connection (for example, by wireless) and disconnections (such as isolation at sea).

Owing to their pronounced spatial and temporal dimensions and their embeddedness in a plurality of connections, long-distance ship passages underline how the connection itself needs to be reconceptualized if we want to understand how global connections impacted on the course of history. By carefully dissecting a well-known London murder case and reassembling it from a different vantage point, I will try to make a case in point. In the following, I will shift the focus of the case’s narrative from a land-based to a sea-based perspective. A transatlantic ship passage will take centre stage. I shall examine how historical actors in transit navigated the connectivity between the ship and the shore; how connections had their own space and time during which the people in transit did not go into hibernation but got on with their lives; how the phase of transit constantly related to the before and after of the connection; and how shipboard communities were, thus, inevitably part of the globalized world that they co-created, while they were at the same time caught in their own confined space.

By shifting the narrative focus to the sea, to the ship, and ultimately to the relation between the ship and the world, a different story will emerge. Not only will its locus change and the environment of the ship become of more importance, but the central cast of the story will also be transformed. As shall be seen, the murder victim, and with her the suspected killer and his mistress – all central personae in the land-based narrative – will move into the background, while other protagonists will push towards the centre of attention. Love, jealousy, and murder will be displaced as the principal motifs of the case by an entirely different sensation: the tension between global connectivity and isolation, between being part of the world and being confined on a ship. By adjusting our vantage point and joining the actors on board the SS Montrose, we will find that the murder case will point us to one of the central concerns of global history: the significance of the connection itself.

The ship: the SS Montrose

In the summer of 1910, a murder case electrified London.Footnote ¹⁸ Cora Crippen, an ambitious but largely unsuccessful music hall singer (also known under her stage name, Belle Elmore), had gone missing and was later found dead, buried in the coal cellar of her house in north London. Cora was the second wife of the American homeopathic doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen. After his practice in New York had failed, Crippen had taken up a position with Munyon’s, a producer of homeopathic patent medicines. In 1897, Munyon’s sent Crippen to London to build up a new branch office there. Cora accompanied her husband to London and started to pursue a stage career. It seems that the doctor’s attempts to manage his wife’s career lost him his job with Munyon’s in 1899. Two years later, Crippen took up a position at Drouet’s Institute for the Deaf, a dubious institution that sold quack cures to deaf people. There, the doctor employed a typist called Ethel Le Neve. After some time, Crippen and Le Neve fell in love with each other and began a romantic relationship. Crippen’s marriage had already been dysfunctional for a while. Cora Crippen was clearly of a different temper from the quiet doctor. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not shy away from describing her as ‘a tipsy, plump, and unfaithful shrew with inordinate vanity and a miserly streak; her docile and submissive husband chafed at her dominion’.Footnote ¹⁹ When Cora found out about Crippen’s affair with Le Neve, she threatened to make it public knowledge in London. Then, in January, after a dinner with friends at their house, Cora Crippen disappeared. When Cora’s friends started to enquire about her whereabouts, Crippen said that she had gone back to America to recuperate from an illness. Later he added that she had died there. After some time, Cora’s friends became suspicious and alerted Scotland Yard to her sudden disappearance.

On 8 July 1910, more than five months after Cora’s disappearance, the Yard sent Chief Inspector Walter Dew to the Crippen home at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in north London. Dew interviewed Crippen about Cora’s whereabouts. Confronted with contradictions in his explanations, the doctor eventually conceded that he had made these stories up as he had been too embarrassed to admit that Cora had simply left him. For the moment, Dew was satisfied with the new, more credible explanation. Crippen, however, seems to have been unsettled by Scotland Yard’s interest in the case and, together with Le Neve, he absconded from London. When the Yard found out about his flight they searched the house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. In the course of this, the search party dug up the coal cellar and eventually discovered a mutilated body that had been buried there. The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury established that these were the remains of Cora Crippen. The body contained hyoscine, a drug used to calm down and sedate patients. Administered in higher doses, however, hyoscine is lethal. Later it was found that Crippen had bought the drug shortly before Cora had disappeared.

Scotland Yard started to search for the fugitives in the United Kingdom and abroad. International wanted posters of Crippen and Le Neve were issued and printed in newspapers all over Europe – at first with little avail. In the meantime, Crippen and Ethel Le Neve, who apparently did not know about the murder charge against her lover, fled from the United Kingdom and crossed the Channel bound for Antwerp. There, they booked a passage to Montreal in the Dominion of Canada on the steamer Montrose.

The Montrose was built in 1897 for Elder, Dempster & Co. The steamer was 135 metres long and had a gross tonnage of 5,440. It sported one funnel and four masts and was propelled by a single screw. After its launch it was employed as a passenger liner between the United Kingdom and Canada. Following a stint as a transport during the Boer War, the Montrose was rebuilt to 7,094 gross tons. In 1903, the ship was sold to the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company and refitted to accommodate 70 second-class and 1,800 third-class passengers. In the following years, the Montrose plied the Atlantic on slightly changing routes, mainly between the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Canada. In 1905, the steamer was rebuilt again to 6,278 tons.Footnote ²⁰

On 20 July 1910, the Montrose left the port of Antwerp to sail for Montreal. The passenger list included a Mr John Robinson and his son, who had booked their second-class passage less than three hours before departure.Footnote ²¹ Crippen and Le Neve had boarded the Montrose under assumed names and disguised as father and son. The doctor had shaved off his beard. Le Neve was wearing her hair short and had put on an ill-fitting boy’s suit. However, only a few hours after the Montrose had left Antwerp the ship’s captain, Henry Kendall, noticed something odd about the couple. The murder of Cora Crippen had been all over the news. Kendall became suspicious and looked for a wanted poster of Crippen and Le Neve in the newspapers brought on board in Antwerp. Legend has it that he used a piece of chalk to white-out the moustache that Crippen was still sporting on the poster.Footnote ²² What he saw then confirmed his suspicion and after some more observation he decided to inform the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company at Liverpool by wireless telegraph: ‘3 PM GMT Friday 130 miles west Lizard have strong suspicion that Crippen London Cellar Murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Voice manner and build undoubtedly a girl. Both traveling as Mr. and Master Robinson. Kendall.’Footnote ²³

The company in turn sent word about Crippen’s discovery to Scotland Yard. The police had been criticized heavily for letting the suspect escape from London in the first place. Questions as to the proper police proceedings had even been asked in Parliament.Footnote ²⁴ To make up, the Yard now acted quickly. Chief Inspector Walter Dew boarded the Laurentic, a brand-new and much faster ship, which could intercept the slower Montrose before it actually reached Canada.Footnote ²⁵ While Dew pursued Crippen across the Atlantic, Scotland Yard communicated with the Canadian Dominion Police to prepare for Crippen’s arrest. This was to take place before the doctor could actually set foot on Canadian soil. Before the steamer entered the St Lawrence, Dew was to come on board disguised as a pilot in order to make the arrest.

However, it was not only the police who were now on Crippen’s heels. In these early years of the technology, wireless radio could only cover comparatively short distances. Kendall had sent his first message to Liverpool briefly before the Montrose got out of radio reach. Any further communication between the British Isles and the steamer had to be relayed by other ships. And so it comes as no surprise that the news was soon leaked to the press. Newspaper editors around the globe quickly learned of Crippen’s whereabouts and now accompanied Scotland Yard’s hunt for Crippen with the most detailed and lurid news coverage. One telling example of many can be found in the Daily Mail of 25 July, where the detection of Crippen and Le Neve was described with a particular sense of drama:

Through this and countless other newspaper reports about the Montrose, an emerging global public could follow the dramatic events around the doctor and his mistress closely, while Crippen and Le Neve themselves, although under ‘ceaseless, unobtrusive scrutiny’, remained totally ignorant of their global media presence until their eventual arrest on 31 July. In this peculiar situation, the need to reconceptualize connections becomes manifest. The doctor and his mistress were not merely making a simple connection between Europe and North America. Rather, they were entangled in a web of connections and disconnections involving several ships travelling on different routes and at different speeds, as well as the wireless telegraph working over relays. Each of these connections linked ship and shore in a particular way and combined to create the specific situation on board.

The wireless: more than just an ‘electric constable’

In the year 1910, wireless telegraphy was still a relatively young technology. Experiments in the transmission of radio signals had been abundant in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the closing years of the century, Italian engineer-cum-entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi was only one of several inventors to bring the technology to maturity and to file a patent for it.Footnote ²⁷ In 1901, however, it was Marconi, who entered into an agreement with Lloyd’s insurance company, the most important maritime insurer, whereby Lloyd’s would only insure ships that were equipped with Marconi wireless systems. This deal gave a great boost to Marconi’s company and accelerated the expansion of wireless telegraphy in the shipping business.Footnote ²⁸ In the early years of the twentieth century, the Marconi system was by far the most widespread wireless telegraph system in use on ships. However, competing technologies operating on different patents, such as the German Telefunken system, existed and started to make significant inroads on the market from 1909 onwards. Until the regulations of the so-called ‘Titanic conference’ in 1913, these competing systems could not communicate with each other – a fact that constituted a significant safety issue as it limited the communicational capacity of a ship.Footnote ²⁹

At the time of Crippen’s flight in 1910, most intercontinental passenger steamers were equipped with a wireless telegraph apparatus. In the case of the Montrose, it was a Marconi system. The ship’s Marconi operator, Llewellyn Jones, could communicate with Marconi land stations or other ships with Marconi equipment on board within a radius of a few hundred nautical miles (depending on weather conditions). Thus, around 1910 the communicational capacity of the wireless was still limited by reach and incompatible systems. Nevertheless, with the advent of wireless, the ship’s place in the world had been transformed. Its isolation on the open sea had come to an end – at least in some respects. Before wireless technology, a ship was practically isolated from the rest of the world when it moved out of sight of harbour or coast. Once on the open sea, there was no way to communicate with either origin or destination. The ship became its own confined space. The only exception were so-called ‘speakings’ with other ships encountered during the voyage.Footnote ³⁰ On these occasions, information (and sometimes goods) were traded and letters could be exchanged. This practice, however, only slightly relieved the separation of the ship and the world. Depending on the courses and positions of the speaking ships, the news received were often as old as one’s own information, and the letters posted would not reach their addressees for quite some time.

In the early years of the twentieth century, wireless communication ameliorated the isolation of the seaborne vessel in some aspects. Messages could now be exchanged between ship and shore (or between one ship and another) as long as one was within radio reach.Footnote ³¹ The main beneficiaries were captain and crew, as information on the weather or other important developments could now be traded.Footnote ³² Wireless also became a means of calling for help in case of emergency. The availability of information from the outside also had direct implications for passengers on longer hauls. Ship newspapers, which were a common feature of long-distance ship passages from at least the early nineteenth century, now changed in style and content.Footnote ³³ Publications such as the Cunard Daily Bulletin or the Aerogram were produced by the crew (not any longer by the passengers themselves) and, besides the usual shipboard chatter, contained the latest news of the world coming in by wireless. More affluent passengers could also send and transmit private messages with the help of the resident wireless operator.

In the episode considered here, however, wireless telegraphy was not only used to provide weather updates for the crew and news for the passengers. The novel technology made it possible to inform the shipping company and then Scotland Yard regarding the whereabouts of a fugitive murder suspect. It was instrumental in setting up the transoceanic hunt for Crippen and finally allowed for his arrest while he was still on board the Montrose. The wireless acted as a kind of ‘electric constable’. The metaphor of the ‘electric constable’ originally refers to the electric telegraph in its conductor-bound form.Footnote ³⁴ Soon after its first practical employment for the coordination of railway trains, the telegraph came to public attention because of the role it played in the arrest of a murderer in London. On New Year’s Day 1845, a man named John Tawell poisoned his mistress, Sarah Hart, with prussic acid at her house in Salt Hill near Slough. Witnesses saw him leave the house after the murder and head for the local railway station. There, he boarded the train to London Paddington. When the station superintendent was informed about the murder of Ms Hart, he used the newly installed telegraph to send word to London. He informed the staff at Paddington that a suspected murder was on his way to London, giving his description and the number of the carriage he travelled in.Footnote ³⁵ Thanks to the telegram, Tawell could be apprehended. The unusual method of arrest was widely covered in the news and earned the telegraph the nickname of ‘electric constable’.

In the Tawell case and several similar stories, the telegraph’s policing power came from its potential to seemingly bend the relationship between time and space (usually by outpacing trains).Footnote ³⁶ Returning to the hunt for Crippen, similar powers can, of course, be claimed for the wireless telegraph. The technology rendered it possible to inform the authorities about his whereabouts and to prepare for his arrest on arrival. And yet the situation was different. The electric telegraph merely outpaced the train. The wireless could penetrate the isolation of the ship during its movement. It provided access to the connection itself and therefore impacted on the framework of the passage. Again, the importance of understanding connections in the plural becomes clear. The ship and the wireless (just as the train and the electric telegraph) have very different mediating capacities. The policing powers of the telegraph can only be understood if we consider these forms of connections in combination and in tandem with that which has been connected.

The world: a global public

The flight of Hawley Harvey Crippen and Ethel Le Neve thus took place in an unusual field of tension between global integration and isolation. Information received via wireless allowed both the police and the public to learn the pair’s whereabouts. Newspapers from all over the world renewed their interest in the London murder case.Footnote ³⁷ Not only did they follow the run of the Montrose and the intercepting course of the Laurentic in great detail,Footnote ³⁸ but the papers also re-examined the entire case. Journalists talked to former London neighbours of the Crippens, tried to unearth novel information about Miss Le Neve, and reconstructed Cora Crippen’s unimpressive stage career. One central focus of the media rested on the ship itself, where Crippen and Le Neve, ignorant of their media presence, slowly steamed into a trap set up by Scotland Yard. It was a peculiar and somewhat novel situation. Roused by the media coverage in newspapers all over the world, a global public started to take great interest in the case and focused its attention on a tiny ship on the Atlantic, the narrow habitat of its subjects of desire, on which the doctor was ‘sailing into [the] clutch of the law’.Footnote ³⁹ The chase for Crippen became a matter of ‘world interest’Footnote ⁴⁰ or, as J. B. Priestley stated in The Edwardians, ‘It was hot news indeed, something was happening for the first time in world history.’Footnote ⁴¹ Ever-increasing global connectivity clashed with the maritime isolation of the fugitives and produced a peculiar situation of unidirectional observation. The media themselves frequently referred to the novelty and absurdity of the situation – during the passage as well as after the arrest. As early as 27 July, well before the arrest, the New York Times informed its readers about the extraordinary circumstances involved in this case: ‘[Crippen and Le Neve are] steaming in almost pathetic helplessness towards the St. Lawrence and capture.’Footnote ⁴²

On the same day on the other side of the Atlantic, the Daily Mirror speculated about the ‘sensations of the hunted Crippen and his companion caged in a floating trap’.Footnote ⁴³ It presented to the eager public a fictional inner monologue of Crippen:

A few days later, on 30 July, the Daily Mail quoted from Liberté in Paris: ‘It is admirable and it is terrible. … [F]rom one side of the Atlantic to the other a criminal lives in a cage of glass … exposed to the eye of the public.’Footnote ⁴⁵

On the same day, the New York Times tried to explain the incredible interest that both media and public took in the chase. The author compared the set-up to a play in a theatre. He argued that ‘chance has arranged scene and circumstance’ along a rule that playwrights often resort to as well:

It might not come as a big surprise that author and playwright J. B. Priestley came up with a similar analogy from the world of the theatre. He stated:

These comparisons to a theatre production highlight a central aspect of the case. Observing the ignorant couple from a distance, equipped with a host of information and privileged knowledge that the two lacked, was a key feature of the global reception of events. Both the success of the arrest and this form of observation depended on the secrecy of the operation. No news about the hunt for Crippen were to reach the Montrose. The Daily Mail stated in this regard:

These extracts of contemporary media coverage illustrate that, after having learned about Crippen’s whereabouts, the attention of the press – and thus of the global public – soon focused on the stage of the ship itself. However, during these early days of the hunt for Crippen, the media had no direct access to the Montrose. All they could do was speculate about the situation on board and build a story around this inaccessible core. The Illustrated London News sported a particularly interesting example of what such a larger story could be comprised of. It printed a series of photographs (see Figure 1) showing how Willy Clarkson, a well-known theatrical costume designer, would disguise a girl as a young man.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was packaged as advice to Ethel Le Neve, whose disguise as a boy had been all too easy to see through. The interplay of connections and disconnections becomes particularly tangible in this episode. Soon, however, the media and public alike would not have to speculate about what was happening on board of the Montrose any more. Again, with the help of the wireless and courtesy of the captain, journalists eventually gained direct access to the hitherto isolated space of the ship.

Figure 1 Series of photographs detailing how the theatrical costume designer Willy Clarkson would transform a young lady into a boy. Source: Goodman, Crippen file, p. 34.

The gatekeeper: Captain Henry Kendall

On 28 November 1965, Henry George Kendall died aged ninety-one in a London nursing home. His life had been eventful. He began his maritime career in his teenage years and had seen violence and abuse early on.Footnote ⁵⁰ In May 1914, he was given command of the RMS Empress of Ireland. Later in the month the ship collided with a Norwegian freighter and sank at the mouth of the St Lawrence – not far from where Crippen had been arrested four years earlier. More than a thousand lives were lost.Footnote ⁵¹ Kendall himself was thrown overboard and survived. His obituary in The Times made no mention of all of this. It read: ‘CAPTAIN HENRY GEORGE KENDALL, who in 1910 as master of the liner Montrose radioed to Scotland Yard that the murderer Crippen was on board, died in a London nursing home yesterday. He was 91.’Footnote ⁵² These few lines illustrate that Kendall’s name remained tied to the Crippen case for the rest of his life and beyond. The sinking of the Empress of Ireland could not compete in this regard. Indeed, Kendall played so central a role in the capture of Crippen that he received the £250 reward advertised by the Home Office, ‘but never cashed the check. He had it framed instead.’Footnote ⁵³ This can be considered testimony that Kendall himself also saw the Crippen case as an important landmark in his life.

The captain was, of course, one of the main protagonists in the story – not so much in the land-based narrative, but certainly in its sea-based counterpart. He was instrumental in keeping the passengers ignorant of the hunt and setting up the ‘cage of glass’. When the captain had seen through the doctor’s disguise, he started to control the flow of information to and from the ship via wireless telegraph. He made sure that no messages about the Crippen case, let alone the ongoing chase, could reach the audience on the ship via this channel. Kendall sent a written note to the Marconi operator on the Montrose, saying: ‘that all message [sic] re Dr. Crippen to any person or persons on board the above ship are to be filed, but not delivered, at the same time notifying me of their contents’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Kendall also took further measures to make sure that the other passengers would not discover Crippen themselves and thus blow the cover. In a telegram he later explained: ‘When my suspicions were aroused as to Crippen’s identity I quietly collected all the English papers on the ship which mentioned anything of the murder, and I warned the chief officer to collect any he might see. This being done, I considered the road was clear.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The captain informed only a select few of his crew. All other people on the steamer, including of course Crippen and Le Neve, remained ignorant of the situation. Kendall thus became the central gatekeeper in this situation, controlling all channels between the ship and the world. Initially, his shutting off of the ship worked both ways – no potentially revealing information came in and nothing went out. But after a few days this balance started to tip. It seemed that after some time the steamer race between the Montrose and the Laurentic was no longer dramatic enough to bind the attention of the global public. For several days, the chase between the two ships had been depicted in numerous charts, the wonders of wireless telegraphy had been described to a flabbergasted readership, and Captain Kendall had been introduced in much colourful detail – but about the situation on board the papers could only speculate.

After all these alleys had been explored, new media input became necessary and thus reporters started to send wireless telegrams to Kendall in order to gather inside information directly from the Montrose. Perhaps surprisingly, Kendall obliged. In the first days, the captain had already doubled as a private detective. He had Crippen and Le Neve clandestinely observed. He invited them to the captain’s table for dinner, and started to make jokes in order to make Crippen laugh so that Kendall could see whether the doctor was wearing false teeth and could add more detail to the description of the doctor’s disguise.Footnote ⁵⁶ Later he had someone from the crew secretly take photographs of Crippen and Le Neve. One of these photos (see Figure 2) is particularly revealing regarding the shift of cast in the sea-centred narrative when compared to the terracentric story. The photo had been clandestinely taken by a crew member through a porthole. Crippen and Le Neve, the latter in her ill-fitting boy’s suit, were caught on camera from behind when strolling down the deck. Neither their faces nor any other trait testifying to their identity were visible on the photograph. The picture is therefore much more revealing about the practices of Kendall and his crew than in what it has to say about the fugitives’ routine. Seen from a sea-based perspective, Crippen and Le Neve had ceased to be among the leading cast. They had been relegated to objects of curiosity, while others, such as Kendall and his crew, had taken centre stage as the main protagonists of the play.

Figure 2 Crippen and Le Neve on board the Montrose, secretly photographed through a porthole. Source: Goodman, Crippen file, p. 38.

Then, a few days before the scheduled arrest, Kendall’s performance reached a new dramatic level when he himself started to send messages to the media.Footnote ⁵⁷ In these telegrams he described how he had discovered the two fugitives, how he had confirmed his suspicions, and how he had kept them ignorant of the whole situation. He dedicated many lines to the detailed description of his various observations. Many papers quoted extensively from Kendall’s messages, in which he closely described Crippen’s and Le Neve’s behaviour. On 30 July The Times reprinted one of the captain’s messages from the Daily Mail:

In this message Kendall focused mainly on a factual description of the fugitives’ situation and behaviour. Only occasionally did he bring in more colourful, emotional elements: he hinted at their guilty conscience when he referred to their sleeplessness and the ‘signs of worry’. But, all in all, the factual description prevailed. This changed in his following messages. Only a day later, the Daily Mail extensively reprinted a more colourful telegram alive with lurid detail:

By now, Kendall had moved away from mere factual report. He created suspense by describing the discovery of the suspects and how he kept them in the dark. He wrote about Crippen’s pleasure about growing a beard. And the climax comes, of course, with the reading list and the remark about The four just men alluding to Crippen’s very own situation. In another message, Kendall described how he had searched their cabin secretly and how he had discovered that Le Neve used a piece of her undergarment to wash her face in the morning.Footnote ⁶⁰ From these messages is seems clear that Kendall had reinterpreted his role as captain and gatekeeper and was keen to provide the outside world with all sorts of information about Crippen and Le Neve – no matter how trivial it might be.

The pilot: Chief Inspector Walter Dew

Kendall (supported by some of his crew and the Marconi operator) was not the only gatekeeper, the only person who fed the global public with information about the hunt for Crippen. When Crippen had escaped from London, Scotland Yard had been scorned by politicians and the media for its alleged incompetence in the case. Now, the Yard tried to turn the tables and use the very same media to repair its reputation. Fuelled for many days by the yellow press, the public anxiously waited for the climax of the chase, the planned arrest of the doctor at the entrance to the St Lawrence. Already days before the arrest, accommodation in the region was booked out by journalists and spectators in anticipation of events to come.Footnote ⁶¹ Scotland Yard scrupulously planned this showdown – not only in terms of setting up the trap but also with regard to getting the right media coverage. On the day of the arrest, the police organized a boat for about fifty journalists. The steam tender Eureka was to be kept out of sight of the Montrose until the arrest had been made. Then it would rendezvous with the Montrose and the journalists would be brought on board to do their work.

The main actor on the side of the law was Chief Inspector Walter Dew, the same policeman who had already investigated the disappearance of Cora Crippen in London.Footnote ⁶² After Crippen’s discovery on the Montrose, Dew had boarded the Laurentic in Liverpool in order to intercept the escapee before he could set foot on Canadian soil. Dew had been chosen for the job because he had met Crippen before and could identify him beyond any doubt. During the Atlantic passage and the subsequent wait for the Montrose at the mouth of the St Lawrence, Dew and Kendall were in frequent contact via wireless, preparing the arrest. Dew was in charge of affairs and this was duly noted by the press and the public:

When the ship approached the St Lawrence, Dew and his Canadian colleagues got active. They were rowed to the Montrose and came on board disguised as pilots. It is a fitting metaphor. Just as the pilot takes over control of a ship in difficult waters, Dew took over responsibility from Kendall when the hunt for Crippen climaxed. Once on board, Dew was in charge of affairs. The Times described the arrest in great detail. Crippen, who was on deck together with Le Neve and the ship’s surgeon Dr Stuart, seems to have wondered about the large number of pilots being rowed to the Montrose. When the pilots had come on board, they walked in the direction of Crippen and Le Neve. ‘Then as Inspector Dew got a good, quick look at Crippen and the girl he gave the preconcerted signal, and the constables made the arrest.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Immediately afterwards, the Eureka with the journalists came alongside the Montrose, the press people being allowed on board in order to conduct interviews and take photographs.Footnote ⁶⁵ For hours they besieged the wireless telegraph room in order to get reports quickly to their newspapers all over the globe. Information transmission was fast enough to allow even Australian newspapers on the other side of the world and more than half a day ahead in time to run the story in the issue of 1 August.Footnote ⁶⁶

After the arrest, Crippen was taken to Quebec gaol, where he had to wait for his extradition to England under the Fugitive Offenders Act of 1881. In mid August, Dew eventually accompanied Crippen and Le Neve on board the White Star Line’s SS Megantic bound for Liverpool. Dew had taken precautions for their arrival in England later in the month. The police expected a curious crowd to wait for Crippen at the pier. Therefore, the party was to disembark via the crew gangway. Maybe unsurprisingly, they were spotted nevertheless and a widely circulated photograph was taken at the occasion (see Figure 3). Again, this picture illustrates vividly how during the ocean passages the cast of the narrative had changed. The photograph clearly places Walter Dew and not, as could be expected, the cloaked Crippen at the centre of attention. Just like Captain Kendall, the inspector had become one of the chief protagonists of the chase.

Figure 3 Dew and Crippen leaving the Megantic in Liverpool. Souce: Daily Mirror, 29 August 1910, p. 8.

The London Cellar Murder: a land-based account

Shifting our analytical focus onto the Montrose and its relation to the world brings a new narrative to the fore that emphasizes the role of different protagonists, spaces, and timelines. It underlines the mediating potential of the connection itself. This becomes particularly obvious when we compare the new narrative to the established land-based understanding of the Crippen case, which focuses mainly on London. Crippen had planned to start a new life with Ethel Le Neve in his native North America. This plan, however, was not to materialize, as we have seen. Crippen and Le Neve were shipped back to England on the SS Megantic. In London, they were brought before the Old Bailey in separate trials. After a long and detailed process, the judge and jury found Crippen guilty of the wilful murder of his wife.Footnote ⁶⁷ He was sentenced to death.Footnote ⁶⁸ On 23 November 1910 Crippen was hanged at Pentonville prison. Ethel Le Neve, on the other hand, was acquitted and emigrated to America on the very day of Crippen’s execution.

The case fascinated many contemporaries and attracted a lot of attention and news coverage. Several factors contributed to this. The figure of Cora Crippen, for instance, proved to be unusually colourful. The aspiring but largely unsuccessful music hall singer seems to have had a temper. Her eventful life and gruesome demise provided excellent material for the boulevard papers of the day.Footnote ⁶⁹ Then there were the circumstances of the murder and of the body’s discovery. Poison was involved, which made the murder particularly insidious. Moreover, the body had been mutilated, which indicated a high measure of ruthlessness and brutality. The floor of the coal cellar at 39 Hilldrop Crescent had been dug up to unearth the victim’s remains. Scotland Yard had taken photographs of the scene and documented the case in lurid detail.Footnote ⁷⁰ All of this held the London public in awe for quite some time. What is more, state-of-the-art forensic procedure was employed in the case. Spilsbury used a scar that had been found on the body to confirm the identity of the deceased.Footnote ⁷¹ Finally, of course, there was the peculiar way in which Crippen had been arrested with the help of the wireless telegraph. In the year 1910 this was a brand-new technology that had only been available for a few years. To many it seemed as if progress itself had eventually brought Crippen down.

In combination, all these elements explain the great attraction that the London Cellar Murder seems to have had on the British. From a spatial viewpoint, it is a land-based story. In fact, it is London-centred: both its beginning and its end took place in the British capital. Jonathan Goodman, who published a comprehensive file on the Crippen case in 1985, displays a map of north London on the opening pages of the book. The map places important loci of the case in relation to each other: the house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent; the Jones Brothers Department Store, where the victim’s pyjamas had been bought (important evidence in the trial); Kings Cross railway station, from where Crippen and Le Neve fled London; and Pentonville Prison, where Crippen was interned and eventually hanged. The central place of the capital in the story also reverberates in the case being named the North London Murder or the London Cellar Murder. Of course, other places featured as well: Dieppe, where Crippen had spent a holiday with Le Neve after the murder; Antwerp, to which Crippen and Le Neve fled before booking their passage; Canada as their assumed destination; and Liverpool, where Crippen was attacked by an agitated young man when being brought back to England for the trial.

In the popular narrative, these are the main locales of the case. They were connected and brought in touch in several different ways. Ships served merely as links. The Montrose took the absconding couple to Canada and the Megantic brought them back after they had been intercepted by Inspector Dew travelling on the faster ship Laurentic. Wireless telegraphy provided a different kind of connection. It brought London, Canada, and the different ships involved into direct contact. However, both the ships as well as the telegraph were mere facilitators in this largely land-based story. The Montrose, for instance, was a facilitator of flight from London to Canada, while the wireless telegraph was eventually a facilitator of arrest. The established narrative of the case itself is terracentric. It unfolds on land and it thrives on the different ways in which its locales are brought into contact with each other. In its traditional form it is a story about places and how they were connected. The connection itself is missing. Its mediating character, its spatial and temporal dimensions, its embeddedness with other forms of connections and disconnections only become visible when we recalibrate our analytical focus and tell the story from a different angle.

Conclusion: passages as mediating connections

A few days before Hawley Harvey Crippen was executed at Pentonville prison, the Daily Mirror and Lloyd’s Weekly News printed a photograph of Ethel Le Neve in boy’s clothes (see Figure 4).Footnote ⁷² Interestingly, however, the picture had not been clandestinely taken on board of the Montrose. It was a studio photograph. The story goes that Le Neve, who had already been acquitted, had come to Bow Street Police Station to ask whether she could borrow the boy’s trousers she had worn during the passage. Apparently, she had been offered money to dress up as Master Robinson again and to re-enact parts of the passage for a professional photographer.Footnote ⁷³ The picture shows an androgynous Le Neve sitting on a chair and looking into the distance. The Daily Mirror even labelled the photograph with the far-fetched claim that ‘It will be noticed that she bears a strong likeness to Dr. Crippen.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 4 Ethel Le Neve posing as Master Robinson for the studio camera. Source: Daily Mirror, 21 November 1910, p. 15.

The photographical re-enactment of Le Neve’s time on the Montrose testifies to the tension between being connected and being disconnected at the same time while on board. Wireless technology and Captain Kendall had made it possible for the global public to partake directly in the events on the ship. And yet the connection was thin and fragile. Wireless telegraphy only provided a low-capacity link to the world at the best of times. Its reach was limited. As the principal gatekeeper, Kendall controlled and filtered all communication. Therefore the ship’s integration with the globalized world that it co-created was incomplete; it only worked in one direction. Crippen, Le Neve, and the other passengers, as well as the better part of the crew, remained ignorant of the global media spectacle focusing on the Montrose. Inside information was fed to the media, but only whetted their appetite for more. Photographs could be taken clandestinely, but were of limited quality and expressiveness. This is why, once full access to the story’s protagonists was granted, certain details had to be re-enacted on land and under studio conditions.

The story of Crippen’s flight and eventual capture is an extraordinary episode in modern history. Nevertheless, I argue that, despite its extraordinariness, it can serve us well in highlighting the importance of looking at ship passages as transformative arenas of transit. Seaborne ships are not merely extraordinary locations divorced from regular space and time, as Michel Foucault’s much-cited dictum of the ship as ‘the heterotopia par excellence’ suggests.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather, the pronounced space and time of the ship passage allows us to study it as a mediating connection with a strong bearing on the people and places it connects. The passage on the Montrose emerged as a long, distinct phase, during which the protagonists were confined to a narrow physical and social space, limited in their actions and movements. In this regard, the connection they made isolated them from the rest of the world. At the same time, the passage was embedded in a web of other forms of connections such as wireless communication and press reports. The ship passage constituted one element in a plurality of connections.Footnote ⁷⁶ This peculiar tension created an arena of transit in which the protagonists on board negotiated their past and their future.

The transit space of the Atlantic crossing was intimately related to both origin and destination in many different ways. For Crippen (and to a lesser degree for Le Neve, who remained ignorant of the murder charge) it was a period of limbo in which he tried to leave Europe behind but could not do so. For the media and the global public, the observation of Crippen and Le Neve on the steamer provided opportunity to reassess their characters and eventually their deeds in London. For Scotland Yard a successful interception was a means of re-establishing its reputation back home. And for Captain Kendall the passage provided the opportunity to reinterpret his duties as the ship’s master and extend his control beyond the space of the ship. The time on the Montrose was, therefore, a highly formative and transformative period for all actors involved and must be understood in its relation to origin and destination, before and after.

Shifting our perspective from that which is connected to the connection itself, from the land to the sea, has transformed the narrative of the case and broadened our understanding of a connected past. The London Cellar Murder has turned into an ocean race. The cast of the story has been expanded. As active protagonists Crippen and Le Neve have faded into the background, while others such as Kendall or Dew have moved to centre stage. The local environment of the ship is key to the sea-based narrative. While a global public entertained itself with the Crippen hunt and the behaviour of doctor and mistress on board the Montrose, the ship itself became a ‘cage of glass’ for the two fugitives: a cage of glass that bound them and presented them to the world at the same time – without them knowing anything about it. The ship promised freedom and opportunity as it moved across the globe; in reality, however, it turned out to be a very narrow space.

The significance of the local highlights the mediating character of global connections, in this case exemplified mainly by the steamship passage. The Crippen case illustrates vividly how we should think of global connections as mediators rather than intermediaries. The scene of the crime was London. The chief suspect was of American descent and tried to escape to his native North America. Typically, the steamer passage would be thought of as the connection that brought origin and destination, Europe and America, in touch. Here, however, much of the story was played out in between, on the ship, during the connection. The main protagonists acted on board and with the means available on the ship, which was at that time a moving but largely isolated space. This space existed in a web of both global connections and disconnections.

Thanks to both the drama of the story and its rich documentation, in the Crippen case the mediating character of the passage becomes tangible. In accordance with other recent scholarship, the articles in this issue demonstrate that long-distance ship passages must be considered as places and times of history-making that had a formative impact on the lives of those on board.Footnote ⁷⁷ Readjusting our analytical focus and considering the ship and the world in tandem will amend our understanding of how connections work by looking both at the connections and at that which is connected. As already pointed out, ship passages serve as tangible examples here owing to their spatial and temporal dimensions, the vividness of the transit, together with their embeddedness in a web of other forms of global connections and disconnections. However, the insights gained have broader implications. They contribute to a more general reconceptualization of our understanding of connections that takes them seriously as distinct, powerful historical phenomena in their own right.

While not all forms of connections have spatio-temporal dimensions as tangible as a transoceanic ship passage, they all have distinct spatial and temporal traits that constitute them as mediators rather than intermediaries. Contact and exchange take their time and occupy a certain space. The space of a connection has a strong bearing over how people or places can be connected, what can be communicated, how stable a connection can be. The time of a connection has much to say about matters of synchronicity and the embeddedness with other forms of connections. The telegraph played a central role in the Crippen hunt and can serve as an additional example here. Contemporaries celebrated the telegraph for its alleged ability to ‘annihilate time and space’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Current research, however, has shown that telegraphy’s dematerialized information transmission could not annihilate time and space – if anything, it essentialized time and bent space.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rather, the telegraph inserted itself in a set of existing communication technologies. It worked in relation to and difference from railways and steamships, letters and telephones. Telegraphy became embedded with other forms of connections. Its distinct communicational qualities reflected its spatial and temporal dimensions, as well as its being part of a plurality of global connections. In our example, the wireless telegrams passing over the Atlantic Ocean in different directions have to be understood in relation to other information reaching the ship, such as the newspapers taken on board in Antwerp. The telegrams’ communicational capacity was limited. They were supposed to be short and to the point. Therefore very little information was actually transmitted, which later had to be repackaged and reinterpreted. Wireless messages did not go from A to B directly. They were broadcasted, went over relays, and could thus develop a spatial life of their own. Their transmission, however fast it might be in comparison to other methods of communication, took some time, especially when practices such as encoding, decoding, and relaying are considered as well. Think, for instance, of the journalists occupying the wireless apparatus after Crippen’s arrest when their employers were already eagerly waiting for news from the ship to share with the world.

What has been exemplified here for the ship passage – and in lesser detail for the wireless telegraph – reflects on our understanding of connections in a more general way. A reconceptualization of connections in the way proposed in this text will allow us to make better assessments of how the character of a connection impacts on the people or places that are connected. We will be able to say in more certain terms what qualitatively distinguishes global connections and renders them the key analytical elements of global history. In doing so, such a reconceptualization will contribute to a sharpening of the approach to global history research.