Malcolm Fraser had likely been drinking, although at the inquest his wife attested that he ‘was not of drunken habits’.
Dozing in a tent at New Zealand’s Hutt Racecourse, Fraser was roused by a sharp pain in his right wrist. The 50-year-old expressman was quick enough to see ‘a spider with a black body and a gold band and cross on the back’, but too slow to catch it.
Beginning with a small mark likened to a flea bite, his right arm soon swelled, turning dusky red and causing considerable pain. Two days later, on 26 January 1891, rising fever and muscle spasms impelled Elizabeth Fraser to summon the local doctor. Charles MacCarthy ordered his patient into a Turkish bath ‘to sweat the poison out of him’, applying flax and cow-dung poultices to this ‘erysipelas’. Becoming delirious, Fraser was admitted to Wellington Hospital, but as the reddened region crept across his back, his lucid periods receded until, weakened by severe diarrhoea, he expired two weeks after his painful awakening.1Coroner Henry Wirgman Robinson heard that Fraser believed himself bitten by a katipo (Latrodectus katipo). That these petite spiders could cause agony was widely acknowledged across New Zealand; Fraser himself had previously suffered thus. But the matter under adjudication was whether a katipo could kill a man. The Scottish-trained medical superintendent of Wellington Hospital, John Ewart, admitted never encountering a similar presentation. Despite having treated snake and centipede bites in India, Irish-educated MacCarthy was likewise perplexed, venturing ‘there is a spider in India which is said to be deadly but I have had no case of it’. Called for his expertise with local insects, English-born Registrar of the New Zealand University, William Maskell, noted that Latrodectus spiders were popularly considered poisonous, from America, Southern Europe and Northern Africa to the Australian colonies and possibly Madagascar and India. ‘Among scientific men who have studied these spiders there has been a good deal of doubt’, he reported. ‘But from a series of communications from various parts of the world which have lately appeared in an American publication...
it seems as if it were fairly settled that this genus, 2is venomous’.2
Maskell then subtly emended his testimony: the bite of the katipo was ‘not usually fatal in healthy adult persons’. He tendered a catalogue of settler and Maori cases collated by Auckland naturalist R. Allan Wight. Symptoms invoked by indigenous informants, Wight claimed elsewhere, were ‘not improbably caused by intense fear, as they have a terrible dread of the Katipo; but this observation would not apply to the white man’. Aided by his six jurors, ‘good and lawful men of the neighbourhood’, Robinson’s coronial conclusion was similarly ambivalent: Fraser had ‘died of erysipelas as a consequence of the bite of the said spider’. Little wonder that the Wellington Evening Post headlined its report: ‘Is the katipo bite poisonous?’3
To modern-day medical investigators, Fraser’s case provides unconvincing evidence for a fatal katipo bite. Yet, from the early 1890s, ‘scientific men’ came increasingly to believe that adult humans could die following bites by the katipo’s relatives, including American black widows (Latrodectus mactans), Australian redbacks (Latrodectus hasseltii) and South African button spiders (various Latrodectus species). This chapter, however, seeks neither to disprove colonial scientific ‘fallacies’, nor to re-open a medical cold case. Rather, acknowledging the differentially privileged testimonies negotiated at Fraser’s inquest, it explores the unstable natures of the many animals moving through nineteenth-century colonial worlds—especially those deemed ‘dangerous’.
More on the topic Malcolm Fraser had likely been drinking, although at the inquest his wife attested that he ‘was not of drunken habits’.:
- Malcolm Fraser had likely been drinking, although at the inquest his wife attested that he ‘was not of drunken habits’.
- DRINKING WATER