The Hunting of the Borneo Wire-Snake

In chapter 7 of Wodehouse's The Girl on the Boat Eustace Hignett relates his first meeting with Jane Hubbard, the famous big-game hunter:

She talked to me about this elephant gun, and explained its mechanism. She told me the correct part of a hippopotamus to aim at, how to make a nourishing soup out of mangoes, and what to do when bitten by a Borneo wire-snake. You can imagine how she soothed my aching heart.

The second sentence (not present in the US version of the novel, Three Men and a Maid) is baffling: while everyone knows what hippopotami and mangoes are, the "Borneo wire-snake" cannot be found in any zoology book, and there is very little in the context to go by and give the name to some other species. All we know is that it is probably venomous, or else its bite wouldn't require special treatment.

A little digging uncovers Wodehouse's probably literary source. In Edgar Wallace’s 1913 novel Grey Timothy ch. 18 we read:

Brian politely declined an invitation to visit the reptile house in the basement, though the old man promised him something very rare in the shape of a new variety of wire snake from Borneo.

Wodehouses's and Wallace's appreciation for each other's stories is well documented, among other things, in the fact that each dedicated books to the other.

The snake, however, doesn't play a role or get another mention in Grey Timothy, so the hunt needs to proceed elsewhere. The Internet Archive provides the next clue, in the works of James Dyer Ball (1847-1919) born and raised in Canton, China to an American missionary and his Scottish wife, and author of a number of books which contributed significantly to a better understanding of Chinese culture in the West. One of these, perhaps the most successful, was Things Chinese; or, Notes connected with China (1892), a sort of encyclopedia of Chinese topics, drawn from the author's personal experience as well as his extensive reading: The first entries: Abacus, Abatement, Aboriginal Tribes, Acupuncture give an idea of the scope of the work. In the fourth edition (1903), pp. 630-1 we read under the entry for Snakes:

The Gardins is a snake not often seen; but it is found in Hongkong and elsewhere in the Kwongtung Province. It is said by the Chinese to be the most deadly of all snakes, no cure being possible for its bite. It is even found on the housetops, or roofs, rather. Its name in Chinese is t'eet seen she [t'ieh hsien shê], or iron-wire snake; it is generally black in colour; but is also seen of a sort of rusty brown shade, is about 7 or 8 inches in length, and of the size of a thick piece of iron wire.

Here we have, then, an "iron wire snake", except that this is not its English name but a literal translation of the Chinese name 鐵線蛇 (apparently this would be tiě xiàn shé in modern transliteration). It is venomous, even fatally so, matching the one for whose bite Jane Hubbard has a countermeasure, while Wallace is not explicit on the subject. The main problem, of course, is that Dyer Ball found it in Hong-Kong, 2,400 km from Borneo, not to mention the sea in between. If we concede this gross inexactitude on his part, we may venture the hypothesis that Wallace took the name directly or indirectly from Dyer Ball, attached a different location to it, and Wodehouse in turn borrowed the new species as "Borneo wire-snake". For the name Gardins I haven't been able to find an explanation yet.

Because the fact remains that Dyer Ball's book wasn't just the most popular text to have brought the name "wire snake" to English-speaking countries: so far it is the only non-specialized contemporary source found. The next occurrence online repositories have to offer is the China Medical Missionary Journal for October 1901, pp. 303-4, with a somewhat graphic report from a cautious correspondent:

Dr. H. N. Kinnear, of Foochow, writes as follows:—
Iron Wire Snakes.
"I am curious to know what experience other workers in China have had with what our Foochow people call the 'Iron Wire Snake.'
A year ago there came to our clinic a boy of nineteen, who reported that when he was eight years' old he was playing out of doors, probably wearing no clothing, when one of these little snakes wrapped itself around his penis at about the middle. It was impossible to get it off for some hours and the resulting ulceration had left a deep sulcus of cicatricial tissue entirely surrounding the organ and interrupting the urethra. The urethra was of full calibre on both sides of the fistula. He came to us because he was about to marry and wished the imperfection removed, but left again before anything was done for him.
My students fully credited the story of the snake, and told me that they sometimes fasten themselves upon the fingers of men working in gardens, strangulating them until they slough off, that they have also been known to strangulate the tails of cattle in the same way. The popular belief seems to be that it is almost impossible to remove them when once wrapped around a part.
The snake is about six inches long, shaped much like a common earth worm, has about the same diameter, a trifle smaller perhaps and darker in color. Have seen a specimen, but have not done any experimenting with my own fingers for the sake of science. Am willing to gain a knowledge of the subject at second hand if any one is ready to impart it."

This is presumably from Fuzhou, quite a different region of coastal China; and it is certainly a different species, not venomous but dangerous in its own peculiar way. We may assume that by "what our Foochow people people call the 'Iron Wire Snake'" is the same 鐵線蛇 as in Dyer Ball's account, but the conclusion will be that a common name was applied to unrelated species in different regions.

Coming now to modern sources, several online Chinese zoological guides apply the name both to the collared reed snake (Calamaria pavimentata), and to the brahminy blind snake (Indotyphlops braminus), very different between them, which supports our last conclusion. None of these is venomous, so the identity of Dyer Ball's specimen remains a mystery, but the description in the medical journal suggests the I. braminus. The last extract I have to quote confirms this. Geoffrey Herklots in The Hong Kong Countryside (1959), pp. 111-2 contributes this anecdote which shows that the tradition about the dangers of handling this dumb chum was hadn't died out:

IRON WIRE SNAKE
After an interval of more than six and a half years my wife, children and I once again lived together in a house with a garden. A first consequence was the inevitable blister at the base of the third finger of the left hand the result of a soft hand in contact with the hard handle of a spade. A piece of ground was dug, which in the month of March was as hard as a tennis court, but it yielded some interesting specimens in the form of iron wire snakes. The first one was claimed by my small daughter and transferred to a cigarette tin together with some earth and a worm. There was a small hole at the top of the tin and through this hole the snake escaped during the night but another took its place and it was carried in triumph to school and exhibited.
This primitive and degenerate snake, Typhlops braminus resembles a short piece of highly polished iron wire hence the common local name of  t'it sin she, iron wire snake. Unlike a piece of wire it is extremely agile. It is the only local snake whose tail ends in a sharp point. When the snake desires to burrow into the earth it inserts the tip of its tail in the ground, thus providing anchorage, and using the tail as a lever moves its body backwards or forwards as desired. Its food consists of soft-bodied insects and worms. It possesses eyes but they are largely hidden by scales and so the snake is practically blind. This small reptile, three or four inches in length does not lay eggs as do many snakes, but brings forth its young alive. It is of course perfectly harmless to man but many Chinese believe that if it twines around a finger it will not release its hold until the finger has dropped off, but the Chinese, like the British, have many curious beliefs about snakes. Many people regard snakes as slimy creatures whereas they are never slimy, their skin stroked in the right direction being as pleasant to touch as silk. Rubbed the wrong way it is rough to the touch except when the snake is a burrower like this species which, like the mole, may be stroked in any direction without rubbing against the grain. The number of these snakes I dug up in this small patch of ground surprised me—four in sixteen square yards. If it was a representative piece of Hong Kong the number per square mile of the Island would reach astronomical figures.

———

This is as far as our hunting for the Borneo wire-snake has taken us. It may be that there are other missing links to be unearthed, but the main takeaway is that the language barrier still makes writing about things Chinese as much a matter of uneducated guesswork for the 21st century internet-based researcher as for the 20th century novelist.