Battle of the Aussie Snake Men: Charles Underwood vs. Joseph Shires

Then he rushed to the museum, found a scientific man, ­

“Trot me out a deadly serpent, just the deadliest you can;

I intend to let him bite me, all the risk I will endure,

Just to prove the sterling value of my wondrous snakebite cure.”

, Banjo Paterson, “Johnson’s Antidote”

*

The first famous Australian snake man was Charles Underwood. Colonial newspapers described him as “the celebrated snake charmer,” “the notorious snake-­charmer,” “the stout able man,” “bilious-­looking,” and “professor.” Some said he learned his tricks in North America; others said he learned them from Amazonian shamans. Underwood’s contemporaries were unclear on many of the details of his life, even before his villainous rival Joseph Shires began claiming that he was Charles Underwood. New South Wales, furthermore, was for a time home to at least two and perhaps three actual Charles Underwoods. Horatio, the middle name of the Charles Underwood, appears only in the record of his birth, on February 19, 1807, to Richard and Elisabeth Underwood of Pleasant Row in London, and in the report on the inquest into his untimely death.

The barest trail of crumbs traces Underwood’s path through early adulthood. In March 1829, he was convicted in London on two counts of highway robbery and sentenced to fourteen years. At the time, this meant transportation to the penal colonies, which, whatever the purported length of the sentence, was most often a one-­way trip. He is listed among the two hundred convicts who arrived in Sydney aboard the barque Norfolk in August 1829. His whereabouts for the next decade are uncertain, although later, as his fame grew, a Queensland newspaper wondered if he was the same Charles Underwood who had spent time in a penal colony there and who was known for keeping company with snakes. There is no further mention of him until 1841, when he was convicted of forging a check and again sentenced to transportation to a penal colony, this time from the Australian mainland to Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania. When he reappeared again, in April 1849, it was as a snake man.

The snake men drew from a deeper cultural well. In handling venomous snakes and weathering their bites, they were acting out an age-­old story.

Underwood, newspapers record, had arranged a snakebite exhibition in a large room of St. Mary’s Hospital in Hobart, Tasmania. On the appointed Saturday, about fifty learned men assembled to watch Underwood’s experiments. Much was at stake: The lieutenant governor had authorized the presiding doctor to release Underwood from the terms of his bail if the experiments were successful. But difficulty piled upon difficulty. Despite running ads in the newspapers in the days leading up to the event, the learned men had procured only three snakes: a “large diamond snake,” a “whip snake,” and a “very small black snake.” The snakes were too docile. When Underwood placed the provided rabbit in a cask with the snakes, they would not bite. Nor would they bite a cat.

When Underwood took one of the snakes and forced its mouth to close over the rabbit’s ear, it failed to envenomate the rabbit. Luckily for Underwood, during this last attempt, the snake bit him instead, finally giving him the opportunity to prove himself. He produced a “small phial containing a light-­coloured liquid, and rubbed a portion over the bite,” wrote one reporter. “He said it was sufficient to cure the bite of the deadliest species of snakes.”

According to the ancient Greeks, a mighty serpent called Ophion incubated an enormous egg that hatched into the universe and all its inhabitants. Ophion also hatched “ophidiophobia,” “ophidiophilia,” Acanthophis, and other terms of serpentine twist. During his famous trials, Hercules encountered Echidna, who was half maiden and half viper. She had stolen his horses while he was napping. “I will give them back to you,” she said, “but only after you have slept with me.” The Gorgons had snakes for hair. Dante, who visited them in Hell, recorded that the trio, “who had the limbs of women and their ways,” also wore girdles made of snakes. After Perseus cut off the head of Medusa, the most famous of the Gorgons, he carried it with him as he flew with his winged shoes over the deserts of Libya. Drops of Medusa’s blood turned to snakes, which, Ovid explained, is “why Libya is now infested with poisonous reptiles.”

During the Roman Civil War, Cato led a Republican army through the deserts of Libya, where his soldiers encountered heat, sand, and the various spawn of Medusa. As Lucan recounted in his Pharsalia, these included the chersydros, the chelydri, the cenchris, the cerastes, the scytale, the pareas, the dipsas, the drowsy asp, the deadly seps, the fierce haemorrhois, the dreadful amphisbaena, the swift jaculi, the scorching prester, and the basilisk. One soldier, named Aulus, stepped on a dipsas. It bit him, and soon his whole body was aflame and he was consumed by an unbearable thirst. A scorching prester bit another soldier, Nasidius, who immediately swelled to great size, bursting his coat of mail, until “he himself lay concealed, completely hidden within his swollen body.” The unlucky nobleman Tullus was bitten by a fierce haemorrhois, causing blood to pour from his eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and other orifices and outlets. The soldier Sabellius was bitten by a deadly seps. His skin fell off, the membranes separating his organs dissolved, his bones turned to mush, and his head rolled away.

European colonists in Australia encountered a suite of venomous snakes just as fearsome as those of the Libyan desert. Australian newspapers in the early 1800s offered constant snake coverage, giving a sense of collective dread. There was a steady toll: women, men, “a fine boy,” “a fine cow,” “a fine ewe,” all dead of snakebite. Some victims fell immediately into unconsciousness. Others vomited and lost their sight. One boy’s tongue turned yellow and his teeth turned black. Another man reenacted the death of Tullus: After he was bitten, blood gushed from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, and his body dissolved, becoming “instantaneously a mass of putrefaction, so that it was with difficulty removed into a grave.”

The bite of a venomous snake is a mysterious thing. The wounds are small and often nearly painless in the moment. Sometimes death comes quickly, but other times it may not arrive for many hours or even days, during which time the victim will suffer any number of symptoms, including pain or numbness, paralysis or spasm, a pulse that races or drags, insensibility, confusion, terror. In their desperation to avoid this fate, people have turned to many different cures. Early remedies for snakebite included ether, tincture of asafoetida, mercury, strychnine, carbolic acid, chlorine of gold, chlorinated lime, mustard poultice, potassium permanganate, whiskey, brandy, gunpowder, petrol, toad urine, human urine, olive oil, wild radish oil, daffodil juice, rancid butter, goat cheese, goat milk, pig’s lard, and pigface plant juice, as well as suction cups, ligature, and impromptu amputation.

Most of these methods worked roughly as well as modern products that promise to thicken the penis or restore memory and concentration to the addled. In one sense, snake men like Underwood were no different from present-­day gadget and ointment salesmen. But the snake men drew from a deeper cultural well. In handling venomous snakes and weathering their bites, they were acting out an age-­old story, of Hercules, Thor, Vishnu, Saint George, Saint Patrick, and other heroes who grappled with serpents, defeating evil, death, even fear itself.

To the astonishment and delight of the assembled learned men, Underwood seemed to suffer no ill effects from the snakebite, ­all thanks, he told them, to his proprietary cure. In March 1850, he conducted further experiments for men of science, this time successfully causing black, brown, and diamond snakes to bite two cats and twenty-­three dogs, of which, one reporter wrote, “28½ per cent died after the application of the antidote, and 27¼ per cent without the antidote.” He began advertising his antidote in the newspapers. In 1852, he was sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor for stealing five gallons of rum.

In 1854, reporters spotted him performing for large crowds in downtown Hobart. “He places the reptile’s head in his mouth,” one reporter wrote, “and allows it to twirl and wind about his person.” A week later, one of the snakes bit Underwood on the tongue. A reporter wrote that “the charmer admitted he was under the influence of liquor.” In 1855, a policeman discovered him lying drunk in the streets. When the policeman tried to arrest him, Underwood threatened him with a bag of snakes. A court later banished him from Hobart.

His growing fame seems to have inspired imitators. In 1857, Underwood published an advertisement cautioning that he could not be answerable for a cure purchased anywhere but at Mr. Millhouse’s Manufactory, and that “no other establishment has the genuine article but him.” In December 1858, newspapers reported the death of George Henwood, an itinerant clock repairman and snake charmer who sold what he called “Underwood’s antidote.”

After he was bitten by one of his snakes while showing them off at a pub, Henwood “took a small bottle out of his pocket and rubbed some of the stuff that was in it on to his finger where it was bleeding,” recalled one witness. “In ten minutes afterwards he came up into the bar; he looked very pale, and [the bartender] gave him a nip of gin, which [he] asked for; he then went into the kitchen and sat down; I asked him how he felt, and he said, ‘better,’ and then asked for some peppermint, which I gave him; he then went up stairs and sat in his bed; in about ten minutes I went up and asked him how he was; he said, ‘better.’ ” Henwood died soon after. In an article on the case published the following February in The Australian Medical Journal, E. Swarbreck Hall, Esq., MBOS, wrote that “it is very necessary to warn the public from reposing confidence in mere external antidotes…as was unfortunately the case, from this snake-­charmer’s trust in Underwood’s antidote.”

In April of that year, Underwood appeared in Melbourne and announced a snake exhibition. “He does not state whether he will permit the snakes to operate upon his person,” the newspaper notice said, “but persons are politely requested to bring their own snakes.” In May, The Cornwall Chronicle revealed the source of Underwood’s power. In a Rumpelstiltskinian turn, the newspaper reported, Underwood had appeared late one night at a shepherd’s hut and asked to borrow a pot. The shepherd observed as Underwood boiled and stirred and filtered his brew. After the snake man left in the morning, the shepherd scuttled down to the newspaper offices. “The plant that possesses the quality of neutralizing the effect of the venom imparted to the human body by the bite of the snake,” the paper declared, “is no other than the common fern!”

In a letter published soon after in The Argus newspaper, Underwood wrote, “I defy all the medical powers in the world to save the life of any person or animal bitten by snakes with fern leaves.” He then offered to tell his secret “for the small sum of one penny per head for the population of Victoria and its dependencies.” Another newspaper calculated the sum to be roughly 3,000 pounds, or something near a half-­million dollars today.

It was around that time that Underwood seems to have caught wind of his most brazen imitator. The first record of this feud is from late October 1859, when The Bendigo Advertiser reported that Underwood had appeared two nights before at the Victoria Hotel in Bendigo and allowed himself to be bitten on the cheek by a snake “kindly lent” by one Dr. Hutchinson. “The effect of the bite was very soon perceptible,” the reporter wrote. “A stupor appeared to be commencing, the pupil of the eye became dilated and insensible to light, and a slight rigidity of the limbs apparent.” He applied his antidote and soon recovered. During his short convalescence, though, a member of the audience declared that this Charles Underwood “could not be the Underwood.”

The meeting fell into argument, until Dr. Hutchinson took the stage and declared that, whether or not this Underwood was the Underwood, he had in fact been bitten by a venomous snake, applied his antidote, and survived, thereby fulfilling all expectations of how a Charles Underwood ought to behave. The Bendigo Advertiser reporter then quoted from an article that had run the day before in the newspaper in Castlemaine, a town about twenty-­five miles away: “A gentleman of the highest respectability showed us a letter from Melbourne yesterday, in which it is stated by a competent authority, that the individual who is now experimenting with snakes in Castlemaine is not the real Underwood, but a person named Joseph Shires.” The Bendigo Advertiser reporter demurred from judgment, writing that “as to the allegation conveyed we cannot offer any opinion,” but noted that the man now claiming to be Charles Underwood at the Victoria Hotel had a tattoo on his arm that read “Joseph Shires.”

None of their contemporaries seems to have realized what is now obvious: The two snake men were working together. The duels were a sham, a way to sell snakebite antidote.

Shires’s beginnings are as mysterious as Underwood’s. He was born under a slightly different name, Joseph Beaumont Shiers, around 1819 in New York, New York. In the file on his 1841 conviction in London, for stealing a coat, watches, a ring, and other goods, he was described as possessing a sallow complexion, an oval head, a long visage, a small mouth, brown hair, black eyebrows, blue eyes, and no whiskers. “Protestant,” the document noted. “Can read and write.” Sentenced to seven years’ transportation, he arrived in Tasmania the following year, among 250 convicts aboard the Surrey. In the public notice announcing the ship’s passengers, Joseph Shiers was transformed into Joseph Shires, ­perhaps a clerical error, perhaps a hint of his tendency toward reinvention.

Over the next two decades, records are few, most of them noting criminal convictions for fighting in bars, stealing a watch, deserting a whaling ship, and beating his wife. The first time his name is mentioned in connection with snakes is in an advertisement he placed in the Melbourne Age in August 1859, two months before the Bendigo exhibition, inviting people to watch him test Underwood’s antidote with two snakes that he’d caught. He signed the advertisement with his own name, apparently only deciding later to adopt Underwood’s.

Upon hearing of the Bendigo exhibition, the real Charles Underwood offered the imposter a public challenge: They would duel by snakebite, and see whose cure was better. Shires accepted the duel, and in late January 1860, the two men met at the Cornwall Assembly Room in Launceston, Tasmania. Advertisements for the free event drew what a reporter deemed “a motley assemblage.” Underwood appeared first. He was dressed in a blue coat, black pants, and a black hat, and wore “a peculiar smile.” When he lifted his hat, a black snake tumbled out. He began charming it, guiding it back and forth on the floor while murmuring incantations to the audience. He decried Shires the imposter, and the audience began to chant “Shires, Shires!”

Shires appeared. He wore no coat or hat, and the tattoo on his arm was visible. Underwood and Shires shook the long, forceful handshake of bitter enemies. They shouted over each other for the audience’s attention. Underwood put the snake back in his hat and took it out again. Shires put the head of a snake in his mouth, then said it bit him, as blood trickled from his lip, though the reporter wrote, “We cannot say whether he did not himself inflict the wound with his own teeth.” The snake charmers tried to test their antidotes on kittens, but the snakes refused to bite. “The exhibition was absurd from beginning to end,” the reporter concluded, “and utterly valueless in settling the question, no doubt a very important one to all, whether or no there is an antidote for snake bites.”

Several months later, another advertisement appeared on the inside pages of The Argus newspaper:

antidote for snake-­bites., ­Challenge to Charles Underwood., ­The undersigned challenges you to meet him, on Monday evening next, the 30th of April, at half-­past seven, at Mr. Taylor’s, All Nations Hotel, Sandridge, there and then to test our antidotes for snake-­bites. The arrangement to be, you bring snakes by which I will be bitten and apply my own antidote, and, vice versa, you to be bitten by snakes I produce, applying your antidote.

The advertisement makes no mention of their prior encounter, nor do the two men appear to have mentioned it during the resulting duel. They met a third time two weeks after that, at the Union Hotel in Geelong, southwest of Melbourne. Witnesses said both men appeared to be drunk. None of their contemporaries seems to have realized what is now obvious: The two snake men were working together. The duels were a sham, a way to sell snakebite antidote. The conspiracy, though, was short lived. Underwood died a little more than a year later, in November 1861, after one of his snakes bit him while he was showing it off in a bar. In the report on the inquest into events leading up to his death, the landlady of the Eureka Hotel recalled that Underwood and his wife and young daughter entered the bar “about half-­past seven o’clock on Saturday night. They had among them a cage of snakes. Could not say whether [Underwood] was sober or not, but should not think he was.”

Joseph Shires was now Australia’s most famous snake man. In the years that followed, he toured widely. Advertisements for his snakebite antidote appeared regularly in newspapers. For a time, it seemed that his snakebite-­based fame and fortune could only continue to grow. Then he encountered Professor George Britton Halford.

An English anatomist with powerful muttonchops, Halford arrived in Melbourne in 1862, and soon joined the colonial quest for a snakebite cure. In early 1867, he published a description of his investigations into the physiological effects of snakebite. Using a microscope, he had discovered that snake venom suffused the blood of the bite victim with what he called “germinal” cells, which rapidly multiplied, preventing the blood cells from carrying oxygen, and causing “coldness, sleepiness, insensibility, slow breathing, and death.” In a subsequent lecture, Halford noted that snake venom’s effect on the blood was like that of cholera, and modestly suggested that the venom of dead snakes, dried and carried aloft on the wind, might be the cause of that disease. People wrote letters to the editor praising him.

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Excerpted from Snake Men: Rebels, Reptiles, and the Race to Name the Creatures of Earth by Zach St. George. Copyright © 2026 by Zach St. George. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.