Sir Arthur Conan Doyle / The Sign of Four ]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) is the English writer and physician best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, though he also produced a large number of other literary works: ghost stories, science fiction, plays, poems, and historical novels.
This work, one of the four novel-length Sherlock Holmes stories (in addition to the 56 short stories), has one metaphorical reference to Newfoundlands, which occurs as Holmes and Watson are pursuing two murder suspects down the Thames River:
One man sat by the stern, with something black between his knees over which he stooped. Beside
him lay a dark mass which looked like a Newfoundland dog.
That "dark mass" turns out to be "a little black man — the smallest I have ever seen — with a great,
misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair." He was an aboriginal inhabitant of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, and one of the murderers Holmes and Watson are pursuing.