Some individuals have tried very hard to stand out on the pages of history, and many have succeeded in very unique ways.
Welcomed Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. If you pay attention to the news, you've most likely heard a sentence that started with the words Florida man, Florida man in no seriously, I have drugs. T Shirts arrested for possession of drugs, Florida man charged with assault with a deadly weapon after throwing alligator through Wendy's drive through window. And Florida man gets tired of waiting at hospital, steals ambulance, drives home. And those, if you're wondering, are all real headlines from the Sunshine State. So what is it about Florida that attracts these kinds of people? Well, the short answer is because there are so many of them. Florida, you see, is the third most populous states in America, with upwards of twenty million residents and another one hundred fifty million tourists visiting each year. So really it's just a matter of statistics. But these hijinks didn't start recently. Florida has always been a part of the news cycle, going as far back as the eighteen hundreds. About one hundred thirty miles north of Tampa Bay is a city known as cedar Key. It's part of a cluster of islands, most of which are uninhabited today and make up a wildlife refuge protected by the government. But during the eighteen hundreds, cedar Key was central to Floridian commerce. The Eagle Pencil Company and eber Hard Faber owned pencil mills in cedar Key. After the Civil War it was a major port and there was even a railroad line connected back to the mainland. But March of eighteen eighty nine was when everything changed. A new mayor had been elected, and his name was William Cartrell, a thirty three year old poster child for nepotism. His father had been a state senator and his brother was a successful business owner on the island. He also managed to marry up joining a high society family that allowed him to move even higher in the world. But old Billy had a problem. He liked to drink when he was sober, he was a pleasant fellow and got along with most everyone. But after a few fingers of whiskey, he was a totally different person, mean, angry, and without restraint. As time went on, the cachet of his politically connected family, along with his own personal police force, turned Mayor Cartrell from a belligerent drunk into a full on tyrant. With carte blanche to do as he pleased, Catrell enjoyed loading up on booze and abusing his authority. He yelled and ranted at people, seemingly at random, screaming at whoever was closest to him at the time. Often those rants would turn into death threats against individuals that he believed had wronged him. He would also walk into his brother's general store and pull a gun on everyone inside, taking them hostage. He didn't want money, though, he just really liked terrifying people. On one awful evening, Mayor Catrell forced several of his constituents out of their homes at gunpoint and made them all dance for him in the street. That gun was also used to torment the local telegraph operator, who Cotrell hated for no known reason. During one of their spats. The mayor aimed the pistol at a black residence standing off to the side, and told him to beat up the telegraph operator for his enjoyment. Despite his out of control nature, however, Catrell went unchallenged even his re election campaign. Was his success. Perhaps the local populace didn't want to upset him any further, but nobody stood up to him, at least nobody in town. That wouldn't happen until the arrival of James Harvey Pinkerton. Pinkerton had been appointed the new customs agent on the island by President Benjamin Harrison. He saw firsthand how the mayor handled his official business with the locals. Pinkerton called him out on it, and the mayor handled the offense as diplomatically as he knew how. He threatened to kill Pinkerton, but that was a bad move. The average telegraph operator might have been helpless against the mayor's drunken outbursts, but not an employee of the federal government. Pinkerton wrote a detailed report of Cantrell's behavior and all the things that he spat at the agents, and then he sent it off to Washington. The report soon found its way to the President's desk, and Benjamin Harrison knew that the problem wouldn't fix itself, so he sent in some reinforcements to help. In May of eighteen ninety, the U. S. Coast Guard landed on the shores of the island to take the mayor and his goons into custody. Catrell, having learned of his impending arrest ahead of time, fled cedar Key for the mainland. While the residents were happy that the mayor was now out of their lives, they wanted the Coastguard guard too. Many of those living in cedar Key had been supporters of the Confederacy and they didn't like the United States government snooping around their island. But the President didn't care about their complaints. His people stuck around and helped cedar Key install a new city government that didn't keep them paralyzed by fear. As for Billy Catrell, he escaped to Alabama until he was finally arrested for his crimes and cedar Key. Unfortunately, though he never stood trial. While out on bond, he got into an altercation at a local bar and was placed in handcuffs once again. He told police Chief Adolph Gerald that he would kill him once he was released, and even challenged him to a duel. Mayor Catrell, true to his words, showed up the next day in a horse drawn carriage ready to duel, but the chief had the upper hand. As the former mayor approached him, Gerald armed with his shotgun, fired twice at his assailant and killed him on the spot. William Catrell was a terrible man with an even more terror will temper. He was given near infinite power over a small city, which he wielded with impunity. But the press had the last word on his reign of terror. Newspapers everywhere published articles about Cantrell's demise, with many using too simple words to sum up everyone's feelings. Good Ribbons Solomon August Andre had a dream. Born in Sweden in eighteen fifty four, Andre could never quite seem to get ahead. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, but came to the United States in eighteen seventy six and worked as a janitor at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Upon his return to Sweden, he ran his own machine shop for several years until a lack of business forced him to close. Andrea returned to his alma mater as an assistant in eighteen eighty, and two years later he was invited to join a scientific expedition to the island of Spitzbergen in Norway. The trip only lasted a year, after which he found work in the Swedish Patent Office. In his spare time, Andrea wrote extensively about air electricity, heat conduction, and various new inventions. But there was something calling to him, something out there, beckoning him from behind his desk and into the great wide open the North Pole. It came during a time known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, when brave explorers risked their lives to chart Antarctica. Andrea, however, wanted to be the first to reach the opposite pole, and to do so using only a hot air balloon. He'd been fascinated with balloons ever since his eighteen seventy six strip to America, when he'd run into John Wise, an American ballooning expert and true pioneer in the field. Andrea was captivated by the idea of soaring over the Earth in a massive balloon and decided that that was how he was going to reach the North Pole, so he approached the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on February and he outlined his plan. He did so again five months later in London when he spoke at the sixth International Geographical Congress. He proposed using a hydrogen filled balloon to be guided by the wind across the Arctic Sea and to the Bearing Strait. From there, he and his team of two other explorers would travel over Alaska, Canada, possibly Russia, and finally across to the North Pole. He already had a balloon to the Svie, which he had purchased two years prior, and he'd accounted for all possible problems that might arise during the journey. He would go during the Arctic summer, when the temperatures were a bit warmer. The midnight sun would allow the men to study the area all day and night without having to stop, and there wouldn't be much in the way of precipitation to weigh the balloon down during the flight, and he snow that did accumulate would simply melt at higher temperature or get blown off by the wind. Andre first attempted the voyage north in eighteen nineties six, but immediately had to cancel when the winds refused to behave It wasn't until July of the following year when he, along with twenty seven year old civil engineer Canute Frankel and physics student Niles Strindberg, were able to lift off from Norway's Danes Island. Takeoff was rocky. The brand new balloon, named the Omen Eagle, was weighed down heavily by the men, their equipment and drag ropes. Those ropes were quickly discarded to allow them to gain altitude within the first few minutes. Though Andrea and his team had expelled more than sixteen hundred pounds of essential weight to get the balloon high enough to clear the water, it was actually too much. They climbed higher and higher, reaching a peak altitude of twenty three hundred feet. Andrea let lose several buoys with messages inside that were meant to be carried back to land on the ocean's currents. Homing pigeons were also released, each carrying a note bearing their coordinates at the time for the papers to report on. They floated for ten and a half hours before the balloon started to sink. What followed was another forty one hours of their basket dragging along the ground as the aircraft struggled to stay up right. They finally landed on a stretch of polar ice just three hundred miles shy of the North Pole on July four. They had come prepared with guns, skis, a tent, and several months worth of provisions, and so they began their trek north, hoping to reach the Pole before winter. Along their journey, the three men killed and eight polar bears and seals to keep them going, all while hiking along the vast icy land. It wasn't until a few weeks later when they realized that all their marching had been in vain, as the pack ice they were on was moving in the opposite direction to where they needed to go. After that, the team changed course to make up for lost time, headed toward a remote island named White Island in October of eight, and that was the last anyone ever heard for essay Andre and his two companions for thirty three years. They were assumed lost until a Norwegian ship on a scientific expedition discovered their remains on the island of Vitea. The crew of the vessel had come to study glaciers. Instead, they found Andrea's boat, his journal, and two skeletons wearing monogram clothing. Another ship came to the island months later and located the final body, as well as a box of photographic film that had been brought by Strindberg to document their journey. The three sets of remains were sent back to Stockholm and cremated, but the cause of their death was still a mystery. They hadn't succumbed to the ice, and they hadn't killed each other. After reading through their journals and notes, it was believed by doctors and experts that all three men had died of an illness brought on by eating half cooked polar bear meat. Although he didn't quite make it to the North Pole, sa Andrea was viewed as a hero. Back home in Sweden, he and his team were celebrated for giving their lives in the name of science. A documentary novel publish in the nineteen sixties, however, posited that Andre had actually been afraid to let down the Swedish press and public, and so he carried on with the expedition regardless of his own misgivings. Whatever the case, Andre died an explorer. He got himself out of the patent office and into the thick of it. He may not have reached the North Pole, but he inspired many others after him to keep trying, just not by hot air balloon. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.