Strike a Pose

Published Jan 25, 2022, 10:00 AM

Curiosity is often found in the center of unusual stories. Let's see what bounty today's tour brings us, shall we?

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Welcome to Aaron Benky'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. The Founding Fathers were brilliant, yet flawed individuals. They undertook a brazen act of rebellion to free their country of tyranny by using the most powerful tool in their arsenal, not guns or canons, but their minds. They believed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But do you know what they didn't believe in dinosaurs. It all started a hundred years prior, during the six hundreds, with a man Robert Plott. Plot was born in England around sixteen forty. He focused hard on his studies and attended good schools as a child, eventually going on to study at Oxford. He graduated some years later with a bachelor's degree, a master's and a degree in civil law. Plot moved up quickly within the university. Post graduation. He became a professor as well as dean and vice principal for a time. He also oversaw three scientific departments at the school, including the Chemistry Lab, the Ashmolean Museum, and the School of Natural History. Plot was interested in natural history, specifically the ancient natural history of Oxfordshire, County, where he had lived. He approached his study of the area in a far more calculated way than the researchers of the past and even several of his contemporaries. He kept detailed notes about his travels, tracking the owners of the properties he visited, as well as rich descriptions of what he found. Plot categorized his findings under chapter headings with names like of the Heavens and Air End of Plants. However, there was one heading that seemed to jump off the page more than the others. It was the one titled of formed stones two Plot. Formed stones were rocks and minerals that resembled parts of the body, both human and animal. There were small spherical rocks that looked like eyes, and larger stones with indentations that bore a resemblance to the human brain. But there was one stone in particular that caught his attention, except it wasn't a stone at all. It was a fossilized bone, and it was massive, larger than any human bone he had ever seen before. Plot first thought it had come from an extinct form of elephant that had roamed the land when the ancient Romans were still in power, but soon tossed that theory out. There was no way an elephant of that kind would have ended up in this part of England. Instead, he deduced that the bone must have come from the femur of a long deceased giant he knew of giants from the past, like Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, who measured over eleven feet tall. There were Secondilla and Pussio, the keepers of the Roman gardens of Sellust. They both topped out at around nine and a half feet tall, and so it wasn't out of line with assumptions that this bone also had once belonged to a man or woman much larger than everyone else. Plot published his findings, Giant Hypothesis and all, in his book Natural History of Oxfordshire around sixteen seventy six. So how did Robert Plott's wildly inaccurate theory about fossils pertained to the founding Fathers. One hundred years later. Well in seventeen sixty seven, Benjamin Franklin received a package while he was in London on a diplomatic mission. He opened it up to find an array of bones, teeth, and tusks that had been found in the Ohio River Valley back in America. They appeared to belong to an elephant. He found the teeth fascinating, as they didn't look like the teeth of modern elephants. They had numerous protuberances and divots, like the teeth found on most carnivores, at least according to Franklin, so he took the files to the scientists that he knew where. It was speculated that they had come from a large elephant like creature that no longer existed. It would be almost one fifty years before British geologist William Buckland would discover the remains of a creature he named Megalosaurus. They'd become the first known fossils belonging to a dinosaur, though the term dinosaur wouldn't be coined for another twenty years. It's possible that the giant bone Robert Plott had found had also belonged to a dinosaur, but nobody knew such animals had ever lived. In fact, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin lived until the seventeen nineties, thirty years before Buckland's Megalosaurus shook the world of science, meaning that two of America's founding fathers died believing the giants were real, but never knowing that dinosaurs had ever existed at all. And I'd call that curious. The stage of piracy has something of an immortalizing effect on its players. Modern audiences swoon over the idea of a carefree, swashbuckling existence, often exemplified in the exploits of historical people like Ann Bonnie and Henry Caesar, and over modern and fictional names like Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swan. But not every pirate is romanticized into such prominent roles in the lore surrounding their profession. During the extended conflict between Spain and England, countless pirate legends were born from the indelible Edward Thatch code named Blackbeard, to the likes of Calico, Jack Black, Sam Bellamy, and many many more. The stories of pirates and privateers all have a relatively similar beginning point. Struggles turned to opportunity and a similar ending point capture and or death. And while that is where Henry began, it is not where Henry and did. As a boy, Henry found himself as a servant in Barbados. When a call to raid the Spanish reached Henry, he was quick to answer, finding gainful employment as a privateer under Christopher Mings. And it was also around this time, in the mid sixteen hundreds, that rum began to make the rounds aboard numerous privateer and pirate vessels, becoming the unspoken signature beverage of marauding sailors all over the world. It's easy to imagine that among the spoils of war and piracy, Henry often found himself with a glass in hand, a barrel in the hold, perhaps under foot, and a pocket of gold amassed from the sale of the native Caribbean drink. Henry established himself as a premier privateer against the Spanish fleet in the seas around Jamaica. He served as captain with the defenses when Spain sent their own invasion against the British stronghold in Jamaica, a defense that held and proved Henry the security of buying his own plantation on the island, which had quickly become his home. All told, Henry's exploits are not to be ignored. Among the most successful pirates and privateers to have ever lived, he proved himself versatile in attack and defense. He led successful raids against the Spanish for nearly a decade in places like Venezuela, Panama, Gibraltar, and more. He made sensible investments into his own foothold on land and rose in the ranks, so high, in fact, that he once found himself as the admiral in charge of a fleet of thirty ships. But all pirates come to an end, though Henry's end is not the usual end of pirates and scalawags. You see, Henry found his way into politics, landing himself a comfortable position in his adopted home of Jamaica, where he continued to have friendly relations with all his former privateer friends. He served briefly as governor before his health began to decline due to, according to his doctor, excessive drinking. Perhaps the Rum had indeed taken a toll on Henry. After all these years, Henry's legacy is mixed. He doesn't stand up in the annals of his stree against the likes of people like Blackbeard, Henry Avery, and other household names of legend and lore. He was the muse of the nineteen two Captain Blood novel by Raphael Sabbatini, as well as John Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in nineteen twenty nine, but after that he doesn't appear as a prominent figure in works of fiction seeking to glorify the Golden Age of pirates, nor is he often included in many lists compiling the best pirates in history. Perhaps it's because he didn't go out in that familiar blaze of glory, or hanged for his crimes, or lost at sea, or even a brigand to the end, Henry had, minus the over indulgence in rum, a bit of a quiet ending, which might well have contributed to his quiet legacy. But there's one thing that Henry does have that makes him stand the test of time, perhaps more than any other pirate legend to dates, because while he did indeed rise above captain to the rank of admiral and even received knighthood later in life, most people today are even aware of him because his name is on a bottle of rum. Captain Morgan to be exact and if he were alive to see it, I imagine Admiral Morrigan would smile a bit and remember the good old days, back when even he had a little captain in it. 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.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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