A Hole in One

Some stories are difficult to believe. But when they're 100% true, it's also difficult to not share them. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey'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

(00:27):
of Curiosities. The books that make the news really do
so because of their prose or even how well they sell.
Usually it's because they stir a controversy. To Kill a
Mocking Bird by Harper Lee has been on countless reading
lists in middle schools and high schools across the United States.

(00:50):
Set in ninety six, it follows the story of a
small town lawyer defending the innocence of a black man
falsely accused of a heinous crime, and since its publication
in nineteen sixty, it's found itself on another kind of
list in some schools, namely the Banned book list. Books
are banned for a variety of reasons. They might be
due to their subject matter or the author's personal beliefs.

(01:12):
Regardless of the reason, those titles not only become prohibited,
they also become coveted, because who doesn't want to read
a book that's been deemed forbidden right well, the Puritans, apparently.
Thomas Morton was a lawyer from Devon, England, who had
endured a fairly conservative upbringing. His family were members of
the landed gentry and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle paid for

(01:33):
by the people renting their lands. Yet despite his traditionalist childhood,
Morton grew up more progressive over time. During his years
studying law. In the fifteen nineties, he fell in with
the libertine crowd, shunning the trends of the time by
enjoying a life of fun and partying. He set sail
from Massachusetts in sixteen twenty two, where he was taken
aback by the Puritans and their well puritanical beliefs. As

(01:56):
a result, he returned to England in sixteen twenty three
to prepare for a more productive visit the following year.
When Morton came back to Massachusetts in sixteen twenty four,
it was as part owner of the Wallaston Company. He
founded a new settlement called Merrymount on land given to
him by the native Algonquins, and, unlike the Puritans, who
saw them as savages to be controlled or killed, Morton

(02:18):
got along well with his indigenous neighbors. He even regarded
them as more civilized and humanitarian than those of his
countrymen in Plymouth, who had shunned the more free thinking
ways that Morton held. In fact, the colony didn't just
dislike Morton, they went to war with him. Puritan militia's
broke up his pagan festivals and spread rumors about the

(02:39):
debaucherous things going on in his town. In reality, much
of the backlash was due to how quickly Merry Mounts
was growing. Many of their business ventures, like fur trading
and farming were taking off, and Plymouth just couldn't compete.
Morton was also trading guns with the Algonquins, who had
already been marked as enemies by the Puritans. Soon enough,

(03:00):
Plymouth's commander, a guy named Miles Standish, used his armed
militia to take control of Merrymounts and then arrested Morton
and the blasphemous act that had done him in the
merrymount May Day celebration. May Day had started as an
ancient festival celebrated on the first of May with singing, dancing,
and delicious food, but the Puritans of the Plymouth Colony

(03:21):
only saw it as a heathen's paradise. For his indiscretion,
Morton was tried and exiled to the Isle of Shoals,
a small cluster of deserted islands between Maine and New Hampshire.
But don't worry, Morton survived with the help of the
native people's who brought him food from the mainland. When
he eventually made it back to Merrymount, the Puritans had
reduced it to a shadow of its former self. This

(03:44):
time he was banished to England, but once there he
found a new way to get revenge that he craved.
He sued the colony, and because England had already been
at odds with the Puritans, King Charles used Morton's case
as the perfect excuse to formally revoke Plymouth's charter. Next,
Morton decided to parlay his success with the lawsuit into
a brand new endeavor. He wrote a series of books

(04:06):
about his experiences in Massachusetts called New English Canaan, and
the books took aim at the men behind the Plymouth Colony.
Their real names were replaced with unflattering nicknames. Of course,
Miles Standish was referred to as Captain Shrimp, while Massachusetts
Bay Governor John Endicott was called Captain Littleworth. Within the
pages of Morton's New English Canaan, he insulted their beliefs

(04:29):
and policies, and suggested the best approach to the New
World was integrating the colonies with the native tribes, the
way Marymount had done. Unsurprisingly, Plymouth's governor, William Bradford hated
the books. He went to great lengths to keep anyone
else from reading them, which is why New English Canaan
is widely considered to be the first book band in America.

(04:49):
Although the English government destroyed the first edition of the
book soon after its publication, a few copies did survive,
and so did Morton's legacy. His exploits were immortalized works
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Vincent Bennett, and Philip Roth. All
those headaches and all that trouble only resulted in a
legacy that has lived on for four hundred years. And

(05:12):
all they had to do to keep it from happening
was to let the man do the one thing he wanted,
the fight for his right two party. Most of us

(05:33):
have experienced a bad day now and then maybe a
stretch of bad luck here or there, or even a
rare major setback, the loss of a job, a car
accident on the way to work. You know the drill.
But some people have experienced even worse blunders that alter
their life forever, or don't just cost the company money
but cost it everything. And at the bottom of that

(05:55):
deep well of failure is one particular story from a
few decades ago, and it's sure to make you feel
better about your own current circumstances. When Leon Viatore and
his son Timmy went fishing on November twenty one of
nineteen eighty, they assumed that everything would go well. Maybe
they'd catch something or maybe they wouldn't, but their lives

(06:15):
would never really be in danger, so they set out
in their boat to see what could happen. Their fishing
spot was a small freshwater lake about fifteen miles south
of Lafayette in Louisiana, known as Lake Panure. It wasn't massive,
maybe ten ft deep, but it was a lovely location,
and it even had its own small island, Jefferson Island,

(06:36):
where visitors can find the rip van Winkle live oak gardens.
But it wasn't all beautiful. From their seats in the boat,
Leon and Timmy could also see an oil rig. It
turns out that, in a search for more natural resources
to take advantage of oil giant Texaco had hired a
local company to do a test drill right in the
middle of the lake. So our intrepid fisherman steered away,

(07:00):
giving the oil rig some distance in hopes that the
fish would follow. But that's when something went wrong. Now,
typically an oil rig will drill down until their target
is reached valuable, precious oil, and we can all imagine
those little geysers of black liquid shooting up from the ground,
signaling success. But at about feet the oil crew felt

(07:21):
something different. It was as if the drill had broken free,
which might have signaled a bad day for them, But
it was about to get worse because not only did
they not see that's tell tale geyser of oil that
they were after, but the water around the drill shaft
began to move. In fact, it almost looked as if
it were swirling, and within a matter of minutes, that

(07:41):
swirling motion looked an awful lot like a bathtub that's
had the drain plug pulled, which is exactly what had
happened because their drill had cut through the lake bed
a thousand feet of rock and then straight into an
active salt mine that they didn't know was there. And
the moment the hole was formed, the entire decided that
it wanted to go down it. What happened next was

(08:03):
something out of a Michael Bay disaster movie. All two
point five billion gallons of water in the lake surged
into the hole, creating a massive vortex that pulled anything
around it down with it. A tug boat that was
present at the oil rig was sucked down and disappeared,
and then one of the heavy duty barges. In fact,
before it was all over, all eleven barges that were present,

(08:25):
we're gone. And it wasn't just boats that were at risk.
The water actually began to erode and pull away chunks
of the land around it. At least sixty five acres
of land were dissolved and pulled into the hole, including
much of the live oak gardens. And as all of
it drained downward, the water level fell so low that
something else happened. You see, there's a canal that connects

(08:48):
the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, so that water
could flow out into the ocean if needed. But now
that canal had begun to run north, sending water from
the Gulf into the lake and the salt mine below it,
and in the process it created a massive one fifty
foot waterfall, the largest on record in Louisiana. Thankfully, all

(09:09):
fifty five men working in the salt mine were able
to evacuate, and no one lost their lives that day,
and once the mind filled up, the lake eventually returned
to whatever the new normal was for it. Even our
friends the fishermen, managed to survive, riding their little boats
all the way to the muddy bottom before being able
to climb out and walk to safety. We've all had

(09:31):
bad days, but when you consider a story like this,
or someone drilled a hole in the world and made
an entire lake disappear, well, it's hard to feel like
a total failure. Fun probably not, but curious you better
believe it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of

(09:53):
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 Mankey
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

(10:15):
over at the world of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious. Yeah,