Open Water

Strange things are floating around in history, from people to objects. Here are a couple of new editions to the Cabinet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is 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

(00:27):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. The ocean is a dark and
mysterious place. One can get disoriented, bobbing like a cork
in the water with no land in sight. Sailors who
are dehydrated or sleep deprived have been known to hallucinate,

(00:47):
seeing ships, islands, and even people that aren't really there,
and history is riddled with tales of vessels turning up
with their crews missing or a lone survivor who can't
remember what happened next. Ships have ways of signaling for help,
of course, from flares to radios and even satellite phones nowadays.
But back in the nineteen forties, one ship in distress

(01:08):
didn't have a radio or a telephone, and it didn't
shoot a flare into the sky either. It sent a harrowing,
cryptic message in a last ditch effort for help that
came too late. What followed could not be explained it
started well, No one is quite sure about that. The
event was said to have occurred in seven with a

(01:29):
cargo ship named the S. S. Orange Madon sent out
a distress call. It was a forty year old steamer
whose name in Malaysian translated to Man of Madon. Much
of the twenty three man crew was made up of
native Indonesians, but whether they had just set out or
were returning home is not known. The ship was traveling
through the Strait of Malacca, a narrow passage separating the

(01:51):
Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. On
a faithful day in June. A message was sent from
the Orange Madon in Morse code that scots and dashes
translated to we float. All officers including the captain dead
in chart room and on the bridge, probably whole of
crew dead, followed by the words I die. No other

(02:14):
details followed. That was the last thing transmitted by the
radio operator on board the ship to other ships in
the area. One called City of Baltimore and one named
Silver Star received the message, but it was the Silver
Star that reached the Madan first. They attempted to communicate
using their loudspeaker, but there was no response. No damage
was detected on the ship's hull either. With all other

(02:37):
options exhausted, Silver Stars crew boarded the vessel to investigate.
What they found stopped them in their tracks. The entire
crew was dead, their faces frozen in terror, as though
something had scared them to death. Their bodies were twisted
in unnatural positions as well, though they bore no visible injuries,

(02:58):
and there were other signs of strangeness play, possibly even supernatural.
For one, the outside temperature was around one hundred degrees fahrenheit,
but the Silver Star crew felt a haunting chill as
they stood on the ship. There was also just a
single lifeboat missing, and the bodies were in a bad
state of decay, despite having died only hours earlier. The

(03:19):
search party had planned on taking a closer look at
the bodies, but were forced to leave in a hurry
when one of the Maddon's smokestacks caught fire. Instead, they
decided to tow the ghostly ship back to shore and
salvage it for parts. Almost as soon as the men
left the Madon, an explosion went off somewhere below deck,
then another. In total, four explosions rang out before the

(03:40):
Orange Madon's smoking hull slip below the waves, taking its
cruise remains with it. After the story got out, it
was believed that the ship had been part of a
smuggling operation involved in transporting harmful nerve agents and other
toxic chemicals. It was possible that ocean water had breached
the cargo hold and cause as to chemical reaction with

(04:01):
the toxins inside. The ensuing cloud of gas would have
poisoned everyone on board. Another theory suggested that it was
carbon monoxide gas that had killed captain and crew, caused
by an undetected fire in the ship's boiler. The mystery
of the Orange Madon is one that has stumped sailors
and researchers for decades, namely because on paper, the ship

(04:22):
never existed. It could not be found on any register,
and the first mentions of it were in the news
stories coming out of Indonesia. They were based on an
account told by an Italian officer from the Silver Star
who had seen the bodies for himself. A photograph was
allegedly taken to but when a newspaper editor tried to
get in touch with him, the officer had vanished. But

(04:43):
Once the story was out, there was no stopping it.
Papers in England and the United States republished it without
checking its veracity. There are people today who don't believe
that the Orange Madon even existed at all. Then again,
perhaps the key was in the missing lifeboats. Maybe some
who really knew what happened had gotten away before he
could be caught. The world may never know the truth

(05:05):
for sure, but the story of the Oranguemdon lives on
as a terrifying reminder that the ocean can be unforgiving
and that dead men really do tell no tales. When

(05:28):
someone is incredibly skilled at something, they can make it
look easy. What we don't see, however, are the hours
of training and rehearsals that got them there, the flooded
lyrics in a song, or the foul balls they hit
into the stands, or the wrong notes on the sheet music.
But sometimes someone is so good it can seem like
there are supernatural forces at play. Robert Johnson, for example,

(05:50):
died in at the age of seven, but was said
to have been so proficient as a blues guitarist that
he must have gotten his talent from the devil himself.
According to a legend, Johnson took his guitar to a
crossroad near a plantation in rural Mississippi at the stroke
of midnight one night. A man appeared before him and
tuned the guitar before strumming a few tunes and handing

(06:11):
it back to him. The deal was done. Johnson had
just become a blues master. And there's a reason these
myths persist where expert artists are concerned. It's hard to
imagine how someone can possess so much talent on their own,
especially while they're still so young. But Robert Johnson wasn't
the first person to have reputedly sold his soul for

(06:31):
fame and fortune. Before the blues guitar, there was the
classical violin and the man who made it sing like
no other. Niccolo Paganini. Paganini was born in seventeen eighty
two in Genoa, Italy. His father played the mandolin as
a side business, an instrument. He began teaching his son
when Niccolo was only five, but when the boy turned seven,

(06:52):
his attention turned to the violin. Paganini was something of
a prodigy. His talents earned him scholarships and opportunities to
study with some of best violinists of his time, but
his teachers quickly realized that they were no match for
his growing skills. He was a force to be reckoned with.
When Paganini turned eighteen, his plane earned him a top
spot as first violin of the Republic of Luca, a

(07:14):
now defunct state in Italy that was annexed by Napoleon
in eighteen o five. Control of Luca was handed to
Napoleon's sister Alyssa, and Paganini served as violinist in her
court until eighteen o nine, when he began touring again.
It wasn't until eighteen thirteen when the virtuoso started making
a name for himself as a violinist. After a successful
concert in Milan, Paganini skyrocketed to success, traveling all over

(07:38):
Europe and giving concerts to large audiences. Even the Pope
was a fan. But Paganini's talents also earned him ire
from rival violinists who were jealous of his abilities. For one,
he didn't perform with sheet music, he memorized his pieces
prior to playing them. Paganini was so blazingly fast too.
His long, thin fingers were able to play twelve notes

(08:01):
per second, a difficult nearly impossible feat for most violinists.
It wasn't long before rumors surrounding the origins of his
abilities started to emerge. An audience member in Vienna claimed
to have witnessed the devil himself assisting Paganini on stage.
Another person said that they once saw the devil caused
lightning to strike his bow during a performance. It eventually

(08:23):
got to the point where audiences stopped attending his shows
for fear of getting too close to evil. To remedy
the situation, Paganini was forced to prove something he never
thought he would have to, that he was human. To
do this, he had a newspaper publish a personal letter
his mother had written him. Clearly, if he had a
regular human mother, then there was no way he could

(08:44):
be a product of the devil. The letter was enough
to quell the rumors and audiences started coming back. So
why did Niccolo Paganini excel in a way no other
violinist could well? That answer ties him to the other
famous musician I mentioned earlier, Robert Johnson. It was believed
that both men had something called Marfan syndrome, a genetic

(09:06):
disorder that affected how their limbs and appendages grew. Those
with Marfan syndrome were often tall, with long fingers and toes.
Both Johnson and Paganini boasted elongated fingers that allowed them
to move about their instruments with great speed and agility. Sadly,
Paganini died of cancer in eighteen forty. A priest tried

(09:26):
to give him his last rites just before his death,
but Paganini refused. He didn't think that it was yet
his time. For those who had accused him of being
in league with Satan, this was just one more reason
to be suspicious. But Paganini did die then, regardless of
what people thought of him, they had to give the
devil his due, because that man left behind an impressive

(09:47):
body of work, one that's still performed today. I hope
you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities,
so scribe 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

(10:10):
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. Yeah,