White Whale

Unbelievable tales always inspire a bit of curiosity. We think you're going to love these two new additions to the tour.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Most of us have heard about Moby Dick, the huge
ship smashing whale that Captain Ahab was desperate to catch.
The book about this fantastical menace has earned a reputation
as one of the great American novels. Published in eighteen
fifty one, it's even been called the greatest book of
the sea ever written. Now, whether you agree with that
assessment or not, the book's popularity makes it very clear

(00:58):
that we have a fascination with creatures of the deep,
including gigantic whales. But giant whales, you see, aren't just
a thing of fiction, and they've been around for a
lot longer than good old Moby Dick. Whales haven't always
been as well understood as they are now. For many
in the Middle Ages, a whale was essentially just a
sea monster. It was seen as something vicious that was

(01:19):
to be avoided, if at all possible. In the sixth century,
the seafarers of Constantinople were dealing with their own monster
of a whale, and just like Moby Dick, he was
causing a bit of a problem for sailors, and really
that makes sense. No one had been able to study
them or their personalities much at this point in history.
Instead of scientific reports about their migration patterns, sailors shared

(01:42):
stories about unfortunate deckhands being swallowed up by these huge creatures.
Their logical conclusion was that anything that big and with
that many teeth had to be a man eating monster.
The specific whale in question that was giving the Byzantines
a rut around was named Porphyrious. We can't know for sure,
but it suspected that he was either a sperm whale

(02:03):
or a very, very large orca. Measuring forty five feet
long and fifteen feet wide, he was absolutely massive. Unfortunately,
he wasn't a friendly giant. Most of what we know
about Porfirius comes from the sixth century Byzantine historian Procopius.
He wrote about Porfirius's exploits in two of his books,
and in both of them, the giant whale was something

(02:25):
to fear. Porfirius was a terror. He had a pension
for destroying ships, and he didn't discriminate. We have stories
going back hundreds of years about whales attacking whaling ships,
but Porfirius he didn't target whalers. He targeted everyone. Fishing vessels,
merchant ships, warships. They were all at risk of being

(02:45):
smashed by Porfirius. His selection process seemed to be completely random, too,
and that utterly terrified the sailors of the day. They
were all afraid that he would choose to go after
them next. Porphirius was usually seen swimming through the boss
for a strait which connects the Black Sea to the
Sea of Marmara. It was such a strategically important strait
that it actually played a part in where Constantine decided

(03:08):
to establish the capital of Constantinople. The strait was wildly important,
but it also wasn't very big. The tight squeeze meant
that there weren't many places these ships could sail to
escape the whale's wrath, so they started to avoid sailing
in the area where Porphyrius lurked, which of course led
to long detours and late shipments. Aside from the logistical nightmare,

(03:29):
the whale was hurting the economy, ships bringing in imports
and supplies had a fair chance of being obliterated, which
also meant that those shipments were lost whenever it happened.
The whales attacks also had an impact on their military,
since more and more soldiers were being killed at sea
by the whale. The fear the deaths and the immense
property damage became such an issue that Emperor Justinian actually

(03:52):
put out a bounty on the whale's head. No one
ever cashed it in, though everyone was too scared to
get close. And the craziest part of the story, This
behemoth of a whale ended up terrorizing the seas of
Constantinople for fifty years. He likely would have thrived many
more years too, if he didn't make a fatal error.
According to Procopius, the whale was beached one day after

(04:15):
chasing dolphins a little too close to the shore. His
gigantic body couldn't roll itself back into the surf, so
the locals found him thrashing there, completely at their mercy.
I'm sad to say that Porphyrius did not have a
happy ending. The Byzantines, ready to take revenge for fifty
years of terror, brought their weapons to meet him on
the beach. After his death, the seas were once again safe,

(04:40):
but Porfirius has not been forgotten. To this day. The
records of his exploits are the earliest ones we have
about whales attacking humans. He's even mentioned in Moby Dick,
and this legacy is oddly present even today. Recently, stories
of whale attacks have been on the rise. News reports
about orcas banding together to go after boats had been

(05:01):
all over our screens, and it's safe to assume that
these stories will be around for quite a while. In
a classic tale of man versus nature, some whales are
still carrying out Porphurius's mission. Will they keep it up
for as long as he did? Though only time will tell.

(05:32):
In eighteen thirty three, a trio of brothers from Manchester,
Connecticut saw the future and it was lined in silk.
Ward Rush and Frank Cheney began growing mulberry trees, the
perfect meal for their meal ticket of choice, the silkworm.
Their goal was to cultivate silk domestically in order to
siphon business away from overseas companies, and it looked like

(05:54):
they had made a wise investment. At first, the price
of mulberry trees grew by almost eight hundred percent from
eighteen thirty four to eighteen thirty six, and their tiny
farm blossomed into several full blown factories across two more states. Unfortunately,
as time, warn looked as though the Cheneys had gone
barking up the wrong tree because their mulberry inventory started

(06:16):
dying and investors began looking elsewhere. Luckily, the brothers Ward, Frank,
and Rush had not been caught out on a limb.
They saw the market's downfall in time and pivoted from
the production of silk to the processing of the material instead.
They opened a new plant with their other brother, Ralph,
and a man named Edwin Arnold in eighteen thirty eight,

(06:37):
which bloomed over the next twenty two years into a
six hundred workers strong silk processing powerhouse, and that growth
continued into the early twentieth century. Silk became a highly
coveted commodity in America thanks to Cheney silks. At its height,
the company employed a whopping four thousand, five hundred workers
in its factories. Sadly, just as had happened in the

(06:59):
eighteen thirds, the silk economy was about to go bust.
The Great Depression brought a halt to the production of
luxury textiles, especially silk, and the company scrambled to save itself.
Between nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty three, Cheney Silks
sold off as much property as it could to stay afloat,
but it wasn't enough. They filed for bankruptcy protection in

(07:20):
nineteen thirty five. But then something happened. A few years
later the company got a second chance. It teamed up
with DuPont and the United States Air Force in nineteen
thirty eight to help with the war efforts. The goal
was to bring to market a brand new kind of parachute,
and to do that, a new subsidiary was formed called
Pioneer Parachute Company. Now Cheney Silks had aided in the

(07:43):
manufacture of parachutes before by providing silk to different companies,
but now Pioneer was doing it all on their own,
and to accommodate the military's generous order, it could no
longer rely on expensive fabrics such as silk. Instead, it
turned to synthetic mater burials like DuPont's brand new invention nylon,

(08:03):
which was strong and easy to sow into predetermined patterns.
The product had originally been intended to make stockings, but
with the war growing overseas, Pioneer began testing the fabrics
viability in parachutes. It used unmanned payloads at first to
measure the rates of dissent in any damage that might
be incurred upon landing, although in order to verify how

(08:24):
it handled on a real jump, a true parachutist would
have to strap in and take a leap of faith,
so the company continued to hone its design over the
next few years until nineteen forty two, when twenty four
year old Adeline Gray from Oxford, Connecticut was enlisted to
test its latest shoot. Gray had been jumping since she
was nineteen and was working at DuPont as a parachute

(08:45):
rigger and packer. On June sixth of nineteen forty two,
she not only became the first person to use a
nylon parachute, she became the first woman to do so
as well. She leapt from a height of twenty five
hundred feet before an audience of reporters and miss military
officials that it was a success. The United States military
placed a massive order for nylon parachutes, which were used

(09:07):
to safely airdrop supplies into hard to reach territories during
World War Two. Plus the new parachutes also helped American
soldiers land at Normandy on June sixth of nineteen forty four,
exactly two years after Adeline Gray's successful test. On that day,
Private Robert C. Hillman donned his own nylon parachute and
jumped out of a C forty seven skytrain over France.

(09:30):
He was one of the tens of thousands of Allied
soldiers who were responsible for D Day's success, from Hillman
to DuPont's engineers, to Adeline Gray, and all the way
back to the Cheney brothers. It's possible that we might
not have won the war without the nylon parachute. But
Private Hillman had one specific person to thank for his
role that day. You see, he was carrying a special

(09:51):
parachute with a woman's initials on it. When asked by
an NBC War correspondent riding in the plane with him
why he was so sure about his upcoming jump, Because
my mother works for the Pioneer Parachute Company, Hillman replied,
and her initials are on my shoot. I hope you've

(10:12):
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 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

(10:34):
learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.