Florida Man

Some individuals have tried very hard to stand out on the pages of history, and many have succeeded in very unique ways.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
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

(00:27):
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

(00:50):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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

(03:19):
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

(03:41):
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.

(04:04):
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.

(04:25):
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

(04:46):
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

(05:08):
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

(05:30):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:14):
simple words to sum up everyone's feelings. Good Ribbons Solomon
August Andre had a dream. Born in Sweden in eighteen

(06:37):
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

(07:01):
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.

(07:23):
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

(07:43):
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

(08:05):
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

(08:26):
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

(08:47):
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

(09:07):
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

(09:28):
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

(09:51):
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.

(10:13):
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

(10:36):
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

(10:59):
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

(11:21):
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

(11:42):
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

(12:02):
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.

(12:29):
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,

(12:52):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.