Fruit Punch

Some folks create their own drama, while others simply ride the waves hoping to survive. Either way, their stories are curious.

Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!

 

Join our Patreon for ad-free episodes!: https://www.patreon.com/grimandmild

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
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 area outside Panama

(00:37):
City was sweltering and packed with people. A train pulled
into the depot, disgorging multitudes into the hot station at
La Sienega. Men and women flocked to the Ocean House
Hotel and the Pacific House Hotel to pay for cheap lodgings.
Those that weren't planning to stay gathered by the station
or at the beach. There was a steamship, the John L. Stevens,

(01:00):
to take these people to San Francisco that it was
currently aground until the tide rolled in that evening. The
situation left many Americans with nothing to do but sweat
and wait. It was April fifteenth of eighteen fifty nine.
The California gold Rush was at its peak, and in
the aftermath of the Mexican American War, plenty of American

(01:20):
colonists were eager to grab California land while it was cheap,
and traveling through Central America was a faster and often
less perilous way of going west compared to the Oregon Trail. However,
at this point, the Panama Canal didn't exist, so it
was still a haphazard route passing through the Republic of
New Grenada, and as a result, Panama City got extremely congested.

(01:43):
Jack Oliver, an American man, stepped out of the Golden
Eagles Saloon at around five thirty PM. He was one
of many foreigners who were passing through Panama City far
slower than he would like. It was already very drunk,
trailed by several friends in similar states of intoxication the way.
He grabbed a slice of watermelon from a street vendor,
which he ate as he walked along. The vendor, understandably

(02:07):
annoyed that the American had stolen the watermelon without pain,
pursued him. That man's name was Jose Luna. He insisted
that Oliver pay him ten cents for that slice. Oliver
brushed him off, telling him to get lost. Luna insisted,
following Oliver further and further down main street. Oliver in
a fit of rage, drew a pistol and pointed it

(02:28):
at Luna's face. Luna defensively drew a knife, but before
either of them could do anything, a local grabbed Oliver's
pistol and attempted to wrestle it from his hands. The
gun went off, fortunately hitting no one. Knowing better than
to press his luck, Luna quietly vanished into the crowd.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
The man who had grabbed the pistol, though, Miguel Abraham,
broke and run the gun still in his hands. Oliver
and the other Americans chased after him, shouting angrily. They
even brandished more weapons, and soon the locals were ready
with weapons of their own. More gunshots went off, and
the pack streets of Panama City descended into chaos. It

(03:06):
was an explosion of tension that had already existed in
the area. Locals, primed and angry toward the arrogant Americans,
took to American run businesses with clubs and other improvised weapons.
Both hotels, The Ocean and the Pacific were trashed in
the ensuing riot. The main group of Americans, including the
ones who had incited it all to begin with, fled

(03:26):
to the train station, where they barricaded themselves inside. The
Panama police arrived shortly after and attempted to control the scene,
but when a stray bullet from the station struck a policeman,
any attempts to calm things down died a quick death.
Police and locals stormed the train station, breaking down the
doors and forcing their way inside. The riots lasted hours

(03:48):
well into the night. By the end, the train station
was destroyed, the telegraph lines had been severed, and even
sections of train track had been torn up. There were
over sixty injuries and seventeen people died, fifteen Americans and
two Panamanians. And what about Jack Oliver, the arrogant American
who thought stealing fruit from a poor vendor was a

(04:10):
good idea Well. Retellings of the riot tend to lose
track of his story, but at least one account claims
that he just sat the riot out. The tide came in,
so he boarded the ship along with the other tourists,
and while the violence raged on, he slept in steerage,
waiting to be taken back to America. To some a
riot like this was inevitable, though the governments of America

(04:31):
and Panama might have had an agreement, but intense racial
and economic disparities between the populations were very well documented. Predictably,
the business owners who lost money in the riot blamed
the locals like Miguel Abrahan, rather than Jack Oliver, who
had drawn his gun in the first place. The conflicts
between nations, individuals, and businesses became inextricably tied up together

(04:52):
in the riot, leaving everyone frustrated. Traveling from one end
of a continent to another is always going to provoke
some sort of stress. Even as technology improves, we accept
a certain amount of discomfort if it gets us where
we're going. Only when your plane has a layover, it
rarely ends with the airport burning to the ground. They

(05:26):
say that you can't outrun fate, but as this story proves,
you may be able to outswim it. On the morning
of November twenty one of nineteen sixteen, a young stewardess
walk through the dining room of the HMHS Britannic. The
Britannic was originally built as a passenger liner, but when
World War One broke out, it was requisitioned for use

(05:47):
as a hospital ship. On this particular November morning, it
was sailing through the Kia Channel on its way to
pick up sick and wounded British sailors from the Greek
island of Lemnos. Our young stewardess, a woman named Violet,
squeeze past the dining tables where doctors and nurses were
chatting over breakfast. She made her way to the kitchen
to pick up breakfast for a sick nurse that she

(06:07):
was caring for. But just as she picked up a
teapot from the pantry, a deafening roar shook the Britannic. Instantly,
the men in the kitchen dropped their pans and spoons
and sprinted toward the deck, but Violet stayed calm. She
was no stranger to chaos at sea. She'd been a
stewardess on the supposedly unsinkable Titanic when it hit an
iceberg four years earlier. A year before that, she'd been

(06:30):
working on another luxury liner, the RMS Olympic, when it
collided with a British warship. Whatever was happening on the
Britannic that morning, it wouldn't rattle Violet jessup, so she
took the pot of tea to her patient in sick
Bay and calmly helped her get dressed and ready, and
then Violet strolled down the deserted hallways to her own cabin,

(06:50):
gathered up her toothbrush and her prayer book, and made
her way up to the deck. As she did, a
startled officer ran up to Violet and told her that
there had been an explosion and the ship was sinking fast.
All of the other women had already been evacuated, and
so she was hurried into a lifeboat, and as it
was lowered into the water, something caught Violet's eye. Another

(07:11):
lifeboat that had already set sail was drifting along the
side of the ship and being pulled into the churning
water by the ship's propellers. She watched in horror as
the other lifeboat was sucked into the propellers. One by one,
its occupants jumped overboard into the water, barely making it
out before the lifeboat was shredded. Violet realized that if

(07:32):
she was going to survive, she was going to have
to jump overboard as well. There was only one problem,
Violet couldn't swim. Pushing down her first pangs of fear,
she held her breath and plunged into the icy water.
She was tossed around by the waves, sinking further and further,
and then bobbing back to the surface. She smacked her
head on something hard, and as she choked and saltwater

(07:54):
filled her lungs, she felt a hand clutch her arm.
Mere moments before she would have drowned, she was pulled
to safety. All told, twenty eight lives were lost in
the sinking of the Britannic, but Violet Jessup survived and
made a full recovery, and the news got out that
the stewardess had lived through a third major disaster on
the ocean. She earned the new nickname Miss Unsinkable. After

(08:18):
taking a short break to reevaluate her life choices, she
decided to go back to work as a stewardess, and
she worked at sea for another three decades, thankfully without
another accident, before finally taking her well deserved retirement at
the age of sixty one. Fates can be a curiously
powerful force, but for Violet Jessup, it couldn't match the

(08:40):
pull of the ocean. 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 Mankie in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make

(09:03):
another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.