La La

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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 are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Many young people long for adventure. They're stuck in school
or menial jobs, and they want a life where they're
constantly on the move and experiencing new things. Young adult
novels and role playing video games cater to this desire,
featuring protagonists who come from humble beginnings and are swept
up on epic journeys. After a chance encounter in eighteen

(00:57):
thirty five, one young English aristocrat received a real life
call to adventure. He set out on a journey that
would change his life and the world. James had never
been good at school. After dropping out, he joined the
East India Trading Company Army, but soon took a bullet
to the chest while in battle and was sent home
to heal. He was bored and listless. The army had

(01:20):
shown him some fascinating parts of the world, but he
hadn't been free to explore it. He wanted to get
back out there on his own. When his father passed
away in eighteen thirty five, he received a massive inheritance.
This was his chance to do something with his life,
and so he did what any young man would do,
and he bought a one hundred and forty two ton

(01:40):
schooner called the Royalist. The lardship had six cannons and
could accommodate dozens of crew members. James hired some men,
purchased a ton of supplies, and then sailed toward Asia
to find adventure. In eighteen forty one, he took on
a request from the British governor of Singapore, who wanted
James to travel to bruce Un to thank the Sultan

(02:01):
there for the rescue of some British soldiers lost at sea.
But like any good adventure, this simple request quickly turned
into a larger ordeal. When James and his crew arrived
in Brunei and met with the Sultan, they learned that
this kingdom was beset by pirates, and so the sultan
offered James governorship over the providence of Sarawak as a

(02:23):
reward if he could put an end to the marauders.
James teamed up with the Sultan's uncle, Hashem, and the
two became friends, sailing the seas around Brunei and putting
an end to the pirates. It was actually fairly easy
with James's expensive ship. Once they found where the pirates
were hiding, they could just blow them apart from the shore.
And when James and Hashem returned to the Sultan, he

(02:45):
gave James his reward, and James thus became the raj
or the prince of Sarawak. But this put the British
in an awkward position. Brunei is a small country on
the northern tip of the large island of Borneo Sarawak
by comparison, to make up most of the northern coast
of the island. At the time, the Dutch controlled the
southern half, and so the British were grateful to James

(03:07):
because he was keeping the Dutch from gaining control of
the island. But at the same time he was now
a private British citizen with full control of his own
Southeast Asian country. His actions could put the British into
conflict if he wasn't careful, and as you can imagine
James wasn't careful. He went about securing his kingdom in

(03:28):
the most aggressive manner possible. He wiped out dozens of
pirate villages. And these weren't just little caves full of
stereotypical eyepatch wearing rogues. They were communities with women and children.
James killed them by the hundreds, but he saw it
as a necessary evil. The pirates threatened British shipping in
the area. Additionally, a lot of the local tribes were

(03:51):
engaged in human trafficking and head hunting, the practice of
cutting off the heads of your enemies and shrinking them
down to keep as trophies. James put an end to
a lot of these practices, although again he was meeting
extreme violence with his own version of extreme violence. In
eighteen forty eight, he was knighted by the English Crown.

(04:12):
Although he had been aggressive in his tactics, he had
further British interests and avoided any conflict with the Dutch.
His entire journey is obviously a pretty blatant example of colonialism.
His desire for adventure led to the deaths of many,
but some good did come from all of this violence.
James's descendants ruled over Sarawak for one hundred years, and

(04:35):
this allowed the people there to maintain their own unique culture,
free from occupation by the British, the Dutch, or other
nearby nations. That was until nineteen forty four, when the
country was occupied by Japan. However, once liberated, the people
of Sarawak were free to join a federation of other
nearby island nations, becoming the nation that we know today

(04:56):
as Malaysia. Curiously, this was only possible because of the
actions of one man from half a world away. His
desire to get out of the house and do something
with his life permanently altered an entire part of the globe.

(05:24):
In eighteen seventy nine, Edgar Degas spent four nights at
the circus studying the routine of a high flying aerialist
named Miss Lalla. He sat with his sketch pad sketching
out images of her whirling through the air performing death
defying stunts. Several months later, at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition
in Paris, he debuted a stunning portrait called Miss La

(05:47):
La at the Cirque Fernando. His painting depicted a graceful
black woman in a brightly colored costume high above the
circus floor, dangling from a rope held not in her
hand but in her teeth. The painting was so captivating
that a well known art critic at the time said
it was among Desgas's most striking and complex achievements. But

(06:09):
while the art world has long marveled at this painting,
history has nearly forgotten the woman who inspired it. They
say a picture is worth a thousand words, right, But
if that's the case, you'll need a whole museum to
cover the fascinating life of famed circus performer Miss La La.
Before Miss Lalla stunned circus goers, her name was Olga Brown.

(06:29):
Records on her early life are sparse, but it's believed
that Olga was the daughter of two fairground artists, Marie
Christine Borchard, a white woman, and Wilhelm Brown, a freed
slave who had made his way from the United States
to Poland in the early eighteen hundreds. Olga was born
in Poland, probably around eighteen fifty eight. Then, because she

(06:50):
grew up around the fairgrounds, she had a keen interest
in performing. At the young age of nine, her mother
signed her into the circus where she quickly proved adept
at the high wire and the trapeze. This was particularly
because Olga was small in stature but muscular, with broad
shoulders and strong legs. She could fly through the air

(07:11):
with amazing height and was a perfect fit for the
human cannonball act. That trick was a crowd favorite. As
you might imagine, at the start of every performance, Olga
would curl into a ball and roll down into a
large wooden cannon at the edge of the circus ring.
The cannon would boom and La La would be ejected
from the barrel and launch across the high top tent,

(07:32):
doing acrobatics as she sailed through the air before finally
landing in a net on the other side of the ring.
It soon became clear that Olga was a rising star
no pun intended. The circus began billing her as a
main event, but as so often happened to black women
at the time, they didn't just focus on her talent.
They also exoticized her, calling her Miss Lalla Venus of

(07:56):
the Tropics, or sometimes the African Princess. It was without
a doubts fetishizing and othering to her, but Olga or
Miss La La, as she was known, never let the
callous way she was built affect her ambitions. Throughout her
teenage years, she performed in several different circuses and music
halls across Europe, making a name for herself as the

(08:17):
first rate aerialist in acrobat that she deserved to be.
But at the time, there was one circus act that
always stole the show, iron jaw routines. Iron jaw performers
were usually early men with extraordinary neck strength. They would
bite down on a leather bit attached to a rope
and then pull, usually some kind of heavy object, across

(08:39):
the ring. Crowds loved it, and La La knew that
she was strong enough to come up with her own
version of an iron jaw routine. She practiced dangling from
a rope clenched between her teeth until she was comfortable
holding her own body weight, and then she practiced aerial poses,
creating beautiful shapes with her body while literally flying by
the skin of her teeth, and by the time she

(09:01):
was twenty one, Miss Lalla had developed something truly unique,
an aerial iron jaw routine. She would walk to the
center of the circus ring as the trapeze bar descended
from the ceiling. She would then attach a hook to
the trapeze and bite down, and then she'd be lifted
into the very top of the circus tent. A swivel
device on her hook allowed her to spin in the

(09:23):
air seventy feet over the audience's heads. After that, she
would lock her knees over the trapeze bar, the metal
hook still dangling from her mouth, and she would use
the hook to suspend one or even two other performers
in mid air, to the roar of the crowds below.
It was truly astonishing, especially given Miss Lalla's size, and

(09:44):
it didn't take long for word about her routine to spread,
and Miss Lalla toured Europe as a main attraction for
the next nine years. But even though Lalla and her
fellow performers were trained veterans, their jobs were still dangerous.
Accidents happened, and in in eighteen eighty eight, a stunt
went wrong. One of Laala's friends fell from a trapeze

(10:05):
and plummeted to her death. After that, Miss Lalla backed
away from performing. A few months after that, she met
a fellow circus performer named Manuel Woodson. They got married
and had three daughters who went on to form their
own circus troop, the Three Kazias. But Laala faded from
public life. Sadly, we're not sure where or when she

(10:26):
passed away, but thanks to Dega, her likeness is forever immortalized.
Her portrait hangs of the National Gallery in London, where
she will forever stun adoring crowds who gather to watch
her fly. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,

(10:48):
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
over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.