Resilient

Curiosity can be found in the strangest places. Let's go exploring today.

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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):
There were probably several other places Sam would have preferred
to be at that moment. In nineteen thirty nine, then
on a Nazi ship. The Bismarck was launched just a
few months before Germany invaded Poland, and by nineteen forty
one was prawling the northern part of the Atlantic. Their
job was to sabotage nabl envoys sailing between Canada and
the UK. Sam was one of twenty two hundred crew

(00:59):
members who wished that they weren't there on May twenty
seventh of nineteen forty one, when the Bismarck engaged in
a violent two day battle with the British Royal Navy
alongside her sister ship. Given that they were outnumbered and outgunned,
no one was surprised that the Bismarck sink. Really it
was a couple of biplanes that dealt the crushing blow.
But I digress now. According to the story, one of

(01:21):
the British ships, the HMS cossack lingered in the area
attempting to rescue survivors. Out of the over twenty two
hundred crewman, there were just one hundred and fourteen souls
left alive after the sinking, including Sam, who was floating
on a plank in the sea of debris. They hauled
him aboard and started calling him Oscar as a nod
to his German origins. Oh, did I forget to mention

(01:42):
that Sam was also a cat, A sweet little tuxedo
cat with black fur and a white patch on his
faced chest and pause. There's a long history of cats
on board ships, hundreds of years of companionship and pest
control in one adorable package. Cats were really the best
animal to have on a ship, no matter how many
stories you hear about parrots. They'll eat anything and were

(02:04):
very good at their job protecting any provisions in cargo
from rats and other pests. It's a tradition that carries
through even today. Some private ships will keep their own cats,
although most every navy in the world has banned them
at this point. Back in the nineteen forties, though sailors
could still have a furry little friend on board, which
leads us back to Oscar. He served on the Cossack

(02:27):
as it conducted escorts in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
They were protecting a convoy from Gibraltar to Britain on
October twenty fourth of nineteen forty one when things started
to get exciting, and honestly, no one wants things to
be exciting in a war zone. Oscar wasn't on the
Cossack for long. To be fair, no one was on
the Cossack for much longer. Within a few months, they

(02:48):
were torpedoed and sank, leaving these survivors bobbing among the
remains of their ship. Luckily, the HMS arc Royal and
Aircraft Carrier was in the area and managed to scoop
up the remaining sailors and of course Sam or Oscar
whatever you want to call him now. In another stroke
of bad luck, Sam's new home wasn't long for this world. Well,
there was a war on and the HMS arc Royal

(03:10):
had their own tangle with a torpedo on November fourteenth
of nineteen forty one. Luckily, the cat managed to survive
once again, although at this point I bet that he
was definitely down a few lives. When the HMS Legion arrived,
they pulled Sam or Oscar and the other survivors out
of the water. Apparently he was quite angry after his
third ship sinking, but ultimately unharmed. As soon as they

(03:33):
learned their new furry friend's history, they christened him Unsinkable Sam. Luckily,
for Sam, his third sinking was his last. Maybe they
were superstitious, or maybe the sailors just felt bad about it,
but either way, Sam was sent off the Legion to
live with the Governor of Gibraltar, where he hunted mice
to his heart's content. His final destination was the UK

(03:54):
at a Belfast home for sailors. So far as I know,
he never left dry land again, passed seen away in
nineteen fifty five. We've certainly heard plenty of stories about
people who survived shipwrecks time and time again. Violet Jessup
comes to mind the star of one of our very
own earlier Cabinet episodes. It's been done, But the thing is,

(04:15):
we're not entirely sure if the story about Sam is true.
Really Sam's whole adventure might just be a tall tale.
There's no record of a cat being brought on board
the Bismarck, and none of the survivors mentioned him later,
although to be fair, at that moment they had other
things on their mind. There are only a couple of
images of Sam. One is a pastel drawing of him

(04:35):
sitting on a floating piece of wood by an unknown artist.
The other is a photograph of a tuxedo cats in
a collar. The cat looks like every description of Sam,
except there's one problem. The collar is inscribed HMS Amethyst,
which Sam never served on. This is likely a photo
of another famous ship cat named Simon. Maybe Sam was

(04:58):
a stowaway, or it's some kind of good luck charm
for one of the sailors on the Bismarck, which would
explain why he was never officially registered as the ship's cat.
In all likelihood, we will never know if Sam was
real or not, but I'm not sure that that matters.
Stories can be important, whether they're real or fake. They
show us what was important to the people during those

(05:19):
big moments. World War two was the war that was
never supposed to happen, especially after the carnage and terror
of the Great War, the idea that a little critter
like Sam was rescued time and time again, that even
during the worst moments of their lives, these sailors wanted
to save what they could. While fact or fiction, I
think that's a curious story worth remembering. Imagine you work

(05:56):
at an art museum. You've had a certain painting, one
from a legendary artist, on display for decades, and one
day you and your team take it off the wall
so you can examine it for an upcoming exhibition. As
you're analyzing the work, you realize that there's something hidden
beneath the portrait, as in, behind the actual paint. It's
something no one has ever seen before. You'd be stunned. Right,

(06:20):
here's this mysterious thing that could potentially change the entire
art world, and you just found it. And if you've
guessed that this hypothetical scenario isn't actually hypothetical at all,
you'd be right. It really happened in July of twenty
twenty two at the National Galleries in Scotland. But before
we get there, let me back up just a bit.
You see, art is often mysterious, right. Painters from DA

(06:43):
Vinci and Picasso to Pollock and Moore have been the
subject of decades, even centuries, of scholarly debate. Staring at
the mona Lisa's shy expression, or a canvas colored and
seemingly random splashes of paint, we can't help but wonder
what does it mean? But while critics mean use about
symbols and metaphor, some experts look at canvas as much

(07:03):
more literally. Art conservators analyze the actual matter of the painting.
This could mean examining the chemical makeup of the paint
itself to figure out exactly where it came from, or
using X rays and infrared light to see through the painting,
usually to get a better idea of how the art
is sketched or layered paint to create the final product.

(07:23):
This the X ray examination, is what those experts at
the National Galleries of Scotland were doing when they made
their big discovery. They had had a van Go painting
called Head of a Peasant Woman since nineteen sixty. When
a lawyer from Edinburgh donated it to the museum. They
took it down so that they could move it for
a July twenty twenty two exhibition on Impressionism, which is

(07:45):
an artistic movement that van Go was a part of.
Before they hung it back up, though, they decided to
x ray the piece and see if they could glean
any new information about it. Now, a few things to know.
Van Go painted Head of a Peasant Woman in eighteen
eighty five, but between then and when it landed in
the National Galleries of Scotland it changed hands quite a bit.

(08:06):
At some point, maybe around nineteen oh five, someone decided
to glue the canvas down on a piece of cardboard,
which seems more like the way that you would treat
a school project and a portrait from one of the
world's most famous artists, but hey, I'm no expert. Regardless,
when they did this x ray, they realized there was
actually a second van Go painting hidden between Head of

(08:28):
a Peasant Woman and the cardboard. It had been painted
on the back of the canvas. Head of a Peasant
Woman was on one side and this second painting was
on the other. But nobody ever recorded the second painting's existence,
and when it was glued to the cardboard it was
basically lost, until, of course, the x ray revealed it
was there. This painting was a never before seen self

(08:51):
portrait of van Go. In it, he's wearing a straw
hat and a neckerchief. He stares directly at the viewer,
and his left ear that he eventually cut off is
still clearly visible. It's remarkable not only because it's newly discovered,
but also because Vang painted it around the time that
he moved to Paris and was first exposed to Impressionist art.

(09:12):
Chances are that he painted both sides of the canvas,
not because he was trying to hide something, but because
he didn't have a lot of money. Canvases were expensive,
and van Go wouldn't be the first artist to paint
both sides or even paint over older works. As it stands,
experts at the National Gallery of Scotland are doing research
looking for a way to remove the canvas from the

(09:34):
cardboard without damaging either painting. Until then, Head of a
Peasant Woman remains on display alongside the X ray image
of the self portrait, and while this type of discovery
is rare, it's not unheard of. Experts have also found
hidden works by both Theicelli and Picasso using similar technology.
So the next time you're at a museum staring up

(09:57):
at a curious canvas and wondering what it all meant.
Consider asking yourself what might be hiding beneath it. 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

(10:21):
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 the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.