Serpentine

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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):
Over the years, between this show and my other podcast, Lore,
we've talked about a number of cryptids, miraculous creatures that
made their presence known a handful of times before vanishing
into legend. Some of these creatures have been readily identified.
Others remain in substantial impossible to pin down by either
science or superstition. In August of eighteen seventeen, a pair

(00:59):
of women were walking along the harbor at Cape Ann,
not far from Gloucester, Massachusetts. One of them saw something
strange in the water, and she stopped a stare. There
seemed to be a great creature moving through the water,
not a fish or a trap shark, but something more
like an enormous life serpent. When they told their neighbors
what they had seen, it was dismissed out of hand

(01:20):
as a fanciful tail. They'd both let their imaginations get
the best of them. But four days later, near ten
Pound Island, it appeared again. This time, it was a
sailor named amos' Story who saw it between twelve and
one o'clock. He described it as a sleek creature with
a head like a sea turtle. By the third sighting,
the creature was starting to attract a frenzy of local attention.

(01:42):
Scores of men and women sighted it from shore. It
must have been at least forty feet long, they said,
maybe as long as fifty, with a sharp horn protruding
from its head. Four boats took to the water, aiming
to catch the strange creature. One of the ships came
close and the carpenter aboard fired at it with his musket,
even though it was almost point blank range. He didn't

(02:04):
even leave a scratch on the creature's head, and a
vanish beneath the waves before he could reload. Now, these
sightings seemed to lend credence to a story the local
indigenous people had been telling for years about a serpent
that coiled itself around the rocks. This story had been
told as early as sixteen thirty eight, but none of
the settlers had believed it until now. For two whole years,

(02:26):
this creature swam in the local waters near Gloucester, generating
a public frenzy among the locals. However, no one was
ever able to catch it. At one point they thought
that one of its spawn had washed ashore, but it
was only a beached sea snake. Enthusiasm started to weighing
when they realized they hadn't caught the fabled sea monster,
but not before the events of eighteen seventeen to eighteen

(02:48):
nineteen were dramatized for this stage in a play called
The Sea Serpent or a Gloucester Hoax. It's the plays
telling of the events. The Sea Serpent's identity as a
deliberate anti climax, not a monster, but a mackerel that
had been misidentified by an eager public. Reality, however, would
not be so clear cut. In the century since the

(03:10):
creature's first appearance, the so called Gloucester Sea Serpent became
a mascot of sorts in the area. Sightings of the
creature continued into the twenty first century, although photographs would
be scarce. Instead, local artists would depict the creature in murals, paintings,
and statues. In the modern day, skeptics of the mythology

(03:31):
went through all the accounts of the time and came
to an entirely different conclusion about what the people of
Gloucester had seen. They had witnessed not a sea monster
out of a Jules Vern story, but something that had
yet to be fully understood by the colonists of the day.
They had seen a narwhale. It's not quite a serpent,
of course, as described by those contemporaneous accounts, but a

(03:54):
narwhal would match the coloring, the general shape, and characteristics
of the creature that these seventeenth century Gloucester residents witnessed,
particularly the long horn protruding from its head, which is
described variously as a sting or a spear. Another characteristic
that is ascribed to the Gloucester sea serpent is its
ability to dive sharply into the water without any visible

(04:16):
contortion of its body. The fast deep diving is something
that nar walls are extremely capable of doing, swimming fast
and able to disappear in a heartbeat under the surface
of the water. Our imagination is a powerful thing. It
can transform an unusual sea creature into something otherworldly. The
ocean as ever, provides us with the opportunity to imagine

(04:37):
infinite possibilities just off the shore. Monsters and mermaids and
sea serpents. Nar walls are mostly relegated to Arctic waters
near Canada and Greenland, but it is not impossible for
one to have gotten lost and swim south. Whatever brought
this unlucky creature to Massachusetts, we may never know, but
it lives on in the memory of the people of

(04:58):
Gloucester forever, and that is curious enough for me. Liechtenstein
is a tiny country, at just sixty two square miles

(05:20):
with a population of just over forty thousand people. It
is the sixth smallest country in the world, with a
smaller area and population than the size of Cleveland, Ohio.
It is not surprising that Liechtenstein no longer feels it
needs a standing army. In fact, they haven't needed one
for over one hundred and fifty years. But the very
last time Liechtenstein marched a war, something amazing happened. The

(05:42):
country actually grew. In eighteen sixty six, the region around
Liechtenstein was embroiled in the Austro Prussian War. Liechtenstein and
several other small kingdoms were part of something called the
German Confederation. This was an organization of mostly German speaking
states ruched across what today would be most of Central Europe.

(06:03):
The German Confederation had existed for a few decades, but
now Prussia, a powerful kingdom in modern day northern Poland,
had allied with Italy to overthrow it. Fighting against them
were a few other states and the Austrian Empire. Now
technically speaking, Liechtenstein was in neutral, but they retained close
ties to Austria. So when Austria requested back up, Liechtenstein

(06:24):
sent all the forces they could muster just eighty soldiers
to guard a place called Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy.
The Liechtenstein soldiers were supposedly there to fight off any
attacks from Prussians or Italians, but by all accounts they
didn't have much to do when no opposing army was forthcoming.
They spent most of their days drinking wine, smoking tobacco,

(06:46):
and looking out at the beautiful mountains that surrounded the pass. Hey,
there are a lot of worse places to be stationed
than the Italian Alps, for sure. The war did it
last very long, In fact, it was over in just
about six weeks, so when the liechtenstein S got the
call that peace had been declared, they reluctantly rose to
their feet and left their Italian alpine vacation behind. It

(07:08):
wasn't until the soldiers returned back to the border that
the officers noticed something odd. They had set out for
Italy with eighty soldiers, but now they were returning with
eighty one. So who was this mysterious new recruit on
this well, accounts differ now. Some claim that the new
immigrant was an Austrian officer who enjoyed the company of

(07:29):
the Liechtensteiners, and when they headed back home, he decided
it was time for a fresh change of pace and
he joined them. Others say the addition was an Italian defector,
or perhaps just a farmer from near the pass. Either way,
he followed the troops home in search of work after
the war. Whatever the true story might be, the second
that man crossed over the border, Liechtenstein's tiny population actually

(07:52):
got a boost, which is pretty unusual for a war.
Their minuscule army was disbanded just two years later in
eighteen six s eight. Small as the army was, it
was just too expensive to keep up. After that, Liechtenstein
declared an official position of neutrality, which it kept through
both World Wars, although it did ban the Nazi Party

(08:12):
in nineteen forty three, which any smart country would have
done today. Liechtenstein is a tiny country nestled between Austria
and Switzerland. Like the Swiss, the country made itself a
tax haven in the late twentieth century. The companies it
attracted in the past few decades have made it one
of the wealthiest monarchies in the world. And I'm sure
the Liechtensteiners have more than enough money to fund an

(08:34):
army these days. Whether they can feel it, well, that's
another story. Unless they start counting corporations as people. They
don't even have enough to fill Yankee Stadium. So perhaps
it's time to send another expedition to the Alps. After all,
Who knows what they might come back with this time.

(08:55):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe I 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

(09:17):
show and you can learn all about it over at
the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.