December 11, 2025 • 10 mins
Two events from a century and a half ago that both sent out waves into the world—some big, some small.
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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):
The year was eighteen sixty five. The place an estate
just east of Nashville. A man named Colonel Patrick Henry
Anderson was struggling under debts, and his land was on
the verge of collapse. His financial ruin seemed inevitable. Now,
before you extend too much sympathy toward the colonel, it's
worth knowing that he was the manager of a plantation
(00:58):
in Civil War era Tennessee. His financial woes were entirely
tied to the resolution of the Civil War. The Confederacy
had lost, and human trafficking, the enterprise that supported the
entire Southern economy, was no more. Colonel Anderson was so
desperate for anyone to salvage his fortunes that he wrote
a letter to a man named Jordan, entreating him to
(01:20):
come back and work for him. Jordan, you see, was
a former enslaved man of the Colonels. Jordan had also
taken the last name Anderson, and had been freed by
the Union Army in eighteen sixty four. The request to
come back and work for his former enslaver was so
absurd that Jordan, who was by this point living in Dayton, Ohio,
had to respond. Now. The man could not read or write,
(01:43):
but what he could do was dictate to a neighbor,
who sent the response on his behalf. The document was
entitled Letter from a Freedman to his old master. In
this letter, Jordan Anderson described his pleasant life in Ohio
to the man who had once held him captive for decades.
Jordan insisted that he and his wife, Millie, were in
a good situation and didn't wish to go back south.
(02:06):
In a tone that at first sounds sincere but drips
with sarcasm, he outlined his concern that he and his
wife wouldn't get the proper treatment they deserved if they
were to go back and work for their one time enslaver.
And then he went on to make a request what
the colonel would have to do in order to get
his interest. Jordan requested thirty two years of back pay
(02:28):
for both himself and his wife, amounting to some eleven thousand,
six hundred and eighty dollars including interest, that's equal to
about a quarter of a million dollars today. To compliment
that dry sense of humor, he said that the figure
included deductions for clothing that his master purchased for them,
and for the services of a dentist to pull a
couple of teeth. Underlying every sly jab in the letter
(02:52):
is the brutal reality that life for a black man
in the South was still extremely difficult even after emancipation.
Dan Anderson mentioned in the letter that he wished to
get his children a good education, implying that this would
not be possible in the South, and that any request
from him to go there would be an absurd decision
on his part and if his intent wasn't abundantly clear
(03:15):
at that point. Jordan also added a PostScript, say howdy
to George Carter, he wrote, and thank him for taking
the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
The reference to attempted murder makes for a perfect punchline.
Jordan Anderson obviously had no intention of going back to
work for the Colonel. It is an eight hundred and
eight word clapback against a man who never saw Jordan
(03:38):
as worthy of human dignity. What makes the letter an
incredible historical document is the use of humor to critique
the brutal reality of slavery. Jordan's tone is blistering to
read even today, and we can only imagine how his
former enslaver received it. One month later, in September of
eighteen sixty five, Colonel Anderson sold his plantation, all one
(04:00):
thousand acres of it, for a fraction of its value.
He was dead two years later at the age of
forty four. According to a journalist who tracked down his
surviving family, they remained bitter at Jordan for generations afterward,
saying that he should have been loyal and respectful to
the colonel, whatever that means, thus proving that generations later
(04:21):
they still missed the entire point of the letter. Jordan. Anderson,
on the other hand, outlived his former master by almost
forty years. His letter, published in local papers, became a
viral sensation in its day, encouraging comparisons to Mark Twain,
the legendary literary satirist, and it was printed and reprinted
among oral accounts of surviving enslaved peoples, helping give insight
(04:44):
and perspective on the sort of person who survived enslavement
in the nineteenth century. Even though he was illiterate, Jordan
Andersen displayed an incredible literary wit, and without the ability
to read or write, he backed his way into becoming
an acclaimed offe, a more important voice of the American
experience than people like Colonel Anderson ever would be. It
(05:20):
was August twenty sixth, eighteen eighty three in the Dutch
colony of Katimbang, on the southern end of the island
of Sumatra. Johanna Baar inc Was the wife of the
local colonial overseer. She stood on the porch of her
family's home, looking out across the Sunda Strait at the
smoking volcano Krakatoa. The volcano was known to occasionally spew
(05:40):
ash and lava into the air, it had for as
long as they'd live there, and it was doing that now.
But Johanna was less concerned with what she could see
and more concerned with what she could hear. For months now,
the volcano had been producing a series of loud bangs
similar to thunder but over the last day or so,
those bangs had been growing in volume and frequency. When
(06:03):
she closed her eyes and listened to the jungle around her,
the birds chirped with a chaotic energy that wasn't typical.
She walked inside, picked up her newborn infant son from
his crib, and held him close. She looked at her
two other young children playing in the sitting room with
their nanny, and she had a bad feeling. Johanna's heart
leapt at the arrival of a new sound, two loud bangs,
(06:26):
but not from the volcano. They were heard coming from
the roof. Outside. She could see large smoldering stones raining
down onto the colony. It was pumice stone. The volcano
was erupting. The family ran with their servants from their
cottage into the hills. Johanna tried to ignore the putrid,
burning air as it coated her throat, and the sharp
(06:48):
panes of the pumice stones when they landed on her,
but once again what she could hear was infinitely more
terrifying than what she could see or feel. This time,
she heard a roaring sound coming from behind them, and
it was getting louder, and then suddenly, a massive wave
crashed through the jungle behind them, sending their hiking party
(07:09):
flying in all directions. It was all Johanna could do
to hold onto her baby. Her husband and their servants
grabbed the other children, and they all held onto whatever
they could, dragging themselves forward through the jungle against the
crashing current. Miraculously, the family managed to pull themselves through
the jungle, out of the water and up into the hills,
(07:29):
where the safety of their village awaited them. The family
and the villagers alike huddled inside. Johanna hoped that the
worst of it was behind them, that she wouldn't hear
any further harbingers of doom. Unfortunately, her hope couldn't have
been more in vain. At five point thirty in the morning,
an ear piercing boom shook the whole island. The baby
(07:51):
cried and the children screamed, And then at six forty
four am, another ash began to fall outside the windows,
and then at eight twenty eight a third boom, and finally,
at ten o two am, the sound to end all sounds.
The whole world seemed to shake. Johanna felt two sharp
pains on both sides of her head, and all went silent.
(08:14):
Her entire body seemed to swell. Her lungs inflated to
their maximum capacity, and she couldn't expel the air. She
felt beyond dizzy, completely disoriented. Luckily, the disorientation quickly passed
and she could breathe again, but she couldn't hear a thing.
Even worse, looking down, she saw white smoke curling its
way up into the room from the floorboards. The heat
(08:37):
was unbearable. When she looked down at the baby in
her arms, she realized that he wasn't moving. Some combination
of the heat, the smoke, and the sound had taken
her child from her. Devastated, she laid the baby down
and wandered outside into the smoke. She couldn't see her
hands in front of herself. She couldn't hear anything. When
she felt her face, she realized that her skin was
(09:00):
hanging loose off of her body. She was literally melting.
She fell to the jungle floor and waited for Krakatoa
to claim her as its next victim. When Krakatoa erupted
that August in eighteen eighty three, it killed over thirty
six thousand people. Most died from the resulting tsunamis, but
some died from the sound of the eruption itself. You see,
(09:24):
that final ten oh two am explosion is believed to
have registered at three hundred and ten decibels, the loudest
sound ever documented in history. At that level, the shockwave
from Krakatoa ceased to be a mere sound wave and
instead became a wave of air pressure, rupturing the ear
drums and even the internal organs of anyone within one
(09:45):
hundred miles. People three thousand miles away in Australia even
heard the sound. Miraculously, Johanna and the rest of her
family actually survived. They were found at the brink of
death and nursed back to health. Their hearing ofally returned.
But it's possible that her baby and hundreds of others
were killed by the sound of Krakatoa alone. It's incredibly
(10:08):
curious that's in a legendary disaster where massive waves, falling
pumice stones and burning clouds could kill you, it was
an invisible force in the air that was the most
deadly of all. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:31):
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 the Worldolore dot com. And until next time,
(10:53):
stay curious.
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):
The year was eighteen sixty five. The place an estate
just east of Nashville. A man named Colonel Patrick Henry
Anderson was struggling under debts, and his land was on
the verge of collapse. His financial ruin seemed inevitable. Now,
before you extend too much sympathy toward the colonel, it's
worth knowing that he was the manager of a plantation
(00:58):
in Civil War era Tennessee. His financial woes were entirely
tied to the resolution of the Civil War. The Confederacy
had lost, and human trafficking, the enterprise that supported the
entire Southern economy, was no more. Colonel Anderson was so
desperate for anyone to salvage his fortunes that he wrote
a letter to a man named Jordan, entreating him to
(01:20):
come back and work for him. Jordan, you see, was
a former enslaved man of the Colonels. Jordan had also
taken the last name Anderson, and had been freed by
the Union Army in eighteen sixty four. The request to
come back and work for his former enslaver was so
absurd that Jordan, who was by this point living in Dayton, Ohio,
had to respond. Now. The man could not read or write,
(01:43):
but what he could do was dictate to a neighbor,
who sent the response on his behalf. The document was
entitled Letter from a Freedman to his old master. In
this letter, Jordan Anderson described his pleasant life in Ohio
to the man who had once held him captive for decades.
Jordan insisted that he and his wife, Millie, were in
a good situation and didn't wish to go back south.
(02:06):
In a tone that at first sounds sincere but drips
with sarcasm, he outlined his concern that he and his
wife wouldn't get the proper treatment they deserved if they
were to go back and work for their one time enslaver.
And then he went on to make a request what
the colonel would have to do in order to get
his interest. Jordan requested thirty two years of back pay
(02:28):
for both himself and his wife, amounting to some eleven thousand,
six hundred and eighty dollars including interest, that's equal to
about a quarter of a million dollars today. To compliment
that dry sense of humor, he said that the figure
included deductions for clothing that his master purchased for them,
and for the services of a dentist to pull a
couple of teeth. Underlying every sly jab in the letter
(02:52):
is the brutal reality that life for a black man
in the South was still extremely difficult even after emancipation.
Dan Anderson mentioned in the letter that he wished to
get his children a good education, implying that this would
not be possible in the South, and that any request
from him to go there would be an absurd decision
on his part and if his intent wasn't abundantly clear
(03:15):
at that point. Jordan also added a PostScript, say howdy
to George Carter, he wrote, and thank him for taking
the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
The reference to attempted murder makes for a perfect punchline.
Jordan Anderson obviously had no intention of going back to
work for the Colonel. It is an eight hundred and
eight word clapback against a man who never saw Jordan
(03:38):
as worthy of human dignity. What makes the letter an
incredible historical document is the use of humor to critique
the brutal reality of slavery. Jordan's tone is blistering to
read even today, and we can only imagine how his
former enslaver received it. One month later, in September of
eighteen sixty five, Colonel Anderson sold his plantation, all one
(04:00):
thousand acres of it, for a fraction of its value.
He was dead two years later at the age of
forty four. According to a journalist who tracked down his
surviving family, they remained bitter at Jordan for generations afterward,
saying that he should have been loyal and respectful to
the colonel, whatever that means, thus proving that generations later
(04:21):
they still missed the entire point of the letter. Jordan. Anderson,
on the other hand, outlived his former master by almost
forty years. His letter, published in local papers, became a
viral sensation in its day, encouraging comparisons to Mark Twain,
the legendary literary satirist, and it was printed and reprinted
among oral accounts of surviving enslaved peoples, helping give insight
(04:44):
and perspective on the sort of person who survived enslavement
in the nineteenth century. Even though he was illiterate, Jordan
Andersen displayed an incredible literary wit, and without the ability
to read or write, he backed his way into becoming
an acclaimed offe, a more important voice of the American
experience than people like Colonel Anderson ever would be. It
(05:20):
was August twenty sixth, eighteen eighty three in the Dutch
colony of Katimbang, on the southern end of the island
of Sumatra. Johanna Baar inc Was the wife of the
local colonial overseer. She stood on the porch of her
family's home, looking out across the Sunda Strait at the
smoking volcano Krakatoa. The volcano was known to occasionally spew
(05:40):
ash and lava into the air, it had for as
long as they'd live there, and it was doing that now.
But Johanna was less concerned with what she could see
and more concerned with what she could hear. For months now,
the volcano had been producing a series of loud bangs
similar to thunder but over the last day or so,
those bangs had been growing in volume and frequency. When
(06:03):
she closed her eyes and listened to the jungle around her,
the birds chirped with a chaotic energy that wasn't typical.
She walked inside, picked up her newborn infant son from
his crib, and held him close. She looked at her
two other young children playing in the sitting room with
their nanny, and she had a bad feeling. Johanna's heart
leapt at the arrival of a new sound, two loud bangs,
(06:26):
but not from the volcano. They were heard coming from
the roof. Outside. She could see large smoldering stones raining
down onto the colony. It was pumice stone. The volcano
was erupting. The family ran with their servants from their
cottage into the hills. Johanna tried to ignore the putrid,
burning air as it coated her throat, and the sharp
(06:48):
panes of the pumice stones when they landed on her,
but once again what she could hear was infinitely more
terrifying than what she could see or feel. This time,
she heard a roaring sound coming from behind them, and
it was getting louder, and then suddenly, a massive wave
crashed through the jungle behind them, sending their hiking party
(07:09):
flying in all directions. It was all Johanna could do
to hold onto her baby. Her husband and their servants
grabbed the other children, and they all held onto whatever
they could, dragging themselves forward through the jungle against the
crashing current. Miraculously, the family managed to pull themselves through
the jungle, out of the water and up into the hills,
(07:29):
where the safety of their village awaited them. The family
and the villagers alike huddled inside. Johanna hoped that the
worst of it was behind them, that she wouldn't hear
any further harbingers of doom. Unfortunately, her hope couldn't have
been more in vain. At five point thirty in the morning,
an ear piercing boom shook the whole island. The baby
(07:51):
cried and the children screamed, And then at six forty
four am, another ash began to fall outside the windows,
and then at eight twenty eight a third boom, and finally,
at ten o two am, the sound to end all sounds.
The whole world seemed to shake. Johanna felt two sharp
pains on both sides of her head, and all went silent.
(08:14):
Her entire body seemed to swell. Her lungs inflated to
their maximum capacity, and she couldn't expel the air. She
felt beyond dizzy, completely disoriented. Luckily, the disorientation quickly passed
and she could breathe again, but she couldn't hear a thing.
Even worse, looking down, she saw white smoke curling its
way up into the room from the floorboards. The heat
(08:37):
was unbearable. When she looked down at the baby in
her arms, she realized that he wasn't moving. Some combination
of the heat, the smoke, and the sound had taken
her child from her. Devastated, she laid the baby down
and wandered outside into the smoke. She couldn't see her
hands in front of herself. She couldn't hear anything. When
she felt her face, she realized that her skin was
(09:00):
hanging loose off of her body. She was literally melting.
She fell to the jungle floor and waited for Krakatoa
to claim her as its next victim. When Krakatoa erupted
that August in eighteen eighty three, it killed over thirty
six thousand people. Most died from the resulting tsunamis, but
some died from the sound of the eruption itself. You see,
(09:24):
that final ten oh two am explosion is believed to
have registered at three hundred and ten decibels, the loudest
sound ever documented in history. At that level, the shockwave
from Krakatoa ceased to be a mere sound wave and
instead became a wave of air pressure, rupturing the ear
drums and even the internal organs of anyone within one
(09:45):
hundred miles. People three thousand miles away in Australia even
heard the sound. Miraculously, Johanna and the rest of her
family actually survived. They were found at the brink of
death and nursed back to health. Their hearing ofally returned.
But it's possible that her baby and hundreds of others
were killed by the sound of Krakatoa alone. It's incredibly
(10:08):
curious that's in a legendary disaster where massive waves, falling
pumice stones and burning clouds could kill you, it was
an invisible force in the air that was the most
deadly of all. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:31):
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 the Worldolore dot com. And until next time,
(10:53):
stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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