May 10, 2022 • 31 mins
No one knew the real name of the woman living alone on San Nicolas Island, but when she returned to civilization after decades in solitude, she was a hit with the locals at the nearby mission. Known for her exuberance and friendliness, the religious authorities and townsfolk alike loved the woman they christened Juana Maria, but they knew next to nothing about her life -- because she spoke a language no one, from the missionaries to the native communities, could understand. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a hand or
like a dolphin to our one and only super producer,
Mr Max Williams. They called me Ben Noll. Have you
ever been stranded in the wild? No, but I went
to a dolphin show an aquarium once. It's kind of
(00:47):
the same thing, right, I mean, it's I think it's
a little sadder. Honestly, I've been to those shows too.
Dolphins are just so intelligent. You've probably heard, folks the
story called Island of the Blue Dolphins. We're diving into
accidental punt accident a wordplay, were punt? That was? That was?
(01:11):
I was not think to do that consciously. We are
exploring rather uh, the real life inspiration for that story
and several other works of fiction. Are you referring to
the Caldicott Award medal winning Island of the Blue Dolphins
by Scott Hodell. Yes, yeah, Island of the Blue Dolphins.
(01:31):
Caldecott books always slap in my opinion. In the book
Island of the Blue Dolphins, you'll see that O'Dell calls
the main character Karana maybe interesting, tending fans of that
book to know that this is indeed based on a
real place, a true story, and a real individual. We're
(01:53):
talking about a place known as San Nicholas Island. It's
it's a tricky name because it's actually uh, it's part
of a larger thing in archipelago of the Channel Islands
off of the coast of California. And it's not like
opulent island real estate. If you pull up a picture,
it's it's pretty barren, kind of wind swept, so much
(02:13):
so that Uncle Sam once upon a time thought this
is where we should test nuclear bombs. They didn't. I know,
what's the deal with that. Why is the government always
like looking at like beautiful remote pieces of natural beauty
to blow up? I don't understand why they why they
need that cheaper parking. Mainly I think based on based
(02:34):
on the the do D documents are fred We're thankfully
not talking about horrible mistakes perpetrated by the U. S.
Government today. We are talking about, in fact, a woman
who lived on a remote island by herself for many,
many years and was discovered. But let's go back in history. Today,
(02:55):
we are talking about a series of islands known as
the Channel Islands, and um they were in fact discovered
in the fifteen hundreds by Juan Rodriguez Cabrio. But long before,
you know, like a lot of these things, before they
get discovered, there's already stuff going on there. People live there.
There's a whole culture that flourished there. The Nicolino tribe
(03:19):
had lived there for ten thousand years before this Spanish
conqueror dude even set foot there. Of course, as it's
usually the case with conquering people, and I would even
bother to really ask any questions like hey, well, what's
your deal? How long have your people been here? It's
mainly just about let's say, let's go ahead and convert
you to Catholicism. We just convert you to Catholicism real quick,
(03:41):
that'd be great, please, assimilator. We will murder you where
you stand, right. So, the Spanish forces arriving in California
at this time were primarily missionaries on paper. That's what
they were doing, is converting people to Christianity. And the
reality of life on the frontier for these folks is
pretty brutal because they haven't been part of a community
(04:04):
that's lived there for thousands of years. They're open to trading,
they're open to learning, relatively speaking for the time, and
they don't ask a lot of questions. As we said,
this all changed in eighteen eleven. Although they had traded
with their neighbors in the islands for a long long time,
they didn't understand or they didn't anticipate. I think a
(04:28):
group of Russian fur traders who found the island and said,
this is paradise for us. Look at all these seals,
look at all these sea otters. And because they were
interested in these natural resources, these otters and these seals,
the Russian forces attacked the Nicolenno community and they assaulted women,
(04:51):
they murdered men. All of this meant that the population,
which had been about three hundred, dropped down to just
a few dozen by eighteen fourteen. With this, I want
to shout out a great article on j Store called
Stranded on the Island of the Blue Dolphins, The True
Story of Wanda Maria by Aaron Blakemore. Everyone wanted a
(05:13):
piece of the action, you know, this whole sea on
our situation. UH Spanish authorities decided to plant their flag
and assert rights over the island. We know how this
game goes. You know, it's all about possession, is nine
tenths of the law and all of that. And there
can of course be legal disputes that can come up
in terms of like who conquered what first, But at
this point it's literally just like, hey, this is ours.
(05:36):
We say so, we're protecting you, we're defending it. Try
to take it from us, we hear you. So they
actually arrested one of these Russian hunters, a guy named
Bois Tasarov, but by this point the badger was already
out of the bag. As as Ben says on stuff,
they don't want you to know. There were just a
few Nicolino tribesmen left, but like they'd essentially all but
(05:58):
killed off the Sea Honor popular Asia. So that left
the folks that were remaining on the island particularly vulnerable,
and the Catholic missionaries absolutely capitalized on that, all of
the scarcity and and the dangerous tenuous situation that these
folks found themselves in in order to kind of attract
(06:18):
these folks to their mission system, where then they were
forced into essentially unpaid labor but also forcibly converted to
catholicis right. Yeah, the idea was, look at this, our
mission is an area of stability and safety. We just
need you to do what we say. And this was
(06:40):
common in this era in history, also the Channel Islands. Overall,
we're encountering problems like this. We know that various groups
on the Channel Islands, which are about fifty three miles
off the modern day Californian coast, these islands, these people
were running into diseases they had never encountered before, technology
(07:04):
they had never encountered before, and belligerent, hostile foreigners. And
it's complicated here. There are a couple of things that
are left up to interpretation even today. But we do
know that by the early eighteen thirties, with the entirety
of the native population, that area in decline and a
lot of village is already abandoned. The authorities that the
(07:25):
missions organized the removal of all remaining people from the
entirety of the archipelago, the entirety of the Channel Islands.
The very last island to be evacuated, San Nicholas. And
that's kind of where our story begins, at least the
mystery part of our story. They knew in eighteen thirty five.
(07:54):
They've being some Franciscan friars from Mission Santa Barbara. They
knew that there was just a very small group, a
couple of dozens or so of Nicolanos on this island,
so they sent a ship, a schooner called Pure s Nata.
A k better than nothing, to say Nicholas Uh and
(08:15):
his spirit. Yeah, his stories are right. His stories are
still divided on whether this was like a well intentioned
rescue mission or whether it was a forced eviction. Like
many things in history. I imagine there were multiple motivations,
so what happened next is indeed also the subject of
(08:36):
some debate. The captain of the Pure As Nada, Charles Hubbard,
had pretty good luck persuading the Nicolaneas people who were
left on the island to get on his ship to
travel to Santa Barbara, but they realized that a woman
and a child who were part of their group were
not on board. Other historians believe that Uh, there was
(08:59):
a a men that realized that her young son was
still left on the island, kind of a hall alone situation.
She jumped off the boat and swam back to shore. Uh.
That's yeah, totally exactly. A few boats did eventually return
to the island to look for them, but they were
never found m M. And this is when the rumors,
(09:21):
the legends began. There were still it was still an
active fishery. Even though the Russians had really done a
number on the otter and seal population, there were there
were still a lot of fish to be had, So
there was still a fishing industry, and just not all
the time, not super frequently. Every once in a while
fisherman would say, I saw someone running along the shore
(09:47):
of that that one weird island, that creepy island that
no one lives on. And this is also beautifully depicted
in l a times great read with Island dig Halted
Lone Woman Still is Stinging Mystery by Louis Sahagun. So
the thing about these sightings is that they all kind
of matched, They all had commonalities. This person, this individual
(10:11):
was always described as female and appearance light complexion, somewhere
between twenty two thirty years old. And the thing is,
there's a lot of mist on the island because of
its its location by the coast, So she would disappear
into the mist and then reappear and After those initial sightings,
(10:31):
she was not seen again for eighteen years. I love
a good disappearing into the mist situation. So the Piero
s Nada did intend to return when the miss cleared
and the rough weather conditions improved, but the ship actually
struck something when it was getting to San Francisco and
it sank. There were efforts made later to send boats
(10:53):
back to find the quote unquote last Indian, but none
of them ever succeeded. That is until all, I guess,
the hero of our story, or a essential figure of
our story, Captain net Ever discovered her in eighteen fifty
three discovery. Because she discovered rescued. What I'm saying like
(11:15):
this didn't nobody she didn't ask to be rescued. Well yeah, well,
well we'll see. It's just I always bring this up
when we talk about things like people discovering the extinct
ceiling can't anyway, there's a lot of stuff in common
with cryptids and uh stories of ferald children. Here, you'll
see what we're talking about, fellow ridiculous historians. So yes,
(11:36):
eighteen fifty three, she is rescued, taken to the mainland,
and immediately people are saying, look, at this we found
a real life Robinson Crusoe, just like Tom Hanks in
a later film. She's been living alone for a long time,
and she had become pretty self sufficient, especially considering there
(11:58):
weren't a ton of resources on the island. You'll hear
depictions of her having fish. She lived on seals, wild ducks.
She had made a house, actually had a whale bones.
She was living on seal fat and she she had
kind of a carefree attitude. She was singing songs. She
was affable, amicable with people, but no one knew what
(12:19):
she was singing, because by the time she was discovered
and taken back to civilization, no one understood her language
at all. And one scholar of of the time minds
you wrote that apparently, um, she actually told Nite her
when he came that her child was torn to pieces
(12:39):
by the wild dogs with which the land is overrun.
That's heavy. It was pieces. Yeah, And and there's there's
another interesting thing that occurs though, because honestly, it didn't
seem like she let this get her down when she
met the crew. If you've ever been to a re
(13:00):
enactment village, she was doing something very much like that.
For their crew. She would have them follow around and
watch her daily activity. She would sing them songs, she
would show them the good hunting and fishing spots. They
took to calling her better than nothing, which sounds mean
until you remember they were basically naming her after that schooner,
and they thought she was the bee's knees. They thought
(13:22):
she was so cool. They loved hanging out with her,
and she seemed to get the vibe as well. So
when they headed back to Santa Barbara, she hopped on
with them, and Captain did ever pretty much one or over.
He wrote about this a lot, by the way, in
his memoirs, We're doing our damnedest to pronounce this guy's name, right.
I think we're going with the most obvious pronunciation. But
(13:44):
what if it ends up basically like Ni Diver you know,
I don't know, just nitty vera, like Bonnie Vair. You know,
let's let the mean emails fly. Actually got me this
mean emails? But um tweet at us or something? Do
you get the email? Now, get any emails? I think
we still have a dead email. The best for us,
(14:06):
but yeah, this this dude. Uh. He wrote a memoir
that was very humbly entitled The Life and Adventures of
George Nittiva. The rescue party was him Uh, a hunter
named Charlie Brown, and according to his own account and irishman,
we called Colorado sounds like a good time. It was
because of his florid complexion. Four sure was and then
(14:31):
there were four mission Indians. They docked on the island
or I guess, I don't know. I don't have a dock.
I guess that we call that. He beached uh in
July um and they were planning for several months of hunting.
But shortly after they found what they described as an
old woman stripping blubber from a piece of seal skin.
(14:53):
And again from his book, ninevah was I guess a
little bit um confused to see her reaction that she
did not turn tail and run and terror. In fact,
she smiled and gave a nice little bow and just
started talking at them. I say at them, because there
was no understanding there. It was in this language they
(15:13):
had no way of comprehending. Um. She described as being
of medium hied about fifty years old, but strong and
clearly someone who's very active, with a very pleasant looking,
you know, disposition, very very nice, smile warm, always smiling,
he described. And her clothing was a single garment of
(15:34):
skins that were that he described. Also, I believe there
were some feathers uh and so over other outfits pretty
much homemade. And this is this is where, uh, this
is where our captain nit ever has an epiphany of sorts.
He's pictured him like the meme from a beautiful mind,
where all the equations are going forth and visibly in
(15:55):
front of his face, and he says, hold on, I
remember what the padres over the mission we're telling me.
They said, if we ran into some lost lady over
on the island, then we should bring her back. And
so they kicked it with her again. They vibed hard,
and about a month later they did take her with
them to Santa Barbara, to the mission. And this lady,
(16:18):
it would later be called Wa Maria or you know,
better than nothing. She loved it. She's delighting in the
sounds of the sensory experiences of civilization. She super super
gets into horses, she likes ox carts half. She becomes
like the town's first really big celebrity. People come to
(16:40):
see her. The captain says, hey, you can stay at
my place, and my wife will like help kind of
assimilate you into society and care for you. And the
issue now right is they want to figure out how
to communicate more effectively. And they say, Okay, we don't
speak whatever language she is speaking, but we have a
(17:03):
lot of native people who live in and around the mission,
so they probably speak her tongue. This was a reasonable assumption,
but it was one that would prove to be incorrect.
No one at the mission could understand her. Also, the
people who had traded with the Nicolo in the past,
the Chumash, they couldn't speak her language. And so the
(17:25):
missionaries sent for some of people from the tongue Va
community in Santa Catalina Island, which is not like just
up the way from Sam Nicholas, and they also couldn't
speak with her, so no one knew No one knew
what she was saying. I think they learned a couple
of words maybe, but even that is unconfirmed. We talked
(17:46):
about that forced labor from a lot of the native
folks that were assimilated and brought into these missions. They
were used to raise thousands of heads of cattle as
are really prosperous farm actually this mission. So they were
essentially helping enrich their kidnappers. How's that for? What's it
called Stockholm syndrome? And in those subsequent years, during that period,
(18:12):
many many of these people died there from harsh conditions.
In one, six years after the Nickelingeons were evacuated to
this farm, the priests that ran the place recorded the
deaths of three thousand, nine hundred and nineties seven Chumash
people they referred to as neophytes or native workers. And
(18:32):
this was likely due to another all too familiar trope
in stories of conquering people, epidemics, diseases that one people
are immune to or have been exposed to and and
are you know, are protected against. And another people have
not seen it at all, and it just ripped through them,
you know, um, like the hand of death essentially, And uh,
(18:54):
that's what happened here. Epidemics swept through the mission's labor
force like a plague. Um. The mission's assets were eventually
sold and liquidated in the Santa Barbara. That's kind of
what led to Santa Barbara, right, the city that we
know today. It's a lovely, you know, beachside community. It
was a very new, very active, young city that was
(19:16):
also going to get a big boost from the gold Rush,
uh and had all kinds of people because of these beginnings. Yeah,
and if you want to learn more about the role
that disease played in European expansion into modern day North
and South America, then I would highly recommend checking out Guns, Germs,
(19:37):
and Steel by Jared Diamond. It's not a perfect book,
but it's a very interesting read. There's the place you
should go for more information. And if you want to
learn more about how diseases affects society in general, check
out Norman Canters in the Wake of the Plague, which
is about the Black Death through Europe and through Asia.
It's amazing anyhow, Yes, yeah, this is a boom town
(20:01):
now and it had to be a sensory overload situation
for Wata Maria four better than nothing. But she took
it in stride and it was almost like the way
it's depicted in newspapers of the time. It sounds like
the first act of Emily or something. She's going around
(20:22):
finding her favorite things. Shellfish, I love shellfish, coffee, what's this, oh, liquor,
I'll take any kind. There's another current of discourse here
that that we have to mention. So people interacted with
(20:45):
her had started telling each other that she had reverted
to a semi wild or feral condition. And during this
time in history, people were particularly fascinated with the idea
of feral children. We have some episodes relating to this,
like on language experiments and so on. This is also
kind of in the nascent days of of you know,
(21:07):
psychological experimentation and just the the field of psychiatry and psychology.
So there were a lot of very morally dubious experiments
going on with like some of these, for example, feral
children or doing twin studies and stuff like that, you know.
So it was kind of this wild West of of
of enlightenment and all that, but usually at the cost
(21:28):
of of of your you know, subjects. Yeah, and people
even people had asked her to perform some of these
songs that she loved so much, I mean, for decades
alone on this island. It was one of the way
she entertained herself and one was recorded, like written down,
and even today linguists aren't sure what language she spoke exactly.
(21:50):
This has led some researchers to claim that she was
not Nicolo at all, that she was from a different community.
If want to learn more about that than check out
the journal The Loan Woman of Son Nicholas Island, a
new hypothesis on her origin by Marla Daily that was
published in California History. So people are trying to figure
(22:14):
out what her language is. She is obviously not a threat,
She's obviously very nice person who loves new things and
loves meeting people. But they want to figure out more
about her. They want to know her mysterious providence and
her origin story. Right now, only four words that she
uttered have been written down, along with two songs that
(22:38):
she allegedly sang. And the words that they know is
that she called a hide like a pelt to skin.
She called it toka. She called a male figure nache.
The sky was Toigua, and the body was I may
mispronounced this year. The body was pool Ja. Those are
(22:58):
the four words they know, but they're badly spelled, and
this is fun um. They believe, or it is believed,
that her songs were mostly made up of kind of
nonsense syllables uh as the new word for me today
vocal vocables or vocables reminds me of the band, the
Icelandic band Seeger Ross, who sort of invented their own language.
(23:19):
It's called Hope Land. I I believe it's what they're
for to it is, so it's scot music or I
like your vocables, like lunchables, you know. I like that
hack of Max. I saw I saw you raising your
hands there. Oh no, I'm just uh you guys can't
hear it now, But I'm just thinking about all the
cigar Ross esque music that's playing right now in the background,
(23:40):
and it's transitioning between songs and background. That's gonna be
let made it go? Max? Can you put some scat
in at the end? Weed ape? I was listening to
Scott Man last night. Actually, you know, he's big in Japan.
(24:00):
That's where he met the bulk of his commercial success.
Actually that makes sense. So what about who's the guy
that caught and eyed Joe? That's not it. He was
big in Japan too. We don't have to talked about
that which certainly don't think about that song. Do not
think about that song. It will get stuck in your
head for the rest of your life. I caution you,
but I it was a slapping episode of he was
in butd head when they talked about this gat man
(24:21):
any who. Um, so we've got several names for this, uh,
this very mysterious individual. At this point, we've got the
lone Woman of San Nicholas. We also referred to her
as Kanana. That's the character I believe in the book,
the the kind of dramatization of this by O'Dell better
than nothing, Guana Maria, uh and the lone woman of course. Yeah,
(24:43):
and Arose by any other name, right, Arose is a rose,
is a rose and so odd. So everybody pretty much
across the board loved her. They were fascinated with her.
She would leave the mission and go, you know, downtown,
and she almost always there's even a gift from someone
who just wanted to interact with her. And children loved her. Eventually,
(25:06):
authorities did learn a little bit about her story despite
the language barrier, through the use of sign language, and
they said, okay, this is verified. This really was the
woman who was left behind during that evacuation in eighteen
thirty five, and she never did find a child she
was looking for. That's what they concluded. But again history
(25:28):
historical accounts differ. After just seven awesome weeks on the mainland.
Well less than two months, she caught dysentery, she became ill,
and she passed away. She was buried in the cemetery
at Mission Santa Barbara, and all of her personal possessions
(25:48):
were given to the California Academy of Sciences and they
were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of
nineteen o six. She is because this was a Catholic mission.
She was baptized on her deathbed, and that's where she
got the name Guanta Maria. You know, it's strange because
(26:10):
the mystery continues today. The mystery almost got solved in
but the U. S. Navy halted a long running archaeological
project that was trying to excavate this cave where she
was believed to have spent part of her time. This
was due to objections by members of the modern day
native community. That's right. And it just seems to be
(26:32):
sort of like a an unfurling of mysteries, sort of
like a Gordita of mysteries or a cheesy Gordita crunch
of mysteries. You know, I'm nestled inside of a choloopa intrigue. Yeah,
and you know obviously that tastes delicious for a researcher.
So with this we kind of I think we wrapped
(26:54):
on the question of of the archaeological project, you know,
the state meant from the representative of the modern day tribes,
one Mark Makaro. He said, we're only trying to do
what's right by our ancestors. We must ensure all applicable
federal laws are followed in reference to this excavation. And honestly,
(27:16):
I know it's a bummer for the people who spent
their careers looking for it, but I can see where
they're coming from, you know, the idea like there was
already so much damage done to the native culture by
the arrival of the Europeans. I think it's completely reasonable
to say, let's try to save and preserve what we
have still. But what a mystery That same push for
(27:37):
preservation means there will probably be no way to ever
know the full true story of the Lone Woman of
Saint Nicholas Island. I think we ran into this a
lot on stuff that I want you to know. For example,
sometimes the mystery is better, you know, leave a those
under the imagination. We don't have to know everything. We
can explore and learn. But we don't always were weren't
(27:59):
We aren't always an answer? M hmmm. Yeah. And this,
you know, I know that a lot of people before
the pandemic entertain the idea of being stuck alone on
a deserted island. It's such a capital are romantic notion
until you know, the pandemic hit and they were maybe
stuck alone in a house or in apartment and they said,
(28:19):
this is what I was thinking about, Wilson. Uh. But
I do want to give a shout out right, yes,
I do want to give a shout out to one More.
One more book. One of my absolute favorite books in
the world, and this story kind of reminds me of
It is called Atlas of Remote Islands. It's by Judas
Lanski and God's so good. I gotta stop talking about air.
(28:43):
I'm gonna go reread it. I send it to so
many people. But that's our episode for today. We would
love to hear your stories about mysterious islands, mysterious people
on isolated islands. There are a lot out there, especially
in the age of seafaring exploration, and I recommend a
podcast and also radio show. But I believe it always
(29:05):
exist in podcast for him, he goes back quite a
long time by the BBC called Desert Island Discs, where
interesting artists and creative weirdos come on and talk about
what their top five songs would be they would have
to have with them on a desert island situation. So, uh,
really good insight into some creative people's minds and also
(29:25):
a good way to get turned onto some cool new music.
And if you want to see a movie that's hilariously
bad and very very dated and very horny with a
very young Brook Shields, check out The Blue Lagoon, which
is sort of like the adult version of this type
of story. And thanks as always to our super producer,
Mr Max Williams thinks the Casey Pegram thanks to one
(29:48):
of the people that I love dearly but would not
like to be stuck on a desert island with Jonathan
Strickland's a k a. The Quister. I wouldn't be able
to get him to stop talking. He would just continue
to quiz us pedantically until we had to fight him
to the death. And nobody wants that. Let's keep this, uh,
let's keep this nemesis relationship copasetic, shall we? I've been
(30:09):
thinking about First Blood a lot. I accidentally watched the
this weird way to say, I actually watched I Guess
the Newest Rambo, which was Last Blood, and I just
kept going back to the First Rambo where he's like
the First Blood. Yeah. Yeah. There's a really good YouTube
video where it's like the moments from lots of different
(30:31):
big movies where they say the name of the movie
and then they just had they choose that moment to
have the fake credits role so to be like this
is Jurassic Park and then it just speak credits but
with like a Limp Biscuit song. So I would check
that out if you can to. Sorry, too many recks
here at the end. It's a Friday. We don't watch
the Last Rambo. Don't watch. It's not a recommendation. I
(30:51):
just need to get it out of my system. I'm
also not don't watch. Yeah, I'm saving, but definitely don't
watch the Blue. Good is okay and this is our
show and we'll see your next dog folks. For more
(31:12):
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a hand or
like a dolphin to our one and only super producer,
Mr Max Williams. They called me Ben Noll. Have you
ever been stranded in the wild? No, but I went
to a dolphin show an aquarium once. It's kind of
(00:47):
the same thing, right, I mean, it's I think it's
a little sadder. Honestly, I've been to those shows too.
Dolphins are just so intelligent. You've probably heard, folks the
story called Island of the Blue Dolphins. We're diving into
accidental punt accident a wordplay, were punt? That was? That was?
(01:11):
I was not think to do that consciously. We are
exploring rather uh, the real life inspiration for that story
and several other works of fiction. Are you referring to
the Caldicott Award medal winning Island of the Blue Dolphins
by Scott Hodell. Yes, yeah, Island of the Blue Dolphins.
(01:31):
Caldecott books always slap in my opinion. In the book
Island of the Blue Dolphins, you'll see that O'Dell calls
the main character Karana maybe interesting, tending fans of that
book to know that this is indeed based on a
real place, a true story, and a real individual. We're
(01:53):
talking about a place known as San Nicholas Island. It's
it's a tricky name because it's actually uh, it's part
of a larger thing in archipelago of the Channel Islands
off of the coast of California. And it's not like
opulent island real estate. If you pull up a picture,
it's it's pretty barren, kind of wind swept, so much
(02:13):
so that Uncle Sam once upon a time thought this
is where we should test nuclear bombs. They didn't. I know,
what's the deal with that. Why is the government always
like looking at like beautiful remote pieces of natural beauty
to blow up? I don't understand why they why they
need that cheaper parking. Mainly I think based on based
(02:34):
on the the do D documents are fred We're thankfully
not talking about horrible mistakes perpetrated by the U. S.
Government today. We are talking about, in fact, a woman
who lived on a remote island by herself for many,
many years and was discovered. But let's go back in history. Today,
(02:55):
we are talking about a series of islands known as
the Channel Islands, and um they were in fact discovered
in the fifteen hundreds by Juan Rodriguez Cabrio. But long before,
you know, like a lot of these things, before they
get discovered, there's already stuff going on there. People live there.
There's a whole culture that flourished there. The Nicolino tribe
(03:19):
had lived there for ten thousand years before this Spanish
conqueror dude even set foot there. Of course, as it's
usually the case with conquering people, and I would even
bother to really ask any questions like hey, well, what's
your deal? How long have your people been here? It's
mainly just about let's say, let's go ahead and convert
you to Catholicism. We just convert you to Catholicism real quick,
(03:41):
that'd be great, please, assimilator. We will murder you where
you stand, right. So, the Spanish forces arriving in California
at this time were primarily missionaries on paper. That's what
they were doing, is converting people to Christianity. And the
reality of life on the frontier for these folks is
pretty brutal because they haven't been part of a community
(04:04):
that's lived there for thousands of years. They're open to trading,
they're open to learning, relatively speaking for the time, and
they don't ask a lot of questions. As we said,
this all changed in eighteen eleven. Although they had traded
with their neighbors in the islands for a long long time,
they didn't understand or they didn't anticipate. I think a
(04:28):
group of Russian fur traders who found the island and said,
this is paradise for us. Look at all these seals,
look at all these sea otters. And because they were
interested in these natural resources, these otters and these seals,
the Russian forces attacked the Nicolenno community and they assaulted women,
(04:51):
they murdered men. All of this meant that the population,
which had been about three hundred, dropped down to just
a few dozen by eighteen fourteen. With this, I want
to shout out a great article on j Store called
Stranded on the Island of the Blue Dolphins, The True
Story of Wanda Maria by Aaron Blakemore. Everyone wanted a
(05:13):
piece of the action, you know, this whole sea on
our situation. UH Spanish authorities decided to plant their flag
and assert rights over the island. We know how this
game goes. You know, it's all about possession, is nine
tenths of the law and all of that. And there
can of course be legal disputes that can come up
in terms of like who conquered what first, But at
this point it's literally just like, hey, this is ours.
(05:36):
We say so, we're protecting you, we're defending it. Try
to take it from us, we hear you. So they
actually arrested one of these Russian hunters, a guy named
Bois Tasarov, but by this point the badger was already
out of the bag. As as Ben says on stuff,
they don't want you to know. There were just a
few Nicolino tribesmen left, but like they'd essentially all but
(05:58):
killed off the Sea Honor popular Asia. So that left
the folks that were remaining on the island particularly vulnerable,
and the Catholic missionaries absolutely capitalized on that, all of
the scarcity and and the dangerous tenuous situation that these
folks found themselves in in order to kind of attract
(06:18):
these folks to their mission system, where then they were
forced into essentially unpaid labor but also forcibly converted to
catholicis right. Yeah, the idea was, look at this, our
mission is an area of stability and safety. We just
need you to do what we say. And this was
(06:40):
common in this era in history, also the Channel Islands. Overall,
we're encountering problems like this. We know that various groups
on the Channel Islands, which are about fifty three miles
off the modern day Californian coast, these islands, these people
were running into diseases they had never encountered before, technology
(07:04):
they had never encountered before, and belligerent, hostile foreigners. And
it's complicated here. There are a couple of things that
are left up to interpretation even today. But we do
know that by the early eighteen thirties, with the entirety
of the native population, that area in decline and a
lot of village is already abandoned. The authorities that the
(07:25):
missions organized the removal of all remaining people from the
entirety of the archipelago, the entirety of the Channel Islands.
The very last island to be evacuated, San Nicholas. And
that's kind of where our story begins, at least the
mystery part of our story. They knew in eighteen thirty five.
(07:54):
They've being some Franciscan friars from Mission Santa Barbara. They
knew that there was just a very small group, a
couple of dozens or so of Nicolanos on this island,
so they sent a ship, a schooner called Pure s Nata.
A k better than nothing, to say Nicholas Uh and
(08:15):
his spirit. Yeah, his stories are right. His stories are
still divided on whether this was like a well intentioned
rescue mission or whether it was a forced eviction. Like
many things in history. I imagine there were multiple motivations,
so what happened next is indeed also the subject of
(08:36):
some debate. The captain of the Pure As Nada, Charles Hubbard,
had pretty good luck persuading the Nicolaneas people who were
left on the island to get on his ship to
travel to Santa Barbara, but they realized that a woman
and a child who were part of their group were
not on board. Other historians believe that Uh, there was
(08:59):
a a men that realized that her young son was
still left on the island, kind of a hall alone situation.
She jumped off the boat and swam back to shore. Uh.
That's yeah, totally exactly. A few boats did eventually return
to the island to look for them, but they were
never found m M. And this is when the rumors,
(09:21):
the legends began. There were still it was still an
active fishery. Even though the Russians had really done a
number on the otter and seal population, there were there
were still a lot of fish to be had, So
there was still a fishing industry, and just not all
the time, not super frequently. Every once in a while
fisherman would say, I saw someone running along the shore
(09:47):
of that that one weird island, that creepy island that
no one lives on. And this is also beautifully depicted
in l a times great read with Island dig Halted
Lone Woman Still is Stinging Mystery by Louis Sahagun. So
the thing about these sightings is that they all kind
of matched, They all had commonalities. This person, this individual
(10:11):
was always described as female and appearance light complexion, somewhere
between twenty two thirty years old. And the thing is,
there's a lot of mist on the island because of
its its location by the coast, So she would disappear
into the mist and then reappear and After those initial sightings,
(10:31):
she was not seen again for eighteen years. I love
a good disappearing into the mist situation. So the Piero
s Nada did intend to return when the miss cleared
and the rough weather conditions improved, but the ship actually
struck something when it was getting to San Francisco and
it sank. There were efforts made later to send boats
(10:53):
back to find the quote unquote last Indian, but none
of them ever succeeded. That is until all, I guess,
the hero of our story, or a essential figure of
our story, Captain net Ever discovered her in eighteen fifty
three discovery. Because she discovered rescued. What I'm saying like
(11:15):
this didn't nobody she didn't ask to be rescued. Well yeah, well,
well we'll see. It's just I always bring this up
when we talk about things like people discovering the extinct
ceiling can't anyway, there's a lot of stuff in common
with cryptids and uh stories of ferald children. Here, you'll
see what we're talking about, fellow ridiculous historians. So yes,
(11:36):
eighteen fifty three, she is rescued, taken to the mainland,
and immediately people are saying, look, at this we found
a real life Robinson Crusoe, just like Tom Hanks in
a later film. She's been living alone for a long time,
and she had become pretty self sufficient, especially considering there
(11:58):
weren't a ton of resources on the island. You'll hear
depictions of her having fish. She lived on seals, wild ducks.
She had made a house, actually had a whale bones.
She was living on seal fat and she she had
kind of a carefree attitude. She was singing songs. She
was affable, amicable with people, but no one knew what
(12:19):
she was singing, because by the time she was discovered
and taken back to civilization, no one understood her language
at all. And one scholar of of the time minds
you wrote that apparently, um, she actually told Nite her
when he came that her child was torn to pieces
(12:39):
by the wild dogs with which the land is overrun.
That's heavy. It was pieces. Yeah, And and there's there's
another interesting thing that occurs though, because honestly, it didn't
seem like she let this get her down when she
met the crew. If you've ever been to a re
(13:00):
enactment village, she was doing something very much like that.
For their crew. She would have them follow around and
watch her daily activity. She would sing them songs, she
would show them the good hunting and fishing spots. They
took to calling her better than nothing, which sounds mean
until you remember they were basically naming her after that schooner,
and they thought she was the bee's knees. They thought
(13:22):
she was so cool. They loved hanging out with her,
and she seemed to get the vibe as well. So
when they headed back to Santa Barbara, she hopped on
with them, and Captain did ever pretty much one or over.
He wrote about this a lot, by the way, in
his memoirs, We're doing our damnedest to pronounce this guy's name, right.
I think we're going with the most obvious pronunciation. But
(13:44):
what if it ends up basically like Ni Diver you know,
I don't know, just nitty vera, like Bonnie Vair. You know,
let's let the mean emails fly. Actually got me this
mean emails? But um tweet at us or something? Do
you get the email? Now, get any emails? I think
we still have a dead email. The best for us,
(14:06):
but yeah, this this dude. Uh. He wrote a memoir
that was very humbly entitled The Life and Adventures of
George Nittiva. The rescue party was him Uh, a hunter
named Charlie Brown, and according to his own account and irishman,
we called Colorado sounds like a good time. It was
because of his florid complexion. Four sure was and then
(14:31):
there were four mission Indians. They docked on the island
or I guess, I don't know. I don't have a dock.
I guess that we call that. He beached uh in
July um and they were planning for several months of hunting.
But shortly after they found what they described as an
old woman stripping blubber from a piece of seal skin.
(14:53):
And again from his book, ninevah was I guess a
little bit um confused to see her reaction that she
did not turn tail and run and terror. In fact,
she smiled and gave a nice little bow and just
started talking at them. I say at them, because there
was no understanding there. It was in this language they
(15:13):
had no way of comprehending. Um. She described as being
of medium hied about fifty years old, but strong and
clearly someone who's very active, with a very pleasant looking,
you know, disposition, very very nice, smile warm, always smiling,
he described. And her clothing was a single garment of
(15:34):
skins that were that he described. Also, I believe there
were some feathers uh and so over other outfits pretty
much homemade. And this is this is where, uh, this
is where our captain nit ever has an epiphany of sorts.
He's pictured him like the meme from a beautiful mind,
where all the equations are going forth and visibly in
(15:55):
front of his face, and he says, hold on, I
remember what the padres over the mission we're telling me.
They said, if we ran into some lost lady over
on the island, then we should bring her back. And
so they kicked it with her again. They vibed hard,
and about a month later they did take her with
them to Santa Barbara, to the mission. And this lady,
(16:18):
it would later be called Wa Maria or you know,
better than nothing. She loved it. She's delighting in the
sounds of the sensory experiences of civilization. She super super
gets into horses, she likes ox carts half. She becomes
like the town's first really big celebrity. People come to
(16:40):
see her. The captain says, hey, you can stay at
my place, and my wife will like help kind of
assimilate you into society and care for you. And the
issue now right is they want to figure out how
to communicate more effectively. And they say, Okay, we don't
speak whatever language she is speaking, but we have a
(17:03):
lot of native people who live in and around the mission,
so they probably speak her tongue. This was a reasonable assumption,
but it was one that would prove to be incorrect.
No one at the mission could understand her. Also, the
people who had traded with the Nicolo in the past,
the Chumash, they couldn't speak her language. And so the
(17:25):
missionaries sent for some of people from the tongue Va
community in Santa Catalina Island, which is not like just
up the way from Sam Nicholas, and they also couldn't
speak with her, so no one knew No one knew
what she was saying. I think they learned a couple
of words maybe, but even that is unconfirmed. We talked
(17:46):
about that forced labor from a lot of the native
folks that were assimilated and brought into these missions. They
were used to raise thousands of heads of cattle as
are really prosperous farm actually this mission. So they were
essentially helping enrich their kidnappers. How's that for? What's it
called Stockholm syndrome? And in those subsequent years, during that period,
(18:12):
many many of these people died there from harsh conditions.
In one, six years after the Nickelingeons were evacuated to
this farm, the priests that ran the place recorded the
deaths of three thousand, nine hundred and nineties seven Chumash
people they referred to as neophytes or native workers. And
(18:32):
this was likely due to another all too familiar trope
in stories of conquering people, epidemics, diseases that one people
are immune to or have been exposed to and and
are you know, are protected against. And another people have
not seen it at all, and it just ripped through them,
you know, um, like the hand of death essentially, And uh,
(18:54):
that's what happened here. Epidemics swept through the mission's labor
force like a plague. Um. The mission's assets were eventually
sold and liquidated in the Santa Barbara. That's kind of
what led to Santa Barbara, right, the city that we
know today. It's a lovely, you know, beachside community. It
was a very new, very active, young city that was
(19:16):
also going to get a big boost from the gold Rush,
uh and had all kinds of people because of these beginnings. Yeah,
and if you want to learn more about the role
that disease played in European expansion into modern day North
and South America, then I would highly recommend checking out Guns, Germs,
(19:37):
and Steel by Jared Diamond. It's not a perfect book,
but it's a very interesting read. There's the place you
should go for more information. And if you want to
learn more about how diseases affects society in general, check
out Norman Canters in the Wake of the Plague, which
is about the Black Death through Europe and through Asia.
It's amazing anyhow, Yes, yeah, this is a boom town
(20:01):
now and it had to be a sensory overload situation
for Wata Maria four better than nothing. But she took
it in stride and it was almost like the way
it's depicted in newspapers of the time. It sounds like
the first act of Emily or something. She's going around
(20:22):
finding her favorite things. Shellfish, I love shellfish, coffee, what's this, oh, liquor,
I'll take any kind. There's another current of discourse here
that that we have to mention. So people interacted with
(20:45):
her had started telling each other that she had reverted
to a semi wild or feral condition. And during this
time in history, people were particularly fascinated with the idea
of feral children. We have some episodes relating to this,
like on language experiments and so on. This is also
kind of in the nascent days of of you know,
(21:07):
psychological experimentation and just the the field of psychiatry and psychology.
So there were a lot of very morally dubious experiments
going on with like some of these, for example, feral
children or doing twin studies and stuff like that, you know.
So it was kind of this wild West of of
of enlightenment and all that, but usually at the cost
(21:28):
of of of your you know, subjects. Yeah, and people
even people had asked her to perform some of these
songs that she loved so much, I mean, for decades
alone on this island. It was one of the way
she entertained herself and one was recorded, like written down,
and even today linguists aren't sure what language she spoke exactly.
(21:50):
This has led some researchers to claim that she was
not Nicolo at all, that she was from a different community.
If want to learn more about that than check out
the journal The Loan Woman of Son Nicholas Island, a
new hypothesis on her origin by Marla Daily that was
published in California History. So people are trying to figure
(22:14):
out what her language is. She is obviously not a threat,
She's obviously very nice person who loves new things and
loves meeting people. But they want to figure out more
about her. They want to know her mysterious providence and
her origin story. Right now, only four words that she
uttered have been written down, along with two songs that
(22:38):
she allegedly sang. And the words that they know is
that she called a hide like a pelt to skin.
She called it toka. She called a male figure nache.
The sky was Toigua, and the body was I may
mispronounced this year. The body was pool Ja. Those are
(22:58):
the four words they know, but they're badly spelled, and
this is fun um. They believe, or it is believed,
that her songs were mostly made up of kind of
nonsense syllables uh as the new word for me today
vocal vocables or vocables reminds me of the band, the
Icelandic band Seeger Ross, who sort of invented their own language.
(23:19):
It's called Hope Land. I I believe it's what they're
for to it is, so it's scot music or I
like your vocables, like lunchables, you know. I like that
hack of Max. I saw I saw you raising your
hands there. Oh no, I'm just uh you guys can't
hear it now, But I'm just thinking about all the
cigar Ross esque music that's playing right now in the background,
(23:40):
and it's transitioning between songs and background. That's gonna be
let made it go? Max? Can you put some scat
in at the end? Weed ape? I was listening to
Scott Man last night. Actually, you know, he's big in Japan.
(24:00):
That's where he met the bulk of his commercial success.
Actually that makes sense. So what about who's the guy
that caught and eyed Joe? That's not it. He was
big in Japan too. We don't have to talked about
that which certainly don't think about that song. Do not
think about that song. It will get stuck in your
head for the rest of your life. I caution you,
but I it was a slapping episode of he was
in butd head when they talked about this gat man
(24:21):
any who. Um, so we've got several names for this, uh,
this very mysterious individual. At this point, we've got the
lone Woman of San Nicholas. We also referred to her
as Kanana. That's the character I believe in the book,
the the kind of dramatization of this by O'Dell better
than nothing, Guana Maria, uh and the lone woman of course. Yeah,
(24:43):
and Arose by any other name, right, Arose is a rose,
is a rose and so odd. So everybody pretty much
across the board loved her. They were fascinated with her.
She would leave the mission and go, you know, downtown,
and she almost always there's even a gift from someone
who just wanted to interact with her. And children loved her. Eventually,
(25:06):
authorities did learn a little bit about her story despite
the language barrier, through the use of sign language, and
they said, okay, this is verified. This really was the
woman who was left behind during that evacuation in eighteen
thirty five, and she never did find a child she
was looking for. That's what they concluded. But again history
(25:28):
historical accounts differ. After just seven awesome weeks on the mainland.
Well less than two months, she caught dysentery, she became ill,
and she passed away. She was buried in the cemetery
at Mission Santa Barbara, and all of her personal possessions
(25:48):
were given to the California Academy of Sciences and they
were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of
nineteen o six. She is because this was a Catholic mission.
She was baptized on her deathbed, and that's where she
got the name Guanta Maria. You know, it's strange because
(26:10):
the mystery continues today. The mystery almost got solved in
but the U. S. Navy halted a long running archaeological
project that was trying to excavate this cave where she
was believed to have spent part of her time. This
was due to objections by members of the modern day
native community. That's right. And it just seems to be
(26:32):
sort of like a an unfurling of mysteries, sort of
like a Gordita of mysteries or a cheesy Gordita crunch
of mysteries. You know, I'm nestled inside of a choloopa intrigue. Yeah,
and you know obviously that tastes delicious for a researcher.
So with this we kind of I think we wrapped
(26:54):
on the question of of the archaeological project, you know,
the state meant from the representative of the modern day tribes,
one Mark Makaro. He said, we're only trying to do
what's right by our ancestors. We must ensure all applicable
federal laws are followed in reference to this excavation. And honestly,
(27:16):
I know it's a bummer for the people who spent
their careers looking for it, but I can see where
they're coming from, you know, the idea like there was
already so much damage done to the native culture by
the arrival of the Europeans. I think it's completely reasonable
to say, let's try to save and preserve what we
have still. But what a mystery That same push for
(27:37):
preservation means there will probably be no way to ever
know the full true story of the Lone Woman of
Saint Nicholas Island. I think we ran into this a
lot on stuff that I want you to know. For example,
sometimes the mystery is better, you know, leave a those
under the imagination. We don't have to know everything. We
can explore and learn. But we don't always were weren't
(27:59):
We aren't always an answer? M hmmm. Yeah. And this,
you know, I know that a lot of people before
the pandemic entertain the idea of being stuck alone on
a deserted island. It's such a capital are romantic notion
until you know, the pandemic hit and they were maybe
stuck alone in a house or in apartment and they said,
(28:19):
this is what I was thinking about, Wilson. Uh. But
I do want to give a shout out right, yes,
I do want to give a shout out to one More.
One more book. One of my absolute favorite books in
the world, and this story kind of reminds me of
It is called Atlas of Remote Islands. It's by Judas
Lanski and God's so good. I gotta stop talking about air.
(28:43):
I'm gonna go reread it. I send it to so
many people. But that's our episode for today. We would
love to hear your stories about mysterious islands, mysterious people
on isolated islands. There are a lot out there, especially
in the age of seafaring exploration, and I recommend a
podcast and also radio show. But I believe it always
(29:05):
exist in podcast for him, he goes back quite a
long time by the BBC called Desert Island Discs, where
interesting artists and creative weirdos come on and talk about
what their top five songs would be they would have
to have with them on a desert island situation. So, uh,
really good insight into some creative people's minds and also
(29:25):
a good way to get turned onto some cool new music.
And if you want to see a movie that's hilariously
bad and very very dated and very horny with a
very young Brook Shields, check out The Blue Lagoon, which
is sort of like the adult version of this type
of story. And thanks as always to our super producer,
Mr Max Williams thinks the Casey Pegram thanks to one
(29:48):
of the people that I love dearly but would not
like to be stuck on a desert island with Jonathan
Strickland's a k a. The Quister. I wouldn't be able
to get him to stop talking. He would just continue
to quiz us pedantically until we had to fight him
to the death. And nobody wants that. Let's keep this, uh,
let's keep this nemesis relationship copasetic, shall we? I've been
(30:09):
thinking about First Blood a lot. I accidentally watched the
this weird way to say, I actually watched I Guess
the Newest Rambo, which was Last Blood, and I just
kept going back to the First Rambo where he's like
the First Blood. Yeah. Yeah. There's a really good YouTube
video where it's like the moments from lots of different
(30:31):
big movies where they say the name of the movie
and then they just had they choose that moment to
have the fake credits role so to be like this
is Jurassic Park and then it just speak credits but
with like a Limp Biscuit song. So I would check
that out if you can to. Sorry, too many recks
here at the end. It's a Friday. We don't watch
the Last Rambo. Don't watch. It's not a recommendation. I
(30:51):
just need to get it out of my system. I'm
also not don't watch. Yeah, I'm saving, but definitely don't
watch the Blue. Good is okay and this is our
show and we'll see your next dog folks. For more
(31:12):
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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