SYMHC Classics: Libertalia

This 2018 episode covers Libertalia, which, in truth, may be completely fictional. It's called a pirate settlement, though the man who spearheaded it claimed he wasn't actually a pirate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since we had a pirate episode this week,
we are returning to that theme for today's Saturday Classic.
It is about the pirate utopia of Libertalia, which may
or may not have been a real place. This originally
came out on July eleventh, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to

(00:23):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. And today I thought we were due
for a little bit of fun summer pirate time. This

(00:44):
one is kind of a fun story. It's a little kooky.
This is a subject that goes by two names depending
on the source you're looking at. Sometimes you will hear
it as Libertatia with a tia ending. Some of it
is Libertalia with an la ending. That's what those things
that even in different printings of the same book, you
will see it both ways, depending on the printer's decision.

(01:07):
I presume. The other part that's fun is that this
may or may not have been a real thing. Yep,
but it is an interesting thing to examine. The primary
account that we have of Libertalia is from a general
History of the robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pirates.
This is in volume two, so if you go looking
online and you only get volume one, you will not

(01:28):
find this and be like what you said, this was
in here volume two. That one published in seventeen twenty eight.
The writing lists its author as Captain Charles Johnson, and
we're going to circle back to more specifics about its
authorship at the end. We've talked about it on the
show before as well, but we will revisit it. And
the idea that a bunch of pirates wanted to create
a utopia of equality, which is what this story is,

(01:52):
might seem a little bit far fetched, but it does
sound a lot like other utopian experiments we've talked about
just said earlier on the timeline, and with a high
seas theme. And there are also some instances we know
about of pirates kind of trying to do that, which
we'll talk about at the end. And it's also in
a place in the world that there were definitely a
lot of pirates, Yes, we talk about that at the

(02:13):
end as well. And Libertalia, which in truth, as we said,
might be completely fictional, would have been settled sometime probably
in the late seventeenth century, and that's just based kind
of on backdating from when the book was published, because
we don't have much in terms of specific dates beyond that.
So we're going to go through this whole story of

(02:34):
this unique pirate settlement as laid out in the General
History by Johnson, and then we will talk about the
other author who usually gets credit for writing a story
and whether that history has roots in reality. The story
of Libertalia begins with a man named Mysol who was
a Frenchman born in Provence to a good family. The

(02:56):
true name of the family is purposefully left out of
the general histy street of pirates to safeguard their reputation.
While Meisson's father did pretty well, there were so many
children in the family that he knew he needed to
go make his own way in the world rather than
depending on any inheritance, which is a popular pirate origin story. Yes, indeed,

(03:18):
this one kind of as we go through you'll find
checks kind of all the boxes of popular pirate stories,
but it also has the fun one of we're not pirates.
So Missoul was educated in humanity, logic, and mathematics and
then at age fifteen, was sent to Angier in western
France for a year of military training, and per Charles

(03:39):
Johnson's account, which he claims is sourced from Meisson's own
writing about his life, Misson's father had a life as
a musketeer in mind for his son, but Misson had
decided on a life at sea. So Meissan's father set
him up with letters of recommendation all of the items
he might need, and then arranged for a volunteer stent
aboard the Victoire, which was a ship commanded by a

(04:01):
relative named Monsieur forbat The young Misson aboard the Victoire
departed the port at Marseille and ventured into the Mediterranean.
Misson learned about navigation and life at sea, and he
spent his early time on the Victoire learning all that
he could from the more experienced men aboard. According to
the story, he just was constantly asking them questions uh.

(04:24):
And he loved being a sailor, and he was well
regarded because of his really well mannered demeanor. But when
the Victoires set into port in Naples, Nisson's life course changed.
He got permission from the captain to go ashore and
to travel inland. To Rome, but what he found there
was really disheartening. He was really chagrined at all the

(04:45):
licentiousness and the indulgence of the papal court. He really
lost his faith, deciding that quote all religion was no
more than a curb upon the minds of the weaker,
which the wiser sort yielded to in appearance only in Rome, Misson,
who was pretty devout at that point, went to confession,

(05:05):
and in doing so he meant a quote. Lewde priest
by the name of Carraccioli, who was Dominican, and while
making the acquaintance of a man of the church who
was not exactly a pillar of piety, solidified Misson's perceptions
that the Church was corrupt. He and Karaccioli became friends,
and they actually would remain companions for the rest of
their lives. Carraccioli told Misson that a life in the

(05:28):
church was a pretty good gig. It came with friends
and opportunities, and quote the ecclesiastical state was governed with
the same policy as were secular principalities and kingdoms, that
what was beneficial, not what was meritorious and virtuous, would
be alone regarded. He likened the papacy to a monarchy
to explain the situation to Misson, and he explained his

(05:51):
own contempt at the whole structure, saying, quote, for my part,
I am quite tired of the farce and will lay
hold on the first opportunity to throw oh off this
masquerading habit. The priest went on to say that he
was worried that by the time he stayed in the
church long enough to make a tidy living so that
he could leave, that he would be too old to
enjoy any of it. So Missoul proposed that the priest

(06:14):
join him on the seas. So the two men traveled
together to Livorno, Italy to meet back up with the Victoire,
and with Missol's recommendation, Carraccioli was welcomed onto the crew.
Almost immediately, Caraccioli got a taste of the dangers of
sailing life. The Victoire was engaged in a long and
brutal battle with two other ships. Caraccioli was shot in

(06:37):
the leg in this conflict, and it was a massive struggle,
but ultimately the Victoir won. There wasn't much of value
to take from the best at opponents, but an estimated
fifteen Christian slaves were freed in the process. After the battle,
the battle damage to Victoire headed back in some Marseilles
for repair, and Masson used the downtime to visit his family,

(06:59):
bringing Caraccioli along with him. He also brought with him
word from the captain that Misson had conducted himself admirably
at sea. He had a nice little letter to show
his parents that he was doing a good job. After
a month of rest, the captain of the Victoire sent
word to Misson and his friend that they were to
set sail again, leaving from Marseilles to go to Rochelle

(07:22):
to pick up merchantmen and saale for the West Indies.
And as the crew waited at Rochelle for the next
phase of the journey, the merchant ships that they were
to join with weren't ready to set sail. Misson and
Caraccioli decided to take work on another vessel in the
meantime because he did not like to be idle at all.
They got into some adventures along the way, but the
more important part of their escapades, as related in the

(07:44):
General History, was their ongoing discussion of religion and God.
Through these discussions, Misson was adopting a deist philosophy and
continuing to just turn away from all organized religion. There's
a chunk of texts that several paragraph long in which
the writer seems to be sorting out his own thoughts
on the matter of God and the soul. Craciole continued

(08:08):
to speak on religion both with Misson and with the
other sailors on their journeys, and as such he became
something of a religious leader simultaneously. Because both Carraccioli and
Misson had become a highly skilled sailors, a lot of
the men they traveled with were really looking up to
both of them. Yeah, there's a sort of wonderful irony
that Carracciole wants to leave the church because he thinks

(08:31):
organized religion is not for him either, and then he
sort of becomes a religious leader after that. That's kind
of a fascinating twist. So on a cruise to Martinique,
the Victoire was engaged in battle by an english man
of war with forty guns called the Winchelsea. The early
battle took a serious toll on the leadership of the Victoire.

(08:52):
The captain, second captain, and three lieutenants were all killed
very early on. So short on officers Misson and Caraccioli,
who had always been quick to step up when needed,
began giving orders and leading the remaining Victoire crew. They
were victorious, but this was actually by accident, because for
reasons unknown, the wind Chelsea exploded, killing all of its

(09:15):
crew save one lieutenant, who died two days later. Aboard
the Victoire, and after the conflict with the wind Chelsea,
Caraccioli saluted Misson as captain and told him that he
must make a choice to return to port and be
at the mercy of other men's decisions, or to take
the Victoire as his own and make his fortune. Misson

(09:36):
opted for freedom, but stated to the assembled crew that
quote a great number of them had resolved with him
upon a life of liberty, and had done him the
honor to create him chief. That he designed to force
no man, and be guilty of that injustice he blamed
in others. Therefore, if any were reverse to the following
his fortune, which he promised should be the same to

(09:57):
all he desired, they would declare them, and he would
set them ashore, whence they might return with conveniency. They
could basically opt out of this sort of life of piracy.
But his offer was instead met with shouts of vive
le capitan nisson, which is also the origin story of
most pirate crews. Yes, I'm gonna be cool, you guys.

(10:21):
You don't have to come with me, but if you
want to, let's go. Let's all go. Yeah, we're going
to talk about Misson's life and leadership, but first we
will pause for a quick sponsor break. So Missul immediately

(10:44):
set the tone of his leadership by giving the crew
the power to select their own officers. Then their next
destination was agreed upon as a group. Misol suggested the
coast of Spain. All of the men were in accord
with that course. Then they had to decide on their color,
and at this point Carraccioli was quick to clarify that
they were in fact not pirates quote, but men who

(11:06):
were resolved to assert that liberty which God and Nature
gave them, and own no subjection to any farther than
was for the common good of all. So he advised
that they fly under a white flag quote, with liberty
painted on the fly. Next, the belongings of all the
officers who were slain in the fight with the wind
Chelsea were brought on the deck and the money on

(11:27):
board was put into a chest which was declared to
belong equally to all the men. The lieutenants were asked
to make an assessment of the men on board and
determine who had immediate need of clothes that they could
be prioritized to receive the clothes of the deceased men.
Misson followed this up with a speech that the men
should all show one another brotherly love and cast aside

(11:48):
any grudges they had, and that they should see one
another as equals. Quote for when equity was trodden underfoot, misery, confusion,
and mutual distrust naturally followed. It sounds so idyllic. Everybody
loved one another. We're all in this together. Uh. But
it was not all hippie love from Misson, as he

(12:09):
also declared war on any ports that would deny them
entry and any who would not give them what they needed.
He was basically saying, so, we know we're not pirates,
but other people might not get that, and if they
treat us like we're pirates, we're gonna have to get piratical. Uh.
He did also admonish his men to always treat prisoners
humanly and generously for the sakes of their immortal souls.

(12:32):
The Victoire and its crew then did some plundering in
the most polite way possible. They took sugar and run
from a ship without violence, and then let it go.
They made fake runs at privateers with no intent to
actually engage them, betting that the ship would try to
take them, which meant that they could then defend themselves.
At one point, Missam told a privateer captain that he

(12:53):
would plunder nothing from the captured ship, but that they
would strip it of guns, and the privateers had to
promise not to engage in racy for six months. They
made their way around the globe for a while, and
eventually Misson had two ships under his command. He had
taken a ship whose crew was so charmed that they
all opted to join with him, and at this point

(13:13):
Caraccioli was named captain of the second ship, which was
named the Biju, and the two vessels made their way
around the Cape of Good Hope and then on to Madagascar.
Mis allied himself to the royal family of an island
near Madagascar in a conflict with a neighboring kingdom. He
also married into the royal family, and so did Caraccioli.

(13:33):
Men of the crew married non royal women of the
island of Johanna, which is modern day Anjuan, and Misson
and his men helped to defend people off the island
against invaders. Yeah, there was actually an invasion by the
queen's brother that they defended against. Uh and they were
always the good guys in this story. So not long

(13:54):
after those events, Misson made his way to nearby northern
Madagascar and he scoped out an area of land that
appealed to him, and then he went ashore and he
found good soil there and available fresh water, and he
decided that he wanted to settle a town there in
this place that he envisioned would have docks, and it
would be an asylum, a place for aging men of

(14:15):
the sea to live out the remainder of their lives
in peace, and he would call it Libertelia. Messaul waited
for his entire crew to agree to his plans before
he actually began the project. All of the men agreed
to the plan, and they immediately set to work on
his designs, and within ten days they had cleared one
hundred and fifty large trees from the area. He requested

(14:36):
that the royal family of Johanna loan him three hundred
men to help with the project and return for the
assistance that had been provided in their defense. And after
a great deal of debate among the leaders of that island,
some of whom feared that enabling the settlement could lead
to their own enslavement down the road, the three hundred
men were loaned for labor. Yeah, a lot of that

(14:59):
discussion said around, Wait, we're gonna help them build a
place from which they could actually come after us. Uh.
And it was like, well, maybe, but that's better than
saying no to them and having them come after us now, right, Like,
this way we at least have a chance that we'll
still all be friends. And Libertelia was set on a harbor,

(15:21):
and the first structures that were built were armed forts
on either side of it, and then homes and shops
were built, and the town slowly began to take shape.
Efforts were made to make friends with the native peoples
of Madagascar. Of course, that is one of those things
that is also always framed from a very European perspective,
So take that as a note if you go looking

(15:41):
for this story. And Libertelia was on its way to
becoming the peaceful settlement that Misson had envisioned when he
first ventured onto the land. Libertelia was anti slavery. This
is something that comes up throughout this account. Misson and
his men liberated slave ships whenever they came across them,
and on occasions when slaves were offered to them as barter,

(16:02):
they would always accept them and then immediately set them free.
Misson wanted the people who chose to settle in Libertalia
to be called Liberi. The idea was that it was
open to all and that it transcended any prior nationality
and signalled a community of equals. Libertalia wasn't Misson's only
focus during this formative time, though. He still took the

(16:23):
Victoire out to challenge ships and take their goods, and
he met with a mix of good and bad luck
on the sea, and one skirmish with a Portuguese ship.
He was able to take a large sum of money,
which is about two hundred thousand pounds, but he also
lost fifty six men in the process, making it the
greatest loss of life that he experienced in this kind
of conflict. But he made his way home to the

(16:45):
developing town of Libertilia, and from its rudimentary beginnings, the
land was worked to grow food, and the town was
able to barter with other villages. They ended up with
several hundred head of cattle. But in addition to growing
its footprint and its own crops, Libertelia also grew in
population because other people came to live there, including the

(17:06):
English privateer Captain Thomas Two. Missol had first encountered too.
When the latter sloop appeared in the waters off the
coast of Madagascar, it appeared there might have been a
potential idea that they were going to take this new town,
but eventually things led to Two and his men joining
the colony at Libertelia. If his name sounds familiar, he

(17:27):
was part of our episode about Henry every and the
raid on the Mughall Fleet. He pops up in a
lot of places. He was a very busy world traveler.
He was Misson and Two didn't always see things in
the same light though. Even when Two first arrived in Libertalia,
Missan was also coming in with a Portuguese ship that
he had taken. Missong quickly realized that if they were

(17:50):
going to keep the prisoners, they had taken, they would
need men to be on guard against an uprising, which
meant he wouldn't have enough men to go back out
to sea. And while he had established the settle meant
as a home base and as a place where any
marin er could call home, he wanted to continue his
voyages as long as he could. He was still building
his settlement and was to be clear getting supplies and

(18:11):
fortifications and wealth by taking them from ships that he bested,
even if he was being polite about it. Yeah, I
don't want to lose sight of the fact that he
was stealing from people, even if he seems like a
great magnanimous dude. Yeah, I'm going to build a pirate
utopia funded by piracy, but I'm not calling at that.

(18:33):
You guys, we are not pirates unless people treat us
like pirates, and then we kind of got to be
pirates a little bit. It's there's a moral flexibility in
the mix of this whole story. So he had planned
to just let the ship, the Portuguese ship that he
had taken and its prisoners go. He also just didn't
want to take on the load of having to see
to the needs of all those captured men, like to him,

(18:54):
this was just way too great a burden for any
value they were going to get out of it. But
two and even Raccioli, we're not fans of this idea
of letting everybody go. They knew that if they set
those prisoners free, all of Europe would soon know about
Libertilia and would invade. My Song called a council and
explained his position, and the men of the council agreed

(19:15):
with him. All the prisoners were brought before my Song.
He told them that he knew that they would cause
his demise, but that he could cause their deaths if
he wished, and that he needed them each to swear
an oath not to work against him. Then he gave
each of them back any belongings that had been taken
from them and set them to sail on a ship

(19:36):
that was stripped of all of its guns. Yeah. I
feel like so much of his leadership is based on
the like we cool, Like that's his whole approach or
are we cool? Uh? The next move for Libertilia was
actually away from this everybody be cool freedom and no
rules approach that it began with. But we will talk
about that after we first hear from one of our sponsors.

(20:07):
While the idea of a utopia always sounds great in theory,
in practice it is really hard to throw a bunch
of humans together, tell them they all equally share in
the land, in the work, and have the whole thing
chug along without any conflict. They are humans, after all.
And while things seemed to work with Miisson's original group,
after two and his men became part of Libertilia, conflicts

(20:30):
started to arise. On one occasion, Libertalia was invaded by
Portuguese sloops. The battle played out and Nissan's men were victorious,
and they treated the defeated men who survived with kindness
and hospitality until they saw two of the men who
had been set free under oath not to bring any
trouble into the settlement. These two men were tried for perjury,

(20:51):
found guilty, and executed, and this caused some men to
question Maissan's leadership. While Meisson and Caraccioli saw this execution
as a matter of self preservation of their way of life,
some of the men saw it as a contradiction of
everything they'd been told about Libertalia and about its values. Eventually,
Karaccioli was able to convince everyone of the necessity of

(21:13):
the execution, but it took a lot of effort and rhetoric. Yeah,
he sounds, based on this account like he was really
quite a good public speaker. But he was often convincing
all of the men of what should be done. But then,
not long after this, there was an argument between Two's
men and Misson's The nature of this argument is a

(21:34):
little unclear, although the account says that Two's men started it.
Two thought that the matter should be solved with swords,
but Misson and Karraccioli wanted to negotiate some sort of accord.
They did not want to set up their new little
utopia as a place where you settled your disagreements by
potentially killing each other. And while they sorted out the

(21:54):
matter at hand, and they figured out how to settle
this particular argument, all three of the captains came to
the inclusion that it was actually time for Libertilia to
have some actual laws. So everyone the entire colony was
gathered so that the three commanders could explain this plan.
They had to have some sort of government, and Misson

(22:16):
Caraccioli into proposed a democratic system with laws made by
the people. The men were to divide themselves into groups
of ten, and from each group one representative was to
be chosen who would assist in setting up the laws
and the government of the settlement. Property and land were
to be divided evenly, but that it would be owned
by each man. It would no longer be a system

(22:38):
of collective ownership. On the first day that the newly
selected lawmakers meant, Caraccioli made a speech and proposed that
there should be a Lord Conservator basically a president that
would be elected and would serve for terms of three years,
so he could be re elected, but every three years
they would revisit that and all agreed, and of course
Misson was immediately made Conservator and two was named as

(23:01):
Conservator Admiral, and Karaccioli was Secretary of State. And for
ten full days this new governing body worked to set
up the laws of Libertalia. They began, under Caraccioli's office
to even develop a new language for Libertalia that incorporated
the various native languages of the many people who had
settled there. They carefully balanced the man power that was

(23:24):
needed to maintain their animals and their crops against their
needs for naval reinforcements. Yet two was like, let's build
our navy, and they were like, hey, somebody's got to
feed the cows. So they kind of were figuring out
some pretty advanced kind of balancing systems about what their
society could handle. And Admiral too then set out to

(23:45):
gather more members of the colony, hoping to meet with
ships at sea and offer to take volunteers to bolster
Libertalia's numbers. He also went and visited places he knew
and sort of told people about it, and as part
of his can for new citizens, which he first began
by finding a settlement of his former men who had
not joined up with Libertelia but had started their own camp.

(24:08):
He spoke really passionately about Libertilia and its government built
around fairness and equality, but also he was clear to
say that the settlement was also willing to work with
other governments, saying, quote, if you will go to America
or Europe and show the advantage which may accrue to
the English by fixing a colony here out of the

(24:29):
love we bear our country, and to wipe away the
odious appellation of pirates, with pleasure, we will submit to
any who shall come with a commission from a lawful government.
But it is ridiculous to think we will become subjects
of greater rogues than ourselves. But while he was visiting
with his friends and potential recruits to their small paradise,

(24:50):
he was surprised when Misson himself found him and told
him that everything they had built had been lost. Maison
told too that the native peoples had attacked the settlement,
killed Correzzioli and many others, and that only he and
forty five other men had managed to escape aboard the Bijoux. Yeah,
this was at a point when two was kind of stranded.

(25:13):
There had been a big storm and the Victoire had
actually capsized and many of the crew were killed, but
they were able to get the ship, and Two thought
that they should head to America and make a fresh start,
And there was even discussion that, like, hey, we know
how to do this now, let's make another settlement. But
Missul was so devastated at having lost all of his

(25:34):
work that he just had no heart for another attempt.
So Misson took the Victoire and set out with a
plan that he would meet to again on the Guinea
coast to regroup, But that meeting never happened. The Victoire
sank during a storm and Masson went down with a ship.
So it has come up on the show before, but
just to recap since the nineteen thirties, the history of

(25:56):
the lives and bloody exploits of the most noted pirates
sometimes the general history of Pirates. You'll see it listed
in a number of different ways because on some republications
it has gotten new titles. Has been attributed to journalists,
spy and novelist Daniel Dafoe, and that attribution came about
through the work of John Robert Moore, who was a
Dafoe biographer, and it has been pretty widely accepted as

(26:18):
truth at this point. Yeah, there are some other candidates
that people name, including Nathaniel Miss who was a sailor
and a publisher, but it's so frequently associated with Daniel
Dafoe that a lot of times that is who the
author is listed as in the library or wherever, with
like no little asterisk or anything. Yeah, there are definitely
versions that don't really even talk about how it came

(26:41):
to be that it gets that attribution. So, remembering that
Dafoe's most famous works were novels like Robinson Crusoe and
maul Flanders. With little evidence to back up, he to
back up what's it containing it? This account and a
general history of the robberies and murderers of the most
notorious pirates is pretty much believed to be fictional. I

(27:03):
mean it's we've talked about this book in a bunch
of different episodes and it's all. They all involve people
we know were real and were involved in piracy, but
the details a lot of times are very questionable. And
an introduction to the modern printing of this work, Maximilian
Enovac wrote that the account of the crew and the

(27:25):
captain that founded the Libertalia as one of the quote
most remarkable and neglected works of fiction among the Foe's work.
But there were, as we said, Tracy mentioned, there were definitely,
in many cases, real people that these stories pulled in,
and we don't there's not a good way to verify
or not. It's not like people that were living a
privateering life were keeping great records, which is probably why

(27:48):
some of these fanciful stories grew to fill the void
of people that wanted to know about them. But there
were a few pirate settlements in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
so the idea of Libertanlia is not entirely outside the
bounds of possibility, and Madagascar, as Tracy mentioned at the
top of the show, was a popular destination for pirates

(28:09):
looking for at times a bit of freedom and peace
and sometimes it take a break from things and also
to attack other ships. Well yeah, I mean you can't
live by rest alone. No, there was a lot of
piratical action happening in that area. Ranters Bay in Madagascar
was founded by pirate John Plantaine in seventeen twenty, although

(28:32):
he had more of a kingdom in mind than a democracy.
And Il Saint Marie, which is four miles east of
the island of Madagascar, is also believed to have been
inhabited by pirates for almost a century and a much
looser sort of setup than Maisson's purported settlement. So there's
a pirate cemetery on that island that continues to be

(28:52):
a tourist attraction. And in two thousand and one, author
Kevin Rushby published a book called Hunting Pirate Heaven, which
was part along and part investigative journalism, and he himself
was basically traveling the roots of privateers, seeking out the
sites of the various legendary utopias that have been part
of pirate lore, and he didn't find Libertilia, and no

(29:14):
one else has any hard evidence or record of it either.
It does live on in popular culture, though it has
shown up in lots of books and movies and video games,
including Uncharted for and Fallout four. I haven't played Uncharted for,
but in Fallout for, it's kind of a cobbled together
raider settlement off the coast of Massachusetts. Yeah, it's not.

(29:34):
It's not so much of the utopia hugfest. No, it's
definitely not a hugfest. If you go there, people shooting you. Yeah,
uh yeah. William Burrows wrote about it at one point.
It's shown up. It's one of those like handy uh
kind of touchstones that people pull in when they're talking
about piracy and privateering to give it a feel of authenticity,

(29:57):
even though that that feel may be based on something
completely fictional. But it's a fascinating idea. I do think
it's interesting to examine why someone would want to write,
presuming it's fiction, to write a story that is so
sort of progressive in this idea of all men being

(30:17):
equal and like so anti slavery. It's an interesting thing
that that would be framed along with the idea of
piracy and freedom from government, and we're going to go
this ship into attacking us so that we can then
fight back and take their stuff. Right. Like I said,
there's some moral flexibility baked into the whole thing. But

(30:39):
that does become an interesting thing to look at, like,
why would that be such an appealing piece of fiction
at a time that we don't often think of as
being really rooted in all men being equal. It's fascinating
and it's a fun read. It's a little bit tricky
to get through it because the language is clunky to
our modern ear. There's some you know, fast and loose

(31:02):
use of capitalization and yeah, so things you're like, wait,
is that a proper net? Oh no, it's not. He
just likes the word prize. Okay, So yeah, there's stuff
like that to contend with. But it is a really
fun read. Yeah. Well, having read chunks of the book
for research of various episodes of the podcast, it does
tend to be a fun read, if not necessarily an

(31:25):
historically accurate one. There's part of me, there is a
doofy part of me that wants in my heart for
some piece of evidence to appear to prove that everything
in the general history is actually accurate and true, because
it would be mind blowing if that were the case. Yeah, like, oh,
here is all of my notes, like my big file,
my binder full newspaper clippings, et cetera, that I used

(31:49):
to research this book. Yet No, I don't think. Oh,
it'd be great, wouldn't it be hilarious? Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to
send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show

(32:10):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.