August 19, 2026 • 11 mins
Did a shipwreck double the size of the United States? Sort of. Listen in to find out what the heck that means.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the short stuff. Chush, Chuck, Jerry Date,
Let's go back in time.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Do you know who else is in the room with us?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Uh, Jerry Murphy.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
No?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Do you know who wrote this article?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
No? Not you? Okay, Yeah, because I was gonna say
I didn't even know about some of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah. This, uh, maybe the densest three pages I've ever
seen written was written by our old colleague Kristin Conger.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Conger. That's right, seriously incredibly well written.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Congs did a great job, and Kristin is thankfully still
around in the podcasting biz. She has her great show,
Unladylike that she used to co host with Caroline, but
eventually Caroline left and Conger kept doing it by herself
and it's it's still great. Still around, she has a
ladylike book, and we I think the world of Conger,
(01:01):
so still support her.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Please, Way to go Conger, and way to go for
this article, because it really is incredibly well done, especially
for something she probably wrote in a day maybe a half.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know we used to crank these out, Yeah we did.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
So. The whole story starts in nineteen ninety three, that's
where Conger put it, and I think that was the
right place, the right way to go out on the
Gulf of Mexico. There's a guy named Jerry Murphy who
was a fisherman there and he was trawling in the
Gulf of Mexico and when he brought the net up,
there was some debris in it. He just assumed were
(01:37):
rocks at first, but I guess he took a closer
look and we're like, those are silver coins that are
fused together because they've been underwater for so long. Hot damn,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So he did what anyone would do. He got in
touch with an attorney. He said, can I keep this stuff?
And then he contacted history experts and said where did
the things come from? And then about a year after that,
they finally said, hey, dude, do you know what this is.
This is from the ruins of the El Cazador or
(02:10):
the Hunter, and this is a ship that disappeared in
seventeen eighty four after it set out from Veracruz, Mexico,
with nineteen tons of Spanish currency, which was silver reels
at the time.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, they were newly minted, even there was apparently a
mint in Mexico, and they were headed to New Orleans,
and at the time you were like, well, why does
Spain care about New Orleans? Spain care about New Orleans
because that was the capital of the Louisiana colony owned
by Spain at the time. Sure you thought it was France. No,
(02:45):
there was a period where Spain owned Louisiana and there
was during this time. And the reason they sent nineteen
tons of silver coins to New Orleans was because New
Orleans currency had recently become devalued. There was a lot
of counter fitting going on. There was a lack of
hard currency around, so they were bringing this hard currency
(03:05):
to pay the soldiers, to pay government officials, and it
went down. I can't imagine being King Carlos the Second
and being like, are you kidding me? We lost nineteen
tons of silver coins forever?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, And so King Carlos was like, I imagine face
palmed and said, oh God, is this Like, is Louisiana
even worth all this? You guys?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
He said, I hate mondays he.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Did Ian Garfield, it was it's so far away. We
lost all this money we just wanted from the French
a couple of decades ago, Like, do we really want
to be in the Louisiana business anymore. And so well,
we should back up a little and just explain who
he was. He was a cousin to King Louis the
fifteenth of France. I said, twenty fifth, just a little
(03:57):
behind the scenes there, Josh corrected me. It was off
in. In seventeen sixty two, Louis seeded the Louisiana territory to
Carlos with a Treaty of Fontainebleau. And it wasn't because
they were family. It was basically he wanted to keep
Louisiana out of the hands of the Brits.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Right better in the hands of a cousin that's ruling
another country than in the Britz, who he has no
friends with, you know. So now Louisiana and New Orleans
is under Spanish rule. And it was actually a pretty
smart move because after the Seven Years War ended, King
Louis had to seed all of the Louisiana territory east
(04:40):
of the Mississippi to the Britz as part of the treaty,
except New Orleans. And the reason New Orleans is such
a plump was because if you wanted to move goods
from one place to another, there were no railroads there
were no stage coaches. You did it on the river,
and the Mississippi in particular was a very, very valuable
(05:01):
river because it went from the top of the continent
to the bottom. And if when you got your stuff
down in New Orleans, you could prepare for a seagoing ship,
put your goods on that and now from the Gulf
of Mexico, you can take that stuff and sell it
anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
That's right. Another reason New Orleans is a plum is
because it's New Orleans. It's sure one of the great
American cities. Man, I love New Orleans. I love that city.
It's it's been too long. I need to get back there.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
It is. It's a cool city. It's it's almost like
it's got its own vibe, you know, like there's no
other place like it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
No other place like it. And one of the friendliest.
Like if you're open to life and you go to
New Orleans, there's a fifty percent chance you're going to
end up in a stranger's home, like eating dinner with
them or something.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Those are high odds.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
All right, speaking of high maybe we should take a
break and we'll be right back after this, all right,
(06:19):
So New Orleans is there. It's a very hot shipping port.
That's one of the pros for sure. One of the
downsides is is tons of mosquitoes, meaning a lot of
yellow fever, a lot of smallpox. But it was great
real estate, obviously, you know, with that port right there.
So around that time, because of this, France starts looking
(06:43):
back at New Orleans and Napoleon is in power by
this point seventeen ninety nine, and he was like, man,
I really want to get into the West, and New
Orleans is pretty great. Man. They got the mouth of
the Mississippi right there, and if I can control New
Orleans then that would be really great for my interests
on that side of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Right, So he goes back to Spain and he's like, hey,
I would love the Louisiana territory back. What do you say,
I give your son in law the throne of Tuscany, right,
and you give me back the Louisiana territory. And so
Napoleon and the King of Spain came up with the
Treaty of San Ildefonso, which in English is the Treaty
(07:25):
of Saint PHONSI, and France suddenly had the Louisiana territory again.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
That's right. But around the same time there was some
in French owned Hispaniola, which was Haitian, the Dominican Republic
is what we would call that today. They were like,
they were farming sugar and coffee and tropical produce. So
that was all great, you know, for the French and
for Napoleon getting New Orleans with me, and you could
(07:54):
trade that stuff much easier or much more easily, and
so he was like, this is all going to come together. However,
the enslaved people there had other ideas and they led
what is the only really successful slave revolt in history.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, the Haitian Rebellion led by Dussaint Lovertire, which I
was like, yes, that's going to be an episode, so
everyone put it on the list.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
O good.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
But this was in Haiti, which at the time was
Saint doming Do Minge, I don't remember how to say Dominge. Yeah,
And Saint Domingue was far and away the crown jewel
of France's economic holdings over in the West, right in
the West Indies. And so even if you had New
(08:41):
Orleans without the country that was producing all the stuff
that you were going to take to New Orleans and
then ship around the world. You're just basically your whole
Western economic empire that Napoleon was going to build is
just out the window. So he said, you know what,
I don't think we really need Louisiana anymore. The Brits
are knocking at the door again. I'm gonna have to
(09:02):
fight them. I'm sick of those guys. I need some
quick money. Let me see who wants to buy the
Louisiana territory. And in walk Thomas Jefferson reading a Bible,
he edited himself.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
That's right, and Napoleon was like, I turns out I
also hate Mondays, And Thomas Jefferson said, you know what,
I love Mondays and I love Louisiana and I love
New Orleans. So TJ comes in, It's like, I don't
want to fight with you guys, so why don't we
just see if we can work this out in a
friendly way. So he sent James Monroe down there to
(09:37):
the French government to buy just New Orleans at this
point for like three million bucks. He's like, that's as
high as I'll go.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Not a penny more. I'm not going to pay a
lot for this territory.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
So so Monroe goes and talks to Napoleon and is like,
what do you think? And Napoleon goes, how about this.
Here's my counter offer. You have to buy all of
the Louisiana territory. And James Monroe dropped his tea cup.
Luckily there's somebody there at catch you before it shattered
on the floor. He said, for fifteen million dollars, and
(10:13):
James wonn Road did the mathro quick in his head
and he's like, that's less than four cents an acre,
and he said sold.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
He said sold. Yeah, so he signed over to Jefferson
and you know, of course we did a whole episode
on the Louisiana purchase. It was a good one, yeah,
the needy, gritty details, but that basically doubled the size
of the country. And then, you know, when I looked
at this article, and I might title it this too,
like how did a shipwreck double the size of the
(10:42):
United States? At the end of my first read through,
I was like, but wait, how did that happen? Again?
I guess the idea is had that shipwreck never happened,
Spain would have been able to deliver their silver and
maybe would have stayed in the Louisiana business exactly. Okay, Yeah,
so I got it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yeah you did. And I feel like we did Conger's
article some justice.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I hope. So, like I said, it was a really
great article and Kristen's awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yep. It was kind of one of our drunk history
style short stuffs.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
That's right, except we're not drinking because it's two fifteen.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah on a Thursday.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Even that's right.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
At any rate, I think short stuff's out, guys.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to the short stuff. Chush, Chuck, Jerry Date,
Let's go back in time.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Do you know who else is in the room with us?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Uh, Jerry Murphy.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
No?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Do you know who wrote this article?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
No? Not you? Okay, Yeah, because I was gonna say
I didn't even know about some of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah. This, uh, maybe the densest three pages I've ever
seen written was written by our old colleague Kristin Conger.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Conger. That's right, seriously incredibly well written.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Congs did a great job, and Kristin is thankfully still
around in the podcasting biz. She has her great show,
Unladylike that she used to co host with Caroline, but
eventually Caroline left and Conger kept doing it by herself
and it's it's still great. Still around, she has a
ladylike book, and we I think the world of Conger,
(01:01):
so still support her.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Please, Way to go Conger, and way to go for
this article, because it really is incredibly well done, especially
for something she probably wrote in a day maybe a half.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know we used to crank these out, Yeah we did.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
So. The whole story starts in nineteen ninety three, that's
where Conger put it, and I think that was the
right place, the right way to go out on the
Gulf of Mexico. There's a guy named Jerry Murphy who
was a fisherman there and he was trawling in the
Gulf of Mexico and when he brought the net up,
there was some debris in it. He just assumed were
(01:37):
rocks at first, but I guess he took a closer
look and we're like, those are silver coins that are
fused together because they've been underwater for so long. Hot damn,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So he did what anyone would do. He got in
touch with an attorney. He said, can I keep this stuff?
And then he contacted history experts and said where did
the things come from? And then about a year after that,
they finally said, hey, dude, do you know what this is.
This is from the ruins of the El Cazador or
(02:10):
the Hunter, and this is a ship that disappeared in
seventeen eighty four after it set out from Veracruz, Mexico,
with nineteen tons of Spanish currency, which was silver reels
at the time.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, they were newly minted, even there was apparently a
mint in Mexico, and they were headed to New Orleans,
and at the time you were like, well, why does
Spain care about New Orleans? Spain care about New Orleans
because that was the capital of the Louisiana colony owned
by Spain at the time. Sure you thought it was France. No,
(02:45):
there was a period where Spain owned Louisiana and there
was during this time. And the reason they sent nineteen
tons of silver coins to New Orleans was because New
Orleans currency had recently become devalued. There was a lot
of counter fitting going on. There was a lack of
hard currency around, so they were bringing this hard currency
(03:05):
to pay the soldiers, to pay government officials, and it
went down. I can't imagine being King Carlos the Second
and being like, are you kidding me? We lost nineteen
tons of silver coins forever?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, And so King Carlos was like, I imagine face
palmed and said, oh God, is this Like, is Louisiana
even worth all this? You guys?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
He said, I hate mondays he.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Did Ian Garfield, it was it's so far away. We
lost all this money we just wanted from the French
a couple of decades ago, Like, do we really want
to be in the Louisiana business anymore. And so well,
we should back up a little and just explain who
he was. He was a cousin to King Louis the
fifteenth of France. I said, twenty fifth, just a little
(03:57):
behind the scenes there, Josh corrected me. It was off
in. In seventeen sixty two, Louis seeded the Louisiana territory to
Carlos with a Treaty of Fontainebleau. And it wasn't because
they were family. It was basically he wanted to keep
Louisiana out of the hands of the Brits.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Right better in the hands of a cousin that's ruling
another country than in the Britz, who he has no
friends with, you know. So now Louisiana and New Orleans
is under Spanish rule. And it was actually a pretty
smart move because after the Seven Years War ended, King
Louis had to seed all of the Louisiana territory east
(04:40):
of the Mississippi to the Britz as part of the treaty,
except New Orleans. And the reason New Orleans is such
a plump was because if you wanted to move goods
from one place to another, there were no railroads there
were no stage coaches. You did it on the river,
and the Mississippi in particular was a very, very valuable
(05:01):
river because it went from the top of the continent
to the bottom. And if when you got your stuff
down in New Orleans, you could prepare for a seagoing ship,
put your goods on that and now from the Gulf
of Mexico, you can take that stuff and sell it
anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
That's right. Another reason New Orleans is a plum is
because it's New Orleans. It's sure one of the great
American cities. Man, I love New Orleans. I love that city.
It's it's been too long. I need to get back there.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
It is. It's a cool city. It's it's almost like
it's got its own vibe, you know, like there's no
other place like it.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
No other place like it. And one of the friendliest.
Like if you're open to life and you go to
New Orleans, there's a fifty percent chance you're going to
end up in a stranger's home, like eating dinner with
them or something.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Those are high odds.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
All right, speaking of high maybe we should take a
break and we'll be right back after this, all right,
(06:19):
So New Orleans is there. It's a very hot shipping port.
That's one of the pros for sure. One of the
downsides is is tons of mosquitoes, meaning a lot of
yellow fever, a lot of smallpox. But it was great
real estate, obviously, you know, with that port right there.
So around that time, because of this, France starts looking
(06:43):
back at New Orleans and Napoleon is in power by
this point seventeen ninety nine, and he was like, man,
I really want to get into the West, and New
Orleans is pretty great. Man. They got the mouth of
the Mississippi right there, and if I can control New
Orleans then that would be really great for my interests
on that side of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Right, So he goes back to Spain and he's like, hey,
I would love the Louisiana territory back. What do you say,
I give your son in law the throne of Tuscany, right,
and you give me back the Louisiana territory. And so
Napoleon and the King of Spain came up with the
Treaty of San Ildefonso, which in English is the Treaty
(07:25):
of Saint PHONSI, and France suddenly had the Louisiana territory again.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
That's right. But around the same time there was some
in French owned Hispaniola, which was Haitian, the Dominican Republic
is what we would call that today. They were like,
they were farming sugar and coffee and tropical produce. So
that was all great, you know, for the French and
for Napoleon getting New Orleans with me, and you could
(07:54):
trade that stuff much easier or much more easily, and
so he was like, this is all going to come together. However,
the enslaved people there had other ideas and they led
what is the only really successful slave revolt in history.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, the Haitian Rebellion led by Dussaint Lovertire, which I
was like, yes, that's going to be an episode, so
everyone put it on the list.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
O good.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
But this was in Haiti, which at the time was
Saint doming Do Minge, I don't remember how to say Dominge. Yeah,
And Saint Domingue was far and away the crown jewel
of France's economic holdings over in the West, right in
the West Indies. And so even if you had New
(08:41):
Orleans without the country that was producing all the stuff
that you were going to take to New Orleans and
then ship around the world. You're just basically your whole
Western economic empire that Napoleon was going to build is
just out the window. So he said, you know what,
I don't think we really need Louisiana anymore. The Brits
are knocking at the door again. I'm gonna have to
(09:02):
fight them. I'm sick of those guys. I need some
quick money. Let me see who wants to buy the
Louisiana territory. And in walk Thomas Jefferson reading a Bible,
he edited himself.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
That's right, and Napoleon was like, I turns out I
also hate Mondays, And Thomas Jefferson said, you know what,
I love Mondays and I love Louisiana and I love
New Orleans. So TJ comes in, It's like, I don't
want to fight with you guys, so why don't we
just see if we can work this out in a
friendly way. So he sent James Monroe down there to
(09:37):
the French government to buy just New Orleans at this
point for like three million bucks. He's like, that's as
high as I'll go.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Not a penny more. I'm not going to pay a
lot for this territory.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
So so Monroe goes and talks to Napoleon and is like,
what do you think? And Napoleon goes, how about this.
Here's my counter offer. You have to buy all of
the Louisiana territory. And James Monroe dropped his tea cup.
Luckily there's somebody there at catch you before it shattered
on the floor. He said, for fifteen million dollars, and
(10:13):
James wonn Road did the mathro quick in his head
and he's like, that's less than four cents an acre,
and he said sold.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
He said sold. Yeah, so he signed over to Jefferson
and you know, of course we did a whole episode
on the Louisiana purchase. It was a good one, yeah,
the needy, gritty details, but that basically doubled the size
of the country. And then, you know, when I looked
at this article, and I might title it this too,
like how did a shipwreck double the size of the
(10:42):
United States? At the end of my first read through,
I was like, but wait, how did that happen? Again?
I guess the idea is had that shipwreck never happened,
Spain would have been able to deliver their silver and
maybe would have stayed in the Louisiana business exactly. Okay, Yeah,
so I got it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yeah you did. And I feel like we did Conger's
article some justice.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I hope. So, like I said, it was a really
great article and Kristen's awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yep. It was kind of one of our drunk history
style short stuffs.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
That's right, except we're not drinking because it's two fifteen.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah on a Thursday.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Even that's right.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
At any rate, I think short stuff's out, guys.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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