July 23, 2022 • 30 mins
This 2011 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the sinking of Black Sam's Wydah, the Medusa's disastrous accident off the African coast, and other historical shipwrecks.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The wreck of the Mary Rose came up
on our most recent installment of Unearthed, and not for
the first time. So Today's Saturday Classic is five shipwreck
stories from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Deblina. Yeah.
I figured, since we keep saying they talked about it
on that prior episode, why not put it back in
the feed. This episode originally came out April seven, and
(00:25):
it covers the Rex of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Mary Rose,
the Medusa, the Brown Maria, and the Widden. So enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:47):
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding, and today
you're infratreat because we're going to be talking about five
pretty amazing shipwrecks. And the really cool thing about it
is you guys picked all of these. Yeah. On Facebook,
we asked for some recommendations, and you guys gave us
awesome ones. And I mean a lot too. I think
there were seventy something comments just on Facebook. Yeah. I
(01:09):
think we could do a shipwreck only podcast series for
the next six months. No kidding. Um, So we're only
gonna do five for this episode, but we might be
tempted to to revisit this again because you'll know that
I like shipwrecks. I think, Dablina, you're certainly growing to
like them. Yeah, I love I love shipwreck stories, that's
(01:30):
for sure. Some of them are kind of sad for
me to stomach. Yeah, they are sad, and I don't
want to sound to light about it, but you know,
they're interesting too, That's that's what I enjoy about them. Yeah. Absolutely,
It's not just about the event the wreck itself. It's
all the things that you learn about a particular culture,
particular time period from the things that are found if
(01:51):
they're found, you know, if there's an excavation that takes place,
and all the things that you get from there and
the consequences. And I think the recovery efforts alone are
really interesting stories. We talked about that a little bit
when we were discussing these Roman shipwrecks last fall. You know,
just the recovery effort is is pretty interesting. All of
the people who work on it, the archaeological work, all
(02:14):
the fish sauce involved fish sauce. Yeah, that was right,
I forgot about that, thanks for thanks for reminding me.
But anyways, we're gonna kick this off with the shipwreck
that sort of made us think that maybe a series
or a list like this would be cool. It was
something that a listener wrote in to suggest, the Raal
Maria shipwreck, and I just thought it was so neat.
(02:36):
It tied in different interests and different things that you
wouldn't expect all into one shipwreck, which I think that's
what they do, right. Yeah, and a tight in art too,
we'll see. But before we can get into the art,
we need to give you a little bit of backstory
about the from Maria. So in the nineteen seventies of
Dr Christian Alstrom found documents in the Finnish National Archives
(02:56):
relating to a sunken Dutch merchant ship. And that's the
ship we're talking about right now. Yeah. It had been
traveling from Amsterdam to St. Petersburg and it sank in
a storm in the Baltic off the southern coast of
Finland way back in the autumn of seventeen seventy one.
So it was quite an old wreck by the time
Allstrom learned about it, and a further search of documents
(03:17):
in the archives and other sources uncovered the ship's protests,
which included the log book, but also a really tantalizing
list of items that had been salvaged from the wreck.
Because it didn't go down immediately like some of the
wrecks were going to discuss, there was time to get
a few of the precious items off off board. Yeah,
that list made the hunt for the fram Maria a
(03:40):
really popular enterprise with among amateur diverse throughout the nineteen seventies.
But it wasn't until nine that the society dedicated to
the search found the wreck, the actual wreck using side
scan sonar. Yeah, our old friend, side skin sonar how
you find ships these days. So the remains that they
found were remarkably well preserved. Ninety percent of the whole
(04:02):
is intact, and this makes it a really great way
to learn about Dutch ship building at the time and
what a jut like, what a typical Dutch merchant ship
would have been like, because it is so remarkably well preserved.
But that's that's not why we're talking about it. It's
not just a nice typical Dutch merchant ship. It's what
(04:22):
might still be inside. That's the real kicker because we
have the custom toll records in Denmark and the log
of the salvaged items, and that let's justus know some
of the luxury items or goods that you would expect
to be on board their sugar and cloth and zinc
and mercury. Fortunately they've determined the mercury has not leaked
into the Baltic die, just just the typical things you'd
(04:46):
think would be on the ship. No fish oil though,
no fish oil. But there was also some cargo listed
as assorted merchandise, and this was likely valuable luxury items,
some of which were also salvaged, and that included things
like books, years with guilt frames and even ivory eggs,
which sounds pretty cool. I'm imagining like crates full of
ivory eggs. Probably it was just a couple of boxes,
(05:08):
but still. But the treasure ship reputation that this wreck
has comes from the fact that the Frown Maria was
on an art run at the time of its thinking
for none other than Catherine the Great. Yeah, that's right.
So if y'all know a little bit about Katherine the Great,
maybe you've listened to the Caffine the Great series, you
know that in the late seventeen sixties early seventeen seventies,
Catherine was really looking to beef up her courts reputation
(05:31):
as a cultural capital, a cultural center that was equal
to the Courts and the rest of Europe. And to
do this, she knew that she didn't just need to
spend a lot of money. She needed to buy some
really pretty stuff, you know, art and things like the
works of Dutch masters. So that's exactly what she did.
She used connections through europe guys like Voltaire to set
(05:54):
up these art deals for her and build the collection.
And in July seventeen seventy one, she had one deal
like this go down, and it was a timber merchant
who was having his estate auctioned off. He was also
an art collector and Catherine's ambassador to the Hague was
sent off to take care of Catherine's interests and bid
(06:15):
on some of these nice paintings. So what was lost
in this wreck of those paintings, because we know that
she ordered them, but she bought them. Yeah, but a
lot of them none of them showed up, right, I
don't think so, none of hers, none of hers. So
judging from the auction catalogs as well as the doctoral
thesis of Dr Clara Bill from nineteen sixty one. We
(06:35):
can guess that the works were mostly of Dutch Golden
Age painters um, including Jan van Goyen, who made an
appearance in the Tulip And there are eleven paintings that
we know of, but it's very likely that there were more,
since correspondence at the time shows that there was an
extremely high value put on the bundle that Catherine bought. Yeah,
(06:56):
but our big question is if the paintings went down
with the ship, are they still down there and what
kind of condition would they be in? And it's pretty
hard to say because as of now a diver can't
safely enter the hold of the ship. It's too rickety,
even though it's in really good condition um. And the
condition of the paintings themselves might really depend on how
(07:18):
they were packaged, because if they were stored in crates
in their frames, they probably would have been destroyed a
long time ago. They would be sitting in water since
the seventeen seventies. But here's the interesting part. If they
were cut from their frames and rolled up like the canvas,
some of them were panel paintings. So that wouldn't have
worked for them. But the canvas paintings were cut and
(07:39):
rolled up and then stored in a lead sealed box.
There's a slim chance that they would still be down
there in in reasonable condition. That would be pretty cool.
But even if they don't come up someday as miraculously
preserved master paintings, they'll still be treasures if anything survives.
I mean, it's Catherine's lost action. Pretty cool. So our
(08:02):
next ship, we're gonna switch gears a little bit and
go from a merchant ship with art to a pirate
ship with gold. Yeah. I feel like we've talked about
pirates a lot lately, but hopefully you're like us and
you can never get enough of those pirate stories. Because
next we're going to talk about a ship called the Widow,
and the story of the Widowship wreck actually begins with
(08:23):
a bit of a love story involving a pirate named
Samuel Black Sam Bellamy. People really tried to pitch us
on that aspect of it, Yeah, they did. That was
requested several times I think on Facebook. Now. Bellamy was
originally from England and it said that he started as
a legit merchant sailor, not a pirate at all. But
then he moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts in seventeen fifteen,
(08:45):
around age seven, to pursue a career as a New
England merchant captain. And when he got there, he fell
in love with a fifteen year old girl named Maria Hallett. Yeah,
but the trouble was, Maria's parents didn't really think that
much of Samuel Bellamy, especially his fortune. They thought he
was too poor to take care of Mariat, so they
(09:06):
refused to allow them to marry. So he decides he's
going to set off and make enough money so that
he can marry his girl. And he hears that there's
some Spanish rex off the coast of Florida, and he
went down to visit the ships and see if he
could hopefully get rich quick that way. Yeah, but that
was kind of a bust um. When he got down there,
(09:27):
he realized that the ship really didn't have anything of
worth that he could use to build his fortune. So
at that point he decided to turn to piracy, and
it turned out that he was pretty good at it.
He learned the trade by joining the crew of successful
pirate Ben Hornegal, whose crew at one point included Edward
Teach also known as black Beard. We all know that name.
(09:48):
I think Hornegal is kind of a pirate mentor, it seemed. Yeah,
he actually mentored a bunch of famous pirates. But by
seventeen sixteen, Bellamy had actually overthrown him, so the student
had become the master, so to speak. He led a
mutiny against torn A Goold and took over as captain
of the Mary Anne, which was the name of the
ship that they were on. And in Bellamy's first year
(10:09):
of captain, the crew robbed more than fifties ships, so
just to give you an idea of how successfully was.
They were really good at this, and they also made
some acquisitions, including a ship called the Sultana, which I
think was also a popularly suggested ship. Yeah, definitely. But
capturing the Widow in February seventeen seventeen is said to
be kind of the pinnacle of Bellamy's career, and that's
(10:31):
because it was an enormous ship. I mean, it would
be the pinnacle of anyone's career. It was a three
hundred ton ship, hundred foot long galley, and it was
practically brand new too. It had been built in benin
Africa only two years before Bellamy ran into it and
the Bahamas not literally stumbled upon it um And it
had been launched originally as a slave ship that was
(10:53):
intended to work the triangle trade, you know, connecting Africa
West Indies England, and so had a lot of valuable
stuff on board, had spices and gems and ivory, and
a lot a whole lot of gold and silver, maybe
twenty to thirty thousand pounds sterling. So there you go,
(11:13):
that's a pirate ship. Definitely happened, Yeah, definitely worth going after.
And Bellamy did his ships chase the Widow for three
days before they finally captured it. And when he finally
got it, he moved all his stuff over there. He
moved like his cannon, all his things, his crew, and
made it his flagship. He gave the Widow's former captain,
Lawrence Prince, the loser in the situation, he gave him
(11:36):
the Sultana, so it's consolation prize there. And after this win,
the Widow and the Mary Anne started sailing north again
towards New England. Yeah, and so most people think he
was probably returning to Maria, or at least if you're
going to be a romantic about it, but we don't
know for sure, because a huge storm hit the Massachusetts
(11:56):
coast on April seventeen, seventeen, just as the Widow was
sailing into Cape Cod Yeah, and it was pretty bad.
Wind gusts topped seventy miles an hour, and the seas
rose to something like thirty feet. The ship was in
sight of the beach, but it was trapped in the
surf zone, so it got slammed into a sandbar and
it began to break apart. The ship was entirely split
(12:19):
in half at one point finally due to the wind
and really large waves, and so of a crew of
a hundred and forty six, only two men survived in
the end, and Bellamy was not one of them. Well,
and the two guys who survived didn't have a great
deal either when they came out of it. One of them,
Thomas Davis, who is a Welshman, was tried as a
(12:40):
pirate in Boston, although it is through him that we
have this story. The other, John Julian, managed to escape.
But it is your Davis's testimony that we learned how
much booty was aboard the Widow. The bulk of it's
never recovered too, so for a long time it was
kind of a a treasure site for a lot of Yeah.
(13:01):
And luckily a cryptographer at the time noted the exact
location of the shipwreck, so in two a Cape cod
diver named Barry Clifford was able to use that crtographer's map,
his journal, and his letters to search for the Widow,
and Clifford managed to find the shipwreck site in nineteen
eighty four, and since then he's led several expeditions and
recovered a lot of the ship's crowed. A lot of
(13:22):
it up, haven't they, Yeah, including cannons, coins, and probably
most significantly, at least in the beginning, a ship's bell
inscribed with the words the Widow Galley seventeen sixteen. Our
(13:45):
next shipwreck also features a pretty major relic that's also
a bell. It's the Edmund Fitzgerald and I have to
say this was probably the most requested ship of those seventies,
something comments we mentioned on Facebook, oh without a doubt.
And I don't know if it's just because of the
Gordon Lightfoot song or because it's fairly recent, but this
(14:07):
shipwreck is definitely on a lot of our listeners minds,
and it's really a tragedy. And I mean maybe because
it's a more recent shipwreck, so we have the radio
chatter and you know, you have a closer connection to
it all. But it's pretty sad. So before we talk
about the wreck, though, we're going to talk a little
bit about Lake Superior, which is where the ship went down. Yeah.
(14:31):
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world
in surface area. It's undred feet deep and three fifty
miles wide. It averages forty degrees fahrenheit year round, and
it's bigger than all the other Great Lakes combined. Yeah,
but the most dangerous part of Lake Superior is something
called the shipwreck coast. Not too surprising there, and the
(14:51):
only way to really escape the storms that brew up
on the lake is to enter Whitefish Bay and so
consequently Whitefish Point eight, which is other approach of the bay,
is littered with shipwrecks. Over two hundred years, three hundred
and fifty ships have sunk there, and the last of
these was the seven D twenty nine ft or freighter
(15:12):
Edmund Fitzgerald, which for thirteen years was the biggest ship
on the Great Lakes. Yeah, it's normal work was toting
or from Silver Bay, Minnesota to steel mills on the
Lower Lakes near Detroit. So on November nine five, the
ship left Superior, Wisconsin with twenty six thousand, one hundred
and sixteen long tons of tacon nite pellets, which is
(15:35):
basically processed iron ore. Yeah, but the weather got bad
really quickly, and so the captain, Ernest McSorley stayed close
to another freighter called the Arthur m Anderston, which was
captained by Bernie Cooper, and it was just the two ships,
we're gonna look out for each other, stay nearby for safety.
And so they headed towards the shelter of Whitefish Bay because,
(15:56):
as I said, the weather was getting worse and worse.
And as they passed by Cariboo Island, Cooper remembered seeing
the Edmund Fitzgerald get way way too close to the shoals,
risking scraping the bottom of the ship. But after that
he can't see the Edmund Fitzgerald anymore. The visibility conditions
are just completely gone. There's snow, their spray. I mean,
(16:19):
you can imagine what a great lake storm is probably like. Right.
So that afternoon McSorley radios to Cooper that his ship
was damaged and slowed down, asking to Anderson to stay
with him for safety. Yeah, but there aren't too many
scary reports after that. It's it's not a report, like
the ship is thinking it's just some damage. The weather
(16:41):
keeps on getting worse though. Yeah. At about six a
monster wave comes down on the Anderson and the ship
kind of pops up and there's another hit, and I
think Captain Bernie Cooper describes it as sort of like
shaking off water like a wet dog. Yea his ship.
But then he also says, quote, I watched those two
waves head down the lake towards the Fitzgerald, and I
(17:02):
think those were the two that sent him under because
the last radio contact that he has with mc sorley
is at seven ten and mcsorley's last words, where we
are holding our own still. It seems like they were
doing okay. The radar signal is lost at seven fifteen,
and at that point they start to get worried. And
(17:23):
by the time the Anderson could venture back, you know,
um Bernie Cooper was in contact with the coast Guard.
By the time he could venture back, they could only
find two lifeboats, and it's unknown how exactly the ship
went down, whether it broke or capsized or nose dive,
but regardless all twenty nine on board died and nobodies
(17:43):
were ever recovered. Though the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society
started dives and they did recover the bell as we mentioned,
leaving a memorial replica in its place, and as Sarah
mentioned also as we started the section, the Gordon Lightfoot's
nineteen seven and six ballad The Wreck of the Edmund
Fitzgerald made the wreck famous. It's pretty well known. So
(18:06):
for our next ship, we're gonna go back a little bit.
This was another popular suggestion, probably because it has some
connections to Henry the Eighth The Mary Rose. Yeah, and
this one was actually discovered a couple of different times
over the years. For example, in eighteen thirty six, of
fisherman fishing in the Silted Sea off of Portsmith caught
his gear on something, and lucky for him, an early
(18:29):
diver named John Deane was also working nearby, diving at
the site of the wrecked Royal George. So the fisherman
offers Dean half of whatever his gear was snagged on
if he could help him free it. So Dean finds
a piece of timber sticking out from the sea floor.
Then he finds a bronze gun and it's the Mary Rose,
(18:49):
Henry the Eighth's one time flagship. Yeah. So Dean excavates
the site for a few years and pulls up bronze
and iron cannons and small artifacts, and then the whole
thing is largely forgotten. You wouldn't think that Henry the
Eight's flagship would would go that way. It seems like
an odd thing to just have slip your mind. Yeah,
that's what basically happens, though, until the late nineteen sixties,
(19:12):
when a man named Alexander McKee takes an interest in
the wreck and starts recruiting people with access to side
skin sonar of course, to check out the site, and
over the next few years, nineteen thousand artifacts are recovered,
and by two the ship was actually raised, which was
a huge international news story. It's installed in a museum today.
(19:35):
But the really interesting thing about the Mary Roses because
it did sink so quickly, unfortunately the crew four hundred
to five hundred people on board were killed. It's a
really slice of life for for tutor time. Yeah, you
can see the cuts of meat that sailors ate, the
plates that they ate off of, and how they distinguished
(19:57):
their belongings with personal markings, even if they were illiterate.
So really fascinating. Yeah, so it's interesting in that way,
but it's also just a really important ship. It's not
just because it's preserved and we have all of these
artifacts from it. It is of a lot of importance
historically too. So in fifteen o nine, a teenage Henry
the Eighth inherits the throne from his father, and his
(20:20):
father's left him a modest navy for the time. There
are five ships. I know that sounds ridiculously small, but
they would have been supplemented with rented vessels, and of
course you have all your aristocracy aristocratic buddies who can
loan you your ships when you need it too. But
still Henry the Eighth is thinking that he's got a
(20:40):
beef up his navy, because the French navy is quite formidable. Yeah.
So Henry commissions a couple of modern carvel whole ships
built for really heavy waterline guns. One is the Peter
Promegranate and the other is the Mary Rose, named for
his favorite sister. Yeah. So during the First French War,
the mary Rose is Henry's flagship, which means that it
(21:03):
would have carried the Lord High Admiral. And during the
Second French War the mary Rose is the vice flagship,
so very important. It's it's really at the top of
its game. And in seven and in fifteen thirty six
again it goes through major refits, the second of which
probably added considerably to its weight, probably added some some
(21:24):
guns and made it a lot heavier. But by it
was definitely ready to fight in the Third French War,
and that was good because the French fleet already vastly
outnumbered the English I think it was something like two
hundred ships to eighty, and they were heading across the
Channel to engage the Brits somewhere between the Isle of
Wight and mainland England. So early during the battle on
(21:46):
July nineteenth, something goes wrong for the mary Rose. It
keels over and water starts to pour in through her
gun ports, and before anyone can do a thing, the
ship just sinks, just like that, and only a few
survivors make it out, mostly the people who were up
in the sails and and well above the top of
(22:07):
the ship, So what happened. For a long time, historians
have chalked up the sinking to some combination of wind
and tied and handling air, but the French have long
assumed that they were responsible for sinking the ship, and
in two thousand nine some new research came out that
suggesting might have been right. Yeah. University of Portsmith the
(22:29):
geographer Dominic Fontana used geographical information systems technology data from
the recovery, tidal current patterns, and skeletal remains to hypothesize
that a French cannonball hit the ship, filling the hole
with water, and that that is what happened. So the
ship after that point likely maneuvered so that it's broadside
face to the French they could fight back, shifting the
(22:51):
water and ultimately causing the ship to capsize. Yeah. But
the really interesting thing about this is Fontana thinks that
people watching on shore would not have known that a
cannon hit the ship, and the whole thing could have
been covered up with a tutor government conspiracy because it
would be better to to blame it on your own
guys or some kind of handling air, weather or tides
(23:15):
than to admit. Yeah, Francis E sonchor ship. Yeah, that
still fascinates me, the fact that you'd rather make a mistake,
and conveniently enough, that ties us into our final entry
for this list, where there's also a little bit of
(23:37):
a scandal, a government scandal involving the whole thing. Yeah,
in this case, what happened after the shipwreck was so
politically charged and just kind of tragic and horrifying. It
was almost more famous than the shipwreck itself. So the
story starts during the Bourbon restoration. You may remember that
from our recent Furman series. Yeah, definitely. Um Napoleon was
(24:01):
in exile, Louis the eighteenth was the new king of France,
and the French Forget Medusa was on its way to Africa,
transporting soldiers and also official passengers to re establish the
French colony at Senegal. Even the newly appointed governor, Colonel
Julian Schmaltz, was on board. So in July second, eighteen sixteen,
the ship ran aground off the west coast of Africa,
(24:23):
and it's generally accepted that incompetent seamanship was what got
the Medusa into trouble in the first place. The ship's
captain hadn't served on a friendship for twenty years prior
to this this journey. He was an aristocrat, he was
recently returned from exile, and it said that he got
the gig because he was pro Bourbon, and the king's
(24:45):
ministers were obviously looking to put those kind of guys
in power and get rid of anyone who'd served under Napoleon.
Maybe a bad move in the case of military stuff,
I'm not sure. But after the ship ran aground, they
tried to refloat the do so over the next couple
of days, but they didn't have any luck, so they
moved on to Plan B because they really wanted to
(25:06):
keep going to Senegal. It was still a couple hundred
miles to the south of them, so they were looking
for anything they could do here. Yeah, and this decidedly
shady Plan B they came up with involved emptying out
about two fifty passengers into six lifeboats and putting the
rest on this raft that they made out of spars
and timber lashed together. It was about a hundred and
(25:29):
forty nine men and one woman who ended up on
the raft, mostly ordinary soldiers and a few low ranking
officers and civilians. And this raft it was it was
fairly large. It was about yeah, it was about twenty
long by seven wide, which doesn't sound large enough to
hold a hundred and fifty people, but it's pretty big,
substantial at least. It had a mast and a sail
(25:51):
and a small deck raised in the center. And the
intention here was that the other boats would tow the
raft to safety the two hundred miles that they were going,
But it became apparent pretty soon that that was not
going to work out. The raff was slowing the other
boats down. It kind of looked rickety like it might
fall apart. So the tow ropes were deliberately cut and
the people on the raft were just left there stranded
(26:14):
with only a few provisions, no navigational equipment. This sad
little sale. They were out of luck, and the situation
from there deteriorated really quickly. By the second day or so,
there was a mutiny and hand to hand fighting that
resulted in about sixty deaths. By the next morning, we
were discussing this, we thought the mutiny happened really fast,
(26:35):
like things got bad really really fast. Yeah, i mean,
I'm thinking just day. Yeah, maybe just desperation being out
there in the hot sun. I think from things I've read,
they just went kind of batty. But yeah, it happened
very fast. Bodies were dumped overboard, and more fighting took
others out soon after that. So from there things only
got worse. Supplies ran out, people had to start drinking
(26:57):
their own urine. Some people were badly injured when their
limbs got caught between shifting spars, and they threw themselves overboard.
Didn't want to be eaten because by the fourth day
all the survivors were practicing cannibalism, and meat was cut
from corpses and dried on the mast before it was eaten,
And by the eighth day, the fittest had taken to
(27:19):
killing the weakest by throwing them overboard to extend the
remaining provisions that they had. I believe that's how the
one woman died. I think she was thrown overboard. Gosh. So,
after about thirteen days total, the survivors were found and
rescued by another ship in the Medusa Convoy, but by
that point there were only fifteen men left. Five of
them died pretty soon after, and two of the remaining
(27:43):
ten on Race Avigny and Alexandra Courriard wrote an account
of what happened and it was published in eighteen seventeen.
That was very bad press for the Bourbon Restoration definitely
became this huge scandal and increased tensions between the Liberal
and the Royalist factions. And um, I believe that the
Royalist factions had to do some basically cover up damage control,
(28:08):
I think is more accurate than cover up. They couldn't
cover up the situation that had happened, but I think
they did try to, you know, pin the blame on
certain parties and try to manage it from that that standpoint.
But most famously, this inspired Tadore Jericho's masterpiece, The Raft
of the Medusa in eighteen nineteen, and we were talking
a little bit about that before. I mean, it's such
a recognizable painting. I'm sure probably all of you have
(28:30):
seen it and maybe just not known that it was
based on a real I never knew the story behind
it until today. So it's pretty interesting piece of art
history knowledge. And it wraps up this podcast nicely too,
I'd say, it really does. I mean a full circle. Yeah,
come full circle with something that you can look at
now and compare to the story, and um that's true
(28:51):
of a couple of cases like the Widow. There's a
traveling exhibition going on of some of the finds from
that shipwrecks and Mary Rose I mentioned there is the
whole museum devoted to that and actually the Edmund Fitzderal too.
There's a Great Lakes Maritime Museum with exhibits on the
Edmund fits d. Thanks so much for joining us on
(29:16):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
(29:38):
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. The wreck of the Mary Rose came up
on our most recent installment of Unearthed, and not for
the first time. So Today's Saturday Classic is five shipwreck
stories from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Deblina. Yeah.
I figured, since we keep saying they talked about it
on that prior episode, why not put it back in
the feed. This episode originally came out April seven, and
(00:25):
it covers the Rex of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Mary Rose,
the Medusa, the Brown Maria, and the Widden. So enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:47):
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding, and today
you're infratreat because we're going to be talking about five
pretty amazing shipwrecks. And the really cool thing about it
is you guys picked all of these. Yeah. On Facebook,
we asked for some recommendations, and you guys gave us
awesome ones. And I mean a lot too. I think
there were seventy something comments just on Facebook. Yeah. I
(01:09):
think we could do a shipwreck only podcast series for
the next six months. No kidding. Um, So we're only
gonna do five for this episode, but we might be
tempted to to revisit this again because you'll know that
I like shipwrecks. I think, Dablina, you're certainly growing to
like them. Yeah, I love I love shipwreck stories, that's
(01:30):
for sure. Some of them are kind of sad for
me to stomach. Yeah, they are sad, and I don't
want to sound to light about it, but you know,
they're interesting too, That's that's what I enjoy about them. Yeah. Absolutely,
It's not just about the event the wreck itself. It's
all the things that you learn about a particular culture,
particular time period from the things that are found if
(01:51):
they're found, you know, if there's an excavation that takes place,
and all the things that you get from there and
the consequences. And I think the recovery efforts alone are
really interesting stories. We talked about that a little bit
when we were discussing these Roman shipwrecks last fall. You know,
just the recovery effort is is pretty interesting. All of
the people who work on it, the archaeological work, all
(02:14):
the fish sauce involved fish sauce. Yeah, that was right,
I forgot about that, thanks for thanks for reminding me.
But anyways, we're gonna kick this off with the shipwreck
that sort of made us think that maybe a series
or a list like this would be cool. It was
something that a listener wrote in to suggest, the Raal
Maria shipwreck, and I just thought it was so neat.
(02:36):
It tied in different interests and different things that you
wouldn't expect all into one shipwreck, which I think that's
what they do, right. Yeah, and a tight in art too,
we'll see. But before we can get into the art,
we need to give you a little bit of backstory
about the from Maria. So in the nineteen seventies of
Dr Christian Alstrom found documents in the Finnish National Archives
(02:56):
relating to a sunken Dutch merchant ship. And that's the
ship we're talking about right now. Yeah. It had been
traveling from Amsterdam to St. Petersburg and it sank in
a storm in the Baltic off the southern coast of
Finland way back in the autumn of seventeen seventy one.
So it was quite an old wreck by the time
Allstrom learned about it, and a further search of documents
(03:17):
in the archives and other sources uncovered the ship's protests,
which included the log book, but also a really tantalizing
list of items that had been salvaged from the wreck.
Because it didn't go down immediately like some of the
wrecks were going to discuss, there was time to get
a few of the precious items off off board. Yeah,
that list made the hunt for the fram Maria a
(03:40):
really popular enterprise with among amateur diverse throughout the nineteen seventies.
But it wasn't until nine that the society dedicated to
the search found the wreck, the actual wreck using side
scan sonar. Yeah, our old friend, side skin sonar how
you find ships these days. So the remains that they
found were remarkably well preserved. Ninety percent of the whole
(04:02):
is intact, and this makes it a really great way
to learn about Dutch ship building at the time and
what a jut like, what a typical Dutch merchant ship
would have been like, because it is so remarkably well preserved.
But that's that's not why we're talking about it. It's
not just a nice typical Dutch merchant ship. It's what
(04:22):
might still be inside. That's the real kicker because we
have the custom toll records in Denmark and the log
of the salvaged items, and that let's justus know some
of the luxury items or goods that you would expect
to be on board their sugar and cloth and zinc
and mercury. Fortunately they've determined the mercury has not leaked
into the Baltic die, just just the typical things you'd
(04:46):
think would be on the ship. No fish oil though,
no fish oil. But there was also some cargo listed
as assorted merchandise, and this was likely valuable luxury items,
some of which were also salvaged, and that included things
like books, years with guilt frames and even ivory eggs,
which sounds pretty cool. I'm imagining like crates full of
ivory eggs. Probably it was just a couple of boxes,
(05:08):
but still. But the treasure ship reputation that this wreck
has comes from the fact that the Frown Maria was
on an art run at the time of its thinking
for none other than Catherine the Great. Yeah, that's right.
So if y'all know a little bit about Katherine the Great,
maybe you've listened to the Caffine the Great series, you
know that in the late seventeen sixties early seventeen seventies,
Catherine was really looking to beef up her courts reputation
(05:31):
as a cultural capital, a cultural center that was equal
to the Courts and the rest of Europe. And to
do this, she knew that she didn't just need to
spend a lot of money. She needed to buy some
really pretty stuff, you know, art and things like the
works of Dutch masters. So that's exactly what she did.
She used connections through europe guys like Voltaire to set
(05:54):
up these art deals for her and build the collection.
And in July seventeen seventy one, she had one deal
like this go down, and it was a timber merchant
who was having his estate auctioned off. He was also
an art collector and Catherine's ambassador to the Hague was
sent off to take care of Catherine's interests and bid
(06:15):
on some of these nice paintings. So what was lost
in this wreck of those paintings, because we know that
she ordered them, but she bought them. Yeah, but a
lot of them none of them showed up, right, I
don't think so, none of hers, none of hers. So
judging from the auction catalogs as well as the doctoral
thesis of Dr Clara Bill from nineteen sixty one. We
(06:35):
can guess that the works were mostly of Dutch Golden
Age painters um, including Jan van Goyen, who made an
appearance in the Tulip And there are eleven paintings that
we know of, but it's very likely that there were more,
since correspondence at the time shows that there was an
extremely high value put on the bundle that Catherine bought. Yeah,
(06:56):
but our big question is if the paintings went down
with the ship, are they still down there and what
kind of condition would they be in? And it's pretty
hard to say because as of now a diver can't
safely enter the hold of the ship. It's too rickety,
even though it's in really good condition um. And the
condition of the paintings themselves might really depend on how
(07:18):
they were packaged, because if they were stored in crates
in their frames, they probably would have been destroyed a
long time ago. They would be sitting in water since
the seventeen seventies. But here's the interesting part. If they
were cut from their frames and rolled up like the canvas,
some of them were panel paintings. So that wouldn't have
worked for them. But the canvas paintings were cut and
(07:39):
rolled up and then stored in a lead sealed box.
There's a slim chance that they would still be down
there in in reasonable condition. That would be pretty cool.
But even if they don't come up someday as miraculously
preserved master paintings, they'll still be treasures if anything survives.
I mean, it's Catherine's lost action. Pretty cool. So our
(08:02):
next ship, we're gonna switch gears a little bit and
go from a merchant ship with art to a pirate
ship with gold. Yeah. I feel like we've talked about
pirates a lot lately, but hopefully you're like us and
you can never get enough of those pirate stories. Because
next we're going to talk about a ship called the Widow,
and the story of the Widowship wreck actually begins with
(08:23):
a bit of a love story involving a pirate named
Samuel Black Sam Bellamy. People really tried to pitch us
on that aspect of it, Yeah, they did. That was
requested several times I think on Facebook. Now. Bellamy was
originally from England and it said that he started as
a legit merchant sailor, not a pirate at all. But
then he moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts in seventeen fifteen,
(08:45):
around age seven, to pursue a career as a New
England merchant captain. And when he got there, he fell
in love with a fifteen year old girl named Maria Hallett. Yeah,
but the trouble was, Maria's parents didn't really think that
much of Samuel Bellamy, especially his fortune. They thought he
was too poor to take care of Mariat, so they
(09:06):
refused to allow them to marry. So he decides he's
going to set off and make enough money so that
he can marry his girl. And he hears that there's
some Spanish rex off the coast of Florida, and he
went down to visit the ships and see if he
could hopefully get rich quick that way. Yeah, but that
was kind of a bust um. When he got down there,
(09:27):
he realized that the ship really didn't have anything of
worth that he could use to build his fortune. So
at that point he decided to turn to piracy, and
it turned out that he was pretty good at it.
He learned the trade by joining the crew of successful
pirate Ben Hornegal, whose crew at one point included Edward
Teach also known as black Beard. We all know that name.
(09:48):
I think Hornegal is kind of a pirate mentor, it seemed. Yeah,
he actually mentored a bunch of famous pirates. But by
seventeen sixteen, Bellamy had actually overthrown him, so the student
had become the master, so to speak. He led a
mutiny against torn A Goold and took over as captain
of the Mary Anne, which was the name of the
ship that they were on. And in Bellamy's first year
(10:09):
of captain, the crew robbed more than fifties ships, so
just to give you an idea of how successfully was.
They were really good at this, and they also made
some acquisitions, including a ship called the Sultana, which I
think was also a popularly suggested ship. Yeah, definitely. But
capturing the Widow in February seventeen seventeen is said to
be kind of the pinnacle of Bellamy's career, and that's
(10:31):
because it was an enormous ship. I mean, it would
be the pinnacle of anyone's career. It was a three
hundred ton ship, hundred foot long galley, and it was
practically brand new too. It had been built in benin
Africa only two years before Bellamy ran into it and
the Bahamas not literally stumbled upon it um And it
had been launched originally as a slave ship that was
(10:53):
intended to work the triangle trade, you know, connecting Africa
West Indies England, and so had a lot of valuable
stuff on board, had spices and gems and ivory, and
a lot a whole lot of gold and silver, maybe
twenty to thirty thousand pounds sterling. So there you go,
(11:13):
that's a pirate ship. Definitely happened, Yeah, definitely worth going after.
And Bellamy did his ships chase the Widow for three
days before they finally captured it. And when he finally
got it, he moved all his stuff over there. He
moved like his cannon, all his things, his crew, and
made it his flagship. He gave the Widow's former captain,
Lawrence Prince, the loser in the situation, he gave him
(11:36):
the Sultana, so it's consolation prize there. And after this win,
the Widow and the Mary Anne started sailing north again
towards New England. Yeah, and so most people think he
was probably returning to Maria, or at least if you're
going to be a romantic about it, but we don't
know for sure, because a huge storm hit the Massachusetts
(11:56):
coast on April seventeen, seventeen, just as the Widow was
sailing into Cape Cod Yeah, and it was pretty bad.
Wind gusts topped seventy miles an hour, and the seas
rose to something like thirty feet. The ship was in
sight of the beach, but it was trapped in the
surf zone, so it got slammed into a sandbar and
it began to break apart. The ship was entirely split
(12:19):
in half at one point finally due to the wind
and really large waves, and so of a crew of
a hundred and forty six, only two men survived in
the end, and Bellamy was not one of them. Well,
and the two guys who survived didn't have a great
deal either when they came out of it. One of them,
Thomas Davis, who is a Welshman, was tried as a
(12:40):
pirate in Boston, although it is through him that we
have this story. The other, John Julian, managed to escape.
But it is your Davis's testimony that we learned how
much booty was aboard the Widow. The bulk of it's
never recovered too, so for a long time it was
kind of a a treasure site for a lot of Yeah.
(13:01):
And luckily a cryptographer at the time noted the exact
location of the shipwreck, so in two a Cape cod
diver named Barry Clifford was able to use that crtographer's map,
his journal, and his letters to search for the Widow,
and Clifford managed to find the shipwreck site in nineteen
eighty four, and since then he's led several expeditions and
recovered a lot of the ship's crowed. A lot of
(13:22):
it up, haven't they, Yeah, including cannons, coins, and probably
most significantly, at least in the beginning, a ship's bell
inscribed with the words the Widow Galley seventeen sixteen. Our
(13:45):
next shipwreck also features a pretty major relic that's also
a bell. It's the Edmund Fitzgerald and I have to
say this was probably the most requested ship of those seventies,
something comments we mentioned on Facebook, oh without a doubt.
And I don't know if it's just because of the
Gordon Lightfoot song or because it's fairly recent, but this
(14:07):
shipwreck is definitely on a lot of our listeners minds,
and it's really a tragedy. And I mean maybe because
it's a more recent shipwreck, so we have the radio
chatter and you know, you have a closer connection to
it all. But it's pretty sad. So before we talk
about the wreck, though, we're going to talk a little
bit about Lake Superior, which is where the ship went down. Yeah.
(14:31):
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world
in surface area. It's undred feet deep and three fifty
miles wide. It averages forty degrees fahrenheit year round, and
it's bigger than all the other Great Lakes combined. Yeah,
but the most dangerous part of Lake Superior is something
called the shipwreck coast. Not too surprising there, and the
(14:51):
only way to really escape the storms that brew up
on the lake is to enter Whitefish Bay and so
consequently Whitefish Point eight, which is other approach of the bay,
is littered with shipwrecks. Over two hundred years, three hundred
and fifty ships have sunk there, and the last of
these was the seven D twenty nine ft or freighter
(15:12):
Edmund Fitzgerald, which for thirteen years was the biggest ship
on the Great Lakes. Yeah, it's normal work was toting
or from Silver Bay, Minnesota to steel mills on the
Lower Lakes near Detroit. So on November nine five, the
ship left Superior, Wisconsin with twenty six thousand, one hundred
and sixteen long tons of tacon nite pellets, which is
(15:35):
basically processed iron ore. Yeah, but the weather got bad
really quickly, and so the captain, Ernest McSorley stayed close
to another freighter called the Arthur m Anderston, which was
captained by Bernie Cooper, and it was just the two ships,
we're gonna look out for each other, stay nearby for safety.
And so they headed towards the shelter of Whitefish Bay because,
(15:56):
as I said, the weather was getting worse and worse.
And as they passed by Cariboo Island, Cooper remembered seeing
the Edmund Fitzgerald get way way too close to the shoals,
risking scraping the bottom of the ship. But after that
he can't see the Edmund Fitzgerald anymore. The visibility conditions
are just completely gone. There's snow, their spray. I mean,
(16:19):
you can imagine what a great lake storm is probably like. Right.
So that afternoon McSorley radios to Cooper that his ship
was damaged and slowed down, asking to Anderson to stay
with him for safety. Yeah, but there aren't too many
scary reports after that. It's it's not a report, like
the ship is thinking it's just some damage. The weather
(16:41):
keeps on getting worse though. Yeah. At about six a
monster wave comes down on the Anderson and the ship
kind of pops up and there's another hit, and I
think Captain Bernie Cooper describes it as sort of like
shaking off water like a wet dog. Yea his ship.
But then he also says, quote, I watched those two
waves head down the lake towards the Fitzgerald, and I
(17:02):
think those were the two that sent him under because
the last radio contact that he has with mc sorley
is at seven ten and mcsorley's last words, where we
are holding our own still. It seems like they were
doing okay. The radar signal is lost at seven fifteen,
and at that point they start to get worried. And
(17:23):
by the time the Anderson could venture back, you know,
um Bernie Cooper was in contact with the coast Guard.
By the time he could venture back, they could only
find two lifeboats, and it's unknown how exactly the ship
went down, whether it broke or capsized or nose dive,
but regardless all twenty nine on board died and nobodies
(17:43):
were ever recovered. Though the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society
started dives and they did recover the bell as we mentioned,
leaving a memorial replica in its place, and as Sarah
mentioned also as we started the section, the Gordon Lightfoot's
nineteen seven and six ballad The Wreck of the Edmund
Fitzgerald made the wreck famous. It's pretty well known. So
(18:06):
for our next ship, we're gonna go back a little bit.
This was another popular suggestion, probably because it has some
connections to Henry the Eighth The Mary Rose. Yeah, and
this one was actually discovered a couple of different times
over the years. For example, in eighteen thirty six, of
fisherman fishing in the Silted Sea off of Portsmith caught
his gear on something, and lucky for him, an early
(18:29):
diver named John Deane was also working nearby, diving at
the site of the wrecked Royal George. So the fisherman
offers Dean half of whatever his gear was snagged on
if he could help him free it. So Dean finds
a piece of timber sticking out from the sea floor.
Then he finds a bronze gun and it's the Mary Rose,
(18:49):
Henry the Eighth's one time flagship. Yeah. So Dean excavates
the site for a few years and pulls up bronze
and iron cannons and small artifacts, and then the whole
thing is largely forgotten. You wouldn't think that Henry the
Eight's flagship would would go that way. It seems like
an odd thing to just have slip your mind. Yeah,
that's what basically happens, though, until the late nineteen sixties,
(19:12):
when a man named Alexander McKee takes an interest in
the wreck and starts recruiting people with access to side
skin sonar of course, to check out the site, and
over the next few years, nineteen thousand artifacts are recovered,
and by two the ship was actually raised, which was
a huge international news story. It's installed in a museum today.
(19:35):
But the really interesting thing about the Mary Roses because
it did sink so quickly, unfortunately the crew four hundred
to five hundred people on board were killed. It's a
really slice of life for for tutor time. Yeah, you
can see the cuts of meat that sailors ate, the
plates that they ate off of, and how they distinguished
(19:57):
their belongings with personal markings, even if they were illiterate.
So really fascinating. Yeah, so it's interesting in that way,
but it's also just a really important ship. It's not
just because it's preserved and we have all of these
artifacts from it. It is of a lot of importance
historically too. So in fifteen o nine, a teenage Henry
the Eighth inherits the throne from his father, and his
(20:20):
father's left him a modest navy for the time. There
are five ships. I know that sounds ridiculously small, but
they would have been supplemented with rented vessels, and of
course you have all your aristocracy aristocratic buddies who can
loan you your ships when you need it too. But
still Henry the Eighth is thinking that he's got a
(20:40):
beef up his navy, because the French navy is quite formidable. Yeah.
So Henry commissions a couple of modern carvel whole ships
built for really heavy waterline guns. One is the Peter
Promegranate and the other is the Mary Rose, named for
his favorite sister. Yeah. So during the First French War,
the mary Rose is Henry's flagship, which means that it
(21:03):
would have carried the Lord High Admiral. And during the
Second French War the mary Rose is the vice flagship,
so very important. It's it's really at the top of
its game. And in seven and in fifteen thirty six
again it goes through major refits, the second of which
probably added considerably to its weight, probably added some some
(21:24):
guns and made it a lot heavier. But by it
was definitely ready to fight in the Third French War,
and that was good because the French fleet already vastly
outnumbered the English I think it was something like two
hundred ships to eighty, and they were heading across the
Channel to engage the Brits somewhere between the Isle of
Wight and mainland England. So early during the battle on
(21:46):
July nineteenth, something goes wrong for the mary Rose. It
keels over and water starts to pour in through her
gun ports, and before anyone can do a thing, the
ship just sinks, just like that, and only a few
survivors make it out, mostly the people who were up
in the sails and and well above the top of
(22:07):
the ship, So what happened. For a long time, historians
have chalked up the sinking to some combination of wind
and tied and handling air, but the French have long
assumed that they were responsible for sinking the ship, and
in two thousand nine some new research came out that
suggesting might have been right. Yeah. University of Portsmith the
(22:29):
geographer Dominic Fontana used geographical information systems technology data from
the recovery, tidal current patterns, and skeletal remains to hypothesize
that a French cannonball hit the ship, filling the hole
with water, and that that is what happened. So the
ship after that point likely maneuvered so that it's broadside
face to the French they could fight back, shifting the
(22:51):
water and ultimately causing the ship to capsize. Yeah. But
the really interesting thing about this is Fontana thinks that
people watching on shore would not have known that a
cannon hit the ship, and the whole thing could have
been covered up with a tutor government conspiracy because it
would be better to to blame it on your own
guys or some kind of handling air, weather or tides
(23:15):
than to admit. Yeah, Francis E sonchor ship. Yeah, that
still fascinates me, the fact that you'd rather make a mistake,
and conveniently enough, that ties us into our final entry
for this list, where there's also a little bit of
(23:37):
a scandal, a government scandal involving the whole thing. Yeah,
in this case, what happened after the shipwreck was so
politically charged and just kind of tragic and horrifying. It
was almost more famous than the shipwreck itself. So the
story starts during the Bourbon restoration. You may remember that
from our recent Furman series. Yeah, definitely. Um Napoleon was
(24:01):
in exile, Louis the eighteenth was the new king of France,
and the French Forget Medusa was on its way to Africa,
transporting soldiers and also official passengers to re establish the
French colony at Senegal. Even the newly appointed governor, Colonel
Julian Schmaltz, was on board. So in July second, eighteen sixteen,
the ship ran aground off the west coast of Africa,
(24:23):
and it's generally accepted that incompetent seamanship was what got
the Medusa into trouble in the first place. The ship's
captain hadn't served on a friendship for twenty years prior
to this this journey. He was an aristocrat, he was
recently returned from exile, and it said that he got
the gig because he was pro Bourbon, and the king's
(24:45):
ministers were obviously looking to put those kind of guys
in power and get rid of anyone who'd served under Napoleon.
Maybe a bad move in the case of military stuff,
I'm not sure. But after the ship ran aground, they
tried to refloat the do so over the next couple
of days, but they didn't have any luck, so they
moved on to Plan B because they really wanted to
(25:06):
keep going to Senegal. It was still a couple hundred
miles to the south of them, so they were looking
for anything they could do here. Yeah, and this decidedly
shady Plan B they came up with involved emptying out
about two fifty passengers into six lifeboats and putting the
rest on this raft that they made out of spars
and timber lashed together. It was about a hundred and
(25:29):
forty nine men and one woman who ended up on
the raft, mostly ordinary soldiers and a few low ranking
officers and civilians. And this raft it was it was
fairly large. It was about yeah, it was about twenty
long by seven wide, which doesn't sound large enough to
hold a hundred and fifty people, but it's pretty big,
substantial at least. It had a mast and a sail
(25:51):
and a small deck raised in the center. And the
intention here was that the other boats would tow the
raft to safety the two hundred miles that they were going,
But it became apparent pretty soon that that was not
going to work out. The raff was slowing the other
boats down. It kind of looked rickety like it might
fall apart. So the tow ropes were deliberately cut and
the people on the raft were just left there stranded
(26:14):
with only a few provisions, no navigational equipment. This sad
little sale. They were out of luck, and the situation
from there deteriorated really quickly. By the second day or so,
there was a mutiny and hand to hand fighting that
resulted in about sixty deaths. By the next morning, we
were discussing this, we thought the mutiny happened really fast,
(26:35):
like things got bad really really fast. Yeah, i mean,
I'm thinking just day. Yeah, maybe just desperation being out
there in the hot sun. I think from things I've read,
they just went kind of batty. But yeah, it happened
very fast. Bodies were dumped overboard, and more fighting took
others out soon after that. So from there things only
got worse. Supplies ran out, people had to start drinking
(26:57):
their own urine. Some people were badly injured when their
limbs got caught between shifting spars, and they threw themselves overboard.
Didn't want to be eaten because by the fourth day
all the survivors were practicing cannibalism, and meat was cut
from corpses and dried on the mast before it was eaten,
And by the eighth day, the fittest had taken to
(27:19):
killing the weakest by throwing them overboard to extend the
remaining provisions that they had. I believe that's how the
one woman died. I think she was thrown overboard. Gosh. So,
after about thirteen days total, the survivors were found and
rescued by another ship in the Medusa Convoy, but by
that point there were only fifteen men left. Five of
them died pretty soon after, and two of the remaining
(27:43):
ten on Race Avigny and Alexandra Courriard wrote an account
of what happened and it was published in eighteen seventeen.
That was very bad press for the Bourbon Restoration definitely
became this huge scandal and increased tensions between the Liberal
and the Royalist factions. And um, I believe that the
Royalist factions had to do some basically cover up damage control,
(28:08):
I think is more accurate than cover up. They couldn't
cover up the situation that had happened, but I think
they did try to, you know, pin the blame on
certain parties and try to manage it from that that standpoint.
But most famously, this inspired Tadore Jericho's masterpiece, The Raft
of the Medusa in eighteen nineteen, and we were talking
a little bit about that before. I mean, it's such
a recognizable painting. I'm sure probably all of you have
(28:30):
seen it and maybe just not known that it was
based on a real I never knew the story behind
it until today. So it's pretty interesting piece of art
history knowledge. And it wraps up this podcast nicely too,
I'd say, it really does. I mean a full circle. Yeah,
come full circle with something that you can look at
now and compare to the story, and um that's true
(28:51):
of a couple of cases like the Widow. There's a
traveling exhibition going on of some of the finds from
that shipwrecks and Mary Rose I mentioned there is the
whole museum devoted to that and actually the Edmund Fitzderal too.
There's a Great Lakes Maritime Museum with exhibits on the
Edmund fits d. Thanks so much for joining us on
(29:16):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
(29:38):
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.