5 Shipwreck Stories

From the sinking of Black Sam's Wydah to the Medusa's disastrous accident off the African coast, history is rife with tales of shipwrecks. Listen in as Sarah and Deblina as they discuss the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Mary Rose, the Medusa, the Vrouw Maria and the Whydah.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding, and today
you're in for a treat because we're going to be
talking about five pretty amazing shipwrecks. And the really cool

(00:22):
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 seventies something comments just on Facebook. Yeah.
I think we could do a shipwreck only podcast series
for the next six months from how Stuff No kidding, Um,

(00:43):
so we're only gonna do five for this episode, but
we might be tempted to revisit this again because you
all know that I like shipwrecks. I think Deblina, you're
certainly growing to like them. Yeah, I love I love
shipwreck stories, that's 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,

(01:04):
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 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

(01:25):
think the recovery efforts alone are really interesting stories. We
talked about that a little bit when we were discussing
those Roman shipwrecks last fall. You know, just the recovery
effort is it's pretty interesting, all of the people who
work on it, the archaeological work, all the fish sauce
involved sauce. Yeah, that was right. I forgot about that.
Thanks for thanks for reminding me. But anyways, we're gonna

(01:49):
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 realm Arie a shipwreck, and
I just thought it was so neat. 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,

(02:10):
and it tied 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 fram Maria.
So in the nineteen seventies of Dr Christian Allstrom found
documents in the Finnish National Archives relating to a sunken
Dutch merchant ship. And that's the ship we're talking about
right now. Yeah, I have been traveling from Amsterdam to St.
Petersburg and it sank in a storm in the Baltic

(02:33):
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 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

(02:53):
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 firm area a really popular enterprise with among
amateur divers throughout the nineteen seventies, but it wasn't until
nine that the society dedicated to the search found the wreck,

(03:17):
the actual wreck using side scan sonar. Yeah, our old friend,
side skin sonar. How do you find ships these days?
So the remains that they found were remarkably well preserved.
Ninety percent of the whole is intact, and this makes
it a really great way to learn about Dutch ship
building at the time and what a Dutch like, what
a typical Dutch merchant ship would have been like, because

(03:39):
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 might still be inside.
That's the real kicker. Because we have the custom toll
records in Denmark and the log of the salvage items
and that let's just know some of the luxury items

(03:59):
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 think would be on
the ship. No fish oil though, no fish oil. But
there was also some cargo listed as assorted merchandise, and

(04:20):
this was likely valuable luxury items, some of which were
also salvaged, and that included things like books, mirrors with
gilt 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, but still. But the
treasure ship reputation that this wreck has comes from the
fact that the Frown Maria was on an art run

(04:40):
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 Catherine 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 as a cultural capital,
cultural enter that was equal to the Courts and the

(05:03):
rest of Europe. And to do that, 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 up these art deals for
her and build the collection. And in July seventeen seventy

(05:25):
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 on some of these nice paintings.
So what was lost in this wreck of those paintings,

(05:47):
because we know that she ordered them, but she bought them,
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 from nineteen sixty one, we
can guess that the works were mostly of Dutch Golden
Age painters um including Jan van Goyen, who made an

(06:07):
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,
but our big question is if the paintings went down
with the ship. Are they still down there and what

(06:28):
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
they were packaged, because if they were stored in crates
in their frames, they probably would have been destroyed a

(06:50):
long time ago. They would be sitting in water since
seventeen seventies. But here's the interesting part. If they were
cut from their frames and roll 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
rolled up and then stored in a lead sealed box.
There's a slim chance that they would still be down

(07:13):
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 collection. Pretty cool. So our
next ship, we're gonna switch gears a little bit and
go from a merchant ship with art to a pirate

(07:35):
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 Widow shipwreck actually begins with
a bit of a love story involving a pirate named
Samuel Black sam Bellamy. People really tried to pitch us

(07:56):
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,
around age twenty seven, to pursue a career as a
New England merchant captain. And when he got there, he

(08:18):
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 Maria,
so they refused to allow them to marry. So he
decides he's going to set off and make enough money

(08:39):
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, he realized that the ship really didn't
have anything of worth that he could use to build

(08:59):
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 Hornegold, whose crew at one
point included Edward Teach, also known as black Beard. We
all know that name. I think Hornigal is kind of
a pirate mentor it seems. Yeah, he actually mentored a
bunch of famous pirates. But by seventeen sixteen, Bellamy had

(09:23):
actually overthrown him, so the student had become the master,
so to speak. He led a mutiny against Tornigold 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 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

(09:45):
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 because it was an enormous ship. I mean, it
would be the pinnacle of anyone's career. Was a three
hundred ton ship, hundred foot long galley, and it was

(10:06):
practically brand new too. It had been built in beneath
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
intended to work the triangle trade, you know, connecting Africa,
West Indies England. And so it had a lot of

(10:27):
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 we go.
That's a pirate ship. Definitely happened yeah, definitely worth going after.
And Bellamy did. His ships chased the Widow for three
days before they finally captured it. And when he finally

(10:50):
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
the Sultana, so it's consolation 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

(11:13):
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
coast on April sev seventeen, just as the Widow was
sailing into Cape Cod. Yeah, and it was pretty bad.
Wind gusts top seventy miles an hour, and the seas

(11:33):
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
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

(11:54):
the end, and Bellamy was not one of them. Well,
and the two guys who survived didn't have a gray
deal either when they came out of it. One of them,
Thomas Davis, who is a Welshman, was tried as a
pirate in Boston, although it is through him that we
have this story. The other John Julian, managed to escape,
but it is there Davis this testimony that we learned

(12:16):
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 treasure site for a lot of folks. Yeah,
And luckily a cartographer 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,

(12:37):
his journal, and his letters to search for the Widow,
and Clifford managed to find the shipwreck site in ninety four,
and since then he's led several expeditions and recovered a
lot of the ship's crib a lot of it up,
haven't they, Yeah, including cannons, coins, and probably most significantly,
at least in the beginning, a ship's bell inscribed with

(12:59):
the words the wind a Galley seventeen sixteen. Yeah, and
our 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 without a doubt.

(13:20):
And I don't know if it's just because of the
Gordon Lightfoot song or because it's fairly recent, but this
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

(13:40):
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.
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world
in surface area. It's hundred feet deep and three fifty
miles wide. It averages forty degree is fahrenheit year round

(14:01):
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
only way to really escape the storms that brew up
on the lake is to enter Whitefish Bay. And so
consequently Whitefish Point, which is at the approach of the bay,

(14:21):
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
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 in Minnesota to steel mills on

(14:42):
the Lower Lakes near Detroit. So on November nine, the
ship left Superior, Wisconsin with twenty six thousand, one hundred
and sixteen long tons of tacon nite pellets, which is
basically processed iron ore. Yeah, but the weather got bad
really quickly, and so the often ernest McSorley stayed close
to another freighter called the Arthur m Anderston, which was

(15:05):
captain 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,
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,

(15:26):
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, there's spray. I mean,
you can imagine what a great lake storm is probably like. Right.
So that afternoon, McSorley radios to Cooper that his ship

(15:47):
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
keeps on getting worse though. Yeah, at about six five,
a monster wave comes down on the Anderson and the
ship kind of pops up and there's another hit, and

(16:09):
I think Captain Bernie Cooper describes it as sort of
like shaking off water like a wet dog. Yeah, his ship.
But then he also says, quote, I watched those two
waves head down the lake towards the Fitzgerald, and I
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 mc sorley's last words, where

(16:30):
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
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

(16:51):
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
were ever recovered. In the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society
started dives and they did recover the bell, as we mentioned,

(17:11):
leaving a memorial replica in its place, and as Sarah
mentioned also as we started the section, the Gordon Lightfoot's
nineteen seventy six ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
made the wreck famous. It's pretty well known, So 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

(17:36):
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 Portsmouth caught
his gear on something, and lucky for him, an early
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

(17:58):
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,
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

(18:20):
thing is largely forgotten. You wouldn't think that Henry the
eighth 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,
when a man named Alexander McKee takes an interest in
the wreck and starts recruiting people with access to side
skins sonar of course, to check out the site, and

(18:41):
over the next few years, nineteen thousand artifacts are recovered
and by night two the ship was actually raised, which
was a huge international news story. It's installed in a
museum today. But the really interesting thing about the mary
Rose is because it did sink so quickly, unfortunately the

(19:02):
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 their belongings with personal markings, even if they were illiterate.
So really fascinating. Yeah, So it's interesting in that way,

(19:23):
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
father's left him of a modest navy for the time.
There are five ships. I know that sounds ridiculously small,

(19:45):
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 beef up his navy, because the French navy is
quite formidable. Yeah, so Henry commissions a couple of modern

(20:08):
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 would have carried the Lord High Admiral. And
during the Second French War the mary Rose is the

(20:28):
vice flagship. Though very important, 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 guns and made it a lot heavier, but by
it was definitely ready to fight. In the third French War,

(20:51):
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
chain and all to engage the Brits somewhere between the
Isle of Wight and mainland England. So early during the
battle on July nineteenth, something goes wrong for the Mary Rose.
It keels over and water starts to pour in through

(21:13):
her gun ports, and before anyone can do a thing,
the ship just thinks, 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 the ship. So what happened. For a long time
historians have chalked up the sinking to some combination of

(21:33):
wind and tied and handling air, but the French have
long assumed that they were responsible for thinking the ship,
and in two thousand nine some new research came out
that suggesting might have been right. Yeah. University of Ports
Smith geographer Dominic Fontana used geographical information systems technology data
from the recovery, tidal current patterns and skeletal remains to

(21:57):
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 friend. They could fight back, shifting
the 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

(22:20):
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 than to admit yeah, Francis E. Sunchor ship. Yeah,
that still fascinates me, the fact that you'd rather make

(22:41):
a mistake, And conveniently enough, that ties us into our
final entry for this list, where there's also a little
bit of 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 rifying it
was almost more famous than the shipwreck itself. So the

(23:04):
story starts during the Bourbon restoration. You may remember that
from our recently fan series, Yeah, definitely. Um Napoleon was
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,

(23:26):
Colonel Julian Schmaltz, was on board. So in July second,
eighteen sixteen, the ship ran aground off the west coast
of Africa, 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,

(23:49):
he was recently returned from exile, and it said that
he got the gig because he was pro Bourbon, and
the king's ministers were obviously looking to put those kind
of guys in power or 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 Medusa over

(24:11):
the next couple of days, but they didn't have any luck,
so they moved on to Plan B because they really
wanted to 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 d and fifty passengers into six

(24:33):
lifeboats and putting the rest on this raft that they
made out of spars and timber lashed together. It was
about a hundred and 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. Yeah, it
was about twenty long by seven wide, which doesn't sound

(24:56):
large enough to hold a hundred and fifty people, but
it's pretty big substantial at least. It had a massed
in a sail and a small deck raised in the center.
And the intention here was that the other boats would
tow the raft to safety this two d 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

(25:17):
like it might fall apart, So the tow ropes were
deliberately cut and the people on the raft were just
left there stranded 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 in hand to

(25:39):
hand fighting that resulted in about sixty deaths. By the
next morning, we were discussing this. We thought the mutiny
happened really fast, 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

(26:02):
fighting took others out soon after that, so from there
things only got worse. Supplies ran out, people had to
start drinking 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

(26:22):
meat was cut from corpses and dried on the mast
before it was eaten, and by the eighth day, the
fittest had taken to 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 in Gosh. So after about thirteen days total,
the survivors were found and rescued by another ship in

(26:46):
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 ten, on Race Avigny and
Alexandra Courriard, wrote an account of what happened and was
published in eighteen seventeen. That was very bad press for
the Bourbon Restoration, definitely. It became this huge scandal and

(27:08):
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, 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

(27:30):
this inspired ted Or 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 seen it and
maybe just not known that it was based on a
real I never knew the story behind it until today.
It's pretty interesting piece of art history knowledge and it

(27:52):
wraps up this podcast nicely too, I'd say, it really does.
I mean a full circle, yeah, come full circle was
something that you can look at now and compare to
the story, and um, that's true 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 a whole museum devoted to that,

(28:13):
and actually the Edmund Fitzgerald too. There's a Great Lakes
Maritime Museum with exhibits on the Edmund Fitzgerald. So probably
wherever you are in the world, you can go visit
some of the shipwreck museums and check out artifacts and
we'll get pictures and maps and send us postcards. Yes,
and us postcards because we like them and that brings

(28:34):
us a listener mail. Yeah, we have one postcard here
actually from Michael in Malaysia and he says, Dear Sarah Deblena,
I'm a Fulbright scholar in Malaysia and I really enjoy
listening to your podcast. One fascinating bit of history that
I came across during my time here is the story
of the so called White Rajas of Sarah Walk, a

(28:56):
family of Englishmen, the Brooks, who founded a dynasty that
ruled Malaysian Borneo for more than a hundred years, often
called the Kings of the head Hunters. It's an incredible
tale that would make for a terrific podcast. Thanks for
making history so much fun. All right, thank you Michael
for the suggestion. I think this has actually been suggested
before this topic, so maybe it's one that we'll have

(29:17):
to look into well. And I think I'm going to
have to put that postcard up, like right in front
of my computer if i'm things, since it's very picture izue,
it's so trying. The beach scene there's like a palm
tree and the sunset. Sure to calm you down in
my deadline. Pretty nice when I'm researching about shipwrecks um our.
Next email is from Angela in Mozambique, and she wrote,

(29:39):
I just wanted to write to tell you how much
I love and appreciate your podcast. I'm currently serving as
a Community Health Peace Corps volunteer in Mozambique, and every
time I'm able to get internet access, downloading your podcast
is the first thing that I do. In fact, I'm
such a fan that I've been spreading the stuff you
missed in history class love to other volunteers all over

(30:00):
the country, and you've become quite popular among our numbers
on behalf of all of us. Thanks for filling our
red houses with entertainment and great info. I just thought
this was so so sweet, and I'm really glad that
all these Peace Corps volunteers in Mosabeque are listening to
the podcast. Yeah that's pretty rad. Yeah. She also suggests
great Zimbabwe Queen of Sheba rumors all kinds of eque stuff.

(30:24):
So thank you, Angela, and uh, thank you Michael. So
keep sending us your ideas. You can email us at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com, or you
can look us up on Twitter at myston history or
on Facebook, and if you want to learn a little
bit more about how to survive a shipwreck? Should you?
We hope you don't. Let's just put us out there.

(30:46):
We really hope you don't get in a situation. But
we do have an article on our website called how
to Survive a ship wreck. Good to be prepared. It's
good to be prepared for any situation, so you can
look that up read a little bit about it on
our homepage at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff

(31:08):
works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click
on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of
our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone app has a ride.
Download it today on iTunes.