General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

General Dumas sounds like a character out of one of his son’s books. Because he pretty much was. His life is a series of dramatic and daring adventures, including an impressive rise up through the ranks of the French military.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. If you've
listened to the show for a while, you've heard us
periodically talk about the accidental two parters, where we got

(00:22):
into an episode that we did not intend to stretch
into two parts but it was so fascinating or so
involved that it did. In today's show is not exactly
an accidental two parter. It's more like an accidental duology.
Because Alexandra Dumont is probably a familiar name to most
of our listeners, there are actually two of those. There's

(00:44):
Alexander duma Pair, the father who wrote things like The
Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and then
his son, Alexander duma Feast, who people call umn that
to try to differentiate between the two of them. He
wrote the play that became the basis for Verity's opera
latch Riata. So Alexandra duma Pair had been on my

(01:04):
list for a really long time, and I had toyed
with the idea of doing kind of a father son
duo package, especially When we started to plan our upcoming
trip to France this June, it seemed particularly appropriate to
get into their stories when we have that on the horizon.
But as I got into this research, I started to
realize that I did not really so much want to

(01:25):
talk about the father son pair of Alexandra's Duma. I
wanted to talk about the elder Alexander and his father,
General Thoma Alexander Duma. Both of their stories are fascinating
and incredibly dramatic, and basically the General sounds like a
character out of one of his son's books because he
pretty much was. And he's even more appropriate to talk

(01:47):
about in connection to this trip that we're taking to Paris,
because a lot of that trip is based around the
French Revolution, which took place while the General was in
the French Army. This episode and the fourth coming One
and his son are there. They're really standalone episodes. You
don't need to listen to one to be able to
understand the other, but there will be some points of
interconnectivity between them. Toma Alexandra Duma was born to Toma

(02:12):
Alexandra Davie de la Pietri. His father was Antoine Alexandra
de Vi Marquis de la Pietrie, who went by Antoine.
Antoine had moved from France to the French colony of
sand Among, which is now Haiti, in the late seventeen thirties.
After moving to the island, Antoine had spent the next
decade more or less freeloading off of his younger brother,

(02:35):
who had married into a family of wealthy sugar planters.
Then in seventeen forty eight, there was some kind of
argument between the two of them that prompted Antoine to
take three of his brothers enslaved laborers, one of whom
was a young woman, and leave that plantation in the
middle of the night. The details are a mystery, but
it seems like there was some sort of family rift

(02:56):
of a major nature at work here or else. Antoine
was just trying to shirk his responsibilities. He did not
tell anyone where he was going, and when his mother
and father died in seventeen fifty seven and seventeen fifty eight,
no one could find any trace of him. He was
the eldest, so they were looking for him pretty hard.
It was later determined that he had moved to the

(03:18):
parish of Jeremy in the southwestern part of the island
and had started going by the name Antoine Delisle or
Antwine of the Island. He also had four children there
with a woman named Marie Cassette duma One of them
was Tama Alexander, who went by alex and was born
on March seventeen sixty two. It's clear from the colonial

(03:41):
record that Marie Cassette was enslaved and that other people
thought the amount of money that Antoine paid for her
was excessive. What isn't clear is whether she and Antoine
were later married. To discourage the births of biracial children,
colonial law imposed fines on white men who fathered children
with enslave women, regardless of who was enslaving them at

(04:02):
the time, but this fee was waived and the mother
and her children were freed if the father married her.
Alex's son Alexander Dumas, would later write that his grandparents
had been married, but there is no written documentation of
that marriage ever happening. After Antoine absconded to Jeremy, his

(04:23):
younger brother Charles, went back to France. He maintained that
he was the oldest of his late parents surviving children,
and he took control of the family's estates, and he
started a smuggling operation back on the island of Espaniola,
moving sugar and enslaved people through a port that was
known as Monte Cristo on the border between Spanish and
French territory. In seventeen seventy five, after both of Antoine's

(04:46):
brothers had ruined most of their own investments and died,
Antoine returned to France with his birth certificate as proof
of who he was, ready to take control of his
family estates and start up a series of legal fights
with his surviving family members. To finance the trip, he
had sold his children and their mother when it came

(05:07):
to Tuma Alexander, though he made the sale conditional so
that he could buy him back once he had access
to his money in France. He never saw his other
children again. So alex was fourteen when this happened, and
he arrived in France on August seventeen seventy six. He
was listed on the ship's manifest as the slave Alexandra,

(05:29):
but once he was reunited with his father, he was
treated more like the teenage son of an aristocrat. His
father legally recognized him as his own and started giving
him the kind of education that was expected of somebody
of his station. Alex hadn't had much formal education at
all in Senti Mangus, so he was way behind his peers.
He started spending his days with tutors and fencing instructors

(05:52):
in the like, learning everything from classical languages to European
style hunting. They learned very quickly, though, and he seemed
to become quite skilled at whatever he put his mind to.
He also started adjusting to French society. Back in Saint
among they had been in a community in which a
lot of the people around them were black or multi racial,
but in France, most of the people around them were white.

(06:14):
He definitely was not the only free person of color
in France's more affluent society, though many had come to
France in much the same way that Alex had. They
were the children of affluent frenchmen who had spent time
in the Caribbean colonies and fathered children with enslaved or
free women of color. This was in spite of the
sorts of laws that we mentioned before, which attempted to

(06:36):
discourage into racial marriages and the births of multi racial children.
Either in or out of wedlock. Some of these people
of color had also become quite prominent. For example, Joseph Boulong,
the Chevalier de Saint George, had been born in Guadaloupe
to a white father and a free black woman in
seventeen forty five. The Chevalier was reportedly the best swordsman

(06:58):
in all of France, and he was also a composer
who was nicknamed Black Mozart. He would also play a
part in Alex's military life later on, which we will
get to. Alex and his father had an extravagant and
lavish lifestyle, and as he got older, Alex increasingly traveled
to Paris, which was about a three hour trip from
their estate. He moved there in the spring of seventeen

(07:20):
eighty four at the age of twenty two. The free
black community in Paris was often viewed with this combination
of derision and curiosity. They simultaneously faced discrimination and also
we're almost admired as kind of exotic and unique, and
Alex's case in particular, he was frequently described as having

(07:40):
an extremely handsome face, an excellent build, and a lovely
skin color. But he was also, as one example, arrested
at a theater in September of seventeen eighty four after
a naval officer and his companions started harassing the woman
that Alex was escorting. When Alex tried to warn them off,
they called him her lackey and then started hurling racist

(08:03):
taunts at him. On February seventeen eighty six, Alex's father,
who was in his seventies, married his thirty three year
old housekeeper, Marie Francois. The marquis started focusing his money
on his new wife rather than on his son. Alex
had no way to support himself, so about two weeks
after the wedding, which he appears not to have attended,

(08:25):
he decided to join the army. Let's talk about that
more after a sponsor break. Becoming an army officer was
a very common employment for young men in the French
nobility in the eighteenth century. As long as they could
prove that they had four generations of nobility on their

(08:48):
father's side, they were entitled to become commissioned officers, and
Alex had that, but France also had discriminatory race laws
that made it a lot harder for him to actually
claim it, so He told his father that he was
just going to enlist as a private, and it did
not even matter to him which unit he enlisted in.
He was just gonna go join whichever one he found first.

(09:09):
According to his son's memoirs, the marquis told him, quote,
that is all very fine, but as I am the
Marquis de la Pietry, a colonel and Commissary General of Artillery,
I will not allow you to drag my name in
the mire of the lowest ranks of the army. His
father was kind of a jerk, that was not clear.

(09:30):
So alex joined the army under his mother's name, describing
himself as quote, son of Antoine and Sissette Duma, which
is just the shadiest way to do that in terms
of the way he was talking about his father. And
from that point on he was just known as Alexandra Duma,
also dropping the Tomah part of his name for the

(09:52):
most part. He joined the Queen's Dragoons on June two six,
and this was not at all a prestigious unit. They
were often on the lines and the dirtiest and most
dangerous parts of battle, basically treated as cannon fider. So
not only had he become a private. He had become
a private in a unit that his father would not
have approved of at all. Then just a couple of

(10:13):
weeks later, on June, his father died. It does not
appear that Alex was there, and he wasn't one of
the signatures on the death certificate. I find it, uh
like I have this little bit of uh gleefulness about
the fact that his father was so concerned about the
family name and then almost immediately died, had not really

(10:36):
needing to have worried about it. Soon though, Alex was
developing quite the reputation as a soldier, and he was
also reportedly very strong and very fond of doing strongman
style stunts like hopping across the room while carrying two
other men, or grabbing an overhead bar while he was
on horseback and then lifting the horse up with his legs,

(10:57):
or do not do this ever, please, putting each of
his fingers into the mouth of a musket and then
lifting them all up by flattening out his hand. And
he was also extremely fond of dueling, which was illegal
amongst civilians in France at this point, but tolerated within
the army. At one point he reportedly fought three duels

(11:17):
in one day while injured from the first of them.
Unsurprisingly given his fondness for dueling. He was also known
for having a very hot temper and for speaking very
freely when he was angry. This is the kind of
thing where I read this list of crazy things he did,
and I just want to go, what is wrong with you? Like, well,

(11:41):
especially the horse thing. That was probably some kind of
a stunt, but yeah, especially the musket thing, Why would
you do that? What's wrong with you? What is wrong
with you? Like I suddenly become I don't know, somebody's mom,
what is wrong with you? Has has your brain been damaged? Like?

(12:02):
Why did you do this? Uh? But anyway, Dumont joined
the army during the prelude to the French Revolution so
quick recamp in the late eighteenth century. Among France's three estates,
which were the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, the
clergy and nobility held all the power, even though the
commoners vastly outnumbered them. The nation was nearly bankrupt and

(12:24):
the common people were facing food shortages, and the food
that was available was astronomically expensive. Violence and unrest grew
during this time. As the commoners pushed back against poverty
and oppression. The six Dragoons spent most of this time
stationed in the countryside north of Paris, fairly removed from
all of the things that were happening just to the south. Okay,

(12:46):
this was definitely not confined only to Paris, but they
just were in a place that was a little bit
off the beaten path from what was happening. The revolution
really got going in seventeen eighty nine, and the face
of going unrest, King Louis the sixteenth summoned the Estates
in General, which represented all three Estates, for a meeting
that was to be held on May fifth, eighty nine,

(13:08):
and then that June, after negotiations failed to get anywhere,
the Third Estate, which represented the commoners, formed the National Assembly.
They vowed to work on constitutional reforms. Revolutionaries stormed the
bast Deal on July fourteenth. In October five, women march
on Versailles to demand relief for the ongoing food shortages
and demand that the King and the Queen returned to Paris.

(13:31):
We have an episode on that in the archive. In
the weeks between the storming of the Best Deal, in
the Women's March under sigh Alex Duma was finally called
into action. In August seventeen eighty nine, a detachment from
the six dragoons were summoned to the defense of the
town of Ville Cotre in northern France, which was being
threatened by rioters. The person who called for this aid

(13:53):
was Claude Laboret, who was the innkeeper of Lottel de
lecu in v a Contre. He had just been elected
the head of the town's national guard, and since the
town had no barracks, the dragoons who came to help
had to be billeted in the homes of various people
around the town. Labret was so impressed with Duma that
he invited him to stay at the end, and that

(14:16):
first night Dumont met Laborat's daughter, Marie Louise. She described
him as quote a fine figure of a man, and
they were engaged on December sixth, sev nine, with her
father giving his approval as long as they waited until
Duma was promoted to sergeant to actually marry, and that
promotion happened in seventeen two, and they married on November

(14:38):
twenty eighth of that year. In the intervening years, Duma
remained stationed in northern France or across the border in
what was then the Austrian Empire after France declared war
on Austria in April of seventeen. During those years, Duma
really made a name for himself through dramatic and daring exploits, including,
for example, cutting off a group of Austrian soldiers that

(15:01):
were on horseback and taking them prisoner without firing a
single shot, and then donating his share of the prize
from that capture to the nation of France. He had
a reputation for being a really exceptional soldier and leader,
always on the side of justice and freedom. His upbringing
in Sandoman probably served him really well in all of this.

(15:22):
He had become quite the stereotypical aristocrat after moving to
France with his father, but as French society reformed itself
during the Revolution, he was able to drop a lot
of those more aristocratic traits, draw on his more humble upbringing,
and keep the respect of the soldiers from the lower
and middle classes. Starting in late sev Dumal was promoted

(15:44):
up through the ranks incredibly quickly, being commissioned as a
second lieutenant, then promoted to first lieutenant then brigadier, all
in a matter of months. And as that was happening,
France was also expanding its military might. The Republic of
France had been called Gring neighboring Territory and had also
offered its support to other nations that wanted to fight

(16:05):
for their own freedom. But the existing French military and
the mercenaries that had been hired to supplement it weren't
big enough to support all of this, so the nation
had allowed the establishment of free legions, which were separate
from the regular French army. One of these was the
Free Legion of Americans and of the South, which was
made up entirely of freemen of color. At this point

(16:28):
in French history, people of color in France were generally
referred to as Americans, whether they were from the America's
or not, and then often American colonists, regardless of their race,
were also called Americans. It was a little confusing. This
would later be nicknamed La le jon noir or the
Black Legion. La le gen Noir was started by Joseph Boulogne,

(16:51):
Chevalier de Saint George, who naturally wanted Duma as one
of his officers. However, Duma was already spoken for. He
had joined another free legion, the Hussars of Liberty and Equality,
started by Colonel Joseph Boyer, and the colonel and the
Chevalier basically had a bidding war as each of them
tried to lure Duma away from the other. Dumas finally

(17:12):
joined the Legend Noir after the chevalier promised him the
rank of lieutenant colonel. He was commissioned in that legion
on January tenth, seventeen ninety three, and even though Duma
was technically second in command, the Chevalier wasn't all that
interested in actually running things, so he mostly just left
Duma to it. This legion didn't last very long, though,

(17:33):
it was chronically underfunded, really short on supplies, and the
Chevalier was suspected of some criminal activity. The legion was
disbanded just a few months after Duma joined it, but
on July seventeen ninety three, he was made brigadier general
of the French Army of the North, and then five
days after that he was made the General Commander in
chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. This made

(17:55):
him the highest ranking black man in the French army
with tens of thousands of mostly white soldiers under his command,
something that would not happen again for hundreds of years afterward.
But in seventeen ninety four, Dumas fortunes started to shift,
and we'll get to that after we first have a
sponsor break. In the seventeen nineties, alex Dema was described

(18:24):
as the finest soldier in the world as the French
Revolution morphed into the reign of terror. He was also
nicknamed Mr. Humanity for pushing back against senseless violence and slaughter,
and for ordering his men not to take unfair advantage
of the people in the towns that they captured. He
had a reputation for integrity and for making wise decisions

(18:45):
rather than rash ones, and for being merciful as much
as possible in the role of a military commander. But
he was also still very stubborn. He still had a
hot headed streak, and he was still pretty vocal about
his opinions. In seventeen ninety four, these traits were nearly
his undoing. While fighting in the Alps that January, he
was ordered to capture two mountain passes, which were at

(19:06):
that time totally impassable due to heavy snow and ice.
Duma thought this was a foolish and probably fatal course
of action, so he refused to do it until the
weather improved. There were also reports that he destroyed a
guillotine and used it as firewood for his men who
had no other way to keep warm, and all of
this raised suspicion that he was a counter revolutionary. This

(19:30):
was in spite of the fact that his very vocal
opinions had been the opposite of that the entire time.
But soon he had been denounced by the local Jacobin Club,
which was one of the French revolutions more radical organizations.
The Committee of Public Safety, which acted as France's executive
government during the Reign of Terror, summoned Dumont back to Paris,

(19:51):
and he probably would have faced execution if he had
gotten there, But before he could go, Maximilian Robespierre, who
was the head of the committee, was himself behead it. Eventually,
Duma was cleared of all the charges against him, in
part because he did go capture those passes once he
thought it was prudent to do so. But he was
moved to a less prestigious posting given command of the

(20:14):
Army of the West, where he was sent to fight
against a royalist uprising. When he got there, though, he
was horrified to discover that the Army of the West
had shifted from fighting and uprising to terrorizing ordinary people
for its own gain. It was also full of new
recruits who had no military training at all and seemed
to be fighting just for sport. So Duma fired the

(20:37):
chief of staff and started reorganizing the army, training all
the new recruits and trying to shape the Army of
the West into an organized and efficient unit and, in
his words quote remind the rank and file of a
love of justice and upstanding comportment. In sevent Duma met
Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine. Napoleon had taken command

(20:59):
of the Army Italy, and Duma served under him during
Napoleon's Italian campaign, and although there are documents in which
Napoleon described Duma with respect and admiration, almost immediately the
two men did not get along. The central issue was
one of the things that had gotten Duma into trouble
during the Reign of Terror. Duma believed in fighting for liberty,

(21:21):
not for conquest and thought that civilians should be actively
protected during warfare, but Napoleon's outlook was increasingly focused on
conquest and dominance. During the Italian campaign, Duma was part
of the successful siege of Mantua, but when Napoleon wrote
up his report after it was all over, he praised
every other officer involved except for Duma. Duma was really

(21:43):
angry about this, and angry that instead of being given
a division of his own to command, he was placed
under another officer that he didn't get along with. In
spite of all of that, as the French army tried
to drive the Austrians out of Italy in the early
months of seventeen Dumat so persistent and so effective that
the Austrians nicknamed him the Black Devil. In March of

(22:05):
that year, he was injured in battle after his horse
was shot out from under him. He was given leave
to go home and recover, and he stayed at Ville
Cotre with his wife and their daughter. He had been
able to make trips home over the years, and they
had had two children by this point, but one had
died of an illness or accident. While Duma was fighting

(22:26):
in the Italian campaign, In sevent Duma once again joined
Napoleon's army, this time to fight in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
This was Napoleon's attempt to cut off Britain from its
colonies in India during the Napoleonic Wars by taking control
of Egypt, and during this campaign, Napoleon found another reason
to dislike Duma. We mentioned earlier in the show about

(22:48):
how Duma was very tall and was considered to be
extremely well built and attractive, and when Dama and Napoleon
rode in together, people assumed that Duma was the one
in comma end Napoleon took this very personally. I know
it caused all sorts of legitimate trouble, but I have
to laugh at the hubris involved uh Duma's opinions and

(23:12):
temper continued to get him in trouble in Egypt. In
addition to the issues of integrity and rules of warfare
that Duma had carried all through his time in the military,
he was frustrated that Napoleon apparently had no plan to
abolish slavery in Egypt. As always, Duma was vocal about
this frustration, and on July nine, Napoleon sent someone to

(23:34):
spy on a meeting among Duma and other officers. After
getting a report back that Duma was bad mouthing him
at this meeting, Napoleon threatened to shoot him. On August one,
seventeen ninety eight, Napoleon suffered a major defeat at the
Battle of the Nile, also known as the Battle of
abukir Bay. Admiral Horatio Nelson and the British navy destroyed

(23:55):
nearly all of the French fleet, and that cut off
Napoleon's army in Egypt. The French military and Egypt started
to crumble and withdraw Dama fought off an uprising in
Cairo before trying to return home to France, but he
was shipwrecked on the way off the coast of Toronto
in Naples, which had fallen to insurgents. He was taken
prisoner and kept in a dungeon for almost two years.

(24:19):
While he was imprisoned, Duma's wife had no idea where
he was or if he was even alive. She wrote
numerous letters to everyone she could think of in the government,
trying to get someone to find him and, if he
was alive, to bring him home, but she had trouble
getting anyone's attention. This wasn't just because of Napoleon's ongoing
animosity against her husband. France was at war and had

(24:43):
other issues to deal with. The first diplomatic efforts to
track down Duma finally started just days before the Coup
of eighteen Bluemire, which began on November nine. This coup
effectively ended the French Revolution and established Napoleon Bonaparte as
the government's first console. It also meant that nearly everyone

(25:04):
Marie Louise had contacted to try to find her husband
was removed from the government during the coup. As his
wife was trying to find help for him, Duma was
also trying to negotiate for his own release from prison,
but without any success. Once he finally was released at
the end of eighteen o one, it was part of
an armistice between France and Naples, which included a deal

(25:25):
for all French prisoners of war to be repatriated to France.
By this point, those twenty months in a dungeon had
taken an enormous toll. Zuma was in very poor health.
He was partially paralyzed and deaf in one ear, and
extremely sick. He was also denied his pension and back
pay for his time in the service, and was only

(25:45):
able to get home to via Corterey because another officer
gave him money out of his own pocket. The Dumal
family fell into extreme poverty, but on July two, Alex
Dumont and Marie Louise Eliza at le Bray welcomed his
son Alexandra, who Alex absolutely doated on for the rest

(26:05):
of his life, along with doating on his wife. They
really seemed to love each other very intensely throughout their marriage.
Their personal poverty was not the only issue affecting the
duma family. Slavery had been abolished in French territory during
the French Revolution, and people of color had also been
granted full citizenship rights in seventeen ninety four, but in

(26:27):
eighteen o two, Napoleon reinstated slavery, and after naming himself
Emperor of France two years later, he started rolling back
those other racial reforms. He started ejecting black members of
the military and enforcing segregation and banning interracial marriages. Retired
military officers of color were prohibited from living in Paris

(26:49):
or the surrounding area, and there was a whites only
zone that was created around Paris. All of us included
the Dumah home, which forced the family to have to
seek special permission to continue living there. For the next
few years, the Duma family struggled. Alex at least somewhat
recovered his health, although he never regained the kind of
vigor that he had had before his imprisonment. He died

(27:12):
on February eighteen o six at the age of forty four.
The likely cause of death was stomach cancer, possibly from
being poisoned while he was imprisoned, but Napoleon's attitude towards
Dumont didn't really change after his death. Marie Louise was
denied a window's pension, and the young Alexandra later wrote

(27:32):
that he was barred from attending French military school or
civil college. Long after the general's death, a statue was
put up in his honor, but it was later destroyed
by the Nazis. As we said at the top of
the show, Alex's life sounds like it could have been
one of his son's books. Specifically, Alexander L. Duma cited
a number of inspirations for his famous work The Count

(27:54):
of Monte Cristo, but the character of Edmund Dante was
undoubtedly influenced by his father. They're particularly in his wrongful imprisonment.
That work has similarities to an earlier shorter work called
Simply George, whose main character is described as Lulato. More
on Duma's work next time, And if you want more

(28:16):
about the general, Tom Rice's The Black Count, which came
out in two twelve and won the thirteen Pulitzer Prize
for Biography or Autobiography along with other awards, is a
great read. It has so much more detail about all
the particulars of Duma's upbringing and military service, plus a
lot more details on all the many, many things that

(28:36):
were going on in French history and the French Revolution
and the rise of Napoleon during all of this. An
announcement also came out in twenty fourteen that John Legends
Production Company bought the film rights to this book. So
maybe there will be a movie I would watch that
I would too, especially because I think that clothes would
be fantastic that they would. You have a listener, mail,

(29:02):
I sure do. This is from Kel, and Kel says, first,
let me give you a warning that this is going
to be a Hodgepodge of an email. I am a
theater artist living in New Orleans with a degree in
staging Shakespeare. So I've been loving your recent spate of
early modern history, as well as your nods to my
current locale. I was interested to learn about the Pelican
Girls and the Petticoat Insurrection during your Six Impossible episodes

(29:25):
Deja Vu in the US and Canada. I have never
heard of those two, but of course I had heard
of the Casket Girls. Their conflation into vampire lore always
made me giggle, because casket can mean a box or
a chest in English too, especially in the early modern period.
My famous example of this is in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice,
where Porsche's father makes her suitors choose one of three

(29:47):
caskets with riddles written on them. Whoever chooses the correct
casket gets to marry her. For now, we will set
aside all comments about whether that's a good way to
choose a spouse. The Casket Girls story certainly change, does
the way we used that word evolved. I've always wondered
if they were so sensationalized before Interview with a Vampire
revved up the New Orleans slash vampire connection or whether

(30:11):
that developed as a result of it. Kel goes on
to ask whether we made it to the New Orleans
Museum of Art while we were visiting. We did not,
but we definitely hope to go back to New Orleans
at some time. I'm going next month and I'm totally going. Okay,
Holly has plans. Kel ends with a few episode suggestions.

(30:32):
Thank you so much. Kill. I continue to just be
really amused by the whole idea that somehow people were
like those girls have boxes, therefore their vampires, and also
they're pale, so their vampires. It's not as though it
was totally normal to be very pale after being in
the hold of a ship and carry your box stuff

(30:53):
around in a box. I don't know it checks out anyway.
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(31:15):
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(31:37):
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