The South Sea Bubble

In the early 18th century, Britain needed money. In 1711, the South Sea Company was established to try to manage this debt, and the heart of the debt consolidation the company arranged was a debt-for-equity swap that did NOT keep the nation from incurring more debt. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Back in,
I wanted to do an episode on the south Sea
Bubble because that was its three anniversary, and for various reasons,

(00:25):
that just did not happen. But I saw a random
joke on Twitter recently that referenced both the south Sea
Bubble and tulip Mania, and I thought, hey, let's go
take another look at that. One of the one of
the reasons I did not do with south Sea Bubble
episode back in is that at that time, a lot

(00:46):
of the resources that I found were written by economists
and economic historians. They were really, really in the weeds
on their financial jargon, and some of them read like
there weren't people involved in this, It was just market forces.
It was all money and concepts. Yeah, it's like, that's

(01:09):
not the approach that we take on our show. So
a big upside of my procrastination is that a ton
of new stuff came out in late and then all
through that was geared more toward a general audience and
not toward other economists. And then was written from a
historical perspective. That's more like our approach of our show.

(01:31):
So back to the top of the list it went.
The south Sea Bubble happened alongside a similar bubble in
France that was known as the Mississippi Bubble, and in
some ways these two financial bubbles were interconnected. I thought
about making this episode cover both of them, but it
turns out that they're similar enough in big chunks of

(01:53):
it that there were parts that were almost repeated but
not exactly, but then also difference enough that there was
a key passage that involved an unwieldy explanation two different times.
So I pitched that idea. We will talk a little
about the Mississippi Bubble, but the south Sea Bubble is

(02:13):
the primary focus here. In the early eighteenth century, Britain
needed money. The Nine Years War, also known as the
War of the Grand Alliance, had stretched from sixteen eighty
nine to sixteen ninety seven, and then the War of
the Spanish Succession started in seventeen o one. As a result,
Britain was deeply in debt, with much of that debt

(02:36):
involving navy contractors. It had reached a point where some
of them were refusing to provide service beyond its actual
involvement in the war. The Royal Navy was also protecting
British ships from pirates, enemy warships, and enemy trading ships,
so Britain really could not afford to jeopardize it. This
was happening alongside some changes in the world of British finance.

(03:00):
British periodicals had started printing lists of stock prices around
sixteen seventy nine. Then in sixteen a man named John
Casting started posting price lists for stocks and commodities and
other investments at Jonathan's Coffee House is founded by Jonathan
Miles Coffee houses in London's Financial District, where where stockbrokers

(03:23):
worked a lot of the time, and Jonathan's Coffee House
was one of the busiest. For this purpose, Casting's price
list became a newspaper that was called Course of the Exchange.
This was really the first time that all of these
prices were brought together in one place and published in
a way that was easily and publicly accessible. So sometimes

(03:43):
it's described as the beginning of the London Stock Exchange,
although that was not formally founded until much later. This
may be apocryphal, but stockbrokers were allegedly working out of
coffee houses because their behavior was so disruptive that they
were banned from the Oil Exchange. But coffee houses had
also become a hub for socializing and information sharing. Most

(04:07):
of them subscribed to multiple newspapers and periodicals, and the
coffee houses where people would go to read them. So
just as coffee houses made these publications more accessible to
more people, the stockbrokers working from them did the same
for investing. As that was happening, the Bank of England
was also established in sixteen nine four. It acted as

(04:28):
the government's banker, including loaning the government money to fund
its wartime efforts. This led to the whole idea of
national debt in Britain, but at this point the British
nation as a whole had no overall budget. Loans and
expenditures were approved as they came up. Nobody had a

(04:49):
clear sense of even how much money the British government
owed and who they owed it to. Eventually, Robert Harley,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked with sorting through all
of this. As Harley was working on that Britain still
needed to find enough money to cover the military payroll.
Harley worked with John Blunt, secretary of the sword Blade Company,

(05:13):
to raise funds through the National Lottery. The sword Blade Company,
sometimes called the Hollow sword Blade Company, was exactly what
it sounds like. They made French style swords that had
become popular in Britain. But the company had also gotten
into banking and it had raised funds to buy lands
by exchanging shares in the company for what we're basically

(05:34):
unsecured government bonds. The company had also bought up more
of these same bonds ahead of time, expecting them to
increase in value when people heard about the share swap,
which they did. Harley was impressed with all of this,
and that was what led him to look to Blunt
for help with the National Lottery. Blunt was in charge
of marketing and promotion. All of this really boosted the

(05:57):
lottery's performance. It existed before or this, but not in
a way that was making a lot of money. This time,
it raised one point five million pounds, and then other
lotteries followed. This was really a stop gap though it
let the government cover some of its most immediate debts,
but the money that was raised with this lottery was

(06:17):
just a fraction of what the government owed. In seventeen eleven,
the south Sea Company, or the Governoring Company of the
Merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South season other
parts of America and for the encouragement of the fishery,
was established to try to manage this debt. It was
to be a counterpart to the British East India Company.

(06:38):
There was also a political element to this. The British
East India Company was controlled by Whigs, but the plan
was for the south Sea Company to be under Tory control,
so this newly established company would, at least in theory,
adjust the financial balance of power between the two parties.
John Blunt was tapped as the company's first chief exact Cative,

(07:00):
with Robert Harley as governor. The south Sea Company was
a public private partnership and it had multiple overlapping purposes.
It was a business. It would have a monopoly on
trade with Spain's colonies in the Caribbean and South America.
Britain also hoped this trading enterprise would allow it to
influence the Spanish colonies. In addition to all of this,

(07:24):
the South Sea Company would also provide a way for
the government to restructure and consolidate some of its debt.
The heart of this debt consolidation was a debt for
equity swap. The south Sea Company would buy a significant
portion of the nation's debt. Investors would then be encouraged
to swap any government debts they had for shares in
the south Sea Company. The government would pay six percent

(07:47):
interest on the debt of the south Sea Company held,
and the south Sea Company would distribute that interest to
investors as a dividend, So this would provide a solid,
predictable return on people's investments. This wasn't just about that
six percent return, though. As the price of shares in
the company went up, the number of shares that were

(08:08):
required to cover the government's debt would go down, but
the total number of shares stayed the same, so once
the government's debts were all accounted for, any surplus shares
could be sold off at market value. As the price
went up, people who sold their shares had the potential
to make a profit that would be well above that
six percent, and if Britain's trade with the Spanish colonies

(08:31):
was successful, the company would become more profitable. In a
portion of those profits would be passed along to investors
as well. Of course, there was a giant hitch to
that part of it when the company was first established,
which was a Britain and Spain were a war, they
were not trading with one another. Don't seem like kind
of a weird thing to make your plan whoops. In

(08:54):
addition to the potential for turning a profit, swapping debt
for equity in the south Sea Company had some other
potential benefits for investors. Holding government debt directly had become
notoriously difficult. In many cases, debt holders were seriously limited
and how or whether they could transfer the debt they

(09:15):
were holding to somebody else or otherwise get rid of it.
There was a lot of red tape involved. Sometimes it
was essentially impossible, and because of the government's ongoing problems
with finances, it's payments were often late or even non existent.
So you could basically be in a situation where you
had loaned money to the British Government, but the government

(09:36):
wasn't paying you on time or at all, and you
just had no way to untangle yourself from this situation.
The south Sea Company plan got around all of that
by encouraging people who were holding all kinds of debts
with all kinds of terms attached to swap them for
shares in the company. From there it would be up

(09:56):
to the company to deal with the government and its
repayments or black thereof, and the company would pay a reliable,
predictable annuity out to those investors who had swapped their
debt for shares. At first this seems to work. About
nine point five million pounds of government debt was consolidated
through the south Sea Company shares in about six months,

(10:17):
But eventually things took a turn, which we will get
to after a sponsor break. As we mentioned before the break.
When the south Sea Company was first established, Britain and
Spain were at war, which made it kind of weird

(10:38):
for Britain to be penning a huge chunk of debt
restructuring on a company that was supposed to trade with
Spanish colonies. But in seventeen thirteen, so just a couple
of years later, Britain's part in the War of the
Spanish Succession ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which was
signed by Queen Anne of England and King Philip the
Fifth of Spain. Part of the Treaty of Utrecht was

(11:00):
the Aciento, or contract, which granted Britain a monopoly on
the transport of enslaved Africans to Spanish territory in the America's.
Under the Aciento, Britain would provide four thousand, eight hundred
enslaved people to Spain's colonies per year. Britain assigned this
right to the South Sea Company. The treaty also specified

(11:22):
that Britain could send one trading ship of general cargo
per year to the Portobello Trade Fair in Panama. Although
these trading rights weren't nearly as broad as people hoped,
Europe's colonies in the America's relied so heavily on enslaved
labor that investors sought the Aciento made this a sure thing.
So yeah, the South Sea Company was going to work

(11:43):
with the Royal African Company. The Royal African Company was
who would purchase the enslaved people in Africa, and then
the South Sea Company would be who transported those people
across the Atlantic Ocean and then sold them in Spanish colonies.
We should note that in the early eighteenth century, Britain

(12:03):
had a small but established population of free black people,
particularly in London. They're also enslaved people in Britain at
this time, and there were absolutely people in Britain who
objected to slavery on moral grounds, but all of this
was happening decades before an abolitionist movement coalesced in Britain.

(12:24):
So slavery and industries that relied on slavery were deeply
entrenched in the British economy. And the fact that so
many people were so eager to invest in what was
at its heart a slave trading venture that's really reflective
of societal attitudes about the institution at the time. In
seventeen fourteen, Queen Anne died and King George the First

(12:47):
came to the throne. As we said earlier, the South
Sea Company had originally been envisioned as an enterprise controlled
by Tories, but at this point many Tories were Jacobites.
They supported James Francis Edward Stewart, son of James the
second and seventh, as heir to the throne, rather than
George the First. We have talked about all of this

(13:08):
in prior episodes, including the one on the Jacobite Rising
of seventeen forty five. So King George's administration was made
up mostly of wigs. Robert Harley was arrested accused of
being a Jacobite and imprisoned for two years. John Blunt
also replaced the south Sea Company's Tory officers with wigs,

(13:28):
and George's son, the future King, George the Second, was
temporarily installed as the company's governor. George the First took
over the south Sea Company himself in seventeen eighteen. Although
the debt for equity swap with the south Sea Company
had allowed Britain to restructure a portion of its debt
didn't really have a part of the plan that was

(13:49):
about keeping the nation from incurring more debt. By the
end of seventeen nineteen, the British national debt was about
fifty million pounds. About three point four million pounds of
that was owed to the Bank of England, roughly the
same amount to the British East India Company. Britain owed
twelve million pounds to the south Sea Company and the

(14:11):
rest was owed to the public. This was obviously a
lot of debt, and at about the same time France
was reckoning with its own debt. As Scottish economist John
Law tried to totally transform the French economy. He founded
a bank in France in seventeen sixteen, which became a
lender to the French government and eventually merged with other

(14:33):
banks to form the Bunk General. The Bank Generral held
a huge chunk of government debt and was later nationalized
and renamed the Bank Royal. In seventeen seventeen, Law established
the Campaignie dud or the Mississippi Company, to control French
trading rights in the Mississippi River Valley. He sold shares

(14:55):
in the company as subscriptions. In seventeen nineteen, he also
took control roll of both the French East India Company
and the China Company, and he consolid all of this
into the Company des Indeed or the Company. This put
him in control of a company that had a monopoly
on virtually all French trade outside of Europe. From there

(15:18):
he amassed even more financial power. The company took over
tax administration in France. The Law was later named Controller
General and Superintendent General of Finance. Then, in seventeen nineteen
and early seventeen twenty, the company's share prices skyrocketed from
about five d livre per share to nine thousand. After

(15:41):
the price hit nine thousand livres, the Bank Royale pegged
it there to keep it from increasing any further. Investors
started trying to exchange their shares for gold, and there
was not enough gold in all of France to cover
the demand. Inflation was rampant as the banc Royal started
trying to get people to take their payouts in paper notes,

(16:02):
including issuing a nine thousand livre note. John Law laid
out a plan to systematically reduce the share price from
nine thousand liver to five thousand livers to try to
deflate the currency somewhat without losing too much share value
in the company, but as the share price started to drop,

(16:23):
his efforts were not enough to keep it from just plummeting.
By the end of seventeen twenty, it had fallen all
the way back to about five hundred livres, which is
where it had been in the spring of seventeen nineteen.
All of this came to be known as the Mississippi Bubble.
The Bunk Royale collapsed in its wake, and John Law
had to flee France after the bubble burst. As all

(16:47):
of this was happening, the South Sea Company share swaps
were also kicking in the high gear, with some of
the demand coming from investors who had gotten out of
the French market. First, the south Sea Company posed another
round of debt for equity swaps and also loaned the
British Government roughly half a million pounds. Then Parliament passed

(17:09):
an Act for making fourth new Exchequer Bills. Under this
Act of the south Sea Company loaned the government roughly
five point seven million pounds. It also acquired roughly thirty
one point five million pounds in government debt, which it
was going to convert into shares. The promised returns on

(17:29):
this were huge. The government was going to be paying
five interest on the debt that was converted into shares,
but the company was promising to pay investors a thirty
percent dividend by the end of seventeen twenty, and then
that was supposed to jump to fifty percent for the
ten years after that. That probably sounds like too good

(17:53):
to be true. Spoiler dun Dune Dune. The company had
promoted its earlier swaps through adver tisements and pamphlets and propaganda,
including some written by people like Daniel Dafoe and Jonathan Swift.
In seventeen nineteen and seventeen twenty, it ramped up these
efforts as well. It also published lists of prominent investors,

(18:15):
including the King and various members of Parliament. This was
all to reinforce the idea that this was a totally
reliable investment that had the support of some of the
nation's most powerful people. All of this fed into an
investing frenzy. The south Sea Company started offering subscription plans

(18:35):
so that investors could buy shares even if they didn't
have all the money up front. There were multiple waves
of these subscription plans, and they allowed investors to pay
for their shares and installments. The company also loaned money
to prospective investors so that they could buy stock with it,
and they loaned current investors money based on the value

(18:55):
of the stock they already had so they could buy
more stock. Hello unsustainable. As interest in investment surged, share
prices spiked in the Bank of England and the East
India Company, but not nearly as much as in the
south Sea Company. The number of companies to invest in
surged as new joint stock companies were established all over

(19:18):
the place, one for making Muslin, one for importing lace
from Flanders, one for ensuring horses, one for making soap,
on and on and on. Some of these new companies
were obvious scams, and in seventeen twenty Parliament past the
Bubble Act, which banned all joint stock companies that did

(19:39):
not have a Royal charter. Those new companies were outlawed,
and many of their former investors turned to south Sea
Company stock. The price for shares of the south Sea
Company rose from about a hundred pounds per share in
seventeen nineteen to three hundred pounds in April and nineteen
twenty five undred pounds in June, all the way to

(20:02):
more than a thousand pounds per share in August. The
company thought this price was just gonna keep going up,
especially once it had covered all the required government debt
and could just sell the remaining shares at market rate
out of profit without having to offset government debt with it.
So the company started paying out more money to investors

(20:24):
who wanted to cash out then it was taking in.
I was expecting those future games to make up the
shortfall that it was creating, but instead the price plummeted precipitously,
dropping from about a thousand pounds in August of seventeen
twenty two a hundred pounds in September. Like the Mississippi bubble,

(20:46):
this had just basically dropped back to its pre bubble price.
A more limited bubble was also playing out in the
Dutch Republic. As all of this was going on, The
price for shares in the Dutch East India Company and
the Dutch West India Company both rose, along with the
Mississippi and South Sea shares. Roughly forty small joint stock

(21:08):
companies were established in the Dutch Republic which went through
the same pattern. This became known as the Dutch vent
Handel of seventy and that, combined with the Mississippi and
South Sea bubbles, is sometimes described as the first international
stock market collapse. This sense of the word bubble existed
before this point. Its first use in writing was in

(21:31):
Edward Ward's Labor in Vain or what Signifies Little or
Nothing in seventeen hundred, but writing about these three intersecting
financial collapses popularized the words use. We will get into
the aftermath of all of this after a quick sponsor break.

(21:57):
When the price of shares in the South Sea Company
dropped precipitously in September of seventeen twenty people who had
bought shares when the price was low saw all of
their games evaporate seemingly overnight. They were understandably outraged, but
a whole lot more people lost actual money, not just

(22:18):
unrealized games that reverted to the previous amount. Some of
these were wealthy people who had previously held government debt
and they had swapped that debt for shares, but others
were just ordinary folks who had gone to a coffee
shop and had bought shares of the company with their savings.

(22:38):
People who had bought subscriptions when the price was still
high also still had payments due on those subscriptions, but
now these payments were for more than the stock was worth.
People who had taken out loans to buy stock defaulted
on them, and in some cases had to declare bankruptcy.
Britain reportedly saw an increase in suicides in the way

(23:00):
of this financial collapse. Meanwhile, people who had bought early
and sold before the crash he mostly just kept quiet
about it. Okay, you don't. You don't hear a lot
of about the people, except for the officers of the
company who were accused of wrongdoing. You really don't hear
a lot of the people who sold at the right
time after having bought at the right time. Uh there

(23:22):
were also some people who sold their shares before the
price crashed, but then wound up buying more shares. One
of those was Sir Isaac Newton, and he is often
used as an illustration for how financially devastating this was.
After some initial skepticism about this whole setup, Newton had invested,
he had made about a hundred percent return on his

(23:44):
initial investment, and then he had gotten out of it,
but then he purchased more shares near the peak of
the bubble. According to his family lore, he lost about
twenty thousand pounds when the price collapsed, but more modern
analysis of his financial records suggest that it was closer
to ten thousand pounds. This is still a lot of money,

(24:07):
even if he did lose more than that, which would
be a lot more money he seems to have recovered.
He was rich when he died in seventy seven, with
an a state that was valued at about thirty thousand pounds.
One of the reasons that Newton became sort of the
poster child for the Soucia bubble. It's just that He
was Isaac Newton. He was a mathematician. He was the

(24:28):
warden and later the master of the Royal Mint. If
Isaac Newton, of all people could fall victim to this crash,
then surely no one could have foreseen it. Newton is
still widely quoted as saying I can calculate the motions
of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,
when he described the rapid rise of the stock price

(24:49):
and the bubble's ultimate burst. But that quote may very
well be apocryphal, and the idea that nobody could possibly
have foreseen this is just inaccurate. In early seventeen twenty,
multiple publications warned that this escalating share price was just
not sustainable. On March thirty one, seventeen twenty, Member of

(25:10):
Parliament Archibald Hutcheson wrote quote, if the truth be as
I verily believe it is that there is no real
foundation for the present much less the further expected high
price of south Sea stock, and that the frenzy which
now reigns can be of no long continuance in so
cool a climate. And amongst the people hitherto so justly

(25:34):
famed for wisdom and prudence, I say If this be
the case, is it not the duty of a British
Senate to take all necessary precautions to prevent the ruin
of many thousands of families? And that our weekly bills
of mortality may not be filled with large numbers of
unhappy people who have hanged, drowned, or shot themselves. And

(25:59):
surely no honest, good natured man can enjoy with comfort
an estate, how immense soever, raised on such a foundation
as this. Hutchinson printed up and distributed a lot of
material about this, trying to warn people at his own expense.
Economists and economic historians have made all kinds of arguments

(26:20):
about what exactly caused the South Sea bubble to inflate
and burst, factoring in market forces, policies, and individual and
collective decisions. But the two prevailing ideas in the eighteenth
century where that it had been a deliberate fraud, or
that more emotional factors were at work, like greed, or
as Newton allegedly said, madness. In the face of public

(26:45):
outrage about alleged fraud, Robert Walpole was named Chancellor of
the Exchequer and was tasked with sorting all of this out.
Walpole again restructured the national debt, including establishing a sinking
fund that the nation paid into to help stabilize the economy.
Multiple committees investigated and issued reports on the bubbles rise

(27:08):
and collapse in seventeen one. One big source of criticism
was that a lot of officials who had promoted this
stock or worked on these debt swaps had taken bribes
to do so, although bribery was really routine at this point.
Directors of the board of the south Sea Company were
arrested and faced corruption trials. The Postmaster General was implicated.

(27:31):
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, John A. Souby, who had
heavily promoted south Sea Company stock and had sold his
own shares at the peak, was expelled from the House
of Lords and imprisoned. In January of seventeen twenty one,
Parliament banned the former directors of the company from leaving
England and also prohibited them from serving as officers in

(27:51):
the south Sea Company, the East India Company or the
Bank of England. In August of seventeen twenty one, Parliament
passed an Act for making several provisions to restore the
public credit, which suffers by the frauds and mismanagements of
the late directors of the south Sea Company and others.
This was in part a relief act that canceled some

(28:14):
of the debts of people who had borrowed money to
buy south Sea stock, as well as canceling subscriptions for
stock purchases that still had outstanding payments. It also seized
the money that the company's directors had earned when the
share price increase, and it redistributed that money among people
who had suffered big losses. Some of the company officers

(28:36):
estates were also seized and sold, with most of that
money covering the south Sea Company's losses. At the same time,
Walpole's response was widely perceived as scapegoating some of the
people while shielding others from punishment. As a result, he
was nicknamed Screenmaster General. In spite of that, he effectively

(28:57):
became Britain's first prime minister before that term was even coined.
A lot of people also wrote about how greed had
been at the root of all of this. One of
those was Daniel Dafoe, who published this in the Complete
English Tradesmen Quote. Avarice is the ruin of many people
besides tradesmen, and I might give the Late south Sea Calamity,

(29:19):
for an example, in which the longest heads were most overreached,
and not so much by the wit or cunning of
those they had to deal with, as by the secret
promptings of their own avarice, wherein they abundantly verified an
old proverbial speech or saying all covet all lose. So
it was there, indeed, and the cunningest, wisest, sharpest men

(29:44):
lost the most money. Defel also wrote such works as
The Villainy of stock Jobbers. Detected jobber was the name
sometimes used for stockbrokers and sometimes for go betweens who
connected stockbrokers to ordinary British investors. Other people placed the
blame on naive or inexperienced investors. The government's encouragement of

(30:08):
people to buy south Sea Company stock had combined with
the use of coffee houses as a stock trading location
to make investing possible for people who had just never
done it before. This included people with more modest incomes,
and it included women. About twenty percent of the general
public investors in the south Sea Company were women. Consequently,

(30:31):
there was a lot of sexist commentary about women's involvement
in the market after the bubble burst. Propaganda, artwork, satirical writing,
and even playing cards also targeted immigrants, Jews, and non
conforming Protestants as people who should never have been involved
in the market in the first place. Therefore they were

(30:52):
to blame past podcast subject. William Hogarth published and engraving
called the south Sea Scheme in seventy one, so this
would have been one of his earlier works. The inscription
at the bottom alludes to this idea that this mixing
of women and immigrants and nonconforming Christians was involved in
the collapse. Quote here all religions flocked together, like tame

(31:15):
and wild fowl of a feather, leaving their strife religious bustle,
kneel down to play at pitch and hustle. Thus, when
the shepherds are at play, their flocks must surely go
astream the woeful cause it. In these times, honor and
honesty are crimes that publicly are punished by self interest
in villainy. So much for money's magic power guests at

(31:39):
the rest you find out more. By the mid nineteenth century,
people were looking at this in terms of math psychology.
For example, in eighteen forty one, Scottish journalist Claude McKay
published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
He described the south Sea Bubble this way quote. During

(31:59):
the progress of this famous bubble, England presented a singular spectacle.
The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation.
Men were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure
profits of cautious industry. The hope of boundless wealth for
the morrow made them heedless and extravagant. For today, a

(32:20):
luxury till then unheard of was introduced, bringing in its
train a corresponding laxity of morals. The overbearing insolence of
ignorant men who had arisen to sudden wealth by successful gambling,
made men of true gentility of mind and manners blush
that gold should have the power to raise the unworthy

(32:42):
in the scale of society. Although the immediate effects of
the south Sea bubbles collapse were huge, it does not
appear to have caused a long term recession or depression
in Britain. The south Sea Company sold most of its
rights to the Spanish government in seventeen fifty. For a while,
the company moved into whaling, but eventually it mostly retained

(33:04):
only its purpose for managing governmental debt. It existed as
a company until eighteen fifty three. That was south Sea Bubble,
something that, Uh, it's weird to consider still. I mean
we talked about a little bit earlier in the episode.
Weird is probably not the right word that all of
this was essentially tied up in a slave trading company. Uh.

(33:27):
There are a lot of articles that just seemed to
not say that part. Uh. For a while, there was
a perception that this whole thing was basically a giant
scheme and that there was no actual work being done
by the south Sea Company. But that is just not true.
It was definitely actively involved in the trans atlantic slave

(33:51):
trade and had a monopoly on Britain strade with the
Spanish colonies, and like that's that was not something that
existed only on paper. That is something that existed for real. Uh.
And so of course the lives of the people who
were captured and transported across the Atlantic and enslaved are
underpinning all of this. On that pepper note, Um, do

(34:15):
you have listener mail as well? I do? I do?
I have a listener mail from Emily. Emily says Hi,
Holly and Tracy. Longtime listener, first time writer. Though I'll
admit I'm a bit behind on episodes, I knew how
I had to write after listening to the October edition
of Unearthed. In part one, you covered a story about
Jeremy the pigeon who saved World War once lost Battalion.

(34:37):
My great grandfather was one of the one ninety four
men who survived the World War one lost battalion, so
Cheremy and the battalion story hold a very important place
in my family's history. In the episode, you wondered whether
you'd previously covered this lost battalion on the show. I
can confirm that you have not, as I've listened for it.

(34:57):
In every episode of the archive you did would cover
a World War two lost battalion, and I experienced emotional
whiplash when that episode came out, thinking you'd finally done
an episode on quote my lost battalion. I hold out
hope that one day you'll do a full episode on
this lost battalion. My family was incredibly fortunate to honor
the legacy of the lost Battalion by visiting the site

(35:19):
of the battle on the one dredth anniversary in ten.
It was surreal to stand in the ruins of the bunker.
Photos attached where my great grandfather, a second lieutenant, was
with Major Whittlesey when he received the orders that launched
the offensive. We've also visited Jeremy while he is on
display at the Smithsonian, although he's looking a little worse

(35:39):
for wear a hundred years later. Photo attached. Ironically, I
did not miss the Lost Battalion in history class. My
world history teacher showed us a two thousand one A
and E film about the battle. Shout out to Mr
de Bruin, and these days, my sister, a high school
history teacher, is also ensuring students don't miss the Lost
Battalion in history class. Thank you for all the hours

(36:01):
of education and entertainment. Attaching favorite photos of our beloved
mini assured Dots and Daisy in the hope it brings
you a moment of joy, Best Emily, Thank you so
much for all these pictures, Emily. I really appreciated seeing
the ones of the battle site and Jeremy, and of
course seeing as sleeping Dots Dots. Daisy is so cute.

(36:24):
I want to, like, I don't know, I want to
kiss Daisy's face real fa um. So, thank you so
much for sending that email those pictures. If you would
like to send us an email about this certainly other
podcasts where at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
we all over social media. Missed in History. There's where

(36:45):
I'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you
can subscribe to our show on iHeart radio app and
wherever else you like to take your podcast. Stuff you
missed in History class is the production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(37:08):
favorite shows. H