November 24, 2014 • 39 mins
Jules Verreaux and his two brothers collected an impressive array of flora and fauna specimens from around the world for placement with museums and collectors. They also did some really unsavory things that had long-term ramifications.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Prying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So sometimes
we will pick a topic because it seems interesting in light,
Like we've had a lot of heavy stuffs that you
and I have both been pretty open that we're looking
(00:22):
at just some less intense, troublesome, fair horrifying. Yeah. Uh
and then while you're doing the research on that thing
that seems like it would just be cool and fascinating,
you discover a whole other story that you didn't know
was there. This is one of those cases. Uh. So
for context, it'll sound like I'm going off on a
crazy tangent, but it's Jermaine. One of my favorite animals
(00:44):
of all time, like in the world is the verrosfaca,
And this is uh an animal you've probably seen footage of.
There are members of the Lemur family uh indre day
in their native dramatic gascar. So even if you don't
recognize your name, you have probably seen footage of them. Um.
They sometimes versions of them show up on children's shows
(01:05):
and in cartoons because they're so incredibly cute. They're mostly white,
and they have kind of rust brown bellies and these
dark chocolate colored faces and these big eyes, and they're
so cute. There are a million videos of them on
YouTube hopping around because they sometimes will travel on the
ground upright in kind of a crazy jumping motion, and
people like to set it to music. It's adorable. We'll
try to include a link to at least one of
(01:25):
those in the show notes. So I thought, hey, you know,
it would be really cool we should talk about Jules Verreaux,
who is the naturalist for whom these charming animals were named.
And then the research got a little bit dark but
also kind of interesting and exciting, even though some of
the subject matter is troubling, And it's not that the
(01:46):
dark parts are also the exciting parts. There's a largely
two different parts. Uh. There's a lot of different elements
to the story, and it really involves an entire family
and sort of their family business. Uh. It's involves botany
and taxidermy and grave robbing and the Paris Exposition and
(02:07):
kind of a lot of different things that we've talked
about on the show before in different episodes. But this
really kind of stacks a number of them together, and
it's kind of fascinating in that regard. So that is
the scoop about Jules Verreaux and sort of have we
got to some you'll see it's about halfway through we
get to kind of the really thing that might make
your if you feel a little unease about some of
(02:30):
the things that they did in the name of exploration
and uh science, but also kind of sensationalist tourism kind
of attractions. So normally we would start an episode that
revolves around the actions of people like this by talking
about the early lives of those people. But this is
(02:52):
kind of tricky in this case because even though there
was some fame and notoriety to the family, the accounts
of like what their childhood with the family, the patriarch
and then his children, who really become the prime point
of the story, like what their home life and their
childhoods were like, it's pretty sparse and there's a lot
of really contradictory stories. So it's sort of this happens
(03:15):
a lot with much older history, where it's sort of
like and suddenly there was a mathematician. Yeah, this seems
recent enough that I'm like, there should be more stuff.
But I think part of it is that because there
is a lot of exploring that happened, and at one
point there was a ship that sank with some things.
Like I'm wondering if documents got lost or journals got
(03:36):
lost along the way. So that's the scoop. So in
eighteen o three, taxidermist Jacques Philippe Verreaux opened Maison Varreau,
which was a taxidermy house. So Mazon Varreau provided taxidermy
specimens to museums and collectors, and this was the foremost
supplier of natural exhibit pieces and worked from the Verreau
(03:58):
family business. It was still on display in museums throughout
the world. Actually, now I'm wondering if there were any
at the I went to a very odd museum a
couple of weekends ago that was full of really old
taxi army specimens, and now I wish I had made
note of who had prepared them all. It's very possible.
There are like a lot of big name museums that
still have their pieces, and one of them were gonna
(04:19):
talk about at length a little bit later. But I
suspect because we're talking about huge volume that these guys
were doing in terms of the specimens they prepared, and
uh there I'm sure some of that has trickled out
into much smaller, uh and sort of less flagship museums
that are a little bit more specialized. But so Jacques
(04:41):
Phelipe and his wife Josephine had three sons. So there
was Jules Pierre, who was born in eighteen o seven,
Jean Baptiste Eduard, who went by Edwards throughout his life.
In eighteen ten, and their youngest son was Joseph Alexey,
and he went by Alexey. When their oldest son, Jules
was eleven or maybe twelve, because he accounts very a
little bit, he traveled with his uncle, naturalist Pierre de
(05:05):
la Land to South Africa. Jules was in South Africa
until he was thirteen, and when the two of them
came back, they brought more than a hundred and thirty
thousand specimens home with them. This number was mostly made
up of plant specimens, but they were also almost three
hundred mammals, more than two thousand birds, and several hundred
fish and reptiles. And then also in their collection were
(05:27):
a number of human skulls and full skeletons which had
been exhumed from their burial spots in Cape Town, and
one of the larger specimens that they brought back was
the skeleton of a hippopotamus, which I don't think had
ever been uh collected before, and that went on display
at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Once he was
(05:47):
back in Paris, Jewels studied anatomy and taxidermy, and he
had this natural proclivity for preserving biological samples. He very
uh almost effortlessly sort of fell in line with the
family business. He was just really naturally extremely good at
mounting specimens. And in eight so Jules had been studying
(06:10):
for a while, his uncle Pierre died. That was the
uncle that he had traveled to Cape Town originally with,
and so Jules actually returned to Cape Town after Pierre's death,
and eventually while he was working there, he helped to
establish and become curator of the South African Museum, and
that was a post that he officially began in eighteen
twenty nine, although the wheels were turning on getting it
set up before that, and he also the whole time
(06:31):
he was there continued to collect samples of both flora
and fauna. During this second collection phase. It just became
glaringly obvious that he was going to need help, so
he sent for his brother, Edward, the second son of Maizomboro,
made this journey to Cape Town in eighteen thirty. Yeah,
so that was just the year after Jules became Jules
(06:52):
assumed his post at the South African Museum. And during
this time there's also some interesting it's almost like a
sigh note in a lot of the the accounts you read. Uh,
he became interested in seeking out sort of mythological creatures
to see if they had any basis in reality. So
he was actually searching for a unicorn during this time,
(07:13):
and also an elephant bird which was apparently extinct. Who
was also during this time that the Verreaux brothers came
into possession of an item that would just be extremely
controversial and I would say justifiably so long after the
two of them were gone. But before we get into
this sort of grim bit of taxidermy, do you want
(07:33):
to pause and have a word from a sponsor so
we don't interrupt sort of the dark weirdness with let's
do okay, and now we will return to the Verreau brothers. Okay,
So before the break. Edward had traveled to South Africa
to assist his older brother Jewels, in the collection of specimens,
both for the museum, where Jewels was a curator and
for a return to Paris to be sold to collectors
(07:55):
as part of the ongoing family high end taxidermy business.
And while the search for a unicorn or some other
mythical animal didn't hand out, they did get their hands
on a human specimen and this particular piece actually involved
a grave robbing um what is believed possibly this isn't
a percent confirmed, and we'll talk about this later to
(08:17):
be a native Botswana man was taken from his resting place,
preserved and mounted, and in a letter to Paris Museum
director George Cuvier, Jules wrote, quote, an object which is
not the least interesting in our collection is a stuffed Bushwana.
So it's a little bit of a wiggly away to
say Botswana, which is very well preserved, and which was
(08:40):
about to cause my death because in order to get it,
I was obliged to disenter it at night in places
guarded by his fellows. Really, French guy, Yeah, it's uh,
there's one account, and we'll talk about. Like I said,
this particular specimen more because his history reaches quite far
so history um that there was one particular piece of
(09:04):
research I was doing. They were like, you can almost
kind of like excuse it a little as just contextualized
in the time. But even so, I think what's telling
is that the museum did not want it. They were like, no,
thank you, hyeah, They said, we would not like to
purchase this piece from you. Yeah, so it went on
(09:25):
display at masal Brow because they had it. It was
already shipped. It's upsetting. It is upsetting well, and I
think the reason that there are a lot of things
that we talked about that that happened in the past
would definitely be inexcusable today. And like there's some degree
at the time, right, attitudes are very different. It's been
(09:49):
really long established that like burying of the dead is
a pretty sacristanc thing across cultures. And that's where I
kind of go, guys, you shouldn't own better. Yeah, well,
especially when he talks about how he had to like
sneakily do it like he started, Yeah, surely there was
a question mark in your head, like is this the
(10:10):
right thing to do? And I don't we don't know unfortunately,
if he was just so driven by this spirit of
collection and you know, cataloging the world of all of
its various types of creatures, or if he was just
kind of weasily and just wanted to sell it off
for money, Like it's not really clear, but it certainly
(10:31):
seems like there had to have. You would hope there
was a moment of moral debate in his head at
least that the following piece appeared in the Parisian periodical
like Constitutional And this is a translation that runs a
little long, but we wanted to include all of it
because it's a really good indicator of the cultural attitude
at the time toward native Africans. Yeah, and this appeared
(10:54):
in November one, So bear with me. I'm going to
read the whole thing. Two young people, Monsieur, the Varreaux brothers,
have recently arrived from a voyage to the ends of Africa,
to the land of the Cape of Good Hope. One
of these interesting naturalists is barely eighteen years old, but
he has already spent twenty months in the wild country
north of the Land of the hottent Tots, between the
(11:15):
latitudes of Natal and the top of Saint Helena Bay.
How can one possibly imagine what deprivations he had to endure.
Our young compatriots had to face the dangers of living
in the midst of natives in this zone of Africa
who are ferocious as well as black, as well as
the fawn colored wild animals among which they live, about
which we do not need to tell. We want to
(11:36):
speak only about the triumphs of their collecting, and do
not know which to admire more, their intrepidity or their perseverance. Humans, quadrupeds, birds, fish, plants,
mineral shells. All of these they have studied. Their hunting
has given them tigers, lions, hyenas, and admirable lubal a
crimson antelope of rare elegance, a host of other small
(11:59):
members of the family, two giraffes, monkeys, long pitchforks, very
curious rats, ostriches, birds of prey which have never been
described before. A great quantity of other birds of all sizes,
colors and species. They also have a collection of birds nests,
which could be the object of a charming descriptive essay.
Roots like onions and other plants of remarkable shape and
(12:20):
extraordinary size. Snakes, a cashelo and a crocodile of a
type previously unknown. But their greatest curiosity is an individual
of the nation of the Bejuanas. This man is preserved
by the means by which naturalists prepare their specimens and
reconstitute their form, and so to speak, their inert life.
He is of small stature, lack of skin, his head
(12:43):
covered by short, wooly and curly hair, armed with arrows
and a lance, clothes in antelope skin, with a bag
made of bush pig full of small glass beads, seeds,
and a small bones. Another thing that we are rather
embarrassed to find a suitable to turn to characterize is
the very special accessory of modest clothing worn by the Bechuanas,
(13:05):
which we find most striking. Monsieur Verro have deposited their
scientific riches at the stores of Monsieur de Lasserre Rue
sulf Jacu number three. They are generously put on display
for the public without charge. It would be well if,
which is the botanical gardens, took this opportunity to extend
its collections, already so beautiful, to become even more desirable,
(13:29):
and to use the skills which they did not already
possess of Monsieur Verrot with the time, the talent and
the energy necessary to go out Africa to catch nature
in the act. It's so crazy of this weird grossness.
It really, well do you say weird grossness? Like this
part turns my stomach where they're talking about this part
(13:50):
that it's a man and it's great that they did this,
you guys. It's such a bizarre, uh like way to
sell it to my mind, you know, like my sensibilities
are very like troubled that they're like, what we really
want to talk about is how amazing these two guys are. Yeah,
And then they talk about the specimen of the botswan
(14:14):
and with such a delight and right like, oh, it's
the neatest thing, and I'm like, that's a person. So listeners,
sometimes this is what happens when we just want to
talk about adorable lemurs and we find horrifying things instead.
So the middle brother Edward brought this human display and
(14:36):
an assortment of other samples to Paris in eight thirty one,
and a lot of them were delivered into the hands
of museums that were really eager to expand their collections.
So we're gonna come back to this particular piece of
taxidermy in a bit, because the story of this mounted
human specimen reaches all the way up to very recent history.
But as for the Arreau brothers themselves, when Edward returned
(15:00):
to South Africa the following year, so that would be
eighteen thirty two, he also brought their third brother, Alexei,
with him. It's believed that Alexei never left Africa after
his arrival and lived out the rest of his life there,
assisting with jules collection efforts. Jules and Edwards seemed to
have done some traveling, although there's no definitive record on
exactly where they went, and the list includes usually places
(15:23):
like the Philippines in China. It does appear that at
one point in the late eighteen thirties a shipment of
their specimens was lost on its way to Paris, when
the whole ship that was carrying the collection sank. Yeah,
that's usually if you look at different accounts, that's usually consistent. Uh,
And then getting into the eighteen forties, it's consistent. But
(15:43):
during that period of the eighteen thirties, particularly the early half,
there will be accounts of them being in two different
places at the same time in different like you know,
journals and accounts that other people have given. We'll say, oh,
they were in China then, and it's some of one
says it's like it doesn't even acknowledge that one exists.
They may not have known that, but it's like, oh,
(16:04):
and then they were here in this part of the world,
and they could not have been in both those places,
so it is a little bit hard to actually track
their movements. In eighteen forty two, Jules Verreaux made his
way to Australia and he wanted to expand his preserved
sample of offerings to include more specimens from outside of Africa.
He explored New South Wales and Tasmania, and he gathered
(16:27):
all kinds of botanicals, insects, birds and mammals, and again
he gained some the possession of some human remains. Yeah,
they you know have It comes up periodically that they
had multiple samples of human remains. It it's usually believed
by most people. I think that they really only did
(16:48):
the one mounting of a human and that the rest
were sort of like bones that have been discovered along
the way. They may have. We talked about them disentering
some bodies in South Africa. Uh, some of the skeleton,
but just for context, there was just the one taxidermy
human that we know of. One too many it is,
but I just want to make that clear that this
(17:08):
wasn't like a but we're making a career of taxidermyng people. So,
after five years of exploring Australia, Jewels returned to Paris
and for several years he worked on organizing and naming
the collection, both the new things that he had brought
as well as you know, sort of placing them in
context with other specimens that he had collected through the years.
(17:30):
He was eventually employed as an assistant naturalist at the
Paris Museum of Natural History, and that started in eighteen
sixty two. So it had been more than a decade
that he had been kind of working on classifications and
and descriptive catalogs of all of his various pieces that
he had gathered throughout the world. Tools had continued to
work on his taxidermy throughout his whole life and his travels.
(17:52):
But it's in the late eighteen sixties that he made
one of his most famous mounted tableau, and it was
entitled Arab Courier Attacked eye lions. In this display, a
mannequin outfitted in the black cape that was typical of
the Arab and our address of North Africa is featured
in the fictional moment that he's pulled off of the
camel he's riding by two Barbary lions. An Arab courier
(18:17):
won the Gold Medal for Excellence at the Paris Exposition
in eighteen sixty seven, and during the seven months it
was on display there, more than fifteen million spectators came
just to see it. Uh. It was a really dramatic
shift from most of the taxidermy that had come before it,
and certainly different than almost anyone had seen before, because
prior to that, it was pretty common even if you
(18:37):
were setting up a scene of taxidermy that it would
kind of just be multiple mounts kind of in a line.
But this is the first time that it really was
sort of an action scene that depicted like an event happening.
After the Paris Exposition closed, the American Museum of Natural
History bought Burrows display, and it wasn't available for public
(18:59):
viewing for some time time. Once museum officials saw the
piece in person, they thought it was a little too
ghost to be part of their collection, so they kept
just kept it in storage for thirty years. Yeah, basically
was in a warehouse in New York for all that time. Eventually, though,
in eight it was sold. It was sold to the
Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was fairly new at
(19:20):
the time, for the tidy sum of fifty dollars, and
it eventually became a prominent part of the collection there.
There is one story that it they were going to
be charged I think it's forty five dollars for them
to actually transport it from its storage place to the museum,
and I think that ruffled some feathers, like we just
paid fifty dollars for this, and I gotta pay another
(19:41):
fifty just to get it here. Uh. But it did
eventually make its way to the collection. And while there
have been rumors throughout the years that the man on
the camel was an actual human, it is not, and
that's one of those things that has been debated. There
was a restoration point where it was worked on because
there had been, you know, some degradation of the the specimen.
(20:01):
But even so, I think most people in most museum
curators that have been involved with it. I don't think
it was ever an actual human, but because of the
precedent of the Botswanan man, they there have always been
some suspicions. And as a side note, Barbary lions went
extinct not long after the Vereux assembled this tableau. So
if you're interested in seeing Arab courier attacked by lions
(20:25):
still on display at the Carnegie Museum. The museum modeled
a snow globe after it in two thousand and nine. Yeah,
they started like an interesting program where they were doing
snow globes of some of their most interesting and famous pieces,
and that was the one that kicked off the collection.
So I have never seen one of the snow globes
and how it actually turned out, but it's kind of fascinating.
(20:47):
I had this brief moment where I was like, I
want one. I should start a snow globe collection. And
then immediately, where are you going to put a snow
loop collection? That's that's the problem always. Uh So, both
Edward and elect he died in eighteen sixty eight and
in eighteen seventies, so that was right after this big
sort of triumph at the Paris exposition of Jules's peace,
(21:10):
and in eighteen seventy Jules Verreaux left France as the
frank Oppression more began and he fled to England and
he lived there for three years before he died. And
when he had sold the Arab Courier piece to the
American Museum of Natural History, he sold with it to
them the vast majority of the collection of Maison Vaux.
And there's been some speculation that he actually knew his
(21:33):
health was already pretty dicey at that point, and he
wanted to make sure that collection went somewhere and somewhere
that was a museum that would understand what exactly they
were getting, because it's been discussed by some historians that
he probably was already pretty sick from the ongoing exposure
to chemicals used in taxidermy that he had basically been
(21:55):
doing since he was a child, So uh, he was
not a great health at that point, despite some claims
that there was a child born out of wedlock when
Jules was still very young. This was the end of
the Verreaux brothers liege. And while there are a number
of species that bear the Verreaux name as a consequence
of all the exploration and collecting that Jules and Edward
(22:16):
did and that Alexei assisted them with. There has also
been some confusion about certain species based on some incorrect
labeling that Jewels is believed to have done to some
of their collected pieces. And there's been some speculation that
he may have purposely mislabeled some specimens uh and the
locations where they had been found to make them appear
(22:37):
more exotic and therefore more valuable to museums and collectors.
We don't know whether or not that was the case,
but regardless of the cause of this labeling, uh, sloppiness,
those poorly cataloged items kind of did a bit of
a disservice to science. There have been a couple of
points of confusion over the years. Was like, wait, this
animal isn't really native to this place. Uh, and even
(23:00):
actually they realized like, no, this is just wrong. Yeah. Well,
and I want to point out that that poor or
inaccurate labor labeling is like not unique to these guys, No,
not at all. There are frequently stories that will come
across our radar, which is like a museum found something
really stunning in their collection that they didn't know they had,
and yeah, a lot of times people are ready to
(23:20):
go whoever made that mistake should be fired. And I'm
kind of like that guy made that mistake in about
nine well and moreover. I mean, I uh, not that
it excuses it, but when you're bringing back hundreds of
thousands of things at a time, I could imagine it
would be easy to lose track of something, or you know,
even if you're attempting to be meticulous, you could just
(23:43):
write down the wrong note in your book as you
go track of uh. And I promised we would return
back to the taxiderman man, and we will, but first
we're going to have a word from a sponsor. If
that's cool with Tracy. I think we should have a
break before we get to this. So back to our
story and to the part that I promised we would
(24:03):
come back to. You're probably wondering what happened to that
taxidermy man from Botswana. Uh. Well, in the eighteen eighties
a Spanish taxidermist and veterinarian named Frenches Darter. It's probably
pronounced differently, but usually it's uh said that way when
people are just discussing it in the sources. I looked
at purchased the piece, Uh, and originally he was gonna
(24:24):
he put it on display at the Spanish Exposition, and
then after he passed, it landed in the Darter Museum
of Natural History, which is in Spain. So this exhibit
was simply labeled El Negro and it drew crowds for
years and not just a few years. Years. The most
shocking part of this story lies in the fact that
(24:46):
this taxider made human being was on display until the
late nineteen nineties. Yeah, nine nineties, uh so a very
long time to be standing there. I think the part
that really gets me is that this was not a person,
like I could almost see a taxidermy human being on
(25:08):
display if that had been their wish, Like they're certainly
people that have donated their bodies, and I get this
is like a grave robbed situation. And then this person
just stayed on display forever, which is troubling. Uh So,
in the museum was asked if they would consent to
return the body to Botswana to be respectfully put to
rest at last after being an African novelty for Europeans
(25:33):
on display for more than a hundred and fifty years,
and initially the museum refused. If this were happening today,
the internet would jump all over. So, writing for the
New York Times in two thousand, Rachel Swarren's stated the
significance of the display piece, and here's a quote to Africans,
he was a symbol of racism lingering from the turn
(25:53):
of the century when blacks were paraded as freaks in
the vaudeville shows and natural history museums of Europe and America. Yeah,
he was certainly not the only instance of this happening. Uh,
But this really became a case where people thought, like
this is correctable, like we can at least make this
a better situation. And so the Spanish government and the
(26:16):
organization of African community really worked in collaboration to try
to convince the Dater Museum to just acquiesce to this
request and finally let Elnegro go home. Curators at the museum,
it seemed like they almost based on what I've read,
I mean, I haven't seen interviews with these people, are
seen their firsthand accounts, but the way it reads, it
(26:36):
sounds almost like they were just kind of briskly that
they were hurt that they had been called racists. And
so is that really tricky thing where they were like, no,
we're really respectful about this display, and we put it
in context. Uh, you know, we talked about the history
and the nature of exploration and specimen collection in the
early eighteen hundreds. And but eventually they kind of saw
(26:58):
the error of that whole logic loop, and so they
did give into this request and the body was finally released.
A medical examination was performed on the preserved body, and
it's believed that Elmiegro died of a lung infection at
the age of about twenty seven. A dater exhibition exhibition
brochure claims that the Verreaux brothers attended the man's funeral
(27:21):
and then stole his body later that night, although there's
no way to verify these claims. Yeah, we don't know
if that was written to be like a sensational museum
card or if that's the actual case. It certainly does
line up a little bit with Jules Verreaux's letter to
the Parisian uh museum head where he kind of says
like we had to sneakily get this while his body
(27:43):
was being guarded. But we don't really have a solid
exact timeline of how that all played out. Well, and
then like, in my mind, if that part is true,
if that's really what they did, like that makes it
even worse. Yes, exactly, because like there are lots of
times in history where where people of one group have
sort of felt like people of another group were not
(28:04):
human beings. That doesn't make it okay. I'm not saying
that's okay or that that justifies anything. But if you
have just literally watched somebody have a funeral for their
fallen kinsman and then you go and steal his body, like,
there is no way that you're justifying to yourself that
that that was not a human being, right, it just
becomes really reprehensible at that point. It's like it was
(28:25):
reprehensible already, and but now it's like fifty times more
than it already was. Exactly, It's really it's just yeah.
Uh So, while it was never confirmed either whether or
not the man had originally been from Botswana, he was
returned there in two thousand to be reinterred, and he
was buried in a state funeral in Gabarone after several
(28:46):
days of visitation, during which huge crowds of people turned
out just to pay their respects to this unknown man.
At the funeral. Foreign Minister Lieutenant General mom Patti Murafe
said in his speech today, a hundred and seventy years later,
where gay other here not only to re enter the
body in African soil, where it likely belongs, but also
to cleanse that act of desecration, restore the dignity of
(29:09):
a common ancestor, to appease the spirits of Africa, and
above all, to correct a wrong which has no statute
of limitations. So I thought it was going to be
about cute lemurs, and it was about something, and then
it became a different which is really sort of a
more important story. It's not sort of. It really is
a more important story to tell. It just wasn't what
I thought I was getting into at the beginning. But
(29:31):
I'm glad that that came to light as I was researching,
because I remember the oh, I got to do something
on the Bob Brothers. Their taxidermists. They discover all these animals.
WHOA they did horrible things. WHOA. You and I have
these conversations sometimes while you're researching at your desk and
I'm researching at my desk, and we have these instant
messages things where like one of us is expressing horror
(29:54):
or delight or surprise or whatever, and I like, I
got this. I think it was I am for and
I am from where you were, Like this turned out
really really upsetting. I didn't think this was happening. But again,
like I said, that's an important story to tell when uh,
you know, we were certainly around when all of this
(30:16):
was happening in the late but I don't really remember
seeing anything about it. Well I don't remember. It could
just be me I wasn't tuned into it, but yeah,
and I think I probably I don't know if I
heard specifically about it or not. I like, there has
been enough in the last few decades, uh, controversy and
debate about repatriation of various artifacts and things, um that
(30:41):
it's like I don't know if among hearing about those
stories I also heard about this one or not. It
definitely I don't remember specifically hearing about it. Yeah, I
did not stick out in my mind. Uh, but that
it's a scoop on Happier notes he has a listener
mailed I have two pieces either, but it's related to
our Halloween candy episode. I know we've read some of that,
(31:05):
but one of these is kind of a counterpoint to
a previous listener mail, and the other one is so
hysterical that I was cackling at my desk and people
thought I might have gone off the deep end. Uh
So the first one is from our listener Pavia, and
you may recall on a recent episode, uh one of
our listeners that had worked in the confection industry replied
to my query during that episode about how I thought
(31:27):
canny making sounds kind of dangerous to me, and so
it is. There have been lots of burns when I
worked in that industry. And it's pretty graphic. It was
really graphic. We didn't read the actual letter because it
was just graphic. But this one comes from another person
that works in the candy industry, and this is a
different perspective. She says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I work
in America's oldest continuously run confectionery, Shane Confectionery in Philadelphia.
(31:51):
The confectionery was built in eighteen sixty three in the storefront,
open in nineteen eleven. The current owners used the shop
as a tool to help inspire interest in understanding in history.
We still make of our chocolates in house, on gas
stoves and large copper pots and with a butter cream
turner that was made in the nineteen teens. Hot sugar
is painful, but candymaking is not as perilous as you presumed.
(32:13):
Even with the old large pots. We wear leather gloves
as of an mits, and we always grab a friend
to help transport and pour if the pots are not
easily handled. I am sure the confectioners at Wonderley were
either fairly strong or they poured in pairs. So that's
a whole other perspective of No, it's yes, it's dangerous,
but we handle it very carefully. Good for being careful,
(32:34):
as which might be. It could just be the difference
of being at um. You know, it is a long
established confectionery, but it sounds like it is not a
big factory. It is sort of a smaller operation, which
might lead to better care procedures, and large factories often
do well. And the one that we got that we
didn't read made it sound as though they were uh,
(32:54):
sort of quote handmade confectioner, yeah, but also large and
a little more really high volume factory volume oriented exactly.
So that's the scoop. So it can be dangerous, but
a lot of people take very good precautions and it's
perfectly safe for them. The other mail that comes from
our listener, Dwayne Uh, and he is actually there are
(33:20):
two stories in this and they're both really funny, so
I'm going to read the whole thing. Uh. Your recent
candy Corn episode about Halloween reminded me of two stories.
You mentioned the history of trick or treating, and that
reminded me of a story my mom always tells. When
she was a little girl in the early nineteen forties,
she lived in a very small town in the Missouri Ozarks.
Halloween did not exist there until a new kid moved
(33:40):
into town and asked if the kids were going trick
or treating. Nobody knew what the kid was talking about,
and after an explanation of how stuff worked see what
I did there, all the kids decided it was a
great idea and ran up to the first house and
screamed trick or treat. Oh no. Of course, the people
in the house didn't know what was going on. When
they answered the door, all the kids in town, about
(34:01):
ten of them, stood their demanding candy. The lady of
the house had no candy, but invited the kids in
for a small slice of pie. After having eaten the pie,
the kids went to the next house, where, of course
the home an owner also knew nothing of trick or treat,
but invited the kids in for a drink of hot chocolate.
The kids continued through town in this manner, always invited in,
always getting some sort of treat, apples, left over cake
(34:23):
or milk, uh in, and in several cases sat down
to share in the dinner of the homeowners. Mom said
it was a really strange night and she probably ate
dinner five or six times. I love that. Uh. In
that episode, you also spoke of the demise of homemade
treats during Halloween. A friend of ours recounts the story
of when she was around twelve and her parents decided
(34:43):
to go out for the evening and left her home
with a huge bowl of candy to hand out to
the trick or treaters. Our friend loved handing the candy out,
but she was overzealous in her distribution and quickly realized
that she was running out of candy way too early
in the evening. She panicked and decided she had to
have something to hand out rather than turn off the
porch light. So she put on a big pot of
boiling water and cooked all the noodles in the house, spaghetti,
(35:06):
egg noodles, any form of pastas she could find. Then
she drained it and started placing it in baggies and
twist tying them closed. Tricker Treaters were that surprised when
a baggy of hot cook noodles landed in their goody bag.
I love it. Um. Our friend doesn't remember if the
number of Tricker Treaters dropped off sharply in the following
(35:27):
year or not. Um. That is the funnest letter. Dwayne,
Thank you so much for sending it, because it really
did have me just cackling. I um was laughing so hard.
Julie from Stuff to Blow Your Mind came over to
my desk. It was like, what is going on? And
I was trying to describe to her the hot cook
noodle baggies and then she was giggling and we were
just kind of useless for a little while. That's a
(35:49):
lot more ingenious than what I did this year, which
is that I was on certain we would not get
Tricker treaters because we live on an upper floor and
there's a lot of steps to trick treat, but you
can't like there's no you have to ring a bell
at the bottom. Oh got and and we didn't have
(36:09):
There's no no jack O lantern on the steps, there's
no portslide on none of that. I was like, we're
not gonna get tricker treaters, and fat I was like,
yes we are. And I was like, no, we're not.
We don't need candy. We're not buying any of course,
we got tricker treaters and they rang our bell three
or four times, and so I went downstairs to make
sure it wasn't the police or something having an emergency,
and I saw that it was tricker treaters and I hid.
We hid this year too. We um My husband kind
(36:31):
of put his foot down because one of the first
years we were in our house. We haven't been there
very long, but like five years we did the candy thing.
And this is the peril of the modern age, because
I think um kids were texting each other that our
house was a good one, because I'm not kidding, Like
entire pickup trucks full of children would come stop in
(36:52):
front of our house, pour out trick or treat, get
back in the truck and go. They didn't trick or
treat to any of the other houses on our coldest
back and so like I had to send poor Brian
out three times for more candy and he was like,
that was like a hundred and fifty dollar Halloween. Like
I don't want to do that every year. So, um,
that makes sense. We kind of have hidden in the
(37:14):
in the basement and played video games the last couple
of years. Well, I felt more bad for uh, for
Patrick who apparently really likes to give out candy on Helen,
which I didn't know. I've never really had trick or
treaters anywhere I've lived before. I felt so I felt
worse for Patrick than for the kids because they had
got plenty of candy from other houses. Yeah so, Colleen,
(37:37):
but that's a fun thing. Um, So if you would
like to write us any stories of crazy things you've
given out at Halloween, I still think hot bags of
noodles is pretty great. You could do so at History
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can also
connect with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in
History on Twitter at missed in History in History dot
(38:00):
obler dot com, and at pinterest dot com. Slash missed
in History. You can also visit our spreadshirt store at
mist in History dot spreadshirt dot com and you can
get missed in History things to where or card around
with you or enjoy at home. If you would like
to do a little extra research on what we've talked
about today, you can go to our parents bite how
stuff Works. Type in the word taxidermy in the search
(38:21):
bar and you'll get an article called how Taxidermy Works.
There's also a pretty fun quiz about taxidermy and you
can research that. You can also go to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you can
see the show notes, our entire archive of all episodes,
the occasional fabulous blog posts, usually by Tracy Uh, and
we encourage you to come and visit us there so
(38:42):
you can hang out a mist in history dot com
or again our parents site, which is how stuff Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Polly Prying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So sometimes
we will pick a topic because it seems interesting in light,
Like we've had a lot of heavy stuffs that you
and I have both been pretty open that we're looking
(00:22):
at just some less intense, troublesome, fair horrifying. Yeah. Uh
and then while you're doing the research on that thing
that seems like it would just be cool and fascinating,
you discover a whole other story that you didn't know
was there. This is one of those cases. Uh. So
for context, it'll sound like I'm going off on a
crazy tangent, but it's Jermaine. One of my favorite animals
(00:44):
of all time, like in the world is the verrosfaca,
And this is uh an animal you've probably seen footage of.
There are members of the Lemur family uh indre day
in their native dramatic gascar. So even if you don't
recognize your name, you have probably seen footage of them. Um.
They sometimes versions of them show up on children's shows
(01:05):
and in cartoons because they're so incredibly cute. They're mostly white,
and they have kind of rust brown bellies and these
dark chocolate colored faces and these big eyes, and they're
so cute. There are a million videos of them on
YouTube hopping around because they sometimes will travel on the
ground upright in kind of a crazy jumping motion, and
people like to set it to music. It's adorable. We'll
try to include a link to at least one of
(01:25):
those in the show notes. So I thought, hey, you know,
it would be really cool we should talk about Jules Verreaux,
who is the naturalist for whom these charming animals were named.
And then the research got a little bit dark but
also kind of interesting and exciting, even though some of
the subject matter is troubling, And it's not that the
(01:46):
dark parts are also the exciting parts. There's a largely
two different parts. Uh. There's a lot of different elements
to the story, and it really involves an entire family
and sort of their family business. Uh. It's involves botany
and taxidermy and grave robbing and the Paris Exposition and
(02:07):
kind of a lot of different things that we've talked
about on the show before in different episodes. But this
really kind of stacks a number of them together, and
it's kind of fascinating in that regard. So that is
the scoop about Jules Verreaux and sort of have we
got to some you'll see it's about halfway through we
get to kind of the really thing that might make
your if you feel a little unease about some of
(02:30):
the things that they did in the name of exploration
and uh science, but also kind of sensationalist tourism kind
of attractions. So normally we would start an episode that
revolves around the actions of people like this by talking
about the early lives of those people. But this is
(02:52):
kind of tricky in this case because even though there
was some fame and notoriety to the family, the accounts
of like what their childhood with the family, the patriarch
and then his children, who really become the prime point
of the story, like what their home life and their
childhoods were like, it's pretty sparse and there's a lot
of really contradictory stories. So it's sort of this happens
(03:15):
a lot with much older history, where it's sort of
like and suddenly there was a mathematician. Yeah, this seems
recent enough that I'm like, there should be more stuff.
But I think part of it is that because there
is a lot of exploring that happened, and at one
point there was a ship that sank with some things.
Like I'm wondering if documents got lost or journals got
(03:36):
lost along the way. So that's the scoop. So in
eighteen o three, taxidermist Jacques Philippe Verreaux opened Maison Varreau,
which was a taxidermy house. So Mazon Varreau provided taxidermy
specimens to museums and collectors, and this was the foremost
supplier of natural exhibit pieces and worked from the Verreau
(03:58):
family business. It was still on display in museums throughout
the world. Actually, now I'm wondering if there were any
at the I went to a very odd museum a
couple of weekends ago that was full of really old
taxi army specimens, and now I wish I had made
note of who had prepared them all. It's very possible.
There are like a lot of big name museums that
still have their pieces, and one of them were gonna
(04:19):
talk about at length a little bit later. But I
suspect because we're talking about huge volume that these guys
were doing in terms of the specimens they prepared, and
uh there I'm sure some of that has trickled out
into much smaller, uh and sort of less flagship museums
that are a little bit more specialized. But so Jacques
(04:41):
Phelipe and his wife Josephine had three sons. So there
was Jules Pierre, who was born in eighteen o seven,
Jean Baptiste Eduard, who went by Edwards throughout his life.
In eighteen ten, and their youngest son was Joseph Alexey,
and he went by Alexey. When their oldest son, Jules
was eleven or maybe twelve, because he accounts very a
little bit, he traveled with his uncle, naturalist Pierre de
(05:05):
la Land to South Africa. Jules was in South Africa
until he was thirteen, and when the two of them
came back, they brought more than a hundred and thirty
thousand specimens home with them. This number was mostly made
up of plant specimens, but they were also almost three
hundred mammals, more than two thousand birds, and several hundred
fish and reptiles. And then also in their collection were
(05:27):
a number of human skulls and full skeletons which had
been exhumed from their burial spots in Cape Town, and
one of the larger specimens that they brought back was
the skeleton of a hippopotamus, which I don't think had
ever been uh collected before, and that went on display
at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Once he was
(05:47):
back in Paris, Jewels studied anatomy and taxidermy, and he
had this natural proclivity for preserving biological samples. He very
uh almost effortlessly sort of fell in line with the
family business. He was just really naturally extremely good at
mounting specimens. And in eight so Jules had been studying
(06:10):
for a while, his uncle Pierre died. That was the
uncle that he had traveled to Cape Town originally with,
and so Jules actually returned to Cape Town after Pierre's death,
and eventually while he was working there, he helped to
establish and become curator of the South African Museum, and
that was a post that he officially began in eighteen
twenty nine, although the wheels were turning on getting it
set up before that, and he also the whole time
(06:31):
he was there continued to collect samples of both flora
and fauna. During this second collection phase. It just became
glaringly obvious that he was going to need help, so
he sent for his brother, Edward, the second son of Maizomboro,
made this journey to Cape Town in eighteen thirty. Yeah,
so that was just the year after Jules became Jules
(06:52):
assumed his post at the South African Museum. And during
this time there's also some interesting it's almost like a
sigh note in a lot of the the accounts you read. Uh,
he became interested in seeking out sort of mythological creatures
to see if they had any basis in reality. So
he was actually searching for a unicorn during this time,
(07:13):
and also an elephant bird which was apparently extinct. Who
was also during this time that the Verreaux brothers came
into possession of an item that would just be extremely
controversial and I would say justifiably so long after the
two of them were gone. But before we get into
this sort of grim bit of taxidermy, do you want
(07:33):
to pause and have a word from a sponsor so
we don't interrupt sort of the dark weirdness with let's
do okay, and now we will return to the Verreau brothers. Okay,
So before the break. Edward had traveled to South Africa
to assist his older brother Jewels, in the collection of specimens,
both for the museum, where Jewels was a curator and
for a return to Paris to be sold to collectors
(07:55):
as part of the ongoing family high end taxidermy business.
And while the search for a unicorn or some other
mythical animal didn't hand out, they did get their hands
on a human specimen and this particular piece actually involved
a grave robbing um what is believed possibly this isn't
a percent confirmed, and we'll talk about this later to
(08:17):
be a native Botswana man was taken from his resting place,
preserved and mounted, and in a letter to Paris Museum
director George Cuvier, Jules wrote, quote, an object which is
not the least interesting in our collection is a stuffed Bushwana.
So it's a little bit of a wiggly away to
say Botswana, which is very well preserved, and which was
(08:40):
about to cause my death because in order to get it,
I was obliged to disenter it at night in places
guarded by his fellows. Really, French guy, Yeah, it's uh,
there's one account, and we'll talk about. Like I said,
this particular specimen more because his history reaches quite far
so history um that there was one particular piece of
(09:04):
research I was doing. They were like, you can almost
kind of like excuse it a little as just contextualized
in the time. But even so, I think what's telling
is that the museum did not want it. They were like, no,
thank you, hyeah, They said, we would not like to
purchase this piece from you. Yeah, so it went on
(09:25):
display at masal Brow because they had it. It was
already shipped. It's upsetting. It is upsetting well, and I
think the reason that there are a lot of things
that we talked about that that happened in the past
would definitely be inexcusable today. And like there's some degree
at the time, right, attitudes are very different. It's been
(09:49):
really long established that like burying of the dead is
a pretty sacristanc thing across cultures. And that's where I
kind of go, guys, you shouldn't own better. Yeah, well,
especially when he talks about how he had to like
sneakily do it like he started, Yeah, surely there was
a question mark in your head, like is this the
(10:10):
right thing to do? And I don't we don't know unfortunately,
if he was just so driven by this spirit of
collection and you know, cataloging the world of all of
its various types of creatures, or if he was just
kind of weasily and just wanted to sell it off
for money, Like it's not really clear, but it certainly
(10:31):
seems like there had to have. You would hope there
was a moment of moral debate in his head at
least that the following piece appeared in the Parisian periodical
like Constitutional And this is a translation that runs a
little long, but we wanted to include all of it
because it's a really good indicator of the cultural attitude
at the time toward native Africans. Yeah, and this appeared
(10:54):
in November one, So bear with me. I'm going to
read the whole thing. Two young people, Monsieur, the Varreaux brothers,
have recently arrived from a voyage to the ends of Africa,
to the land of the Cape of Good Hope. One
of these interesting naturalists is barely eighteen years old, but
he has already spent twenty months in the wild country
north of the Land of the hottent Tots, between the
(11:15):
latitudes of Natal and the top of Saint Helena Bay.
How can one possibly imagine what deprivations he had to endure.
Our young compatriots had to face the dangers of living
in the midst of natives in this zone of Africa
who are ferocious as well as black, as well as
the fawn colored wild animals among which they live, about
which we do not need to tell. We want to
(11:36):
speak only about the triumphs of their collecting, and do
not know which to admire more, their intrepidity or their perseverance. Humans, quadrupeds, birds, fish, plants,
mineral shells. All of these they have studied. Their hunting
has given them tigers, lions, hyenas, and admirable lubal a
crimson antelope of rare elegance, a host of other small
(11:59):
members of the family, two giraffes, monkeys, long pitchforks, very
curious rats, ostriches, birds of prey which have never been
described before. A great quantity of other birds of all sizes,
colors and species. They also have a collection of birds nests,
which could be the object of a charming descriptive essay.
Roots like onions and other plants of remarkable shape and
(12:20):
extraordinary size. Snakes, a cashelo and a crocodile of a
type previously unknown. But their greatest curiosity is an individual
of the nation of the Bejuanas. This man is preserved
by the means by which naturalists prepare their specimens and
reconstitute their form, and so to speak, their inert life.
He is of small stature, lack of skin, his head
(12:43):
covered by short, wooly and curly hair, armed with arrows
and a lance, clothes in antelope skin, with a bag
made of bush pig full of small glass beads, seeds,
and a small bones. Another thing that we are rather
embarrassed to find a suitable to turn to characterize is
the very special accessory of modest clothing worn by the Bechuanas,
(13:05):
which we find most striking. Monsieur Verro have deposited their
scientific riches at the stores of Monsieur de Lasserre Rue
sulf Jacu number three. They are generously put on display
for the public without charge. It would be well if,
which is the botanical gardens, took this opportunity to extend
its collections, already so beautiful, to become even more desirable,
(13:29):
and to use the skills which they did not already
possess of Monsieur Verrot with the time, the talent and
the energy necessary to go out Africa to catch nature
in the act. It's so crazy of this weird grossness.
It really, well do you say weird grossness? Like this
part turns my stomach where they're talking about this part
(13:50):
that it's a man and it's great that they did this,
you guys. It's such a bizarre, uh like way to
sell it to my mind, you know, like my sensibilities
are very like troubled that they're like, what we really
want to talk about is how amazing these two guys are. Yeah,
And then they talk about the specimen of the botswan
(14:14):
and with such a delight and right like, oh, it's
the neatest thing, and I'm like, that's a person. So listeners,
sometimes this is what happens when we just want to
talk about adorable lemurs and we find horrifying things instead.
So the middle brother Edward brought this human display and
(14:36):
an assortment of other samples to Paris in eight thirty one,
and a lot of them were delivered into the hands
of museums that were really eager to expand their collections.
So we're gonna come back to this particular piece of
taxidermy in a bit, because the story of this mounted
human specimen reaches all the way up to very recent history.
But as for the Arreau brothers themselves, when Edward returned
(15:00):
to South Africa the following year, so that would be
eighteen thirty two, he also brought their third brother, Alexei,
with him. It's believed that Alexei never left Africa after
his arrival and lived out the rest of his life there,
assisting with jules collection efforts. Jules and Edwards seemed to
have done some traveling, although there's no definitive record on
exactly where they went, and the list includes usually places
(15:23):
like the Philippines in China. It does appear that at
one point in the late eighteen thirties a shipment of
their specimens was lost on its way to Paris, when
the whole ship that was carrying the collection sank. Yeah,
that's usually if you look at different accounts, that's usually consistent. Uh,
And then getting into the eighteen forties, it's consistent. But
(15:43):
during that period of the eighteen thirties, particularly the early half,
there will be accounts of them being in two different
places at the same time in different like you know,
journals and accounts that other people have given. We'll say, oh,
they were in China then, and it's some of one
says it's like it doesn't even acknowledge that one exists.
They may not have known that, but it's like, oh,
(16:04):
and then they were here in this part of the world,
and they could not have been in both those places,
so it is a little bit hard to actually track
their movements. In eighteen forty two, Jules Verreaux made his
way to Australia and he wanted to expand his preserved
sample of offerings to include more specimens from outside of Africa.
He explored New South Wales and Tasmania, and he gathered
(16:27):
all kinds of botanicals, insects, birds and mammals, and again
he gained some the possession of some human remains. Yeah,
they you know have It comes up periodically that they
had multiple samples of human remains. It it's usually believed
by most people. I think that they really only did
(16:48):
the one mounting of a human and that the rest
were sort of like bones that have been discovered along
the way. They may have. We talked about them disentering
some bodies in South Africa. Uh, some of the skeleton,
but just for context, there was just the one taxidermy
human that we know of. One too many it is,
but I just want to make that clear that this
(17:08):
wasn't like a but we're making a career of taxidermyng people. So,
after five years of exploring Australia, Jewels returned to Paris
and for several years he worked on organizing and naming
the collection, both the new things that he had brought
as well as you know, sort of placing them in
context with other specimens that he had collected through the years.
(17:30):
He was eventually employed as an assistant naturalist at the
Paris Museum of Natural History, and that started in eighteen
sixty two. So it had been more than a decade
that he had been kind of working on classifications and
and descriptive catalogs of all of his various pieces that
he had gathered throughout the world. Tools had continued to
work on his taxidermy throughout his whole life and his travels.
(17:52):
But it's in the late eighteen sixties that he made
one of his most famous mounted tableau, and it was
entitled Arab Courier Attacked eye lions. In this display, a
mannequin outfitted in the black cape that was typical of
the Arab and our address of North Africa is featured
in the fictional moment that he's pulled off of the
camel he's riding by two Barbary lions. An Arab courier
(18:17):
won the Gold Medal for Excellence at the Paris Exposition
in eighteen sixty seven, and during the seven months it
was on display there, more than fifteen million spectators came
just to see it. Uh. It was a really dramatic
shift from most of the taxidermy that had come before it,
and certainly different than almost anyone had seen before, because
prior to that, it was pretty common even if you
(18:37):
were setting up a scene of taxidermy that it would
kind of just be multiple mounts kind of in a line.
But this is the first time that it really was
sort of an action scene that depicted like an event happening.
After the Paris Exposition closed, the American Museum of Natural
History bought Burrows display, and it wasn't available for public
(18:59):
viewing for some time time. Once museum officials saw the
piece in person, they thought it was a little too
ghost to be part of their collection, so they kept
just kept it in storage for thirty years. Yeah, basically
was in a warehouse in New York for all that time. Eventually, though,
in eight it was sold. It was sold to the
Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was fairly new at
(19:20):
the time, for the tidy sum of fifty dollars, and
it eventually became a prominent part of the collection there.
There is one story that it they were going to
be charged I think it's forty five dollars for them
to actually transport it from its storage place to the museum,
and I think that ruffled some feathers, like we just
paid fifty dollars for this, and I gotta pay another
(19:41):
fifty just to get it here. Uh. But it did
eventually make its way to the collection. And while there
have been rumors throughout the years that the man on
the camel was an actual human, it is not, and
that's one of those things that has been debated. There
was a restoration point where it was worked on because
there had been, you know, some degradation of the the specimen.
(20:01):
But even so, I think most people in most museum
curators that have been involved with it. I don't think
it was ever an actual human, but because of the
precedent of the Botswanan man, they there have always been
some suspicions. And as a side note, Barbary lions went
extinct not long after the Vereux assembled this tableau. So
if you're interested in seeing Arab courier attacked by lions
(20:25):
still on display at the Carnegie Museum. The museum modeled
a snow globe after it in two thousand and nine. Yeah,
they started like an interesting program where they were doing
snow globes of some of their most interesting and famous pieces,
and that was the one that kicked off the collection.
So I have never seen one of the snow globes
and how it actually turned out, but it's kind of fascinating.
(20:47):
I had this brief moment where I was like, I
want one. I should start a snow globe collection. And
then immediately, where are you going to put a snow
loop collection? That's that's the problem always. Uh So, both
Edward and elect he died in eighteen sixty eight and
in eighteen seventies, so that was right after this big
sort of triumph at the Paris exposition of Jules's peace,
(21:10):
and in eighteen seventy Jules Verreaux left France as the
frank Oppression more began and he fled to England and
he lived there for three years before he died. And
when he had sold the Arab Courier piece to the
American Museum of Natural History, he sold with it to
them the vast majority of the collection of Maison Vaux.
And there's been some speculation that he actually knew his
(21:33):
health was already pretty dicey at that point, and he
wanted to make sure that collection went somewhere and somewhere
that was a museum that would understand what exactly they
were getting, because it's been discussed by some historians that
he probably was already pretty sick from the ongoing exposure
to chemicals used in taxidermy that he had basically been
(21:55):
doing since he was a child, So uh, he was
not a great health at that point, despite some claims
that there was a child born out of wedlock when
Jules was still very young. This was the end of
the Verreaux brothers liege. And while there are a number
of species that bear the Verreaux name as a consequence
of all the exploration and collecting that Jules and Edward
(22:16):
did and that Alexei assisted them with. There has also
been some confusion about certain species based on some incorrect
labeling that Jewels is believed to have done to some
of their collected pieces. And there's been some speculation that
he may have purposely mislabeled some specimens uh and the
locations where they had been found to make them appear
(22:37):
more exotic and therefore more valuable to museums and collectors.
We don't know whether or not that was the case,
but regardless of the cause of this labeling, uh, sloppiness,
those poorly cataloged items kind of did a bit of
a disservice to science. There have been a couple of
points of confusion over the years. Was like, wait, this
animal isn't really native to this place. Uh, and even
(23:00):
actually they realized like, no, this is just wrong. Yeah. Well,
and I want to point out that that poor or
inaccurate labor labeling is like not unique to these guys, No,
not at all. There are frequently stories that will come
across our radar, which is like a museum found something
really stunning in their collection that they didn't know they had,
and yeah, a lot of times people are ready to
(23:20):
go whoever made that mistake should be fired. And I'm
kind of like that guy made that mistake in about
nine well and moreover. I mean, I uh, not that
it excuses it, but when you're bringing back hundreds of
thousands of things at a time, I could imagine it
would be easy to lose track of something, or you know,
even if you're attempting to be meticulous, you could just
(23:43):
write down the wrong note in your book as you
go track of uh. And I promised we would return
back to the taxiderman man, and we will, but first
we're going to have a word from a sponsor. If
that's cool with Tracy. I think we should have a
break before we get to this. So back to our
story and to the part that I promised we would
(24:03):
come back to. You're probably wondering what happened to that
taxidermy man from Botswana. Uh. Well, in the eighteen eighties
a Spanish taxidermist and veterinarian named Frenches Darter. It's probably
pronounced differently, but usually it's uh said that way when
people are just discussing it in the sources. I looked
at purchased the piece, Uh, and originally he was gonna
(24:24):
he put it on display at the Spanish Exposition, and
then after he passed, it landed in the Darter Museum
of Natural History, which is in Spain. So this exhibit
was simply labeled El Negro and it drew crowds for
years and not just a few years. Years. The most
shocking part of this story lies in the fact that
(24:46):
this taxider made human being was on display until the
late nineteen nineties. Yeah, nine nineties, uh so a very
long time to be standing there. I think the part
that really gets me is that this was not a person,
like I could almost see a taxidermy human being on
(25:08):
display if that had been their wish, Like they're certainly
people that have donated their bodies, and I get this
is like a grave robbed situation. And then this person
just stayed on display forever, which is troubling. Uh So,
in the museum was asked if they would consent to
return the body to Botswana to be respectfully put to
rest at last after being an African novelty for Europeans
(25:33):
on display for more than a hundred and fifty years,
and initially the museum refused. If this were happening today,
the internet would jump all over. So, writing for the
New York Times in two thousand, Rachel Swarren's stated the
significance of the display piece, and here's a quote to Africans,
he was a symbol of racism lingering from the turn
(25:53):
of the century when blacks were paraded as freaks in
the vaudeville shows and natural history museums of Europe and America. Yeah,
he was certainly not the only instance of this happening. Uh,
But this really became a case where people thought, like
this is correctable, like we can at least make this
a better situation. And so the Spanish government and the
(26:16):
organization of African community really worked in collaboration to try
to convince the Dater Museum to just acquiesce to this
request and finally let Elnegro go home. Curators at the museum,
it seemed like they almost based on what I've read,
I mean, I haven't seen interviews with these people, are
seen their firsthand accounts, but the way it reads, it
(26:36):
sounds almost like they were just kind of briskly that
they were hurt that they had been called racists. And
so is that really tricky thing where they were like, no,
we're really respectful about this display, and we put it
in context. Uh, you know, we talked about the history
and the nature of exploration and specimen collection in the
early eighteen hundreds. And but eventually they kind of saw
(26:58):
the error of that whole logic loop, and so they
did give into this request and the body was finally released.
A medical examination was performed on the preserved body, and
it's believed that Elmiegro died of a lung infection at
the age of about twenty seven. A dater exhibition exhibition
brochure claims that the Verreaux brothers attended the man's funeral
(27:21):
and then stole his body later that night, although there's
no way to verify these claims. Yeah, we don't know
if that was written to be like a sensational museum
card or if that's the actual case. It certainly does
line up a little bit with Jules Verreaux's letter to
the Parisian uh museum head where he kind of says
like we had to sneakily get this while his body
(27:43):
was being guarded. But we don't really have a solid
exact timeline of how that all played out. Well, and
then like, in my mind, if that part is true,
if that's really what they did, like that makes it
even worse. Yes, exactly, because like there are lots of
times in history where where people of one group have
sort of felt like people of another group were not
(28:04):
human beings. That doesn't make it okay. I'm not saying
that's okay or that that justifies anything. But if you
have just literally watched somebody have a funeral for their
fallen kinsman and then you go and steal his body, like,
there is no way that you're justifying to yourself that
that that was not a human being, right, it just
becomes really reprehensible at that point. It's like it was
(28:25):
reprehensible already, and but now it's like fifty times more
than it already was. Exactly, It's really it's just yeah.
Uh So, while it was never confirmed either whether or
not the man had originally been from Botswana, he was
returned there in two thousand to be reinterred, and he
was buried in a state funeral in Gabarone after several
(28:46):
days of visitation, during which huge crowds of people turned
out just to pay their respects to this unknown man.
At the funeral. Foreign Minister Lieutenant General mom Patti Murafe
said in his speech today, a hundred and seventy years later,
where gay other here not only to re enter the
body in African soil, where it likely belongs, but also
to cleanse that act of desecration, restore the dignity of
(29:09):
a common ancestor, to appease the spirits of Africa, and
above all, to correct a wrong which has no statute
of limitations. So I thought it was going to be
about cute lemurs, and it was about something, and then
it became a different which is really sort of a
more important story. It's not sort of. It really is
a more important story to tell. It just wasn't what
I thought I was getting into at the beginning. But
(29:31):
I'm glad that that came to light as I was researching,
because I remember the oh, I got to do something
on the Bob Brothers. Their taxidermists. They discover all these animals.
WHOA they did horrible things. WHOA. You and I have
these conversations sometimes while you're researching at your desk and
I'm researching at my desk, and we have these instant
messages things where like one of us is expressing horror
(29:54):
or delight or surprise or whatever, and I like, I
got this. I think it was I am for and
I am from where you were, Like this turned out
really really upsetting. I didn't think this was happening. But again,
like I said, that's an important story to tell when uh,
you know, we were certainly around when all of this
(30:16):
was happening in the late but I don't really remember
seeing anything about it. Well I don't remember. It could
just be me I wasn't tuned into it, but yeah,
and I think I probably I don't know if I
heard specifically about it or not. I like, there has
been enough in the last few decades, uh, controversy and
debate about repatriation of various artifacts and things, um that
(30:41):
it's like I don't know if among hearing about those
stories I also heard about this one or not. It
definitely I don't remember specifically hearing about it. Yeah, I
did not stick out in my mind. Uh, but that
it's a scoop on Happier notes he has a listener
mailed I have two pieces either, but it's related to
our Halloween candy episode. I know we've read some of that,
(31:05):
but one of these is kind of a counterpoint to
a previous listener mail, and the other one is so
hysterical that I was cackling at my desk and people
thought I might have gone off the deep end. Uh
So the first one is from our listener Pavia, and
you may recall on a recent episode, uh one of
our listeners that had worked in the confection industry replied
to my query during that episode about how I thought
(31:27):
canny making sounds kind of dangerous to me, and so
it is. There have been lots of burns when I
worked in that industry. And it's pretty graphic. It was
really graphic. We didn't read the actual letter because it
was just graphic. But this one comes from another person
that works in the candy industry, and this is a
different perspective. She says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I work
in America's oldest continuously run confectionery, Shane Confectionery in Philadelphia.
(31:51):
The confectionery was built in eighteen sixty three in the storefront,
open in nineteen eleven. The current owners used the shop
as a tool to help inspire interest in understanding in history.
We still make of our chocolates in house, on gas
stoves and large copper pots and with a butter cream
turner that was made in the nineteen teens. Hot sugar
is painful, but candymaking is not as perilous as you presumed.
(32:13):
Even with the old large pots. We wear leather gloves
as of an mits, and we always grab a friend
to help transport and pour if the pots are not
easily handled. I am sure the confectioners at Wonderley were
either fairly strong or they poured in pairs. So that's
a whole other perspective of No, it's yes, it's dangerous,
but we handle it very carefully. Good for being careful,
(32:34):
as which might be. It could just be the difference
of being at um. You know, it is a long
established confectionery, but it sounds like it is not a
big factory. It is sort of a smaller operation, which
might lead to better care procedures, and large factories often
do well. And the one that we got that we
didn't read made it sound as though they were uh,
(32:54):
sort of quote handmade confectioner, yeah, but also large and
a little more really high volume factory volume oriented exactly.
So that's the scoop. So it can be dangerous, but
a lot of people take very good precautions and it's
perfectly safe for them. The other mail that comes from
our listener, Dwayne Uh, and he is actually there are
(33:20):
two stories in this and they're both really funny, so
I'm going to read the whole thing. Uh. Your recent
candy Corn episode about Halloween reminded me of two stories.
You mentioned the history of trick or treating, and that
reminded me of a story my mom always tells. When
she was a little girl in the early nineteen forties,
she lived in a very small town in the Missouri Ozarks.
Halloween did not exist there until a new kid moved
(33:40):
into town and asked if the kids were going trick
or treating. Nobody knew what the kid was talking about,
and after an explanation of how stuff worked see what
I did there, all the kids decided it was a
great idea and ran up to the first house and
screamed trick or treat. Oh no. Of course, the people
in the house didn't know what was going on. When
they answered the door, all the kids in town, about
(34:01):
ten of them, stood their demanding candy. The lady of
the house had no candy, but invited the kids in
for a small slice of pie. After having eaten the pie,
the kids went to the next house, where, of course
the home an owner also knew nothing of trick or treat,
but invited the kids in for a drink of hot chocolate.
The kids continued through town in this manner, always invited in,
always getting some sort of treat, apples, left over cake
(34:23):
or milk, uh in, and in several cases sat down
to share in the dinner of the homeowners. Mom said
it was a really strange night and she probably ate
dinner five or six times. I love that. Uh. In
that episode, you also spoke of the demise of homemade
treats during Halloween. A friend of ours recounts the story
of when she was around twelve and her parents decided
(34:43):
to go out for the evening and left her home
with a huge bowl of candy to hand out to
the trick or treaters. Our friend loved handing the candy out,
but she was overzealous in her distribution and quickly realized
that she was running out of candy way too early
in the evening. She panicked and decided she had to
have something to hand out rather than turn off the
porch light. So she put on a big pot of
boiling water and cooked all the noodles in the house, spaghetti,
(35:06):
egg noodles, any form of pastas she could find. Then
she drained it and started placing it in baggies and
twist tying them closed. Tricker Treaters were that surprised when
a baggy of hot cook noodles landed in their goody bag.
I love it. Um. Our friend doesn't remember if the
number of Tricker Treaters dropped off sharply in the following
(35:27):
year or not. Um. That is the funnest letter. Dwayne,
Thank you so much for sending it, because it really
did have me just cackling. I um was laughing so hard.
Julie from Stuff to Blow Your Mind came over to
my desk. It was like, what is going on? And
I was trying to describe to her the hot cook
noodle baggies and then she was giggling and we were
just kind of useless for a little while. That's a
(35:49):
lot more ingenious than what I did this year, which
is that I was on certain we would not get
Tricker treaters because we live on an upper floor and
there's a lot of steps to trick treat, but you
can't like there's no you have to ring a bell
at the bottom. Oh got and and we didn't have
(36:09):
There's no no jack O lantern on the steps, there's
no portslide on none of that. I was like, we're
not gonna get tricker treaters, and fat I was like,
yes we are. And I was like, no, we're not.
We don't need candy. We're not buying any of course,
we got tricker treaters and they rang our bell three
or four times, and so I went downstairs to make
sure it wasn't the police or something having an emergency,
and I saw that it was tricker treaters and I hid.
We hid this year too. We um My husband kind
(36:31):
of put his foot down because one of the first
years we were in our house. We haven't been there
very long, but like five years we did the candy thing.
And this is the peril of the modern age, because
I think um kids were texting each other that our
house was a good one, because I'm not kidding, Like
entire pickup trucks full of children would come stop in
(36:52):
front of our house, pour out trick or treat, get
back in the truck and go. They didn't trick or
treat to any of the other houses on our coldest
back and so like I had to send poor Brian
out three times for more candy and he was like,
that was like a hundred and fifty dollar Halloween. Like
I don't want to do that every year. So, um,
that makes sense. We kind of have hidden in the
(37:14):
in the basement and played video games the last couple
of years. Well, I felt more bad for uh, for
Patrick who apparently really likes to give out candy on Helen,
which I didn't know. I've never really had trick or
treaters anywhere I've lived before. I felt so I felt
worse for Patrick than for the kids because they had
got plenty of candy from other houses. Yeah so, Colleen,
(37:37):
but that's a fun thing. Um, So if you would
like to write us any stories of crazy things you've
given out at Halloween, I still think hot bags of
noodles is pretty great. You could do so at History
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. You can also
connect with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in
History on Twitter at missed in History in History dot
(38:00):
obler dot com, and at pinterest dot com. Slash missed
in History. You can also visit our spreadshirt store at
mist in History dot spreadshirt dot com and you can
get missed in History things to where or card around
with you or enjoy at home. If you would like
to do a little extra research on what we've talked
about today, you can go to our parents bite how
stuff Works. Type in the word taxidermy in the search
(38:21):
bar and you'll get an article called how Taxidermy Works.
There's also a pretty fun quiz about taxidermy and you
can research that. You can also go to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you can
see the show notes, our entire archive of all episodes,
the occasional fabulous blog posts, usually by Tracy Uh, and
we encourage you to come and visit us there so
(38:42):
you can hang out a mist in history dot com
or again our parents site, which is how stuff Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it how stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.