July 10, 2019 • 16 mins
Why we love short stuff - because we can tell stories like this one. A man goes to an island to start a commune of sorts that subsists entirely on coconuts. It didn't go well.
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 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
There's other Josh who's basically fast becoming. He's gunning at
Jerry's heels. I would say, Chuck. When't you agree? Well,
I think at the very least he's the new Frank
the chair. For sure. He may soon be the new bird,
the bobbing bird. Oh that's right. Yeah. At any rate,
(00:24):
we're glad Josh is here, and we just almost two
inanimate objects. Exactly. We just ate up about a third
of our time. So let's we're gonna have to remove
the ending from this one. Okay, Yeah, this one is
interesting because I read the original New York Times piece
from nineteen o five or whatever, la la very different
than the story we get here in a lot of ways.
(00:45):
So I can't wait to who knows, Let's just I'll
just point out what the New York Times article said
compared to what we have in front of us. Do
it like a cranky I T guy when I say something,
just be like wrong? Well, who knows? It is New
York Times, But I don't know what There's andreds were
like in nineteen five. I don't know either, right, Um,
(01:08):
So there's this this article from How Stuff Works that
we found um does a really good job of of
of placing this in context in the world and saying
that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vershka,
which means tree which gives all that is necessary for living,
(01:30):
which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot
about what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying, you
don't need anything else but this one tree. That's how
great this tree is. Yeah, and that's also just a
slightly fancier way than saying Webster's defines a little blank
a little bit. It's it's definitely fancier, for sure. It's
it's got like cursive everywhere. But the whole point is it,
(01:52):
coconuts m m are pretty fun and good to eat
and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It is it
turns out that the sans Christs were saying is quite wrong,
like it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist
on coconuts. And there was actually a guy who was
born in eighteen seventy five named August Engelhardt who who
basically proved that inadvertently it wasn't his intention to prove
(02:15):
that the Sanskrit term was wrong, but um, he actually
took it to heart, um and and tried to live
exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed
was coconuts and sunlight. And uh ended up living on
I don't want to say deserted island, but certainly a
sparsely populated island. Um living and dying there to to
spoil the ending. Yeah, yeah, this is uh interesting mostly
(02:40):
to me because it was when it happened. He was
born in eighteen seventy Like, if this happened in the
nineteen seventies would be like, sure, of course this happens
all the time. But this guy was born in eighteen
seventy five in Germany, and then after college sort of
became uh well there's a lot of debate and whether
or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that,
(03:01):
he became very much into the Laban's Reform, which is
life reform movement. Basically what you would think of these
days is like a very sixties hippie American thing they
were doing, I guess in Germany in the you know,
early twentieth century. Yeah, I took it to be kind
of like a prototype for Goop, for who for Goop,
(03:25):
Gwyneth Paltrow's site. Oh good lord, Yeah, that's that's kind
of I mean, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was
a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and
what you could find on like some of the sites
that Coop endorses and coop itself, especially if you take
into account this book that he wrote, Um, it sounds
a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days.
(03:48):
You got sand Coop Coop so in he wrote a book,
uh called a care Free Future colon the New Gospel Semicolon.
That's rare glimpse into the depth and distance for the
selection of mankind, comma comma for the reflection of all
comma for consideration and stimulation. And he should have just
(04:12):
put an exclamation point at the end, just over all spaces.
He missed that Oxford comma after consideration though. But it
was a kind of a cookie book. He talked about life,
his lifestyle and what you know he believed his version
of the Laban's reform was. And then he also wrote
poems about coconuts. Yeah, like mother Coconut, The Coconut Spirit,
How to Become a Coconut. Those were titles of some
(04:32):
of the poems and tracks that he included in this book.
And like, it's really hard to overstate just how much
faith this guy placed in the coconut as the source
of not just life but health. And um it was based.
It was based on some somewhat unfounded ideas. So it
(04:53):
tied in very much with an idea that he had
that the sun was the source of all life in
the universe, and that coconuts grew on coconut palms um
toward the top, just like the brain in the human
head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun,
coconuts are closest to the sun. Ergo the coconut can
(05:16):
care for the brain and everything else you need in life.
And um, that was it. Yeah, that probably would have
been the end of his story had he not had
a substantial amount of money. Uh. I was about to
say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative,
so he had some cash. All of a sudden, he
bought a hundred and eighty five acres of land on
a tiny little island called kabakan Um off of Papa
(05:40):
what is now known as Papua New Guinea, and he
took a long books, got rid of most of his
clothes and went out there and lived um by himself.
Well not by himself because there uh, there are indigenous
peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only
white German there right. And his whole jam was that
(06:02):
he he had either heard or figured out that that
humans had evolved in the subtropics, between Tropic of Cancer
and Tropic of Capricorn. And that's what we were basically
evolved too, That's where we were evolved to be. So
the idea of living in like a house and driving
a car eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet,
but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. Um. The idea
(06:26):
of just basically living in a boxing, cubicalized, stuffy life.
It was and athetical of how we were designed by
evolution or natural selection or even God if that's your bag, right,
And so he moved to this island so that he
could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts,
living how This guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live.
(06:49):
And from what I can tell, he fully expected to
basically be free of all disease and any kind of
terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way
that it ended up at all. No, because, first of all, coconuts,
you cannot live on coconut alone. Um. They do have
a lot of good stuff in there. They have good
carbs and fat and stuff like that, but they lack
(07:11):
a lot of vitamins, notably B twelve, B six A K,
calcium um and protein. There's a little bit of protein,
about three to three grams or so, uh, but that's
that's not very much protein. So if you're gonna eat
enough coconuts to supply your body, and he was about
(07:32):
five ft eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly
less as time went on, Obviously he would have had
to been eating, you know, between fourteen and eighteen coconuts
a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean,
if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked
on an island, reading some books, you got time to
eat fourteen to eighteen coconuts a day. So he could have,
(07:53):
but it's not clear that he knew he needed to
eat that amount. And it's also not clear that he
would have responded to that information. So he didn't and
he started to wither away, which, as you said, um,
probably would have been the end of the story had
this guy actually not managed to convince other people through
his book and then through correspondence with them to come
(08:15):
join them. And so people started to show up on
this island. And we'll talk about what happened after that
after this. Alright, So this this is where the New
(08:45):
York Times story has diverged already. Okay, they wrote an
article and everyone, if you don't know that The New
York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written,
uh scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's uh.
So there was an article failure of a womanless Eden
in the Pacific Dash, a strange story from the South seas.
(09:06):
As the New York Times tells it, only two people
joined the Sona Norton cult the Order of the Sun
cult um. This article that we have says, and I'm
inclined to go with ours, because you know, investigative journalism
has gotten better since nineteen UM. But the New York
Times set a boat showed up in the end that
(09:28):
he was thought was going to be full of like
twenty people and there was only two guys. Uh. The
rest of the people got worried that the island was
full of cannibals and decided not to show up. Which
if that's wrong, it sounds like it was completely made
up by the by the writer, because our thing says
that about fifteen people showed up, uh and took their
(09:49):
clothes off, and we're basically like, let's do this. Um.
They did agree on the two two dudes though one
one guy's name was Einrich Yukin's. He was four years old,
he was a vegetarian, and he was away down with this, uh.
And the other was very famous person actually um or
at least medium famous in Germany at the time. Um,
(10:11):
that's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzow
and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of
the Lutzeu Orchestra in Berlin. Right. So, so Yukin's and
lets ou basically showed up, from what I understand, and said,
we're here, Um, we're very enthusiastic for this. Let's see
some coconuts. They took their clothes off, they started to
(10:33):
live this way. Um. But there were two big problems
for for um Yukon's It was that he his body
did not take to this diet despite from what I understand,
being a vegetarian, if not a vegan ahead of time. Right, Still,
the coconuts got him. Maybe had an allergy, maybe he
got too much sign who knows, but he died. This
(10:54):
article from how Stuff Works puts that he dropped dead
within weeks of showing up and starting this this coconut subsistence.
New York Times confirms that, okay, good, all right, so
we've got a fact. We've we've unearthed the fact here too.
It's double double sourced, um unless our house stuff Works
article used that New York Times as a source. That's
how facts get generated. And then the other guy loots
(11:17):
out the conductor. He was doing fine and apparently he
got along with um August angel Heart, the leader of
this cult. But um he also they had they had
varying tastes in music, and that actually created a bit
of tension between the two. Yeah, apparently, let's out. I'm
sorry Inglehart hated but Set. I think let's love but Set.
(11:43):
And it says that lets brought his music collection. The
only thing I can figure is that he brought over
he was a violinist as well. That he brought a violin,
I don't know. He could have probably one of those
cranky gramophones maybe, you know, or maybe a bird with
a beak like Flintstone style, or maybe a person dressed
like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah,
(12:06):
maybe he did bring records. Uh, I mean, Augus Inglehart
brought books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player.
So maybe that's what happened. But they they got the
way The New York Times described it as they started
getting into arguments about music. Uh. And because it was
just the two of them, according to that article, it
(12:27):
you know, it's gonna get a little crazy after a while.
And looks I was like, I don't want to spend
the night hit next to you tonight. Um And he
applied for permission, supposedly with Inglehart, to go spend the
night on a missionary boat that was nearby. Um at
one of the other it was a bunch of islands around,
and I guess Inglehart granted him this. He went on
(12:49):
board this boat, he spent the night. He would refuse
to eat any of the food that they had and
apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting
back to his coconut paradise, and he died. Yes, he died.
And if there were so, if two people showed up
of the visitors died, but even if there were more
(13:12):
in this house stuff works articles, right, because this guy
carried this guy, August Engelhardt, he carried on even after
these two deaths, um for more than a decade beyond
that that New York Times articles. So maybe more people
showed up afterward, and that accounts for the discrepancy. But
as this how stuff Works article tells it, um, more
people showed up, More people died from things like the hydration,
(13:34):
heat stroke. Um. And then this one, this is tough
to swallow. If it is true, then there is a
creator God who does take pleasure in and and messing
with us. But somebody died from being hit by a coconut.
Somebody in the coconut worshiping cult died from being killed
(13:54):
or died from a coconut injury. Which happens, Sure it does,
it does, But I mean imagine traveling from Germany in
the nineteenth century early twentieth century, showing up to eat
nothing but coconuts and then dying because of coconut hit
you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic.
So um August Engelhardt himself died too, but he hung
(14:15):
on for a really long time, considering he had the
true grit of somebody who really would have just eating
eaten coconuts. From what I can tell, yeah, I mean,
there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time
from people who, uh, I guess we're nearby, and he
he looked awful. He looked like he would expect someone
to look. They describe him as a bearded bag of bones.
(14:38):
There were lesions on his body. It was clear that
he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York
Times tells it, he eventually was one of these missionary
boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto
a boat, where he fought them physically as best he
could while they tried to care for him. It's probably
(14:58):
not not much now, until he jumped off the boat
to swim back to the island where he died. According
to our article and perhaps further you know, more accurate research,
he he did go on that boat. He was kind
of nurse back to semi health and then left again,
went back to the island. Um survived until nineteen fourteen,
(15:20):
and then because of World War One, he was captured
as a prisoner of war. Released from camp when they
realized he was mentally ill, They're like, wait, what is
this about coconuts? You're saying uh? And he carried on
apparently until nineteen nineteen, when he died at the age
of forty four, weighing less than seventy pounds. So this
guy did this for like maybe years ish, Yeah, I
(15:42):
mean eighteen years. That's impressive. Man. Hats off to this
guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story
of August angle Heart. You can learn more about him
on How Stuff Works. They wrote this article. I also
want to just throw my two cents in and say
I would put pretty decent money on the idea that
angle Heart spent at least a significant amount of time
(16:04):
married to a coconut on the island probably, so uh.
Well with that, everyone, we bid you adieu from short Stuff.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
There's other Josh who's basically fast becoming. He's gunning at
Jerry's heels. I would say, Chuck. When't you agree? Well,
I think at the very least he's the new Frank
the chair. For sure. He may soon be the new bird,
the bobbing bird. Oh that's right. Yeah. At any rate,
(00:24):
we're glad Josh is here, and we just almost two
inanimate objects. Exactly. We just ate up about a third
of our time. So let's we're gonna have to remove
the ending from this one. Okay, Yeah, this one is
interesting because I read the original New York Times piece
from nineteen o five or whatever, la la very different
than the story we get here in a lot of ways.
(00:45):
So I can't wait to who knows, Let's just I'll
just point out what the New York Times article said
compared to what we have in front of us. Do
it like a cranky I T guy when I say something,
just be like wrong? Well, who knows? It is New
York Times, But I don't know what There's andreds were
like in nineteen five. I don't know either, right, Um,
(01:08):
So there's this this article from How Stuff Works that
we found um does a really good job of of
of placing this in context in the world and saying
that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vershka,
which means tree which gives all that is necessary for living,
(01:30):
which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot
about what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying, you
don't need anything else but this one tree. That's how
great this tree is. Yeah, and that's also just a
slightly fancier way than saying Webster's defines a little blank
a little bit. It's it's definitely fancier, for sure. It's
it's got like cursive everywhere. But the whole point is it,
(01:52):
coconuts m m are pretty fun and good to eat
and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It is it
turns out that the sans Christs were saying is quite wrong,
like it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist
on coconuts. And there was actually a guy who was
born in eighteen seventy five named August Engelhardt who who
basically proved that inadvertently it wasn't his intention to prove
(02:15):
that the Sanskrit term was wrong, but um, he actually
took it to heart, um and and tried to live
exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed
was coconuts and sunlight. And uh ended up living on
I don't want to say deserted island, but certainly a
sparsely populated island. Um living and dying there to to
spoil the ending. Yeah, yeah, this is uh interesting mostly
(02:40):
to me because it was when it happened. He was
born in eighteen seventy Like, if this happened in the
nineteen seventies would be like, sure, of course this happens
all the time. But this guy was born in eighteen
seventy five in Germany, and then after college sort of
became uh well there's a lot of debate and whether
or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that,
(03:01):
he became very much into the Laban's Reform, which is
life reform movement. Basically what you would think of these
days is like a very sixties hippie American thing they
were doing, I guess in Germany in the you know,
early twentieth century. Yeah, I took it to be kind
of like a prototype for Goop, for who for Goop,
(03:25):
Gwyneth Paltrow's site. Oh good lord, Yeah, that's that's kind
of I mean, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was
a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and
what you could find on like some of the sites
that Coop endorses and coop itself, especially if you take
into account this book that he wrote, Um, it sounds
a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days.
(03:48):
You got sand Coop Coop so in he wrote a book,
uh called a care Free Future colon the New Gospel Semicolon.
That's rare glimpse into the depth and distance for the
selection of mankind, comma comma for the reflection of all
comma for consideration and stimulation. And he should have just
(04:12):
put an exclamation point at the end, just over all spaces.
He missed that Oxford comma after consideration though. But it
was a kind of a cookie book. He talked about life,
his lifestyle and what you know he believed his version
of the Laban's reform was. And then he also wrote
poems about coconuts. Yeah, like mother Coconut, The Coconut Spirit,
How to Become a Coconut. Those were titles of some
(04:32):
of the poems and tracks that he included in this book.
And like, it's really hard to overstate just how much
faith this guy placed in the coconut as the source
of not just life but health. And um it was based.
It was based on some somewhat unfounded ideas. So it
(04:53):
tied in very much with an idea that he had
that the sun was the source of all life in
the universe, and that coconuts grew on coconut palms um
toward the top, just like the brain in the human
head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun,
coconuts are closest to the sun. Ergo the coconut can
(05:16):
care for the brain and everything else you need in life.
And um, that was it. Yeah, that probably would have
been the end of his story had he not had
a substantial amount of money. Uh. I was about to
say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative,
so he had some cash. All of a sudden, he
bought a hundred and eighty five acres of land on
a tiny little island called kabakan Um off of Papa
(05:40):
what is now known as Papua New Guinea, and he
took a long books, got rid of most of his
clothes and went out there and lived um by himself.
Well not by himself because there uh, there are indigenous
peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only
white German there right. And his whole jam was that
(06:02):
he he had either heard or figured out that that
humans had evolved in the subtropics, between Tropic of Cancer
and Tropic of Capricorn. And that's what we were basically
evolved too, That's where we were evolved to be. So
the idea of living in like a house and driving
a car eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet,
but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. Um. The idea
(06:26):
of just basically living in a boxing, cubicalized, stuffy life.
It was and athetical of how we were designed by
evolution or natural selection or even God if that's your bag, right,
And so he moved to this island so that he
could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts,
living how This guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live.
(06:49):
And from what I can tell, he fully expected to
basically be free of all disease and any kind of
terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way
that it ended up at all. No, because, first of all, coconuts,
you cannot live on coconut alone. Um. They do have
a lot of good stuff in there. They have good
carbs and fat and stuff like that, but they lack
(07:11):
a lot of vitamins, notably B twelve, B six A K,
calcium um and protein. There's a little bit of protein,
about three to three grams or so, uh, but that's
that's not very much protein. So if you're gonna eat
enough coconuts to supply your body, and he was about
(07:32):
five ft eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly
less as time went on, Obviously he would have had
to been eating, you know, between fourteen and eighteen coconuts
a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean,
if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked
on an island, reading some books, you got time to
eat fourteen to eighteen coconuts a day. So he could have,
(07:53):
but it's not clear that he knew he needed to
eat that amount. And it's also not clear that he
would have responded to that information. So he didn't and
he started to wither away, which, as you said, um,
probably would have been the end of the story had
this guy actually not managed to convince other people through
his book and then through correspondence with them to come
(08:15):
join them. And so people started to show up on
this island. And we'll talk about what happened after that
after this. Alright, So this this is where the New
(08:45):
York Times story has diverged already. Okay, they wrote an
article and everyone, if you don't know that The New
York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written,
uh scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's uh.
So there was an article failure of a womanless Eden
in the Pacific Dash, a strange story from the South seas.
(09:06):
As the New York Times tells it, only two people
joined the Sona Norton cult the Order of the Sun
cult um. This article that we have says, and I'm
inclined to go with ours, because you know, investigative journalism
has gotten better since nineteen UM. But the New York
Times set a boat showed up in the end that
(09:28):
he was thought was going to be full of like
twenty people and there was only two guys. Uh. The
rest of the people got worried that the island was
full of cannibals and decided not to show up. Which
if that's wrong, it sounds like it was completely made
up by the by the writer, because our thing says
that about fifteen people showed up, uh and took their
(09:49):
clothes off, and we're basically like, let's do this. Um.
They did agree on the two two dudes though one
one guy's name was Einrich Yukin's. He was four years old,
he was a vegetarian, and he was away down with this, uh.
And the other was very famous person actually um or
at least medium famous in Germany at the time. Um,
(10:11):
that's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzow
and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of
the Lutzeu Orchestra in Berlin. Right. So, so Yukin's and
lets ou basically showed up, from what I understand, and said,
we're here, Um, we're very enthusiastic for this. Let's see
some coconuts. They took their clothes off, they started to
(10:33):
live this way. Um. But there were two big problems
for for um Yukon's It was that he his body
did not take to this diet despite from what I understand,
being a vegetarian, if not a vegan ahead of time. Right, Still,
the coconuts got him. Maybe had an allergy, maybe he
got too much sign who knows, but he died. This
(10:54):
article from how Stuff Works puts that he dropped dead
within weeks of showing up and starting this this coconut subsistence.
New York Times confirms that, okay, good, all right, so
we've got a fact. We've we've unearthed the fact here too.
It's double double sourced, um unless our house stuff Works
article used that New York Times as a source. That's
how facts get generated. And then the other guy loots
(11:17):
out the conductor. He was doing fine and apparently he
got along with um August angel Heart, the leader of
this cult. But um he also they had they had
varying tastes in music, and that actually created a bit
of tension between the two. Yeah, apparently, let's out. I'm
sorry Inglehart hated but Set. I think let's love but Set.
(11:43):
And it says that lets brought his music collection. The
only thing I can figure is that he brought over
he was a violinist as well. That he brought a violin,
I don't know. He could have probably one of those
cranky gramophones maybe, you know, or maybe a bird with
a beak like Flintstone style, or maybe a person dressed
like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah,
(12:06):
maybe he did bring records. Uh, I mean, Augus Inglehart
brought books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player.
So maybe that's what happened. But they they got the
way The New York Times described it as they started
getting into arguments about music. Uh. And because it was
just the two of them, according to that article, it
(12:27):
you know, it's gonna get a little crazy after a while.
And looks I was like, I don't want to spend
the night hit next to you tonight. Um And he
applied for permission, supposedly with Inglehart, to go spend the
night on a missionary boat that was nearby. Um at
one of the other it was a bunch of islands around,
and I guess Inglehart granted him this. He went on
(12:49):
board this boat, he spent the night. He would refuse
to eat any of the food that they had and
apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting
back to his coconut paradise, and he died. Yes, he died.
And if there were so, if two people showed up
of the visitors died, but even if there were more
(13:12):
in this house stuff works articles, right, because this guy
carried this guy, August Engelhardt, he carried on even after
these two deaths, um for more than a decade beyond
that that New York Times articles. So maybe more people
showed up afterward, and that accounts for the discrepancy. But
as this how stuff Works article tells it, um, more
people showed up, More people died from things like the hydration,
(13:34):
heat stroke. Um. And then this one, this is tough
to swallow. If it is true, then there is a
creator God who does take pleasure in and and messing
with us. But somebody died from being hit by a coconut.
Somebody in the coconut worshiping cult died from being killed
(13:54):
or died from a coconut injury. Which happens, Sure it does,
it does, But I mean imagine traveling from Germany in
the nineteenth century early twentieth century, showing up to eat
nothing but coconuts and then dying because of coconut hit
you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic.
So um August Engelhardt himself died too, but he hung
(14:15):
on for a really long time, considering he had the
true grit of somebody who really would have just eating
eaten coconuts. From what I can tell, yeah, I mean,
there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time
from people who, uh, I guess we're nearby, and he
he looked awful. He looked like he would expect someone
to look. They describe him as a bearded bag of bones.
(14:38):
There were lesions on his body. It was clear that
he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York
Times tells it, he eventually was one of these missionary
boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto
a boat, where he fought them physically as best he
could while they tried to care for him. It's probably
(14:58):
not not much now, until he jumped off the boat
to swim back to the island where he died. According
to our article and perhaps further you know, more accurate research,
he he did go on that boat. He was kind
of nurse back to semi health and then left again,
went back to the island. Um survived until nineteen fourteen,
(15:20):
and then because of World War One, he was captured
as a prisoner of war. Released from camp when they
realized he was mentally ill, They're like, wait, what is
this about coconuts? You're saying uh? And he carried on
apparently until nineteen nineteen, when he died at the age
of forty four, weighing less than seventy pounds. So this
guy did this for like maybe years ish, Yeah, I
(15:42):
mean eighteen years. That's impressive. Man. Hats off to this
guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story
of August angle Heart. You can learn more about him
on How Stuff Works. They wrote this article. I also
want to just throw my two cents in and say
I would put pretty decent money on the idea that
angle Heart spent at least a significant amount of time
(16:04):
married to a coconut on the island probably, so uh.
Well with that, everyone, we bid you adieu from short Stuff.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
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.