May 11, 2016 • 41 mins
Cannibalism is the macabre practice of eating other humans. But sometimes, people have no choice if they want to survive. It's called survival cannibalism and it tastes like chicken.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck. Right, there's Jerry and this is
stuff you should know, right, Chucker, how are you, sir?
(00:22):
I'm good? How are you great? Just toothless and happy good.
I'm halfway there to your tooth to the pre when's
your next visit? Well, I go in tomorrow to make
sure the implant is looking good. I can tell you
(00:43):
that it looks great, and then in August is what
I'll actually get the post and crown. Man. I'm really
sorry that you have to do all this. Thanks many,
It sucks. Yeah, that's why I'm sorry you have to
do it. And I can't. Not that I wear my
my flipper much anyway, but right now he was like,
don't even wear your flipper while the implants in there,
And I was like, all right, is that why you're
(01:04):
wearing overalls today? That's right. Uh, let's see Chuck. Chuck,
if you ever tasted human flesh? No, but I think
you asked me that same question when we did our
regular cannibalism episode. Yeah. Probably, but this is the subject
so nice. We had to serve it twice. Well, we've
actually talked about some other stuff too, like we did
(01:26):
a whole dinner party episode. We talked about the Essex
and the whaling episode. Oh yeah, Um, we've talked about
cannibalism a lot. Like if there's a um, a tag
cloud would be decent size chuck, we should say. Um,
if you guys didn't get this from the title, we're
(01:47):
talking about cannibalism, and some of the stuff we're talking
about gets pretty graphic and grizzly. So if you have
a weak stomach or you're a little kid and you
don't want nightmares, uh, maybe don't listen to this one.
Very good sir, And now let's move on to Survival Cannibalism.
So again, people go listen to our cannibalism episode because
it was a particularly good one. If you ask me, um,
(02:09):
did we talk Surely we talked about the Uruguayan rugby team.
I don't know if we did or not. Is it
just that I'm so familiar with the story that or
actually we probably did, but we're going to revisit it today. Okay, Well,
let's go back way back in time and the Uruguayan
National rugby team is flying through the Andies on the
(02:30):
way to play the Chili Chilean rugby team for a match,
and they don't make it. They don't. They're plane crashes
on a mountain something like thirteen thousand feet above sea level,
basically in the middle of nowhere. That's right. A fair
Child F two to seven of the Uruguayan Air Force
(02:53):
had forty passengers and five crew members, including that rugby team.
And you know it was pretty much mostly just the
rugby team, right, Yeah, they charted it, okay, but I
think there were some other folks. There were some kids there. Really,
I think I knew that. So, um, here's the deal
with the Andes mountains. Uh, it's only a hundred and
(03:15):
seventy meters wide, but they're very tall and peaky. So
the tallest one, um is almost seven thousand meters and
it's the highest peak on the American continent. And uh,
the fair Child as a plane could only ascend a
seven thousand meters, so they had to find like low
(03:38):
spots to make that passage. It's called poor planning. Well,
I would guess that the uruguayne rugby team would agree
with me that that was poor planning. No, I don't
think so. Like this pilot had made this passage. I
had the number in here, but many many many times
before may have been eighty. UM. So I don't know
(04:00):
if it was poor planning, but it was. Here's what happened.
They're flying, they take a sharp descent at about three
thirty in the afternoon, and they dipped below the clouds
because of these strong air pockets. So the captain was like, everyone,
fasten your seat belts. This is a little bumpy right now.
(04:21):
I don't think they felt like they were in real
danger yet. And then it entered a strong downward air
current and it said violently dropped several hundred meters. So
this uh. Following that, there was a second sharp ball.
And at this point people looked out the window and
saw they were below the clouds and they saw mountains
like you know in their face, and they realized that
(04:42):
this is not good. They tried to gain altitude, could not.
The right wing broke off when it hit a mountain.
When that broke off, it went backwards, UH, cut off
the tail and then the at that point several like
four or f We're just pulled out at that point
and died, sucked out of the plane, sucked right out,
(05:03):
immediately fell to their death. Uh. Then the left wing
was ripped off, and what you've got is just part
of the fuselage remaining, and it goes sliding down the
mountains like a like a toboggan. Um. And by all accounts,
they thought they were done for, like, there's no way
we're gonna stop. Um. But as luck would have it,
they did slow down. They entered a valley and slowed down,
(05:27):
but with such force that the seats like ripped from
their bolts and they crashed through like the luggage compartment
and came to arrest. So how many survivors there were,
I'm not quite fair. Another forty people on the plane.
Seven people survived the initial crash out of the forty five. Okay,
(05:47):
so that's bad enough, right, Yes. And they're like, okay,
we're stranded up in the andies. The temperatures like negative
thirty negative thirty degrees fair, right, which is negative thirty
four celsius. Too bad, It wasn't just negative forty. Um.
So they're they're like, but at least we have the
fuselage of this plane to act as an an impromptu
shelter while we figure out what's going on. Yeah, let's
(06:09):
take stock of our supplies. Let's see, we've got some
wine and we've got some chocolate, and that's it. Yeah,
but very much, it said, a few more snacks, but
it was very very very very little food. Um. And
then a short time after they crashed and they had
taken stock and we're trying to like figure out what
to do, an avalanche came and buried the plane, buried
(06:30):
some of the people alive inside of it. Yeah, so
eight more people died, I think. Yeah. And previous to this,
they actually had a working radio, uh, and there was
a search party, and after ten days they literally heard
on the radio that they're presumed dead and the search
was called off. So your spirits broken. Then the avalanche
comes and that kills eight people right off the bat,
(06:52):
I think you said, including the guy who was the
team captain, who had emerged as the leader of the survivors.
So he died in the avalanche. Yeah. So then they're
trapped in there for a few days, and as as
people are dying, they start making pecks. This is a
There was a team. First of all, there was a
rugby team, and then there were family members all among
the rugby teams, so it was a very like tight right,
(07:15):
And so they started making packs that if if if
I die, you guys eat me, so that like you
can try to survive. Somebody's got to make it out
of here alive, so be sure to eat me. Yeah.
And they had cleverly found a way to get fresh
water by melting snow, using metal from the seats um
(07:36):
and dripping it into those empty wine bottles. So they
they it was remarkable that they were surviving at all.
So they were all very religious or Roman Catholic, and uh,
you know, you're not supposed to eat people, so for
religious reasons, a lot of them had a lot of
problems with the notion of doing so. Um, but they
you know, they did what they had to do in
(07:57):
the end. So they sent out a A A I
don't know if you'd call it a search party. What's
the opposite of a search party to brave dudes? Yeah,
but those those were kids, um, and they went on
like a ten day trek, and finally we're found by
a Chilean shepherd who was working the mountain, and um
(08:19):
who he went and got a search party. Mustard and
brought him back, and they found the guys. A bunch
of them survived through in part survival cannibalism, but definitely
more than just that. These guys just didn't didn't just
lay down and die. It was their their spirits were
still up somehow. That's right, dude. In the end, uh,
sixteen people ended up surviving this ordeal amazing weeks and
(08:43):
weeks and weeks in the Andes Mountains and freezing temperatures.
And they made a great movie. I've not seen it.
Is it good? Yeah? That is good? Um. Of course,
you know, in typical Hollywood fashion, it was all white dudes. Yeah,
isn't Ethan Hawk one of the guys. Ethan is one
of the guys. Vincent Spano is Italian. Oh but hey,
you don't know the difference between an Italian and you're going. Yeah,
(09:05):
they were all white dudes, but um, or maybe not
all but the lion chair of them, of course. So um.
Aside from that, it was it was a good movie.
And I remember we definitely talked about this because I
remember telling the story being a kid, and like the
book was a really big bestseller and I thought it
was a soccer teams. I didn't know the difference between
rugby and soccer. If you listen to our soccer podcast,
(09:28):
you might think, I still don't know the difference. Uh So,
up next, Chuck is Jamestown. This is actually a fairly
recent revelation. Apparently, if you were a scholar and historian
of colonial America, you were in the know that there
was persistent legends and rumors that the people in Jamestown
(09:51):
had resorted to cannibalism during the winner of sixteen o nine,
sixteen ten. Yeah, there were five historical accounts of of
the years that people pointed to, and these are like
first person diaries from the people who were there at
the time, saying it was so bad that we ate
anything in sight, including dead people the end, But there
(10:13):
was nothing to back it up. So I guess the
historians were like these colonists trying to show off, or
they're using hyperbole, maybe like they were saying, I was
so hungry I could eat a horse, but they were
using cannibalism instead of the horse, because they actually did
eat the horse. Well. Then, finally, a couple of summers
ago in two thirteen, some archaeologists who were excavating Jamestown
(10:36):
came upon a tresh heap where they found the butchered
bones of horses and human teeth and a partial skull.
And when they examined the teeth in the skull, they realized, like,
oh wow, these are butcher marks right here. They weren't
just exaggerating or showing off. They really did engage in
cannibalism in Jamestown. Yeah, and this is the only artifactual
(10:58):
evidence of cannibalism by europe ends ever. Supposedly, that's what
it says, um. And with science, it's pretty remarkable what
you can do these days. They actually did three D
reconstructions and examined this skull and learned a lot about
this fourteen year old girl that they called Jane. Uh.
(11:21):
She was found buried a couple of feet down two
and a half feet down, but in a in a
trash heap, a huge giveaway seventeenth century trash heap in
the cellar inside the site at James Fort. So these
colonists died in the winter of sixteen o nine, and
they found what they called multiple chop marks on the
(11:42):
girl's skull um clearly interested in cheek, meat, muscles of
the face, tongue in the brain, and they think that
the person who at least was responsible for harvesting the
flesh in the brain from the head was not an
experienced butcher. The marks on the forehead are hesitant, and
apparently they they couldn't stand or staring at them while
(12:04):
they were doing this, so they turned her over and
then from the back of the head that's when the
marks became a little more confident and where they finally
cleaved her skull open. So they've turned her over and
that's when the butcher marks start to get a little
more confident, and apparently that's where they were They managed
to access her skull by cleaving it into from behind.
(12:24):
That's right. They also found cuts and saw marks and
stuff along her lower jaw uh that they said was
made to get the meat. Who said that in this article?
I read arbies from uh. But here's the remarkable thing.
They use isotope studies to find out a lot about
(12:46):
this girl. So they know from examining examining her shinbone
that she was fourteen, really sad. But the good news
is like she wasn't murdered, No, she starved to death.
Well goodness bad. I guess it's sad anyway you look
at it, although that's not necessarily true. There were there's
a lot of disease that was spreading through Jamestown at
the time as well, so as possible, she died of
(13:08):
other causes that aren't quite as bad as starvation. Where
here's the deal Jamestown was. It's not what you learned
about in elementary school, like, it was doing very poorly
at this point. People were starving. The local Native American
tribe that were once friendly with them had cut them
off and and they actually showed up in sixteen o
(13:30):
seven or six sixteen o seven during the worst drought
in the region in centuries. So it was a really
just inauspicious beginning. And they called this period, especially during
the winter of sixteen o nine and sixteen ten, the
starving time. It was the capital escent Capital t so
you know it was significant. So, Uh, in sixteen o nine,
(13:53):
they're already in bad shape and then three hundred new
settlers show up. Uh, what's for dinner? On the six
years They were in bad shape when they got there
because they had a rough crossing. And so they believe
from studying isotopes in this girl's teeth that um a
few things. One that is she came over on those
six boats, that she hadn't been there long. Um too,
(14:17):
that she was either a served as a maid to
a family of high status, was from a family of
high status, because they found that she had a lot
of protein. Um, and then they determined that she's It's
amazing what they can determine that she was from probably
the southern coast of England because they water that she consumes.
(14:37):
While she's got her little baby teeth are forming an infancy,
you can tell years later where that came from. Son,
leave it to the Smithsonian. Those guys hats off. So
after eating horses, dogs, cats, rats, mice, they ate, leather,
they ate, they ate anything they could get their hands on,
(14:59):
they f only did resort to uh eating humans. Now
we have evidence of it and by spring of sixteen,
only sixty people had survived. Isn't that amazing? It is
because three hundred came over on the boat, So I
don't know how many are already there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man,
(15:20):
it's a bad jam. It's a bad jam, all right.
Uh should we take a break. Yeah, let's take a break,
all right. I need to regather myself, so Chuck. I
(15:51):
believe we talked about this one before too, because it's
so astounding. But there was a guy named Richard Parker
and he was working aboard a yacht that was sailing
from England to Australia. And the name of the yacht
was the Mignonette. Do you know what I was sailing there? Uh? No,
A rich dude bought it in Australia and it was
(16:12):
just like literally being delivered to him. I guess I
did kind of know that. Yeah, I didn't know. I
just thought it was some expedition or something like. No,
I do kind of remember that from when we talked
about it before. When do we talk about this cannibalism?
So the Mignonette is sailing to Australia. A couple of
months in the trip, it sank because it's not supposed
to sail from England to Australia. It was not built
(16:35):
for that really. Yeah, and they even kind of fortified
it apparently and didn't work. So on board there's a
cabin boy, seventeen year old named Richard Parker. Have you
ever seen cabin Boy? The movie? Great movie? Yeah? You
kid me, Chris Elliott, Yeah, I was I think I
saw that in the theater. I was so excited. Yeah,
(16:58):
David Letterman's in that too. Sure he is a weird cameo.
Uh so cabin boy. Cabin boy Richard Parker, uh seventeen
years old and he um there there's an old tradition
called the custom of the sea where you are in
bad shape and you draw lots, and whoever draws the
short straw um says, you know, kill me and eat me. Well,
(17:20):
they say, all right, I won't hold it against you.
When you guys, that's probably how it goes. So they
considered drawing lots, and then the captain Thomas Dudley said, nah,
let's not even bother. Look at Parker. It smells like onions.
I don't like how the kids looked. Ever, well, it's
(17:42):
pretty sad. They literally were like, I don't think we
even need to draw lots, like he's clearly the one
that needs to go. He was malnourished. He was skinny.
Uh he It sounded like from the accounts I read
that he was. They were having to kind of care
for him, like he fell overboard at one point and
they had to rescue him. More trouble, Leny's word. He
drank sea water and got himself sick, and everyone's like,
(18:03):
you don't drink seawater, Richard. So they said, I think
we're just gonna take care of this without a vote.
And um, he didn't have family or anything like that.
He was a kid. So Dudley jabs a pen knife
in his neck. Not a good way to go, Joe
Pesci style, you're gonna dispatch be dispatched. That's not a
(18:24):
good way to go. A pen knife in the neck. Now,
I don't know how I mean on they were on
a little dinghy at this point. I don't know. That's
just like a seagull. And then hit him over the
head and then you can stand him with the pen
knife once he's out. You don't just go from zero
to pen knife in the neck. Hey, I agree, Uh,
no arguments here to go. Peesci style is barbaric. So
(18:47):
they killed him with the pen knife, ate his flesh,
drank his blood, and just a few days later they
were found. Um, I don't know if they would have
survived those few days or if that haunted them for
the rest of their lives. They're rescued ronically by a
German ship called the Montezuma. It was the famous Aztec
king who eight people and made me poop. That's right.
(19:09):
Oh really yeah, huh, that's interesting. It gets even more
interesting though, while they were tried for murder I know
where you're going, and found guilty, but people felt pretty
bad for them. They were like, yeah, we've all met
Richard Parker. He did smell like onion. Uh. And so
six months later they were released from prison. But here's
where it does get a little weird. Oh me, yeah,
(19:31):
so I love this. This is eighteen eighty four, right
when this happened. Um, in eighteen thirty eight, a little
guy named Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story about
a boat that sank and some guys were in a
lifeboat and a guy got killed and eaten, and the
(19:54):
guy who got killed in Eaton's name was Richard Parker.
In that awesome it's pretty weird. The narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pim of Nantucket was the short story. And um,
I saw something that pointed out like many other things
didn't match up. I was like, that's really all you
need to call it a startling coincidence, you know. Apparently,
(20:16):
also the guy who wrote the Life of Pie named
the Tiger Richard Parker as well, did you know that
I haven't seen that movie or read the book. I
haven't read the book. Movie was really good. I heard
nothing but good things. Yeah, I've just never been in
a Life of Pie mood, you know what I mean?
The name sort of it's kind of like, yeah, it's Pie.
Do I care about his life? No? It's a good
(20:38):
movie though, all right. Moving on to uh, Alfred or
Alfred Packer? Who knows? I heard it was Alfred, but
I've seen it both ways, illiterate gold miners in the
Old West? Who knows that's right? Uh, February Alfred. He's like,
(21:00):
he's a gold miner, he's a prospector, and he wants
to go to the high mountains of Colorado to find
gold and apparently makes like half of the trip and
then stops in the winter and stays with the Ute
tribe and they're like, you need to just stay here
until spring, don't go any further. He says, no, no, no,
I got this. I'm going to continue on. Thanks for
(21:23):
the warning. So he goes on with his his friends
and um eventually wanders out of the woods alone. Yeah,
he went in with five other dudes, came out alone,
that's right, and said who me, Oh, I'm just the
sole survivor of the group. A storm hit and everybody
(21:44):
went their separate ways. Let's not talk about it again. Yeah,
he said, my feet got frozen and I couldn't keep up,
and I don't know what happened to those dudes. And
they're like, oh really, He's like, okay, fine, all right,
yeah I killed one of them, but it was in
self defense. And they're like what He's like, all right, okay, alright,
we ate some of the other dudes, but they died naturally. Well,
(22:06):
the reason they first said, wait a minute, what's going
on here? As he said that I don't know what
happened to those guys, and they said, well, why do
you have their personal belongings in your pack? And he went, oh, well,
I know I've got wallets full of money from these guys, right,
so maybe I should come somewhat clean. So the story
keeps changing every time they asked him. Uh. They eventually
(22:28):
he's in jail. Is very kg. He's in jail at
this point, um obviously while he's being questioned and all
this stuff, But the jail was basically a log cabin.
No jail can hold Alfred Packer. No, especially not to
jail in eighteen seventy four in Colorado, so he busted out,
goes on the lamb for nine years. They catch him
(22:48):
in Wyoming, liver under the leaving under the alias John Schwartz.
Actually somebody who was part of another expedition that he
was on, a guy named French. He recognized him, just
happened to run cross paths with him. It was like
you no way, Yeah, wow, that's bad luck. I guess,
(23:09):
good luck. Um. So he was convicted of manslaughter and
sentenced to forty years, released on parole in one after yes,
seventeen years. Yeah, and supposedly died of vegetarian at the age.
That's what they say, and it sounds to me like, yeah,
(23:31):
that's what I think. He Well, he's become a beloved
figure there. I guess. There's a statue of him on
the campus of you see it Boulder. Well, yeah, they
named their cafeteria after him, and with the subheading have
a friend for lunch. Terrible. Those college students back in
the sixties had a real sense of humor, and of
course the South Park guys wrote cannibal the musical after him.
(23:56):
So Alfred Packers Survival Cannibalist, what degree? We don't know?
That's right, I need another break, sir, I'm hungry. Is
that is that awful? We'll be back right after this. Okay,
(24:31):
did you get to eat, buddy? No, not yet. Your
forearms looking pretty good, though. I'd make I'd make a
nice meating meal. Well, you know, one of the great
revelations in my adult life is that when you're eating meat,
you're not eating anything but muscle. Did you realize that? When?
Did you realize that? When you told me on the show?
(24:52):
I know that I go over some stuff more than once,
but it was a big revelation I know. And that's
why red meat is red, because it has more red
blood vessels. Those are those are muscles that you use
more often dark meat. I'm sorry. So like in in
a chicken, the dark meat are muscles that the chicken
(25:13):
uses far more frequently than say, like the breast, which
is white, So there's fewer blood vessels, so it's dark
compared to the white meat. Interesting, it's mind blowing. You
like dark meat? I like it. I like it all.
I used to just be like oh no, white meat
only please, And then I like really started trying dark meat.
I'm like, yeah, that's good stuff. Now I'm less like
(25:34):
bring it on. Right service choice, that's what I always say,
wide or dark service choice. And then I'm like, no, no no, no, mixed.
I'm not going to leave this in your hands. And
they say this diner is so wacky. The Franklin Expedition, Yes,
(25:55):
this one is. Uh, this is a good one. Uh,
Sir John frank when at the age of sixty, had
already taken too expeditions, ah, dangerous ones. Yeah sixty. Also,
we're talking the eighteen fifties, forties. That's old. Yeah, that's
(26:19):
that's an old dude. So hats off to him for
doing it again. Salty old swarthy seamen act. So. Um,
they were looking for the northwest passage from Europe to
Asia up in the Arctic. I guess right, going that
would be going westward, westward, northwest. Oh yeah, northwest passes.
(26:41):
I never thought about that before. But there's no southeast
passage or northeast passages there. I don't know who cares,
right anyway, Franklin's leading this expedition, and um, there are
a hundred thirty four dudes. Yeah, I've seen another couple
of numbers, but we'll just we'll go with that and
they're never heard from again. Yes, and they were not Uh,
(27:06):
they were pros. They weren't a bunch of dummies that
just said, let's you know, take a bag of rice,
it's a beef turkey. They had five years of food. Uh.
They went to a provision er. I didn't really know
this how this worked. I figured they just went shopping.
But you would, like you would find someone to get
all your provisions for the trip, like they would win
(27:28):
the bid and you would hire them. So they hired
a guy named Stephen Goldner. Uh. And he apparently was
in a rush because I guess they just cut it
close time wise and hastily put together, um, five years
worth of food and tens soldered him shut. Eight thousand
tins of food eight thousands. Uh, he soldered them shut.
(27:51):
Apparently that's how they say in the UK, So shout
out UK, right, um, And here's the quote I saw
was that, Uh, the lead dripped like melted candle wax
down inside the surface. That's a bad soldering job, it is.
And we just an episode on lead. So you know
that if lead is in your canned goods, that is
(28:12):
no goods. So this expedition had to uh two ships,
and they were really well outfitted ships. They had internal heat.
Hot water was piped throughout the cabin so they they
could stay warm. They had UM railroad engine screw propellers.
They were um fitted with iron. They were iron clad
(28:35):
in parts to break through ice. They were really nice ships.
The Arabis and the Terror. Yeah, very poorly named. Yeah,
the Terror is not what you want to name a
ship on an expedition, right, No. And the Arabas. I
looked it up because I was just curious. And apparently
in Greek mythology, Uh, it's the place where you would
go right after death. It's the personification of darkness. So
(28:56):
terrible names, the Terror and the Arabas. So chuck. They
found at least one of the ships. Yeah, just two
years ago. Okay, they discovered the wreck of the h M.
S Erebus offshore of King William Island underwater. Is trapped
in ice underwater, but they think that it was trapped
in ice is how they originally because they were stuck.
(29:20):
There's a big mystery with the Franklin Expedition because even
if they were stuck, they had plenty of supplies, five
years worth the supplies to wait until it thought enough
to sail at least go back. So why would they
abandon these these ships. It's a it's a huge mystery,
and a lot of people say, well it was the lead.
(29:41):
Look at the behavior. They apparently took lifeboats, dragged them
across the tundra. They had non essentials on board with
things like silverware. You'd have to just be totally off
your nut to be on like a survival expedition to
go find help, and you bring along silverware. So everybody
pointed to what was the duce's named, Richard Golding's work,
(30:02):
terrible salt soldering work, Stephen Goldner, and that his that
the lead had had poisoned these guys and clouded their judgment,
that they kind of went mad. But apparently they did
some They they some of the bodies have since been found,
and they did some forensic analysis of it and said, actually,
now these guys have lots of lead poisoning, but it's
distributed evenly throughout their bones, like they were just poisoned
(30:25):
by lead throughout their lives. It wasn't acute poisoning from
this soldering work. So it just remains a mystery. I
guess it does. And some Inuit tribes reported seeing um
about forty guys, forty white men that were in bad
shape that they sold some seal meat too, and uh,
(30:46):
when one of the search parties came across the Innuit tried,
they told him the story. And I think over the
years they've been finding, you know, piles of these bodies
in different locations. And uh, the Inuits first where the
ones who said, yeah, we actually saw one of their camps,
like after we ran into the guys, we think we
found him again, all dead like the following year, and
(31:08):
there was like human bones and their kettles and stuff
like that. So they definitely resorted to to uh, survival
cannibalism at some point. Yeah, it said, um the direct
quote was from the mutilated state of many of the
bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident
that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last
dread alternative cannibalism. Kind of dramatic, yeah, for sure. So check.
(31:31):
Let's do one more, huh. Okay, let's do our famous
top ten, consisting of six tops boy, this one is
super super sad like. There's not much joking about this.
I mean, none of this has been funny, but we're
trying not to just depress everyone. But the Siege of
Leningrad is one of the saddest moments in world history.
(31:53):
It's when the Nazi forces uh invaded, bombarded over three
years against what is now St. Petersburg, and basically for
nine hundred days cut them off in an effort to
starve out a city of three three point three million people.
(32:14):
And it worked. Yeah, it's it's a great effect. Three
point three million people. A million died over the three
year siege. Yeah, and eight hundred thousand of those died
from starvation. Eight hundred thousand people nuts. So the government
nobody could get to it. The Nazis had formed a
ring around the city and we're defending it and just
trying to They were bombing it every day, but they
(32:35):
were also well aware that they were purposefully starving the
population as well. Inside um, the people had a ration
of bread once a day, a piece of bread about
the weight of a bar of soap. Yeah, manual laborers
got two hundred and fifty grams of bread. But apparently
the bread was cut with pine shavings, and they were
(32:57):
subsisting on three hundred calories a day. Yeah, if you
were in the army, you would get things like um,
fern leaf soup and um cream of nettle, probably not
even cream, but like broth of nettle soup. So people
were joining the army just for that, just to have
that every day. Yeah, here's some of the things that
(33:17):
they use as food substitutes. UM, cotton seed cake, uh macaroni,
which is in quotes made from flax seed for cattle meat,
jelly produced from boiling bones and calf skins, yeast soup
from sawdust, fermented sawdust, joiner's glue, boiled and jellified, toothpaste,
(33:40):
cold cream. Basically, it said they even licked dried pasteuff
wallpaper because there was a rumor that it was potato based.
Anything for calories. I mean, that's how desperate things were. Yeah,
and and not to stephen calories, but like vitamins too.
Apparently they were sweeping the tobacco shavings from a tobacco
(34:01):
factories ventilation system because tobacco is vitamin C in it unbelievable,
vitamin B one of those too. So what happens is
a crime wave starts breaking out, as you would expect
in a city that large that's starving to death, like
people literally just laying dead in the street, like everywhere
you look right. And apparently not just laying dead in
the street, they were half eaten, some of them laying
(34:22):
dead in the street. Yeah, and they they kept this
under wraps for many, many years because they didn't want
people to know the world to know how ugly it was.
But we have a lot more information now. But um,
you would have these ration cards to get this, you know,
the tiny allotments of food that they had, and so
if their relatives die, they would hide the bodies so
(34:44):
they could still use the ration card. And then these gangs,
these teenage gangs of teenage boys started breaking out where
they would mug you for food in your ration card. Uh.
One eight year old killed his two younger brothers for
their cards. Uh. One guy murdered his grandmother and boiled
an eight her liver. And a seventeen year old stole
(35:04):
a corpse from a cemetery and put it through a
meat minzer. So it's like one of the most shocking
things that I've ever heard in world. History, and it
isn't much talked about. I mean, you hear about the
Siege of Lennon Grand, but I mean the details of
it are just horrifying. Yeah, it was pretty whitewashed, I
think when I studied it in college. But um, well
that's because the Soviets just denied the horror of the
(35:28):
whole thing. Two thousand people were arrested for cannibalism. Um
five eighty six were executed for murdering people and eating them.
And it said most people arrested were women. Apparently mothers
would smother like their youngest kids to feed to the
other kids. Man, what a horrible time. Alrighty, that's a
(35:50):
nice uplifting way to leave people. Yeah there's others one,
there's others that we haven't touched upon. So if you
want to learn more about it, you can just type
survival cannibalism into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that it's time for basebook questions,
I can't think of a more inappropriate way to end
this show into take social media questions and laugh. But
(36:15):
maybe we need to laugh now. Let's all right, I've
got a hilarious one. All Right, this is from lu
Jen If you had one, if you had to eat
one food for the rest of your life, what would
it be? Fried chicken? Oh yeah, easy, mom. Would be
either a really good Indian curry or a really good
Japanese curry. Either one of those would be happy. So
(36:37):
a curry, A curry, A good one, though, great one?
Are you well? And food? Fried chicken? I'm gonna if
if it's a meal, I'm gonna say fried chicken, mashed
potatoes with gravy and corn bread or biscuit or something.
What about green Yeah? I love it, um, but dealer's choice,
like you said, okay, green beans, collared whatever, But that
(37:00):
would be my meal. First good one. That was hilarious.
This is from Jeff Ruth. Why doesn't John Candy get
comedic props that he's due? Great question, I agree. One
of the great great comic actors of our time. Yeah,
it's great. Sad, sad that we lost him. Uh. He
was huge at the time. I mean, everybody knew John Candy.
(37:22):
He was in some major, major motion pictures, many of
which were surrounded by him. I think he's gotten tons
of props. So what are you saying, Jeff? Wake up,
Wake up? Also because he was Canadian. Okay, good answer. Uh,
here's one from Lily Highum, what is it like for
Jerry producing stuff you should know? Well, here's Jerry's answer.
(37:45):
All right, yeah, nice eliminating. That's always Russell Redman. What's
your favorite breed of cat? And don't lie, because I'll
know Russell. I mean, I think I'll probably go with
the breeds that I have right now because they're dear
to me. So I'm gonna say a tabby in a
main tune. Okay, and yeah, are you ready for this question?
(38:10):
Charlie Manson asked, Chuck always wears a baseball cap. Is
there a reason for this? Chuck? I think you should
tell them right now you're not wearing a baseball cap.
I'm not because, as most of you know, my beloved
Last Chance Garage had that have had for twenty years
was lost in Austin, Texas and is in a dumpster
somewhere in Austin, Texas. I don't know if that's true.
(38:31):
I think it's adorning the hat of a hipster in Austin, Texas. Seriously,
if you're in an Austin, keep an eye off for
that thing. It says last Chance garage. It's black circle
emblem smells like twenty years of Chuck. No one else
would want to wear that hat. I'm guarantee you. But
now I don't wear a hat that much anymore because
of that. I love that hat. Okay, alright, l I
(38:53):
p okay. Jack Mayhan says, what is your favorite automobile
and why? Uh? Mine is probably the AMC Pacer, just
because it's pretty cool looking. I'm not a big car guy,
but I'm gonna go with the nineteen sixties VW Beetles
because I drove them and I still love him. I
saw beautiful looking beetle the other day. Cherry restored that
(39:15):
this guy was driving, and I was just like, man,
I'm getting another one one day. Totally do it, Chuck,
I am. I'm gonna have a real nice one. Okay.
Um Bryant Tarbell, Oh Tarbell, why do you tempt me? So?
Described to flate Gate in one word, we go at
it a lot on Facebook. He's our friend from Boston.
In one word, uh, two words, three words, Tom Brady Cheetah.
(39:41):
Oh moving on? Well, I think a score one for Chuck. Uh.
Tara Dickinson asks this catch up a sauce or a condiment.
I think it's probably both. I don't think it has
to be one or the other. I did it. Don't
be dumb on the origin of ketchup. Did you know
it's vieting a musing origin? No idea? Really? Cat is
(40:03):
that pounced? Really? And is that why it's spelled uh
as cats up? Yes, that's exactly right, that's the tradition spelling. Yeah.
And did you know like originally before tomatoes weren't introduced
until like the late nineteenth century, but they were. The
British were making versions of this stuff, um, like from
the like mid eighteenth century, and they were using things
(40:24):
like walnuts and anchovies and all sorts of weird stuff mushrooms.
It's more like a fish sauce. That's how catsup started. Really? Yeah?
Is that why it's got vinegar in it today? Probably?
Probably idea? Don't remember why. I think it might just
have been originally a preservative. Gotcha? I'll do one more
for me. This is from Caleb James Wyant. Would either
(40:49):
of you ever consider running for public office? Um? For me?
Not a chance. No, never had any interest whatsoever. Um.
And I wouldn't be allowed to anyway, they would expose
me so quickly for past crimes against humanity, They would
dig stuff up on me, and I would be disqualified.
(41:12):
So now, for many reasons, I think that's a great
way in this great If you want to get in
touch with us, you can visit us on Facebook at
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can
tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(41:37):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck. Right, there's Jerry and this is
stuff you should know, right, Chucker, how are you, sir?
(00:22):
I'm good? How are you great? Just toothless and happy good.
I'm halfway there to your tooth to the pre when's
your next visit? Well, I go in tomorrow to make
sure the implant is looking good. I can tell you
(00:43):
that it looks great, and then in August is what
I'll actually get the post and crown. Man. I'm really
sorry that you have to do all this. Thanks many,
It sucks. Yeah, that's why I'm sorry you have to
do it. And I can't. Not that I wear my
my flipper much anyway, but right now he was like,
don't even wear your flipper while the implants in there,
And I was like, all right, is that why you're
(01:04):
wearing overalls today? That's right. Uh, let's see Chuck. Chuck,
if you ever tasted human flesh? No, but I think
you asked me that same question when we did our
regular cannibalism episode. Yeah. Probably, but this is the subject
so nice. We had to serve it twice. Well, we've
actually talked about some other stuff too, like we did
(01:26):
a whole dinner party episode. We talked about the Essex
and the whaling episode. Oh yeah, Um, we've talked about
cannibalism a lot. Like if there's a um, a tag
cloud would be decent size chuck, we should say. Um,
if you guys didn't get this from the title, we're
(01:47):
talking about cannibalism, and some of the stuff we're talking
about gets pretty graphic and grizzly. So if you have
a weak stomach or you're a little kid and you
don't want nightmares, uh, maybe don't listen to this one.
Very good sir, And now let's move on to Survival Cannibalism.
So again, people go listen to our cannibalism episode because
it was a particularly good one. If you ask me, um,
(02:09):
did we talk Surely we talked about the Uruguayan rugby team.
I don't know if we did or not. Is it
just that I'm so familiar with the story that or
actually we probably did, but we're going to revisit it today. Okay, Well,
let's go back way back in time and the Uruguayan
National rugby team is flying through the Andies on the
(02:30):
way to play the Chili Chilean rugby team for a match,
and they don't make it. They don't. They're plane crashes
on a mountain something like thirteen thousand feet above sea level,
basically in the middle of nowhere. That's right. A fair
Child F two to seven of the Uruguayan Air Force
(02:53):
had forty passengers and five crew members, including that rugby team.
And you know it was pretty much mostly just the
rugby team, right, Yeah, they charted it, okay, but I
think there were some other folks. There were some kids there. Really,
I think I knew that. So, um, here's the deal
with the Andes mountains. Uh, it's only a hundred and
(03:15):
seventy meters wide, but they're very tall and peaky. So
the tallest one, um is almost seven thousand meters and
it's the highest peak on the American continent. And uh,
the fair Child as a plane could only ascend a
seven thousand meters, so they had to find like low
(03:38):
spots to make that passage. It's called poor planning. Well,
I would guess that the uruguayne rugby team would agree
with me that that was poor planning. No, I don't
think so. Like this pilot had made this passage. I
had the number in here, but many many many times
before may have been eighty. UM. So I don't know
(04:00):
if it was poor planning, but it was. Here's what happened.
They're flying, they take a sharp descent at about three
thirty in the afternoon, and they dipped below the clouds
because of these strong air pockets. So the captain was like, everyone,
fasten your seat belts. This is a little bumpy right now.
(04:21):
I don't think they felt like they were in real
danger yet. And then it entered a strong downward air
current and it said violently dropped several hundred meters. So
this uh. Following that, there was a second sharp ball.
And at this point people looked out the window and
saw they were below the clouds and they saw mountains
like you know in their face, and they realized that
(04:42):
this is not good. They tried to gain altitude, could not.
The right wing broke off when it hit a mountain.
When that broke off, it went backwards, UH, cut off
the tail and then the at that point several like
four or f We're just pulled out at that point
and died, sucked out of the plane, sucked right out,
(05:03):
immediately fell to their death. Uh. Then the left wing
was ripped off, and what you've got is just part
of the fuselage remaining, and it goes sliding down the
mountains like a like a toboggan. Um. And by all accounts,
they thought they were done for, like, there's no way
we're gonna stop. Um. But as luck would have it,
they did slow down. They entered a valley and slowed down,
(05:27):
but with such force that the seats like ripped from
their bolts and they crashed through like the luggage compartment
and came to arrest. So how many survivors there were,
I'm not quite fair. Another forty people on the plane.
Seven people survived the initial crash out of the forty five. Okay,
(05:47):
so that's bad enough, right, Yes. And they're like, okay,
we're stranded up in the andies. The temperatures like negative
thirty negative thirty degrees fair, right, which is negative thirty
four celsius. Too bad, It wasn't just negative forty. Um.
So they're they're like, but at least we have the
fuselage of this plane to act as an an impromptu
shelter while we figure out what's going on. Yeah, let's
(06:09):
take stock of our supplies. Let's see, we've got some
wine and we've got some chocolate, and that's it. Yeah,
but very much, it said, a few more snacks, but
it was very very very very little food. Um. And
then a short time after they crashed and they had
taken stock and we're trying to like figure out what
to do, an avalanche came and buried the plane, buried
(06:30):
some of the people alive inside of it. Yeah, so
eight more people died, I think. Yeah. And previous to this,
they actually had a working radio, uh, and there was
a search party, and after ten days they literally heard
on the radio that they're presumed dead and the search
was called off. So your spirits broken. Then the avalanche
comes and that kills eight people right off the bat,
(06:52):
I think you said, including the guy who was the
team captain, who had emerged as the leader of the survivors.
So he died in the avalanche. Yeah. So then they're
trapped in there for a few days, and as as
people are dying, they start making pecks. This is a
There was a team. First of all, there was a
rugby team, and then there were family members all among
the rugby teams, so it was a very like tight right,
(07:15):
And so they started making packs that if if if
I die, you guys eat me, so that like you
can try to survive. Somebody's got to make it out
of here alive, so be sure to eat me. Yeah.
And they had cleverly found a way to get fresh
water by melting snow, using metal from the seats um
(07:36):
and dripping it into those empty wine bottles. So they
they it was remarkable that they were surviving at all.
So they were all very religious or Roman Catholic, and uh,
you know, you're not supposed to eat people, so for
religious reasons, a lot of them had a lot of
problems with the notion of doing so. Um, but they
you know, they did what they had to do in
(07:57):
the end. So they sent out a A A I
don't know if you'd call it a search party. What's
the opposite of a search party to brave dudes? Yeah,
but those those were kids, um, and they went on
like a ten day trek, and finally we're found by
a Chilean shepherd who was working the mountain, and um
(08:19):
who he went and got a search party. Mustard and
brought him back, and they found the guys. A bunch
of them survived through in part survival cannibalism, but definitely
more than just that. These guys just didn't didn't just
lay down and die. It was their their spirits were
still up somehow. That's right, dude. In the end, uh,
sixteen people ended up surviving this ordeal amazing weeks and
(08:43):
weeks and weeks in the Andes Mountains and freezing temperatures.
And they made a great movie. I've not seen it.
Is it good? Yeah? That is good? Um. Of course,
you know, in typical Hollywood fashion, it was all white dudes. Yeah,
isn't Ethan Hawk one of the guys. Ethan is one
of the guys. Vincent Spano is Italian. Oh but hey,
you don't know the difference between an Italian and you're going. Yeah,
(09:05):
they were all white dudes, but um, or maybe not
all but the lion chair of them, of course. So um.
Aside from that, it was it was a good movie.
And I remember we definitely talked about this because I
remember telling the story being a kid, and like the
book was a really big bestseller and I thought it
was a soccer teams. I didn't know the difference between
rugby and soccer. If you listen to our soccer podcast,
(09:28):
you might think, I still don't know the difference. Uh So,
up next, Chuck is Jamestown. This is actually a fairly
recent revelation. Apparently, if you were a scholar and historian
of colonial America, you were in the know that there
was persistent legends and rumors that the people in Jamestown
(09:51):
had resorted to cannibalism during the winner of sixteen o nine,
sixteen ten. Yeah, there were five historical accounts of of
the years that people pointed to, and these are like
first person diaries from the people who were there at
the time, saying it was so bad that we ate
anything in sight, including dead people the end, But there
(10:13):
was nothing to back it up. So I guess the
historians were like these colonists trying to show off, or
they're using hyperbole, maybe like they were saying, I was
so hungry I could eat a horse, but they were
using cannibalism instead of the horse, because they actually did
eat the horse. Well. Then, finally, a couple of summers
ago in two thirteen, some archaeologists who were excavating Jamestown
(10:36):
came upon a tresh heap where they found the butchered
bones of horses and human teeth and a partial skull.
And when they examined the teeth in the skull, they realized, like,
oh wow, these are butcher marks right here. They weren't
just exaggerating or showing off. They really did engage in
cannibalism in Jamestown. Yeah, and this is the only artifactual
(10:58):
evidence of cannibalism by europe ends ever. Supposedly, that's what
it says, um. And with science, it's pretty remarkable what
you can do these days. They actually did three D
reconstructions and examined this skull and learned a lot about
this fourteen year old girl that they called Jane. Uh.
(11:21):
She was found buried a couple of feet down two
and a half feet down, but in a in a
trash heap, a huge giveaway seventeenth century trash heap in
the cellar inside the site at James Fort. So these
colonists died in the winter of sixteen o nine, and
they found what they called multiple chop marks on the
(11:42):
girl's skull um clearly interested in cheek, meat, muscles of
the face, tongue in the brain, and they think that
the person who at least was responsible for harvesting the
flesh in the brain from the head was not an
experienced butcher. The marks on the forehead are hesitant, and
apparently they they couldn't stand or staring at them while
(12:04):
they were doing this, so they turned her over and
then from the back of the head that's when the
marks became a little more confident and where they finally
cleaved her skull open. So they've turned her over and
that's when the butcher marks start to get a little
more confident, and apparently that's where they were They managed
to access her skull by cleaving it into from behind.
(12:24):
That's right. They also found cuts and saw marks and
stuff along her lower jaw uh that they said was
made to get the meat. Who said that in this article?
I read arbies from uh. But here's the remarkable thing.
They use isotope studies to find out a lot about
(12:46):
this girl. So they know from examining examining her shinbone
that she was fourteen, really sad. But the good news
is like she wasn't murdered, No, she starved to death.
Well goodness bad. I guess it's sad anyway you look
at it, although that's not necessarily true. There were there's
a lot of disease that was spreading through Jamestown at
the time as well, so as possible, she died of
(13:08):
other causes that aren't quite as bad as starvation. Where
here's the deal Jamestown was. It's not what you learned
about in elementary school, like, it was doing very poorly
at this point. People were starving. The local Native American
tribe that were once friendly with them had cut them
off and and they actually showed up in sixteen o
(13:30):
seven or six sixteen o seven during the worst drought
in the region in centuries. So it was a really
just inauspicious beginning. And they called this period, especially during
the winter of sixteen o nine and sixteen ten, the
starving time. It was the capital escent Capital t so
you know it was significant. So, Uh, in sixteen o nine,
(13:53):
they're already in bad shape and then three hundred new
settlers show up. Uh, what's for dinner? On the six
years They were in bad shape when they got there
because they had a rough crossing. And so they believe
from studying isotopes in this girl's teeth that um a
few things. One that is she came over on those
six boats, that she hadn't been there long. Um too,
(14:17):
that she was either a served as a maid to
a family of high status, was from a family of
high status, because they found that she had a lot
of protein. Um, and then they determined that she's It's
amazing what they can determine that she was from probably
the southern coast of England because they water that she consumes.
(14:37):
While she's got her little baby teeth are forming an infancy,
you can tell years later where that came from. Son,
leave it to the Smithsonian. Those guys hats off. So
after eating horses, dogs, cats, rats, mice, they ate, leather,
they ate, they ate anything they could get their hands on,
(14:59):
they f only did resort to uh eating humans. Now
we have evidence of it and by spring of sixteen,
only sixty people had survived. Isn't that amazing? It is
because three hundred came over on the boat, So I
don't know how many are already there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man,
(15:20):
it's a bad jam. It's a bad jam, all right.
Uh should we take a break. Yeah, let's take a break,
all right. I need to regather myself, so Chuck. I
(15:51):
believe we talked about this one before too, because it's
so astounding. But there was a guy named Richard Parker
and he was working aboard a yacht that was sailing
from England to Australia. And the name of the yacht
was the Mignonette. Do you know what I was sailing there? Uh? No,
A rich dude bought it in Australia and it was
(16:12):
just like literally being delivered to him. I guess I
did kind of know that. Yeah, I didn't know. I
just thought it was some expedition or something like. No,
I do kind of remember that from when we talked
about it before. When do we talk about this cannibalism?
So the Mignonette is sailing to Australia. A couple of
months in the trip, it sank because it's not supposed
to sail from England to Australia. It was not built
(16:35):
for that really. Yeah, and they even kind of fortified
it apparently and didn't work. So on board there's a
cabin boy, seventeen year old named Richard Parker. Have you
ever seen cabin Boy? The movie? Great movie? Yeah? You
kid me, Chris Elliott, Yeah, I was I think I
saw that in the theater. I was so excited. Yeah,
(16:58):
David Letterman's in that too. Sure he is a weird cameo.
Uh so cabin boy. Cabin boy Richard Parker, uh seventeen
years old and he um there there's an old tradition
called the custom of the sea where you are in
bad shape and you draw lots, and whoever draws the
short straw um says, you know, kill me and eat me. Well,
(17:20):
they say, all right, I won't hold it against you.
When you guys, that's probably how it goes. So they
considered drawing lots, and then the captain Thomas Dudley said, nah,
let's not even bother. Look at Parker. It smells like onions.
I don't like how the kids looked. Ever, well, it's
(17:42):
pretty sad. They literally were like, I don't think we
even need to draw lots, like he's clearly the one
that needs to go. He was malnourished. He was skinny.
Uh he It sounded like from the accounts I read
that he was. They were having to kind of care
for him, like he fell overboard at one point and
they had to rescue him. More trouble, Leny's word. He
drank sea water and got himself sick, and everyone's like,
(18:03):
you don't drink seawater, Richard. So they said, I think
we're just gonna take care of this without a vote.
And um, he didn't have family or anything like that.
He was a kid. So Dudley jabs a pen knife
in his neck. Not a good way to go, Joe
Pesci style, you're gonna dispatch be dispatched. That's not a
(18:24):
good way to go. A pen knife in the neck. Now,
I don't know how I mean on they were on
a little dinghy at this point. I don't know. That's
just like a seagull. And then hit him over the
head and then you can stand him with the pen
knife once he's out. You don't just go from zero
to pen knife in the neck. Hey, I agree, Uh,
no arguments here to go. Peesci style is barbaric. So
(18:47):
they killed him with the pen knife, ate his flesh,
drank his blood, and just a few days later they
were found. Um, I don't know if they would have
survived those few days or if that haunted them for
the rest of their lives. They're rescued ronically by a
German ship called the Montezuma. It was the famous Aztec
king who eight people and made me poop. That's right.
(19:09):
Oh really yeah, huh, that's interesting. It gets even more
interesting though, while they were tried for murder I know
where you're going, and found guilty, but people felt pretty
bad for them. They were like, yeah, we've all met
Richard Parker. He did smell like onion. Uh. And so
six months later they were released from prison. But here's
where it does get a little weird. Oh me, yeah,
(19:31):
so I love this. This is eighteen eighty four, right
when this happened. Um, in eighteen thirty eight, a little
guy named Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story about
a boat that sank and some guys were in a
lifeboat and a guy got killed and eaten, and the
(19:54):
guy who got killed in Eaton's name was Richard Parker.
In that awesome it's pretty weird. The narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pim of Nantucket was the short story. And um,
I saw something that pointed out like many other things
didn't match up. I was like, that's really all you
need to call it a startling coincidence, you know. Apparently,
(20:16):
also the guy who wrote the Life of Pie named
the Tiger Richard Parker as well, did you know that
I haven't seen that movie or read the book. I
haven't read the book. Movie was really good. I heard
nothing but good things. Yeah, I've just never been in
a Life of Pie mood, you know what I mean?
The name sort of it's kind of like, yeah, it's Pie.
Do I care about his life? No? It's a good
(20:38):
movie though, all right. Moving on to uh, Alfred or
Alfred Packer? Who knows? I heard it was Alfred, but
I've seen it both ways, illiterate gold miners in the
Old West? Who knows that's right? Uh, February Alfred. He's like,
(21:00):
he's a gold miner, he's a prospector, and he wants
to go to the high mountains of Colorado to find
gold and apparently makes like half of the trip and
then stops in the winter and stays with the Ute
tribe and they're like, you need to just stay here
until spring, don't go any further. He says, no, no, no,
I got this. I'm going to continue on. Thanks for
(21:23):
the warning. So he goes on with his his friends
and um eventually wanders out of the woods alone. Yeah,
he went in with five other dudes, came out alone,
that's right, and said who me, Oh, I'm just the
sole survivor of the group. A storm hit and everybody
(21:44):
went their separate ways. Let's not talk about it again. Yeah,
he said, my feet got frozen and I couldn't keep up,
and I don't know what happened to those dudes. And
they're like, oh really, He's like, okay, fine, all right,
yeah I killed one of them, but it was in
self defense. And they're like what He's like, all right, okay, alright,
we ate some of the other dudes, but they died naturally. Well,
(22:06):
the reason they first said, wait a minute, what's going
on here? As he said that I don't know what
happened to those guys, and they said, well, why do
you have their personal belongings in your pack? And he went, oh, well,
I know I've got wallets full of money from these guys, right,
so maybe I should come somewhat clean. So the story
keeps changing every time they asked him. Uh. They eventually
(22:28):
he's in jail. Is very kg. He's in jail at
this point, um obviously while he's being questioned and all
this stuff, But the jail was basically a log cabin.
No jail can hold Alfred Packer. No, especially not to
jail in eighteen seventy four in Colorado, so he busted out,
goes on the lamb for nine years. They catch him
(22:48):
in Wyoming, liver under the leaving under the alias John Schwartz.
Actually somebody who was part of another expedition that he
was on, a guy named French. He recognized him, just
happened to run cross paths with him. It was like
you no way, Yeah, wow, that's bad luck. I guess,
(23:09):
good luck. Um. So he was convicted of manslaughter and
sentenced to forty years, released on parole in one after yes,
seventeen years. Yeah, and supposedly died of vegetarian at the age.
That's what they say, and it sounds to me like, yeah,
(23:31):
that's what I think. He Well, he's become a beloved
figure there. I guess. There's a statue of him on
the campus of you see it Boulder. Well, yeah, they
named their cafeteria after him, and with the subheading have
a friend for lunch. Terrible. Those college students back in
the sixties had a real sense of humor, and of
course the South Park guys wrote cannibal the musical after him.
(23:56):
So Alfred Packers Survival Cannibalist, what degree? We don't know?
That's right, I need another break, sir, I'm hungry. Is
that is that awful? We'll be back right after this. Okay,
(24:31):
did you get to eat, buddy? No, not yet. Your
forearms looking pretty good, though. I'd make I'd make a
nice meating meal. Well, you know, one of the great
revelations in my adult life is that when you're eating meat,
you're not eating anything but muscle. Did you realize that? When?
Did you realize that? When you told me on the show?
(24:52):
I know that I go over some stuff more than once,
but it was a big revelation I know. And that's
why red meat is red, because it has more red
blood vessels. Those are those are muscles that you use
more often dark meat. I'm sorry. So like in in
a chicken, the dark meat are muscles that the chicken
(25:13):
uses far more frequently than say, like the breast, which
is white, So there's fewer blood vessels, so it's dark
compared to the white meat. Interesting, it's mind blowing. You
like dark meat? I like it. I like it all.
I used to just be like oh no, white meat
only please, And then I like really started trying dark meat.
I'm like, yeah, that's good stuff. Now I'm less like
(25:34):
bring it on. Right service choice, that's what I always say,
wide or dark service choice. And then I'm like, no, no no, no, mixed.
I'm not going to leave this in your hands. And
they say this diner is so wacky. The Franklin Expedition, Yes,
(25:55):
this one is. Uh, this is a good one. Uh,
Sir John frank when at the age of sixty, had
already taken too expeditions, ah, dangerous ones. Yeah sixty. Also,
we're talking the eighteen fifties, forties. That's old. Yeah, that's
(26:19):
that's an old dude. So hats off to him for
doing it again. Salty old swarthy seamen act. So. Um,
they were looking for the northwest passage from Europe to
Asia up in the Arctic. I guess right, going that
would be going westward, westward, northwest. Oh yeah, northwest passes.
(26:41):
I never thought about that before. But there's no southeast
passage or northeast passages there. I don't know who cares,
right anyway, Franklin's leading this expedition, and um, there are
a hundred thirty four dudes. Yeah, I've seen another couple
of numbers, but we'll just we'll go with that and
they're never heard from again. Yes, and they were not Uh,
(27:06):
they were pros. They weren't a bunch of dummies that
just said, let's you know, take a bag of rice,
it's a beef turkey. They had five years of food. Uh.
They went to a provision er. I didn't really know
this how this worked. I figured they just went shopping.
But you would, like you would find someone to get
all your provisions for the trip, like they would win
(27:28):
the bid and you would hire them. So they hired
a guy named Stephen Goldner. Uh. And he apparently was
in a rush because I guess they just cut it
close time wise and hastily put together, um, five years
worth of food and tens soldered him shut. Eight thousand
tins of food eight thousands. Uh, he soldered them shut.
(27:51):
Apparently that's how they say in the UK, So shout
out UK, right, um, And here's the quote I saw
was that, Uh, the lead dripped like melted candle wax
down inside the surface. That's a bad soldering job, it is.
And we just an episode on lead. So you know
that if lead is in your canned goods, that is
(28:12):
no goods. So this expedition had to uh two ships,
and they were really well outfitted ships. They had internal heat.
Hot water was piped throughout the cabin so they they
could stay warm. They had UM railroad engine screw propellers.
They were um fitted with iron. They were iron clad
(28:35):
in parts to break through ice. They were really nice ships.
The Arabis and the Terror. Yeah, very poorly named. Yeah,
the Terror is not what you want to name a
ship on an expedition, right, No. And the Arabas. I
looked it up because I was just curious. And apparently
in Greek mythology, Uh, it's the place where you would
go right after death. It's the personification of darkness. So
(28:56):
terrible names, the Terror and the Arabas. So chuck. They
found at least one of the ships. Yeah, just two
years ago. Okay, they discovered the wreck of the h M.
S Erebus offshore of King William Island underwater. Is trapped
in ice underwater, but they think that it was trapped
in ice is how they originally because they were stuck.
(29:20):
There's a big mystery with the Franklin Expedition because even
if they were stuck, they had plenty of supplies, five
years worth the supplies to wait until it thought enough
to sail at least go back. So why would they
abandon these these ships. It's a it's a huge mystery,
and a lot of people say, well it was the lead.
(29:41):
Look at the behavior. They apparently took lifeboats, dragged them
across the tundra. They had non essentials on board with
things like silverware. You'd have to just be totally off
your nut to be on like a survival expedition to
go find help, and you bring along silverware. So everybody
pointed to what was the duce's named, Richard Golding's work,
(30:02):
terrible salt soldering work, Stephen Goldner, and that his that
the lead had had poisoned these guys and clouded their judgment,
that they kind of went mad. But apparently they did
some They they some of the bodies have since been found,
and they did some forensic analysis of it and said, actually,
now these guys have lots of lead poisoning, but it's
distributed evenly throughout their bones, like they were just poisoned
(30:25):
by lead throughout their lives. It wasn't acute poisoning from
this soldering work. So it just remains a mystery. I
guess it does. And some Inuit tribes reported seeing um
about forty guys, forty white men that were in bad
shape that they sold some seal meat too, and uh,
(30:46):
when one of the search parties came across the Innuit tried,
they told him the story. And I think over the
years they've been finding, you know, piles of these bodies
in different locations. And uh, the Inuits first where the
ones who said, yeah, we actually saw one of their camps,
like after we ran into the guys, we think we
found him again, all dead like the following year, and
(31:08):
there was like human bones and their kettles and stuff
like that. So they definitely resorted to to uh, survival
cannibalism at some point. Yeah, it said, um the direct
quote was from the mutilated state of many of the
bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident
that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last
dread alternative cannibalism. Kind of dramatic, yeah, for sure. So check.
(31:31):
Let's do one more, huh. Okay, let's do our famous
top ten, consisting of six tops boy, this one is
super super sad like. There's not much joking about this.
I mean, none of this has been funny, but we're
trying not to just depress everyone. But the Siege of
Leningrad is one of the saddest moments in world history.
(31:53):
It's when the Nazi forces uh invaded, bombarded over three
years against what is now St. Petersburg, and basically for
nine hundred days cut them off in an effort to
starve out a city of three three point three million people.
(32:14):
And it worked. Yeah, it's it's a great effect. Three
point three million people. A million died over the three
year siege. Yeah, and eight hundred thousand of those died
from starvation. Eight hundred thousand people nuts. So the government
nobody could get to it. The Nazis had formed a
ring around the city and we're defending it and just
trying to They were bombing it every day, but they
(32:35):
were also well aware that they were purposefully starving the
population as well. Inside um, the people had a ration
of bread once a day, a piece of bread about
the weight of a bar of soap. Yeah, manual laborers
got two hundred and fifty grams of bread. But apparently
the bread was cut with pine shavings, and they were
(32:57):
subsisting on three hundred calories a day. Yeah, if you
were in the army, you would get things like um,
fern leaf soup and um cream of nettle, probably not
even cream, but like broth of nettle soup. So people
were joining the army just for that, just to have
that every day. Yeah, here's some of the things that
(33:17):
they use as food substitutes. UM, cotton seed cake, uh macaroni,
which is in quotes made from flax seed for cattle meat,
jelly produced from boiling bones and calf skins, yeast soup
from sawdust, fermented sawdust, joiner's glue, boiled and jellified, toothpaste,
(33:40):
cold cream. Basically, it said they even licked dried pasteuff
wallpaper because there was a rumor that it was potato based.
Anything for calories. I mean, that's how desperate things were. Yeah,
and and not to stephen calories, but like vitamins too.
Apparently they were sweeping the tobacco shavings from a tobacco
(34:01):
factories ventilation system because tobacco is vitamin C in it unbelievable,
vitamin B one of those too. So what happens is
a crime wave starts breaking out, as you would expect
in a city that large that's starving to death, like
people literally just laying dead in the street, like everywhere
you look right. And apparently not just laying dead in
the street, they were half eaten, some of them laying
(34:22):
dead in the street. Yeah, and they they kept this
under wraps for many, many years because they didn't want
people to know the world to know how ugly it was.
But we have a lot more information now. But um,
you would have these ration cards to get this, you know,
the tiny allotments of food that they had, and so
if their relatives die, they would hide the bodies so
(34:44):
they could still use the ration card. And then these gangs,
these teenage gangs of teenage boys started breaking out where
they would mug you for food in your ration card. Uh.
One eight year old killed his two younger brothers for
their cards. Uh. One guy murdered his grandmother and boiled
an eight her liver. And a seventeen year old stole
(35:04):
a corpse from a cemetery and put it through a
meat minzer. So it's like one of the most shocking
things that I've ever heard in world. History, and it
isn't much talked about. I mean, you hear about the
Siege of Lennon Grand, but I mean the details of
it are just horrifying. Yeah, it was pretty whitewashed, I
think when I studied it in college. But um, well
that's because the Soviets just denied the horror of the
(35:28):
whole thing. Two thousand people were arrested for cannibalism. Um
five eighty six were executed for murdering people and eating them.
And it said most people arrested were women. Apparently mothers
would smother like their youngest kids to feed to the
other kids. Man, what a horrible time. Alrighty, that's a
(35:50):
nice uplifting way to leave people. Yeah there's others one,
there's others that we haven't touched upon. So if you
want to learn more about it, you can just type
survival cannibalism into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that it's time for basebook questions,
I can't think of a more inappropriate way to end
this show into take social media questions and laugh. But
(36:15):
maybe we need to laugh now. Let's all right, I've
got a hilarious one. All Right, this is from lu
Jen If you had one, if you had to eat
one food for the rest of your life, what would
it be? Fried chicken? Oh yeah, easy, mom. Would be
either a really good Indian curry or a really good
Japanese curry. Either one of those would be happy. So
(36:37):
a curry, A curry, A good one, though, great one?
Are you well? And food? Fried chicken? I'm gonna if
if it's a meal, I'm gonna say fried chicken, mashed
potatoes with gravy and corn bread or biscuit or something.
What about green Yeah? I love it, um, but dealer's choice,
like you said, okay, green beans, collared whatever, But that
(37:00):
would be my meal. First good one. That was hilarious.
This is from Jeff Ruth. Why doesn't John Candy get
comedic props that he's due? Great question, I agree. One
of the great great comic actors of our time. Yeah,
it's great. Sad, sad that we lost him. Uh. He
was huge at the time. I mean, everybody knew John Candy.
(37:22):
He was in some major, major motion pictures, many of
which were surrounded by him. I think he's gotten tons
of props. So what are you saying, Jeff? Wake up,
Wake up? Also because he was Canadian. Okay, good answer. Uh,
here's one from Lily Highum, what is it like for
Jerry producing stuff you should know? Well, here's Jerry's answer.
(37:45):
All right, yeah, nice eliminating. That's always Russell Redman. What's
your favorite breed of cat? And don't lie, because I'll
know Russell. I mean, I think I'll probably go with
the breeds that I have right now because they're dear
to me. So I'm gonna say a tabby in a
main tune. Okay, and yeah, are you ready for this question?
(38:10):
Charlie Manson asked, Chuck always wears a baseball cap. Is
there a reason for this? Chuck? I think you should
tell them right now you're not wearing a baseball cap.
I'm not because, as most of you know, my beloved
Last Chance Garage had that have had for twenty years
was lost in Austin, Texas and is in a dumpster
somewhere in Austin, Texas. I don't know if that's true.
(38:31):
I think it's adorning the hat of a hipster in Austin, Texas. Seriously,
if you're in an Austin, keep an eye off for
that thing. It says last Chance garage. It's black circle
emblem smells like twenty years of Chuck. No one else
would want to wear that hat. I'm guarantee you. But
now I don't wear a hat that much anymore because
of that. I love that hat. Okay, alright, l I
(38:53):
p okay. Jack Mayhan says, what is your favorite automobile
and why? Uh? Mine is probably the AMC Pacer, just
because it's pretty cool looking. I'm not a big car guy,
but I'm gonna go with the nineteen sixties VW Beetles
because I drove them and I still love him. I
saw beautiful looking beetle the other day. Cherry restored that
(39:15):
this guy was driving, and I was just like, man,
I'm getting another one one day. Totally do it, Chuck,
I am. I'm gonna have a real nice one. Okay.
Um Bryant Tarbell, Oh Tarbell, why do you tempt me? So?
Described to flate Gate in one word, we go at
it a lot on Facebook. He's our friend from Boston.
In one word, uh, two words, three words, Tom Brady Cheetah.
(39:41):
Oh moving on? Well, I think a score one for Chuck. Uh.
Tara Dickinson asks this catch up a sauce or a condiment.
I think it's probably both. I don't think it has
to be one or the other. I did it. Don't
be dumb on the origin of ketchup. Did you know
it's vieting a musing origin? No idea? Really? Cat is
(40:03):
that pounced? Really? And is that why it's spelled uh
as cats up? Yes, that's exactly right, that's the tradition spelling. Yeah.
And did you know like originally before tomatoes weren't introduced
until like the late nineteenth century, but they were. The
British were making versions of this stuff, um, like from
the like mid eighteenth century, and they were using things
(40:24):
like walnuts and anchovies and all sorts of weird stuff mushrooms.
It's more like a fish sauce. That's how catsup started. Really? Yeah?
Is that why it's got vinegar in it today? Probably?
Probably idea? Don't remember why. I think it might just
have been originally a preservative. Gotcha? I'll do one more
for me. This is from Caleb James Wyant. Would either
(40:49):
of you ever consider running for public office? Um? For me?
Not a chance. No, never had any interest whatsoever. Um.
And I wouldn't be allowed to anyway, they would expose
me so quickly for past crimes against humanity, They would
dig stuff up on me, and I would be disqualified.
(41:12):
So now, for many reasons, I think that's a great
way in this great If you want to get in
touch with us, you can visit us on Facebook at
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can
tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(41:37):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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