Serpentine

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Over the years, between this show and my other podcast lore, we've talked about a number of cryptids, miraculous creatures that made their presence known a handful of times before vanishing into legend.

Some of these creatures have been readily identified.

Others remain insubstantial, impossible to pin down by either science or superstition.

In August of 1817, a pair of women were walking along the harbor at Cape Ann, not far from Gloucester, Massachusetts.

One of them saw something strange in the water, and she stopped to stare.

There seemed to be a great creature moving through the water.

Not a fish or a trap shark, but something more like an enormous life serpent.

When they told their neighbors what they had seen, it was dismissed out of hand as a fanciful tale.

They'd both let their imaginations get the best of them.

But four four days later, near 10 Pound Island, it appeared again.

This time it was a sailor named Amos Story who saw it between 12 and 1 o'clock.

He described it as a sleek creature with a head like a sea turtle.

By the third sighting, the creature was starting to attract a frenzy of local attention.

Scores of men and women sighted it from shore.

It must have been at least 40 feet long, they said, maybe as long as 50, with a sharp horn protruding from its head.

Four boats took to the water, aiming to catch the strange creature.

One of the ships came close and the carpenter aboard fired at it with his musket.

Even though it was almost point-blank range, he didn't even leave a scratch on the creature's head and it vanished beneath the waves before he could reload.

Now, these sightings seemed to lend credence to a story the local indigenous people had been telling for years about a serpent that coiled itself around the rocks.

This story had been told as early as 1638, but none of the settlers had believed it, until now.

now.

For two whole years, this creature swam in the local waters near Gloucester, generating a public frenzy among the locals.

However, no one was ever able to catch it.

At one point, they thought that one of its spawn had washed ashore, but it was only a beached sea snake.

Enthusiasm started to wane when they realized they hadn't caught the fabled sea monster, but not before the events of 1817 to 1819 were dramatized for the stage in a play called The Sea Serpent, or a Gloucester Hoax.

It's the play's telling of the events, the sea serpent's identity as a deliberate anticlimax, not a monster but a mackerel that had been misidentified by an eager public.

Reality, however, would not be so clear-cut.

In the century since the creature's first appearance, the so-called Gloucester Sea Serpent became a mascot of sorts in the area.

Sightings of the creature continued into the 21st century, although photographs would be scarce.

Instead, local artists would depict the creature in murals, paintings, and statues.

In the modern day, skeptics of the mythology went through all the accounts of the time and came to an entirely different conclusion about what the people of Gloucester had seen.

They had witnessed not a sea monster out of a Jules Verne story, but something that had yet to be fully understood by the colonists of the day.

They had seen a narwhal.

It's not quite a serpent, of course, as described by those contemporaneous accounts, but a narwhal would match the coloring, the general shape and characteristics of the creature that the 17th century Gloucester residents witnessed, particularly the long horn protruding from its head, which is described variously as a sting or a spear.

Another characteristic that is ascribed to the Gloucester sea serpent is its ability to dive sharply into the water without any visible contortion of its body.

The fast, deep diving is something that narwhals are extremely capable of doing, swimming fast and able to disappear in a heartbeat under the surface of the water.

Our imagination is a powerful thing.

It can transform an unusual sea creature into something otherworldly.

The ocean, as ever, provides us with the opportunity to imagine infinite possibilities just off the shore, monsters and mermaids and sea serpents.

Narwhals are mostly relegated to Arctic waters near Canada and Greenland, but it is not impossible for one to have gotten lost and swim south.

Whatever brought this unlucky creature to Massachusetts, we may never know, but it lives on in the memory of the people of Gloucester forever.

And that is curious enough for me.

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Liechtenstein is a tiny country.

At just 62 square miles, with a population of just over 40,000 people, it is the sixth smallest country in the world.

With a smaller area and population than the size of Cleveland, Ohio, it is not surprising that Liechtenstein no longer feels it needs a standing army.

In fact, they haven't needed one for over 150 years.

But the very last time Liechtenstein marched to war, something amazing happened.

The country actually grew.

In 1866, the region around Liechtenstein was embroiled in the Austro-Prussian War.

Liechtenstein and several other small kingdoms were part of something called the German Confederation.

This was an organization of mostly German-speaking states that stretched across what today would be most of Central Europe.

The German Confederation had existed for a few decades, but now Prussia, a powerful kingdom in modern-day northern Poland, had allied with Italy to overthrow it.

Fighting against them were a few other states and the Austrian Empire.

Now, technically speaking, Liechtenstein was neutral, but they retained close ties to to Austria, so when Austria requested backup, Liechtenstein sent all the forces they could muster, just 80 soldiers, to guard a place called Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy.

The Liechtenstein soldiers were supposedly there to fight off any attacks from Prussians or Italians, but by all accounts, they didn't have much to do.

When no opposing army was forthcoming, They spent most of their days drinking wine, smoking tobacco, and looking out at the beautiful mountains that surrounded the pass.

Hey, there are a lot lot of worse places to be stationed than the Italian Alps, for sure.

The war didn't last very long.

In fact, it was over in just about six weeks.

So when the Liechtenstein soldiers got the call that peace had been declared, they reluctantly rose to their feet and left their Italian Alpine vacation behind.

It wasn't until the soldiers returned back to the border that the officers noticed something odd.

They had set out for Italy with 80 soldiers, but now they were returning with 81.

So, who was this mysterious new recruit?

On this, well, accounts differ.

Now, some claim that the new immigrant was an Austrian officer who enjoyed the company of the Liechtensteiners, and when they headed back home, he decided it was time for a fresh change of pace, and he joined them.

Others say the addition was an Italian defector, or perhaps just a farmer from near the pass.

Either way, he followed the troops home in search of work.

after the war.

Whatever the true story might be, the second that man crossed over the border, Liechtenstein's tiny population actually got a boost, which is pretty unusual for a war.

Their minuscule army was disbanded just two years later, in 1868.

Small as the army was, it was just too expensive to keep up.

After that, Liechtenstein declared an official position of neutrality, which it kept through both world wars, although it did ban the Nazi Party in 1943, which any smart country would have done.

Today, Liechtenstein is a tiny country nestled between Austria and Switzerland.

Like the Swiss, the country made itself a tax haven in the late 20th century.

The companies it attracted in the past few decades have made it one of the wealthiest monarchies in the world.

And I'm sure the Liechtensteiners have more than enough money to fund an army these days.

Whether they can feel it, well, that's another story.

Unless they start counting corporations as people, they don't even have enough to fill Yankee Stadium.

So perhaps it's time to send another expedition to the Alps.

After all, who knows what they might come back back with this time.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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