Screaming Mad

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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.

Conquistadors are dark figures from a modern perspective, warlords from the Spanish Empire who brought disease and violence to Central and South America.

Hernán Cortés is one of the most infamous, known for his defeat of the Aztec Empire.

But the reality of that history is more complicated than you might realize.

He would never have been able to defeat the Aztecs without the help of a different native tribe, the Laxcalanes.

And it was their incredible ingenuity that handed him the most important victory of the war.

Cortes was a man whose ego could not be contained.

When he was sent to the New World, he was supposed to submit to the authority of the governor of Cuba, who just wanted him to survey modern-day Mexico and report back.

Cortes ignored this order and in 1519 took his men further inland to conquer the kingdom of Tenochtitlan.

Some of Cortés' men were loyal to the governor of Cuba and so Cortez ordered the men who were loyal to him to disassemble their ships so that the Cuban loyalists couldn't sail back to Cuba.

But Tenochtitlan proved more difficult to conquer than Cortés had hoped.

It was a massive sprawling metropolis situated in the middle of an even larger lake, Lake Texcoco.

If the Spanish tried to use their horses to ride into the city, they would be sitting ducks on the various bridges that connected the city to the mainland.

Cortez suddenly wished that he had all those ships that he ordered his men to disassemble.

But then again, it's not as if they could have carried them from the ocean to the lake.

But it turns out that the Aztecs were pretty cruel leaders and Cortes quickly made allies with their neighbors who had grown tired of Aztec rule.

But it was through these alliances that Cortes learned of the forests of Laxcala, a mountain province with timber that could be used to make new ships.

Although this was 60 miles from the lake, Cortes saw no other options.

Working with several native leaders, he ordered timber to be cut and carefully shaped for the construction of new ships.

He also had his men return to where they disassembled their original ships, recovering the anchors, the sails, and other pieces that could be used on the new vessels.

But Cortez didn't stop there, ordering the damming of a local river so that his new ships could be tested before they got anywhere near Lake Texcoco.

This required that the natives undertake an entirely separate engineering project before their work on the ships could even begin.

But they were successful in damming the river and providing a deep enough body of water for one of the new boats to be tested on.

The Spanish and their indigenous allies constructed an entire brigantine there in the mountains, made sure that it could float on the river, and then deconstructed the whole thing again so that it could be transported down the mountain.

Once all the pieces were ready, a massive convoy of thousands of indigenous men carried the timber from the mountains to Cortez's camp on the edge of Lake Texcoco.

Once they arrived, they got to work assembling the ships again.

This took months of time, and while they worked, Cortez's army had to fend off multiple attacks from Tenoctitlan.

But at least on the lakeshore, the Spanish's horses, cannons, and iron weapons gave them an advantage.

Even once the ships were finished, the indigenous work wasn't done.

They next dug a 9,000-foot canal from their worksites to the lake, allowing the ships to be released into the water.

And then finally, after months of hard work, the invasion could begin.

The ships ships had been outfitted with cannons, and as they approached the city, they easily blew apart the Aztec navy, which consisted of small canoes that fired arrows and darts.

They then decimated the city's walls and began a siege of the city.

For years, Tenocticlan had been safe on the water, but now it was thoroughly outmatched by the combined ingenuity of the Spanish and the local attackers.

After weeks of back and forth fighting, the Spanish finally overwhelmed the city.

Their conquest was brutal.

Hundreds of thousands of Aztecs were killed.

It was the end of their empire and the beginning of Spanish rule in Mexico.

Soon enough, smallpox from the Spanish conquistadors spread throughout the remaining Aztecs and the Spanish native allies, decimating their populations even further.

Cortez wasn't punished for disobeying the orders of the governor of Cuba.

He had delivered Mexico to the king, and so he was made governor.

He spent the rest of his career conquering Mexico and rebuilding Tenochtitlan, which of course became Mexico City.

If you're wondering, they drained the lake over time to where it barely exists today.

Curiously, when Cortes finally returned to Spain in 1541, he felt that the king never really gave him the credit he deserved for accomplishing so much.

Maybe the king resented him for disobeying orders all those years before, or maybe he knew that without the help of his native allies, Cortés wouldn't have been able to accomplish what he did.

Either way, it was a curious case of landlocked naval warfare that altered the course of history forever.

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Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Oh, really?

Thanks, Capital One Bank guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital1.com slash bank.

Capital One NA member FDIC.

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In 1904, a Danish art critic was touring the National Museum of Norway when they made a startling discovery.

One of the museum's most controversial works had been vandalized.

Someone had used a pencil to scrawl a phrase in Old Norwegian across the top of the painting.

Translated to English, it read, could only have been painted by a madman.

While the delivery of the message was new, this wasn't the first time that kind of criticism had been leveled at the piece.

The vandalized artwork was Edvard Monk's The Scream.

It's an unforgettable image and one that you'd probably recognize in an instant.

A gaunt, alien-looking figure stands on a long bridge beneath a blazing sky.

The figure's hands gripped the side of their skull-like face, eyes and mouth stretched wide, in an expression of existential horror.

That expression is a pretty close approximation for the way viewers reacted when The Scream was first displayed in 1895.

Many art critics thought the painting was proof that Monk was clinically insane.

One medical student said that he should be locked up in an asylum and kept from ever touching a paintbrush again.

And their reactions horrified Monk partly because they seemed to confirm his own worst fears.

Mental health problems ran in his family, and he had personally suffered from panic attacks in the past.

One of those experiences served as the original inspiration for The Scream.

In 1893, he was out walking with some friends at sunset when he looked up and saw the sky filled with blood and flaming tongues.

He was overcome with pain and an inexplicable feeling of anxiety and heard what he later described as an infinite scream passing through nature.

The experience naturally left Monk badly shaken and he feared that the panic attacks would get worse with time.

So when people started calling him crazy based on his artwork, it got to him.

Eventually, the controversy surrounding his work faded and Monk continued to paint.

And then, a decade after he first revealed the scream to the public, the inscription was discovered.

The writing was faint, almost blending in with the swirling sky, but once seen, it couldn't be ignored.

Closer inspection proved that it was added after the painting was completed, and the museum curators were confident it hadn't been there when they added the work to their collection.

Which means that someone, perhaps a prankster or an angry critic, snuck into the gallery while the guards were absent and defaced the painting.

The museum even brought in forensic experts to analyze the writing, but they failed to come up with any suspects.

Meanwhile, Monk became increasingly obsessed with his critics.

His diaries and letters are full of complaints about the people who called him mad, and that fixation eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He was hospitalized in 1908 after a nervous breakdown, but the treatment seems to have helped.

After his release, he painted more frequently and was reportedly much happier.

After he died in 1944, the scream only grew in prominence.

Today, it's one of the most iconic paintings in the world, having been endlessly reproduced in political cartoons and memes.

It's even become an emoji, which is all the proof you can ask for that an image is still relevant today.

And its staying power suggests that Monk wasn't half as mad as his critics believed.

Perhaps he was just ahead of his time, an artist who foresaw the alienation and anxiety that would come to define modern life.

And it seems that he had a sense of humor about it all, because in 2021, a group of researchers finally solved the riddle of the scream's mysterious inscription.

Using infrared scans and handwriting analysis, they concluded that the culprit was none other than Edvard Monk himself.

It seems that sometime after the painting was hung in the museum, he returned to vandalize his own masterpiece with those words.

Could only have been written by a madman.

Whether Monk meant that as a confession or a self-deprecating joke isn't clear today.

But I like to think that it was a message to his critics.

If you think I'm mad right now, just wait.

You'll all be joining me soon enough.

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.

The 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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