Episode 379 -The Great Siege of Gibraltar ft. Josh Boerman

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Hello and welcome to the Wines Ed by Dunkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Josh Borman.

Josh and I are the chairman of the Peninsula Revolutionary Army.

That's right, Joe.

Tom is an honorary member because, well, we need a big-headed Irishman if history tells us anything.

We long to throw the shackles off of our comrades, to tell the world that we will not be chained down by a ball and chain rapt runner, various isthmuses.

And while I understand that this movement brings some serious questions regarding Korea and all that, we stand united as much as we stand alone in a body of water.

How you doing, fellas?

For the first time since the last time Josh was on, one of the many hosts of the worst of all possible worlds, one of the hosts of ill-conceived Michiganders are the majority on this podcast.

Finally, as it should be.

As it goddamn should be.

Fucking right.

You know, you mentioned isthmuses.

I don't like them as much as peninsulas.

Peninsulas are definitely my favorite.

Well, this is going to be a hot button here because an isthmus can be the area of land where a peninsula meets the rest of the body of land.

So, unfortunately, it is like an ankle or a neck, possibly a wrist.

Whatever geographical body part.

It could be the ass neck.

Sure.

The grundel.

The peninsular grundle.

But at the end of the day, it's about being the appendage.

That's what we love to be.

That's what we love to see, I think.

That we're appendage maxing.

That's right.

We're drinking the mysterious goo on the street in order to appendage.

That's why you have that pilot of street energy drink, Joe.

Exactly.

You want to grow a second nose on your back.

Yeah.

That's right.

Because if there's one thing that Armenia needs, it's another nose.

Tom was,

I was actually in London and Tom and I got a very nice coffee,

a couple coffees, really.

And he was telling me about the palette of energy drinks that you found, Joe.

That's really something.

Look, sometimes you're given a gift.

All right.

You don't look the gift dumpster in the mouth.

You just take the energy drinks.

So I've gathered everybody here today because we're going to talk about a part of the American Revolution, which is why I gathered myself and Josh, two people who are from states who are not part of the United States.

USA.

USA.

And an Irish guy.

I mean, inevitably, an Irish guy will show up.

Yeah, exactly.

I think having like the random Irish guy is certainly more Civil War coded, but, you know, close enough.

Why not?

There was always an Irish guy around doing something.

That is the history of America.

But if I was to ask you two, where you thought the largest, longest, but most importantly, last battle of the American Revolution was and who fought in it, where would you guess?

I mean, I guess I could see it being in like the state of New York, maybe?

That's a good guess, especially like looking at the end of what most people consider the war.

Yeah.

Tom, you got it, you got a shot?

Oh,

I see.

I am going to base my answer based on where is the most likely place for a random Irish person to pop up.

So Boston.

I mean, see, I'm currently reading a really good book about Thomas Francis Maher, a man who was sent to Van Diemen's Land and escaped and made it to America and then became the governor of Missouri.

So I'm going to say Missouri.

Missouri wasn't a state yet, but good shot.

But actually, it really doesn't matter what your answer was.

Nobody was going to get this.

Unless, of course, you cheated and looked at the title of this episode, which is the only bit of information that either of you two actually have at this moment.

I mean, what I'm seeing in the thing is Gibraltar.

That's you got it.

What?

So, the great siege of Gibraltar.

I know we're not talking about what I assume is like Gibraltar, Ohio, which is probably a place that exists.

It was not in New England.

It was not in New York.

It wasn't in Missouri.

It was not in revolutionary America at all.

And it was not fought by Americans whatsoever.

We are summoning the big fat guy from the meme who's like beating the drum saying, come on, fucking England, win some fucking wars.

Actually, yeah, pretty much.

Okay, so like Gibraltar, like the huge rock

is what we're talking about.

Okay.

It was an over three year long siege that accidentally ended up deciding the fate of Canada and weirdly, Florida and Puerto Rico's future.

Okay.

There's a lot of things wrapped up here, but since this is not taking place in what would become the United States, let's talk about a little rock called Gibraltar.

Due to its location, as, of course, the greatest form of geography on Earth, a peninsula, it's actually

the best kind of geography two times over because it's a peninsula of the Iberian Peninsula.

Bam, Gibraltar, Gibraltar, Grand Champion Peninsula.

It's sort of like the thumb in Michigan.

It's a peninsula in a peninsula.

The difference is nobody would ever accuse the thumb of Michigan of being cool.

Once again, it's answering a question that wouldn't be asked until like probably the late 1970s, early 1980s: what if a Spanish guy was English?

Yeah, actually, kind of.

Gibraltar is who we have to thank for that.

Yes, sir.

I love a Tom Skinner.

I love

sausage in the mash.

And I loved ging.

I know that there's at least one Lions Led by Donkeys listener from Bay City, Michigan.

If that's you, send Joe angry emails right now demanding that the thumb be respected.

Look, anyone from the thumb knows that the thumb is a seriously fucked up place.

There's a reason why the other Oklahoma City bomber lived there.

Terry Nichols had a farm there and his brother did.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, famously,

if you go back in time a little bit to the documentary Bowling Columbine, he goes there to interview Terry Nichols' brother, who is a deeply fucking weird man.

And like, there's a part where they go into his bedroom because he's like, yeah, I sleep with a gun under my pillow.

And Michael Moore's like, no, you don't.

And he walks Michael Moore into his bedroom and pulls out.

like a fucking dirty, hairy ass pistol.

It's like, yeah, it's right here.

And then like, he points it at his own head.

Oh, I do remember that.

Yes.

That was crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Moore, another case of Michigan excellence.

Parentheses, cursed.

But Gibraltar is this weird place.

It overlooks the, obviously, the Straits of Gibraltar.

But because of its natural location, that being a peninsula jutting off what would, of course, become Spain, capped off by the Rock of Gibraltar, which is over a thousand foot high ridge that overlooks the water.

And that isn't really what makes it so important.

But what makes it important is that rock really has no place to land at the bottom of it.

If you were to try to scale this fucking place, you need to have a whole army of tactical Spider-Men at your disposal.

It's just not going to work.

It's probably on top of being the world's grand champion peninsula.

It's also the grand champion of withstanding various different sieges over the years to include like several generations of the same Spanish family over the course of like a hundred different years.

Like 10 of them tried to besiege Gibraltar and they all failed.

That was a whole other subject that I wrote about and fell into a deep, deep hole here.

But I ended up cutting it out because the script is already like 11 pages long.

Ah, yes.

A girthy script.

I just love the idea of a generational blood feud against a peninsula, which is just what you call Ohio now.

I was going to say, yeah.

The Ohio state blood feud.

That's right.

By the early 1700s, it was under the control of Spain until the end of the War of Succession, which ended with the Allied force of Brits and the Dutch taking it from them before the war officially gave it to the Brits in 1713.

After this, things looked pretty good for the Brits.

They had a death grip on trade in the region because they had Gibraltar and they had one of the best fortifications in the world, but specifically in the area, a strong base for the Royal Navy, and having Gibraltar at the time amounted to a money printing machine.

Yeah, I mean, like, if you are trying to ship stuff from the continent down into the Mediterranean Sea, you have to go through Gibraltar.

And it's, you know, if Britain decides that they don't want you to go through the channel, they can prevent you from coming through the channel.

Yeah.

And they often did if you didn't pay them.

And failing that, if there wasn't some kind of toll, which sometimes there was, sometimes there wasn't, traders would need a place to rest and refit Gibraltar.

You're like a trucker rest stop, but you know, probably with less meth and parking lot-based sex workers.

Probably.

Probably.

Buying the Gibraltar-based Rhino dick pills.

I'm going to the Gibraltar Buckies.

It just has a fucking George's Cross on the pill, and it's huge.

You have to eat it in sections.

I think that it's a little bit too heteronormative, the Strait of Gibraltar and the sort of things that are happening around there.

I think we need the gay of Gibraltar in order to compromise.

Yeah, we're doing bodies and spaces on the Rock of Gibraltar.

We're queering the Straits of Gibraltar in terms of shipping zones.

Where are the bisexuals of Gibraltar?

That's a good idea.

Okay,

I see where you're going to, so I have a compromise.

We'll staff it only with the Royal Navy.

While fighting between the Brits and the Spanish did mean it was put under siege more than once during the 1700s, all this came to nothing.

Then the American Revolution kicks off 1775, and then obviously 1776, on what amounted to be the other side of the world from here.

However, something many Americans do not really want to grapple with.

and understand is our revolution and our path to independence was little more than a proxy war for the empires of Europe.

No, that's not true.

That's not true.

That's not true.

That's not true.

That's not true.

The U.S.

Revolution was the most important revolution in the history of the world where finally human liberties were enshrined in a written constitution for the first time.

That's right.

I will have you know the American Revolution is the second most important revolution in the world after the Texas Revolution.

I mean, the Constitution, the United States Constitution, a perfect written document inspired by God himself.

We know this.

Yes, it was written by Jesus.

I don't know why you're doing historical revisionism on the podcast, Joe.

That's messed up.

This podcast is developing a blood debt to the Mormons, weirdly.

Not a whole lot of people know that York Automatons was founded on the Rock of Gibraltar.

The special salination of the air from the Mediterranean Sea, meeting the Atlantic, allowed us for the fusion of Duema technology and Gibraltar rock to create the first ever York Automatons in order to replace human labor on the farm.

Oh, God.

Don't send that one to the South.

York Automatons was canonically on the side of the Confederates.

It would be.

Now, even before the so-called shot heard around the world, which is not a name that is exactly unique to the American Revolution, but the Americans kind of took it.

The British Empire's mainland enemies, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch, in this context, they have a lot more enemies as well, were financially supporting the colonial revolutionaries in one way or another.

Hell, even before the French would eventually sign an open treaty with the new American government and loudly proclaim to the world that they were going to get all up in that shit directly, the Dutch had ships full of guns, powder, and other warfighting supplies loaded up in the harbors down at Leiden to the point that the British kept telling them, could you please stop?

Like, it was an open secret that everybody was supporting the American Revolution because it goes back to something we talk about often on the show.

It's the greater unifying theory of fuck that guy.

In this case, it was the British and the Americans prospered because of it.

Though I should point out here that this is not a direct intervention of the Dutch Republican government.

Rather, it was a tale as old as time and quite possibly something the Dutch did before anyone else.

And that was, look.

The government is not involved.

However, who are we to get in the way of free trade?

But they kindly asked their traders, don't sell anything to the British military.

Most people are aware of the heavy French hand in the revolution.

It is hard to miss.

That's not really something that the Americans have done a great job erasing, thanks to Marquis de Lafayette.

And, you know, the statue of William

Statue in Harbor, yeah, I was going to say, like, come on.

Which was famously inscribed with.

Several sayings that our people have done a great job ignoring ever since.

That's right.

Another wonderful part of this is Benjamin Franklin fucking his way across France as our nation's greatest diplomat.

The most syphilitic man in the history of humanity.

That man did not need people to clap for him.

He brought the clap with him everywhere he went.

But the French were out for British blood.

They have lost most of their North American empire at the end of the Seven Years' War and their North American chapter, which is something we call the French and Indian War.

It was a massive loss of French prestige, as well as all of the money that they would extract from that land all going up in flames and being given to the British.

This is a question that I have.

The French and Indian Wars, when you say we, by we, do you mean Americans?

What is that referred to otherwise?

Does everybody call it the French and Indian War?

I'm not sure if Canadians do, but I know in the U.S.,

American History Education calls our little chapter of the Seven Years' War the French and Indian War.

Right.

Despite the fact that it was fought between the British, which include the Americans at the time, and the Canadians, against the French and their Native American allies.

Yeah, I mean, it was mostly a pretext to do more genocide.

It's always a pretext to do more genocide, Josh.

That's the secret.

It's always hiding there just below the surface.

Genocide is always the secret ingredient, like MSG.

Like in all settler colonial states of a modern one, I can't possibly think of off the top of my head, genocide fuels them.

Now, virtually as soon as the Declaration of Independence went across the French desks, they were allowedly on the side of Americans, just despite the British.

The Spanish effectively fell into the same camp.

They hadn't lost a huge swath of their empire to the British, not yet, anyway, but they were allies with the French, and they're beefing with the British over the Caribbean and parts of what would become Florida.

Because this was back in the day when Florida was something that like someone wanted rather than something that happened to you, joining the war would weaken the Brits and open up a chance for the Spanish to consolidate their holdings.

It would also allow the Spanish a crack at recapturing something the Brits had taken from them that they really wanted back, Gibraltar.

Give me back my big rock.

I want my big rock.

I have to ponder the rock.

I mean, like, look, so much of this period of war is like, I want that big rock.

I want that small river.

I want this bridge.

Yeah.

And then everybody looks at boss and is like, you can have it.

Don't want it.

So soon the French and Spanish began popping up shell companies in order to sell military supplies to the Americans years before an open declaration of support would be signed.

I should point out here that without support from these countries, namely the French, because the French would eventually commit thousands of ground troops, a lot of their navy, and very, very badly needed trainers and leaders, the American Revolution would have almost certainly failed.

And the U.S.

today would probably look more like a Commonwealth nation like Canada.

So I guess long story short is we really fucked up by winning this war.

Whoops.

I don't know what you're talking about.

America's about as good as it's ever been.

I'm not saying Canada exactly is exactly a cornucopia of hopes and dreams at the moment, but come on.

The Americans, they have suffered their folly.

They will not enjoy the thing that we call the Quebecois Emburger.

Oh, man.

I just realized that that is suddenly now creating in my mind the idea of a bilingual commonwealth where like down south you have the french in like Louisiana in the surrounding area Louisiana as America's Quebec is a wild fucking thought that I did not have until right now

if Louisiana was just way more French yeah

which maybe it would have been uh if we'd gone down that road you know yeah who's to say what if the French Empire in Mexico uh invaded north and we had French Texas yeah Phil Anselma would have ended up in a marching band instead of being a neo-Nazi.

Or he would just be a neo-Nazi who plays the tuba.

Kill the ethnics.

I do think he would have just been in a position of government in this specific version of Louisiana.

This is a place where David Duke very nearly was elected to popular office.

Yeah, I mean, like, Phil Anselmo just like has the kind of same

dark energy as someone like John Fetterman.

So it's like, you know, you could either be in Pantera or you can be in government.

All of my ogres are French.

That's what the war was fought over is to destroy the French ogre.

The French and ogres war.

But this was part of the deal between the French and the Spanish.

The Spanish would not be setting soldiers to fight the British in the 13 colonies.

They'd leave that to the French.

The French, after all, were more powerful.

They would be trying to strike out abroad with help of the French army and navy, as well as, of course, clashes in Florida and the Caribbean.

Obviously, the French wanted Gibraltar out of the hands of the British, too.

And as Empire's ally and beef, they knew eventually they'd probably have to fight the Spanish over it as well.

But they knew at the time they wanted it out of the hands of the British.

Well, and at this point, the English Navy was still like unparalleled.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The closest would have been the French, and that distance was the distance between first and second place is quite far.

It's very similar to today, whereas like the United States Navy has the largest Navy in the world.

And if you look at second place, it is very far in second place.

And just like today, completely unnecessary.

Fun fact about the supremacy of the British Navy, part of the contributing factor to the massive technological advance and the just sheer number of ships that the British Navy had is partly due to the fact they completely deforested an entire country.

They did not, yeah, Ireland was like 95% covered in forest.

And then they were like, nah, we need ships and just cut everything down.

That is the secret of empire.

Like, wow, look at all their technological advances.

Like, squint in.

Oh, God.

It's misery.

It's always misery.

The cheat code in this version of Sid Meier's civilization is just Ireland for everything.

Typing in Ireland, unlimited trees.

Typing in Ireland, unlimited potatoes.

This is admittedly very, like, you you know, stupid American talking, but the more that I learn about what England actually did to Ireland, the more flabbergasted I get.

Yeah.

It's not good.

Like I remember, I remember with, you know, seeing Sinead O'Connor on SNL and all that, right?

When she was really popular and being like, okay, like, but you're doing a bit much.

And it was like, no, you're not going anywhere near hard enough.

I remember when that happened, I was old enough to watch it on TV with my mom.

And my mom,

I'm not Irish, my mom is an Irish, but she was raised Roman Catholic when she tore up the picture of the Pope.

And my mom was just like, good, fuck that guy.

Yeah, it's the only thing me and

unionists in the north of Ireland agree on is fuck the Pope.

Oh, God.

Handshake across the peace walls.

They're calling him Ulster Tom.

But like, fun fact for anyone at home, I asked this in the pub quiz that I've run last week.

It was like, so essentially in Ireland pre-Civil War, there was like the Royal Irish Constabulary who essentially formed their own paramilitary death squads called the Black and Tans.

I'll give you one guess where they were sent in 1922 after Irish independence.

Oh, I wonder.

Could it have been Kenya?

No, they got sent to the British Mandate of Palestine.

Even better.

By the way, for Tom and I, the last roughly hour of our coffee was just asking each other trivia questions, and it was great.

Meanwhile in Gibraltar, things were quite relaxed for obvious reasons.

The British knew that their enemies were supplying revolutionaries.

It was hard to miss.

But it wasn't an open war between the three of them quite yet.

So Gibraltar's governor, the sprightly 77-year-old George Elliot, was just kind of chilling, which makes sense if you look at George Elliott's life.

The man was old as hell for the 1700s.

And remember, he's 77 years old.

That's old for being the governor of anywhere.

I mean, America notwithstanding.

Normally, you're dead or retired by then, right?

Donald Trump is 79.

Like, I feel like that puts a little bit of context.

Tyan Feinstein is logged on.

And as we've all learned, this is a great system and we shouldn't change it.

I love that every era has had their own Holden Blood feast.

And he got stationed in Gibraltar as something of a retirement gig.

He had been in the army for 40 years at this point.

He was a general and thanks to his service in the Seven Years' War, he temporarily captured Havana, Cuba from the Spanish and been paid a massive cash bonus from the crown for this.

£25,000

in 1700s money.

Holy shit.

Which, according to a conversion calculator that I found, is about £6 million today, which means he could almost afford an apartment in London.

Let's bring it back a second.

He had a 40-year military career in his 70s, which means he joined the military in his 30s, which is insane for this time.

He started his British Army military service in that.

He had a strange life, especially for his day.

He was a weird guy.

Despite being British, born and raised, he went to school in the Netherlands.

He went to the University of Leiden.

Don't tell me he was in the Dutch Army.

He did serve some time in the Dutch army, but then he went to military academy in France and then served in the Prussian army.

Wow.

He's just a military tourist, but that isn't actually too weird for its day.

What is weird is that he was a staunch vegetarian, which was so uncommon in the 1700s that people thought he might be crazy.

And it kind of hurt his political aspirations.

A British historian with the most British name in this episode, Reginald Hargreaves, described him as surviving on, quote, vegetables, simple puddings, and plain water.

My man, full of pudding.

I mean, it's great that like it held true for 200 years that like up until maybe like the late 2000s, if you were a vegetarian and wanted a political career, everyone just pointed at you and went, huh, gay?

Yeah, pretty much.

Yep, not wrong.

Wait, now I'm genuinely wondering if this has something to do with the origin of the term pudding head.

I would like to think so.

Let's roll with that.

Okay.

Now, he absolutely never drank.

He was a teetotaler.

But similarly, he never demanded people not drink or smoke around him.

He just, it was not for him.

Also, he only slept like three to four hours a night his whole life.

He was one weird workout program away from being a modern day influencer.

Yeah, he's almost David Goggins.

If he took up jogging, yeah.

He's like the Wim Hoff of his era.

Wim Hoff, but instead of getting it ice water, he's like, this is room temperature pudding.

Did I ever tell you guys about there was at a company that I worked for, there was this unbelievably weird guy who I think he was from Georgia.

And he would just randomly be like, hey, I'm going to lead a workshop for anybody who wants to come about Wim Hoff breathing techniques and how you can use them to.

This guy did not last long.

He was gone after six months, but every so often he pops back into my head and then he left a really salty glass door review for the company that we all laughed at.

Yeah, I mean, if anybody deserves it, it's the guy who brought up Wim Hoff breathing techniques at work.

Yeah.

He made some of the women uncomfortable.

Would that surprise you?

No.

I've had a lot of bad jobs, namely the Army.

And the Army in the early 2000s is obviously a much different beast than it is today.

It's still stupid, but stupid in in a different way.

Well, at least it's not woke anymore.

Sure.

I think if someone told us, like, we're going to practice Wib Hoff breathing techniques, we all would have beat him up.

Now, all of this simmers for a few years until 1778, when the French openly joined the revolution, signing the Treaty of Alliance with the United States, and the next year, the Treaty of...

Aranez with Spain.

Now, the treaty with Spain is interesting.

Not only did it end with a Spanish War of Declaration against the British, that's kind of a no-brainer, but with an agreement between the French and the Spanish that forbade any treaty with the British until the Spanish reclaimed Gibraltar.

So none of them could go for a separate peace with the British until they got that rock back.

The Franco-Spanish team of Bourbon kings thought this conquest of Gibraltar would be so easy that it would be a speed bump effectively.

They believe that the British must be so weakened due to the revolution, so distracted by the revolution, that they would just be able to walk right in.

And then, of course, what comes next, according to them, but an invasion of the British home islands.

Like, this is all very easy stuff.

The Spanish put Martín Alvarez de Sotomayor in charge of taking Gibraltar, and I assume his great, great, great ancestor would eventually end up on the Supreme Court.

That's right.

So, yeah.

His effort was two-pronged.

As we've kind of led on here a little bit, you know, subtly, Gibraltar is a peninsula off of Spain.

So for starters, the peninsula would need to be cut off from the mainland while simultaneously blockaded by the sea.

So on June 24th, 1779, an army of 7,000 Spanish soldiers began digging siege works across the peninsula, which is about a mile long, give or take, while the Spanish fleet under the command of Admiral Don Antonio Barcelo closed the sea lanes.

Barcelo's fleet was a strange mashup of a few ships of the line, a few small frigates, and a lot of smaller gunboats.

It's not exactly a powerhouse necessarily, which will become an issue.

Now, Elliot saw this happening, so he set his garrison to work reinforcing his already very strong position.

For starters, he sent combat engineers to the Rock of Gibraltar, that being the sheer cliff face going into the sea.

He believed that some parts of it were easier to climb, like that was possible.

So he just started blowing them up, which must have been a sight to see from the Spanish Navy.

Like, I believe he's blowing up the rock, sir.

He also built earthworks and palisades, dropped logs and other nearby moles, kind of like a rock pier, to make it harder for any sea landings to happen elsewhere.

He also evacuated a lot of civilians, which is a good thing, though a lot of civilians simply would not leave because like all military bases back in the day, A lot of them were family members of soldiers.

Work had also begun to burrow into the rock to create reinforced tunnels.

They attempted to, what we call on this podcast, Diglet Max,

but the tunnels were not completed quite yet.

They end up being used for like supply dumps for gunpowder, but like a complex network of rat tunnels for cover weren't done yet.

As it turned out, all this is made much, much easier for Elliot because around nine years before, the British government conducted a survey of Gibraltar and came to the conclusion that older Spanish-built fortifications were decrepit as shit and needed to be replaced.

So thousands of men went to work doing just that.

And this created a lot of new defenses and coastal blockhouses equipped with dozens of cannons, more fortifications around the waterfront, and then forts along the isthmus and something called the Grand Battery, which is effectively a massive blockhouse full of cannons and whatnot.

Yeah, it's what it sounds like.

It's a battery and it's pretty grand.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a really big Duracell battery.

Joe, have you ever been to Battery Park?

I have not.

Oh, okay.

One thing that I dig in New York City is that a lot of those old, old forts are still there.

And so whether you go down to Battery Park or over to Governor's Island, it's really, really fun to look at those old defensive fortifications.

And it makes you realize, talking about the American Revolution, how important control of that stuff on the harbor was, as well as how quickly the U.S.

blew it by allowing the British Navy to just sail right up into the harbor.

Whoops.

Yep.

It's always interesting when, like,

I have some, like, really old fortifications near me.

Not obviously that old, but it's always fun where you have to wonder, do they leave it there for a historical marker, or is it one of those, like, they built it so well that it is a monumental pain in the ass to get rid of?

That's how you know it's good.

It's probably both, right?

Yeah.

On top of that, he had begun bringing in more and more soldiers and conducting routine drills so every man knew their duties during a siege.

Though the Royal Navy's contingent was quite shoddy, since we're talking about the power of the Royal Navy, it simply was not at Gibraltar at this time.

They had a single ship of the line, which is the HMS Enterprise, about a dozen gunboats, many of whom were privateers and smugglers.

Hell yeah.

They were pirates.

Like, the privateer is a pirate for people who don't know.

It's a pirate that flies under your flag.

It's a salaried pirate, which is, you know, you got to respect the pirate who settles down, decides it's time to get a government job with benefits.

Yeah, it's like all of the

former military, military contractors in sub-Saharan Africa right now guarding oil fields.

I would say that's a mercenary.

That's different.

A pirate and a mercenary are two different things.

Say what you will about a pirate, but they at least only temporarily exploit others for resources.

Yes, we're getting into etymological arguments over mercenaries versus pirates.

We're seven-year-old maxing right now.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

No, that would be pirates versus samurai, I think.

Yeah, true, true.

Well, ninjas.

Or ninjas or ninjas.

Or dinosaurs.

Don't even bring up the ninjas.

Knights either.

Yeah, yeah.

This is some freaking epic bacon.

I'll tell you that for prayer.

Boo this man.

Boo.

Now, it might sound like, you know, pirates and smugglers aren't something you want in your navy from a tactical standpoint, but in my opinion, these guys turn into all-stars of the siege.

But we'll get to why in a second.

There's also a 60-gun ship of the line called the HMS Panther, though it was so old that it had been converted into a gun platform.

It was permanently tied up.

It could not go anywhere.

This is just to give you a sense of how my brain is hardwired, is that every time you say HMS, and particularly when you say HMS,

I'm expecting to hear HMS pinafore

because,

you know, that's just, again,

that's how my brain is wired.

Hey, we're not here to say any of our brains are wired incorrectly other than mine.

Joe, I think you're the very model of a modern major podcast.

Oh, that's cute.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Someone should say that very, very quickly to the point it's confusing.

By the time that the Spanish locked him down, he had only about 5,000 men stationed on Durock, as well as 412 cannons of various different sizes.

But as we know, the most dangerous part of any siege has nothing to do with men or weaponry at all, but rather being cut off from supplies and dying of disease.

Gibraltar had been supplied adequately enough, especially with gunpowder and ammo.

It had a ton of gunpowder and ammo.

It also had plenty of food and water for a couple months, which the British thought was more than enough under normal circumstances.

And it was for a while because it's now September 12th.

This has already been going on for months, and and the first real shots of the siege are fired at this point.

Up until now, pretty much everyone is a battle of positions, a lot of construction.

On the north, which is the part that crosses into the mainland Spain, the Spanish soldiers were just digging constantly because when you're on the ground fortification of a siege, all you're doing is digging closer and closer and closer, building.

trenches and tunnels and whatever, inching your way towards what you're besieging.

And that's been going on for months.

But at this point, Elliot opens fire with cannons to the north.

According to legend and the accounts of a sergeant that was there, the first shots of the siege were fired by an officer's wife who really, really, really wanted to be the first person to strike a match and touch off a cannon.

Hey, sweetie.

Hey, sweetie.

Can I, can I fire the cannon, sweetie, please?

I've always really wanted to.

I think it'd be so much fun.

Look, dudes had to do some weird shit in the 1700s to impress their wives.

Yeah, we've two brilliant things holding, you know, throughout history is one, the Spanish dedication to jihad against the British

and men kind of like, all right, okay, you can do it.

You can fire the fucking cannon.

World's first combat wife guy?

Yeah, hell yeah.

Tactical wife guys.

Which also implies the existence of the tactical wife, which I think is really cool too.

That's right.

And all around the rock, all around the waterfront, other British guns opened fire on the Spanish fleet that was lurking just beyond their range.

This is an interesting facet of Elliot's tactics.

He ordered his gun crews to either be firing or ready to fire at all times, even if the Spanish were out of range, hoping to intimidate them and show them, look, we have so much ammo, we don't give a fuck.

And it did kind of scare off the Spanish, at least the fleet.

The fleet, despite being much stronger than the Royal Navy contingent at Gibraltar, really only dared to zip in the Bay of Gibraltar with gunboats at night, fire off some shots, and get the fuck out of there.

Like, Elliot has gun crews firing wildly day and night to the point that the Spanish are like, We don't want to go anywhere near them.

They seem like they have a lot of guns and ammo.

Despite the Spanish and French thinking the rock would be a pushover, it was now clear from the beginning that they were going to be in for a very, very long haul.

I don't think they realized how long it would be, because by the end, it would be almost four

years long.

However, Elliot's defense plan did run into a pretty big snag.

That being at no point did he think that he would be trapped there with the American Revolution pulling away huge amounts of British naval assets.

The entire defensive plan of Gibraltar assumed that he would just have to camp out there for a month, maybe three months, maybe four months, and then the Royal Navy would come save his ass.

But now, they were not coming.

But in the immediate impact on Gibraltar, the most damage was actually coming from Spain over land from the north.

And the reason for that is Gibraltar is a rock.

It is a barren piece of rock that really has no dirt to speak of, very little trees.

It is a boulder, right, on a cliff.

So, people who lived in Gibraltar, that being the military garrison, would oftentimes have farms in the very north.

These farms generally supply the peninsula with all of its tillable land, which meant all of its not pig-based food.

The farms being on the isthmus.

Yes.

This is what happens when you get rid of the caliphate of Cordoba is like you rely too much on pork products.

We've gone too far in the other direction.

Yeah,

you should never let a Spaniard hit it from the north.

So as soon as the Spanish began digging in and encroaching towards British lines, they did so through those farms and made them no longer accessible.

to the British.

So when the Brits saw this happening, civilians ran north as close as the Spanish lines as they dared before getting shot and just started taking handfuls of dirt and running south with them.

They're like, we have to plant gardens on the rock.

We have to plant pulses and legumes.

How else am I going to have beans on toast?

That's so good.

So that's what they did.

Any place that seemed like it might work, they tried to build like little local gardens and things did grow using, you know, night fertilizer, as as they call it, but it was hardly enough.

Soon, forge teams were hopping up and down the rocks like goats, looking for dandelions and wild leeks, and then eventually, our favorite green on the show, grass.

But I cannot stress this enough.

At no point, despite this being a siege in this situation, did the Spanish fully close off Gibraltar.

Chalk it up to incompetence, chalk it up to whatever.

Maybe they were taking a nap, I don't know.

Remember how I talked about the privateers and the smugglers?

This is where they become the MVPs because every single night, smugglers and privateers snuck out of the blockade and sailed towards Morocco.

After that, Morocco, at the time, being neutral in the whole situation, they load their boats up with food, mostly, sometimes weapons, but almost entirely food and medicine, and sneak back through the lines.

So these are privateers working under contract with the English.

Yes.

And there's just a guy in the fort who's like, oh, fuck sake, I got to eat Coos Coos again.

Where's my beans on toast?

I demand rashers.

I demand beans.

I demand toast.

What is this Mediterranean diet shit?

Is this a fucking olive?

I think that is held time immortal.

Is British people being faced with any food that isn't like heavily greasy and meat-based?

Yep, yep.

I see one.

more cucumber in my food.

I swear to God, we're going to invade Morocco.

If I have to eat tabboule once more, I'm fucking jumping off the rock.

Meanwhile, there's like an enlisted guy who's already had a boil wood boot and he's like, wait, you guys are having two meals a day?

What are you complaining about?

I have not shit solid in six months.

There's just like a really pretentious soldier who's stuck there.

It's like, yeah, so like if you look ethnographically at the Moroccans, like their diet is actually really good for you.

Like I know we have to eat dandelions and grass, but like we're getting so much vitamin K.

I mean, Elliot's thriving.

He's like, I live off of dandelions and grass at the best of days.

Yes, they had the best man for the job there.

He's only missing his simple puddings.

Meanwhile,

you have mercenary solid snakes swimming across the Strait of Gibraltar, coming back with pockets full of couscous.

Taboulee.

Couscous.

Metal gear.

We got to feed the people, snake.

You don't understand?

Taboule and couscous are actually the other agents names

yeah yeah yeah actually tabule and couscous are a hundred percent like boss characters in a potential kojima game it would be a guy named tabule couscous that's what his name would be

that's the villain in the next call of duty game when suddenly morocco is evil these supply runs were never enough you know for like abundance nobody was well fed but they were never starving to death.

They were in the gray.

They weren't dying.

They certainly weren't threatened.

It was just enough to stay alive, but it was still something.

Thankfully for Elliott and the defenders, because so many ships were constantly sneaking through the blockade, it meant that the government back in London was also getting a pretty steady stream of information regarding how things were going.

Because the smugglers and privateers would sneak over to Morocco, make contact with British agents, be like, this is a letter from General Elliot.

These are a request, blah, blah, blah.

Like they had a way, a communicate, a very roundabout way of communication, but they did have something.

In one message, Elliot begged them for any kind of relief they could send.

So in December 1779, the British began slapping together a rescue convoy under the command of Admiral George Rodney, who was actually under public orders to make for the West Indies.

But he had additional orders that were secret given to him by the government not to share with anyone else to relieve Gibraltar along the way because they were afraid that the Spanish might learn of his approach via spies.

Virtually as soon as Rodney left the port, he and his convoy of 19 ships of the line began absolutely wrecking the Spanish's shit.

First in January 1780, they hit a Spanish supply convoy, capturing everything and adding it to his convoy to eventually give to Gibraltar.

And when the Spanish Admiral Juan de Legara was sent out to stop him, Rodney smashed him too at what would become known as the moonlight battle off of St.

Vincent.

Imagine how hard you would bust a nut if you've been eating nothing but dirt and dandelions for a year and you have a piece of chorizo.

I feel like that would just like knock everything loose inside of you and you would have a shit that has never been comprehended before by human beings.

You know, I feel like it might kill you.

It'd shit out your very spine.

The shit that kills you instantly.

You're just experiencing the self-inflicted version of a mortal combat fatality.

Reaching up your own ass and tearing out your spine.

This one simple trick defeats the siege of Gibraltar.

That's actually Tabule Couscous's finishing office.

Rodney, violently ill with fever, was mostly unable to command during this battle and said he passed it off to his second command, who then wrecked the Spanish's shit where rodney left off the spanish fleet was hammered every spanish sailor 2500 men were killed wounded or captured and hilariously the spanish flagship the phoenix and its crew were immediately released and the reason for that is ligara told the uh the second command like we surrender but we should tell you we have a whole lot of smallpox on this ship right now So he was like, you know what?

You're free to go.

You take your plague ship and fuck off back to Spain.

It's unknown if he actually had that many smallpox victims on his boat or not.

I contend with one is too many, so good call on his part.

By January 25th, Rodney's fleet was smashing into the Spanish blockade around Gibraltar, scattering it, and soon tons of supplies are being offloaded, as well as a thousand more infantry.

The soldiers on the rock not only finally got to eat a full meal, not made out of dirt and grass clippings, but also got a change of clothing for the first time in months.

This included new shoes because before this, they were wearing a very, very awful sounding shoe.

It was canvas with soles made of yarn.

Oh, oh.

I can't even begin to imagine the calluses that you'd get as a result of that.

I think it's nothing but callous at this point.

Larry Bird was dunking in those things in like the 70s.

And what is weird is the normal British Army shoe at the time, what was like, they were leather shoes with buckles on them.

They're called buckle boots, even though they weren't boots.

They were literally leather shoes.

Also, they were not fitted to right or left feet.

They were straight.

Sorry, sorry.

My brain is doing something that I need to get out now, which is you said buckle boots, and it made me think of Betty Buckley, who originated the role of Grizabella in cats on Broadway.

And now it's making me think Booty Buckley.

And this is nothing, but like I just needed to get it out there just for the sake of preserving my own brain.

Please continue.

Young British private Booty Buckley.

Okay, maybe this is something.

To Booty Coose Coose.

Sergeant Booty Buckley.

What's fucking me up is if you guys ever went to a hot topic when you were younger, those really high buckle like goth chick boots.

Yep.

Yeah.

Demonias.

That's what I'm seeing the British soldiers wearing now.

So you got

Operation Black Parade as a go.

When I was

a young boy, my father took me to Gibraltar to get dysentery

to eat some dandelions.

There we go.

That's what the Spanish army just hears like emanating out of the fort every night.

So with the siege broken, the Spanish fleet scattered, this whole thing should be over then, right?

Nope.

Rodney's fleet was actually en route to the West Indies, so it just pulled away after it offloaded its supplies.

And also, all the Spanish soldiers are still in place to the north, digging ever closer to Gibraltar, leaving Gibraltar by the sea wide open.

Soon, the Spanish fleet moved right back in, closed off the straits again, and keeping their distance and on watch for another surprise appearance from the Royal Navy.

Yeah, Rodney was like, yeah, no, I need to sail away because I don't, I get no respect around here.

Admiral Rodney Dangerfield, thank you.

Yes.

The Spanish fleet obviously didn't want to get caught napping again, but there was still the Royal Navy ships, the Enterprise of the Panther, in the port on defense.

So they decided they need to go for them next.

I mean, I would argue this is the Spanish fleet going for something first since they haven't really done anything yet.

But in June of 1780, the Spanish went back to the drawing board and decided that they would roll out a classic of these two sides would know very well.

Fire ships.

Now, so for people who don't know, a fire ship is exactly what it sounds like.

It is a ship that is filled with combustible things, set alight by a crew, and then they dive overboard, ghost riding that motherfucker directly into an enemy navy, sometimes a port, depending on what the target is.

And then it catches fire.

Fire at sea in an era of wooden ships is a bad thing.

It's still bad now.

Fire in a boat is horrible.

Has the Kuznetsov press-proofed multiple times over?

Ah, the Kuznetsov, rest in peace to the worst ship we've ever talked about.

R.I.P.R.

sweet boy.

Yeah.

Too dumb to live.

Too dumb to die.

Just dumb enough to be in the Russian Navy.

Yep.

Soon, a few fire ships appeared, gunning it towards the old mole, which again is, despite its name of sounding something like really gross and on your grandmother's face, is like a stone pier that they use to offload things.

It was the main offloading port for the defenders.

And the Panther and the Enterprise, they opened fire on these fire ships.

Meanwhile, teams of rowboats from the British side were kicked out into the water, racing towards the fire ship, armed with nothing more than grappling hooks.

That's because their whole tactic was paddle really, really close, throw grappling hooks on these fire ships.

Remember, are only being powered by wind here and currents.

And then once the grappling hooks are in place, paddle your ass off and pull the fire ships off course.

So they drift out to sea, run into the side of the Gibraltar rock, make them harmless, right?

This worked.

They took out six fire ships this way.

Wow.

Which is not a job I would want to do.

Meanwhile, three more were taken out by the Enterprise and the Panther.

And of course, because this is the Spanish Navy of the time we're talking about here, three just entirely missed.

And as soon as the fire ships crashed and burned out, This is actually like a huge boon to the defenders because, again, they're on a featureless rock, right?

What is one supply that you think maybe you wouldn't think off of the top of your head that, like, if I don't have this, I'm going to die?

Remember, you're not freezing to death.

It never really gets that cold in Gibraltar.

Like, winter in Gibraltar is like, you know, 17 degrees centigrade.

You'll be fine.

Well, I'm not sure what it would be because, as you said, I can't quite think of it off the top of my head.

Wood to make cooking fires.

Oh, yeah.

Because remember, they get all this food.

You can't eat raw meat.

You'll die.

You can't, you know, you need to be able to boil your oats to eat them.

You need to be able to boil your wheat to eat eat it uh they got all these supplies and suddenly couldn't use them because they'd already burned through their stock of firewood before this time to go to ireland

well instead they did the secret spanish thing which is go to whichever colony they were using to get their their shipwood because yeah after their fire ships burnt out they dragged the burnt out hulks to the shore and then just parted them out for firewood.

It's always like those little fun things that you learn in in a fortress during a siege of like, what do you use every single day that you never worry about running out that suddenly you die if you don't have it?

But the siege wore on.

The Spanish continued the same tactics going forward.

Strangle off the garrison, dig forward in the north, hit them as much as they can with cannons.

Their navy still stuck to nighttime raids as the siege stretched on until its second summer, then fall.

then winter.

Elliot did his best to keep his forces together, but once again their supplies began to wear thin.

Once again, soldiers and civilians inside Gibraltar were put on just above starvation rations coming from the never-ending stream of blockade runners.

Most of the British blockade runners, like we said, were going to Morocco, but eventually the Salt of Morocco joined the side of the Spanish.

This did not stop the smugglers, though.

It just meant they now had to run two blockades instead of one, and they did, because nothing was going to stop them.

Also, like, yeah, I feel like if you're dedicated privateer, you're going to treat that as a challenge.

Yeah, and the, I mean, the British were paying the very, very well.

You're already running a blockade by the Spanish Navy, and that didn't scare you off.

I'm pretty sure the Moroccan Navy isn't going to scare you off either.

Like, do you have any idea where I just came from, dude?

Get out of here.

Disease, however, began to spread like wildfire, namely cholera and dysentery,

which was always going to fucking happen.

You're telling me that there were meager rations, a grueling pace, and dysentery?

What is this?

The freaking Oregon Trail?

Less wagons, more chickens.

The Oregon Trail, but you're just riding a chicken around in circles.

Yeah.

Now, one of the major issues here is hygiene, which is always an issue when you have several thousand people packed into a small area.

As we often joke about, it's never a good time to go camping in the woods with 5,000 of your homies.

Armies would do normally, obviously, is they knew that shit should not be going near you or your drinking water.

So you dig trenches, slit trenches, specifically to shit and piss in.

Namely to shit in.

People would still piss wherever.

But again, they're on a rock.

There's nowhere to dig.

So everybody is just shitting all over like a bunch of British seagulls.

After the smuggling routes became harder and harder, supplies got thinner and thinner.

Included in this was their main supply of citrus fruit, which meant everyone on Gibraltar soon became absolutely riddled with scurvy.

Ah, yeah.

Which is not something you ever expect to get, not on a pirate ship, right?

You never expect to get that on shore.

Also, as well, like

insane to get that on the Iberian Peninsula as well, where oranges are literally everywhere.

Congratulations, you found the one part of Spain that is literally nothing but a barren rock covered in British dude poop.

So many people were showing symptoms that the small amount of fruit and onions, because onions also works to offset.

scurvy a little bit, were saved for the worst people, like the worst off with scurvy so they didn't die.

So like, oh, you're getting to the point you're bleeding from your mouth and your teeth are falling out.

Have some fruit juice or whatever.

I do love that.

That is a really funny mental image of like this guy who's just fully like emaciated, dying of scurvy.

Here's one onion.

Good luck.

Oh, actually, speaking of that, they had more onions than anything else.

Like, I don't know how their supply system worked or what kind of weird connection the smugglers had at Barocco, but they had an absolutely wild amount of onions.

Like, it was most of their diet at one point.

And eventually, when the scurvy started settling in on everybody, the doctor that was in Gibraltar would give men who were the worst off one pound of onions to eat per day.

What?

These dudes fucking reeked.

And he's just walking up eating an onion like an apple.

It's like, I don't see what the problem is.

I do this literally all the time.

He has like an onion floating in his glass of plain water.

He's like, yeah, I wanted some spice.

Spanish soldiers soldiers continued to inch forward.

Gunboats nipped at the British edges, and the Spanish bombing got worse and worse to the point that Elliot decided he needed to reinforce their defenses even further.

However, now he had no supply of materials to build these defenses, and they needed the wood to cook with, otherwise they would just be down to raw onions, I suppose.

So he needed to get creative.

So he sent work crews out to begin digging up the cobblestone roads and bricks from any building that he thought was unimportant so they could build their defenses larger and larger.

Parts of Gibraltar that were not blown up by the Spanish were disassembled by the British.

By the end of this, there's pretty much no town of Gibraltar left.

Once again, another thing that Hull's concurrent is being built up or being torn apart or blown up is either Eta or British Tourists and Bendador, which is the worst terrorist organization.

However, no real bunker was perfect.

because the Spanish and the British began firing flammable cannonballs at one another.

This was before the era of like hollow charge explosives and everything like that so they had to get very creative in spectacularly evil ways yeah i was like how do you set a lead ball on fire what does that look like you drill holes in it and you fill it with sulfur saltpeter and oil

so you set it on fire and then fire it at someone with the idea that the the cannonball is weak and full of these things and the impact will cause it to just explode.

A fart-smelling bomb would just rock it into a bunker and atomize whoever was inside.

As bad as this sounds, and it was, the Spanish thought they had it all in the bag as the siege went into its second winter.

That was until another British relief convoy blasted through the Spanish cordon and delivered tons of food, gunpowder, shells, and then fucked off once again.

This time it was a hundred ships.

So just at like every time Elliot and his men were like, oh, lost another tooth to scurvy, another shit full of onions would show up.

You're losing all your teeth.

You can't eat the onions anymore.

You have to like cut up the onions and then put it in your lip.

Like it's a zin.

I got my onion-flavored zinn.

I'm dipping diced onions.

Everybody smells so bad.

Once again, Elliot is just like, I don't see what the problem is.

I dip onions every day.

I got onions in my pockets right now.

I got an onion tied around

my belt because that's the style at the time.

You know what I'm saying?

It was the style at the time.

Quite literally, it was in this case.

Yeah.

Everyone's going around like a fucking character of a French man with a string of onions around their neck.

I can only imagine what it's like to be a Spanish soldier at this point because they're still fighting overground in the north.

And every time they shoot a British soldier and like loot his corpse, like, why is every pocket full of onions?

They're drilling holes holes in the onions to try and make shoes

they have become the onion knight they're loading the onions in the cannons and firing them oh that's definitely like the episode art for this one is the final fantasy onion knight in a british army uniform

now as the bombardment went on soldiers kept moving their new supplies around in order to save them from getting hit by one of the estimated 200 cannonballs per day minimum that were rocketing into Gibraltar's town.

This led to strange stories that that could only happen to soldiers while under artillery fire.

In one case, a Spanish cannonball glanced off a rock, ping-ponged around, took off a dude's leg, and then bounced back out into the ocean.

In another, a white hot cannonball flew so close to a sergeant that it set him on fire while trying to save a barrel of flour.

So

he drops the barrel of flour, strips butt naked, picks up the barrel of flour, and runs, saving the food.

Wow, okay.

That story didn't end the way that I thought it would.

Nope.

In another case, soldiers chance being murdered by the artillery to sprint across open ground to break into the storerooms they knew had barrels of rum and wine.

They get blind, blind drunk while under cannonball fire.

Others used a barrage as covered to eat more than they were rationed, including one group of soldiers who was caught hiding in a bunker, slaughtering a pig and grilling them.

Following the smell of grilled meats.

Like, Sergeant, this isn't what it looks like.

As you're just like rotating the rotisserie.

You don't understand.

The pig is Spanish.

Yes, sir.

I am a Spanish pig.

I don't know how I ended up on Gibraltar, but I am very happy to die.

I don't want to be alive anymore.

I'm listening to a lot of a papa roach.

Look, in the famous words of Barack Obama, gotta have my ribs.

That's right.

They're just doing doing the Obama thumbs up and everything.

Elliot got pissed at men breaking rationing rules.

So when they stopped getting shot at, he ordered all the men to be flogged in front of the others.

This did not slow soldiers down, of course.

More cases of people getting really, really drunk and killing pigs and chickens and breaking ration rules kept popping up.

Elliot realized something serious was happening.

This is something we talk about quite frequently on the show.

The discipline inside the siege was breaking down.

Now, the second that the disciplinary body of soldiers begins breaking down, people stop acting like soldiers and instead just kind of go feral,

especially in a situation of intense stress, starvation, depravity, you know, you name it.

So there's a few things you can do in a situation like this, and we've talked about a lot of different options over the years.

The worst one is just start shooting guys because that's a net negative, right?

Because now you have less soldiers and you're not getting reinforcements.

The best thing you can do, generally a light punishment, motivational speech, and everybody gets back into line.

That does require you having some decent sergeants at this point to be your enforcement, but a lot of the guys that Elliot was catching doing this were sergeants, so that's a problem.

So Elliot decided, fuck it, I'm going to shoot like five people.

So he did.

This did seem to do the trick, though.

The drunken pignapping seemed to have stopped.

However, civilians in Gibraltar were just kind of left on their own.

They were not part of the military structure.

They were not part of the military rationing system.

They were left on their own to survive.

And now their entire town is destroyed or parted out by the British.

So they had to flee the wreckage.

They formed a tent village at the southern end of the peninsula, which the Spanish then, of course, wheeled around and bombed.

By the southern end of the peninsula, you mean on the other side of the rock?

Close to the rock, but not in military areas.

Okay.

But they were close enough where the Spanish saw it and hit it with a fuckload of cannonballs.

Sure.

And then the tent city would just be rebuilt every time.

The tent village eventually earned the nickname Cowardstown, but I hate to be living in Cowardstown.

I went to Cowardstown and everyone knew you.

There it is.

Yeah.

But not because of like the civilians being there, but because deserters from the army would hide out there.

before trying to make a break to what they saw as freedom across the northern Spanish line in the middle of the night.

Oh, okay.

So this, sorry, I'm just Cowardstown here located very close to like the actual Spanish border.

Close enough.

Yeah.

So on the north side of the rock.

I was thinking it was on the south side of the rock.

No, I mean, Gibraltar itself is not very big.

Right.

So like, even if it is in the very south of the British-held part of the peninsula, in the middle of the night, you can make it from one end to the other.

Right.

Elliott gave orders to his men in the north to open fire on anyone attempting to cross the lines.

But soldiers did not take these orders very well.

One British officer noted that every time they saw a deserter try to run across the Spanish lines and he ordered his men to fire, they never hit anybody.

They're just like firing their guns in the air, like, oh, good luck.

What is this?

The dang Ohio State Militia?

Huh?

Got them.

You shouldn't run your

military under the same rules of Warhammer 40k Imperial Guardsmen.

Because generally speaking, your rank and file dude is not going to shoot a guy in the back because he's in the same shitty situation that he is right and also remember they've been under siege for years at this point everybody knows each other yeah also as well it's like hard to maintain like shooting discipline when you have like arm strength that has been sustained solely on onions for the past year

Also, just to just to be very clear about the previous thing that I said, I'm not saying that it is good to be shooting people who are fleeing, right?

And I'm not saying that it is is cowardly of Ohio to not do so.

I'm simply pointing to it that Ohio can't hit anything

because they suck.

That's right.

Take that, Ohioans.

It's your one episode a year where you take shit.

That's right.

And also the other 364 days of the year because you live in Ohio.

Joe, do you hate the abominable Brutus Buckeye as much as I do?

That fucking monster.

He's the synagogue.

That's man and God.

Yeah.

He's a horrible little pervert.

He deserves like the guillotine.

Also, they should.

That entire university should burn

because of the things that it covered up.

Similarly to my university.

The day by day, Spanish lines to the north got closer as they dug in and in and in.

Soon they were only about 700 meters away from the town of Gibraltar.

Elliott decided, waiting is not working anymore.

We need to do a sortie, an offensive to push the Spanish back over land, right?

It's their only option.

It's not like they can send out their busted-ass navy to chase off the Spanish, though.

For some reason, I think their privateers and smugglers could probably beat the Spanish Navy off the coast of Gibraltar at this point.

They really seem asleep at the wheel.

So Elliot decided we're going to go on the offensive, but it has to be a secret because their steady trickle of deserters might leak the plan to the Spanish.

So Elliot passed orders to two subordinate commanders for an attack on November 27th, 1781, with additional orders of not to tell a single fucking person until about 10 minutes before the start time of the attack at 2 a.m.

And it turned out the Spanish were well protected from British artillery during their dig up towards Gibraltar.

They had built shelters to hide from cannonballs, meaning shelters vertically to protect cannons.

Their cannons had been positioned.

to fire at British cannons, but there had been no infantry offensives this whole time, this whole time during the siege.

So they hadn't prepared for one at all.

They had zero infantry defenses waiting for the British as the British charged at them.

And another good reason why the Spanish believe that this one happened is like they're starving.

They're diseased.

They know what happens during a siege.

But

here come the half-starved disease, mouth-bleeding ass scurvy patients, absolutely reeking of onions, charging out in the middle of the night.

Some of whom I'm assuming are fully nude at this point.

They have to be.

They have to be.

Just for the love of the game, honestly.

Yeah.

And they're fucking Chuck Taylors with yarn bottoms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you're just like a naked Larry Bird in his like yarn.

Fucking Chuck Taylors who stinks of onions running you down.

But he's got solid fundamentals.

He's dribbling a hollow cannonball filled with sulfur and saltpeter.

He's like one of the titans from Attack on Titan running down your encampment.

Spanish soldiers broke and ran, caught completely by surprise.

Several Spanish cannons were blown up.

Their fortifications were set on fire.

But also, as the Spanish stormed forward, one of the places they took over were their former farmland, which had been left completely wild by the Spanish.

So they just kind of began stealing all the vegetables they could and just stuffing it in their pockets before running back towards Gibraltar.

I love that.

Just like, you know, shooting with one hand and shoving carrots into your mouth with the other, you know?

Just literally anything other than onions.

Give me something.

I don't even care if I don't have teeth anymore.

I'll gum that fucking carrot down to mush.

Being assaulted by the Bogsbonnie Brigade.

This was finally too embarrassing for Sodomaier, and he got fired.

He was replaced by Captain General Louis de Belbes, a French nobleman serving in the Spanish military.

Furthermore, the French began to take an active role in the Siege of Gibraltar after it, because, you know, several years have passed and the Spanish have not closed the deal.

By May of 1782, they sent 40,000 men and hundreds of cannons to go support the Spanish, as well as elements of the French Navy, combat engineers, all that stuff.

And for comparison's sake, Service keeping track of home.

The British only had about 6,000 men, most of them sick, starving.

They had taken a few hundred casualties at this point, but still mostly 6,000 men.

However, still the British found inventive ways to fight back.

Smuggling continued, and along with the trickle of food and ammo came entire disassembled gunboats stashed on privateer ships.

Wow.

The Brits quickly slapped the gunboats together and added them to a small gunboat navy they had been building, constantly doing drive-bys on the Spanish and French navies, who were left wondering just how the fuck this kept happening.

Where did that boat come from?

All the parts smuggled in by Tabulu Couscous.

That's right.

It's at that scene from Lord of War, who opens the container.

It's nothing but fucking onions, and you move it aside and there's a gunboat.

I got you, baby.

But by now, things were changing.

The British had all but lost the American Revolution.

The siege of Yorktown ended in October 1781.

Independence of the United States was assured.

All that was left was the resulting negotiations, which were ongoing, how this would look legally eventually.

It also meant that the reality of the war between the three sides stuck here at Gibraltar was about to change.

The British reached out to the French to begin, you know, let's talk a way out of this.

But remember, they'd promised not to do that with the Spanish.

But I'm also thinking about the fact that now, with the Revolutionary War drawing to a close, that the English do have additional resources now that they could potentially send down to Gibraltar.

And so that gives them some additional like hard power for negotiating purposes.

It could.

Another thing that could happen is the Spinish, the French take it before negotiations are over.

That is what they're aiming for, because that would put the British in a weak situation.

It's important to remember where the French are coming from here.

They want to fuck the British up so badly that during negotiations about the independence of the United States, they can say, okay, but we also want Quebec.

Right.

That's what they're aiming for.

And they're probably more than willing to take Gibraltar, be like, look, if you give us Quebec, we'll help you get Gibraltar back.

The French and the Spanish, having thought this entire battle would be little more than a nothing, had spent the last almost four years.

smashing their head against a rock to little to no effect.

So an idea was put forward to use their massive ground army to surge down from the north, paired with landings from the sea, all supported by a new revolutionary gun platform that would pound British defenses to dust.

That weapon was a sea battery, which doesn't sound that revolutionary at all.

It's a stationary, anchored sea platform with cannons on it.

There's nothing special about that, but bear with me.

It's also my favorite Hudson Mohawk song: Sea Battery, Sea Bat, Hurry,

and that guy on Reddit was just fucking to the sound of cannons.

That's right.

Rather than just a floating platform for artillery, though, a French engineer named Jean-Lee Machaud de Arcan was deciding we need to go above and beyond with this one.

The batteries that he designed and built were absolutely insane.

These were heavily armored floating gun batteries built out of reinforced heavy timber with layers of wet sand in between them to absorb concussions, more wood, and then then a safety feature.

Water piping going directly into the ocean should a British cannon shot set the battery on fire.

They can immediately splash water on that bitch and put it out.

That's cool.

That's actually pretty ingenious.

And just to let you in on the size of this thing, each of these, and he built 10 of them, would be big enough for 700 men.

Some of them even more.

Some close to 800 men.

Holy cow.

All with dozens of cannons inside.

How many men is like a ship of the line carrying at this time?

I think it's comparable to that.

Maybe a little less.

I mean, like the Panther, for example, has 60 guns on it.

Like that's that's a big ship,

if it was still a functioning ship at the time.

And it was believed that these floating monsters would be completely impervious to incoming fire.

The idea was that these batteries, the navy, and the Spanish and French artillery on the northern line, would be able to smash the Gibraltar defenses and then mop the British up with the massively overpowered French and Spanish infantry.

Like 40, almost 45,000, I think at this point, versus 6,000 on the British side.

Like if the infantry is entering battle, this battle is over.

So on September 13th, 1782, what became known as the Grand Assault on Gibraltar began behind a storm of hundreds of cannons on the batteries, the navy, and the land.

There's little doubts in the head of the French and the Spanish that this would go down in history as one of their greatest triumphs.

And actually, so did the locals, because thousands of Spanish and French civilians gathered at a nearby hilltop to watch the whole battle live.

Look, there was a huge amount of entertainment at the time.

Yeah, I'm willing to give him a pass on this one.

Like, this is probably the coolest thing any of them are ever going to see.

One of the people in the crowd was the future king of France, Charles X.

Wow.

Yeah.

However, things went badly immediately.

For starters, the batteries were towed into the wrong place.

Oh, well, that's...

You hate to see that.

Whoops.

You think they would have had that part figured out.

So when they opened fire, their cannons were off target and the batteries were not self-correcting,

meaning they just were bobbing there.

Then their anchors failed, which meant soon the current of the bay began smashing them into the walls of Gibraltar.

Yeah, sort of a floating wooden platform versus gigantic fucking rock.

The rock is going to win 10 out of 10 times.

Yeah, I'm putting my money on it.

In fantasy rock football, I'm definitely drafting the rock in the situation.

Yeah.

They were right about one thing, though.

British cannonfire did very little to the wooden-armored boxes full of cannons.

That was until Elliott got a very, very good idea.

Heated shot.

Now, these were cannonballs put in a forge until they were white hot and then fired.

Oftentimes, the whole goal of this is whatever these things hit, it's so hot it immediately catches them on fire.

Sure.

The British gunners then aimed at the batteries that had gotten the most stuck on the rocks.

And at first these heated cannonballs didn't work, but the British kept pumping them into the batteries until they started so many fires that the battery crews couldn't control it all with the piping system.

British gun crews were throwing cannonballs into forges that were now so hot and overworked that the forges themselves began to melt.

Holy cow.

And then they would take the cannonballs with a pair of tongs, load them up in a wheelbarrow full of sand so they could be transported over to the cannons.

They had like an assembly line of this going.

I would hate to be the guy.

It's like, hey, you grab the white hot cannonball.

Try not to touch it.

Yeah, that sounds like maybe the most dangerous job of all time.

Being an artillery crewman back then would suck at the very base level.

And it's just like every new thing makes it worse.

Like, okay, you're either handling a cannonball, firing your artillery so close that a dude with a rifle or a guy on horseback is going to kill you because you're very valuable on the field of battle.

Or you have to handle the fart bomb that we talked about earlier.

I mean, I will say, I have been playing a lot of Thief lately because we just talked about Thief 2 on the worst of all possible worlds this past week.

And all of these

forms of weaponry sound like shit out of Thief.

The like the super hot cannonball, the fart grenade.

Like these sound like things that could potentially be in Garrett's loadout or used against him.

I do like the idea of when the fart bomb hits its target, it lets out a very loud, beefy fart sound.

has a bit of a squelch to it

and then you get a guard saying

what was that noise ah must have just been rats it's just like like this whole system of like pulling it out of the foundry loading it into wheelbarrow full of sand this is reminds me so much of the videos that i see of uh people working in foundries in china and there's like no shirt on they're like whipping the metal around and then they're just getting a bucket of water thrown on them periodically yep yep pretty much one battery far from the others caught a cannonball in an area that began smoldering and they couldn't really find where the cannonball was lodged.

The bunker was so thick and for lack of a better term, girthy with reinforced timber.

All right, let's go.

That the cannonball just wedged in a crack somewhere, smoldering hot and starting a fire before, and it just got out of control before any of them noticed.

I often get out of control when I'm wedged within a crack.

Sorry.

You get out of control when you get a hot ball wedged in your girthy crack.

There you go.

Everybody is saying this.

But I mean, that's two batteries down, right?

But they have eight more of these things.

This battle could certainly be salvaged.

And then a problem came up that nobody saw because the Spanish and the French were really bad at planning.

And that is the Spanish land forces fighting in the north ran out of ammo.

Whoops.

Nobody is sure why.

It really seems like just sheer unbridled incompetence.

That is like the one thing we didn't want to happen, right?

And like the French officers were just fucking furious.

Like, how could you let this happen?

The whole point of the northern axis of this assault is hitting them with cannon fire.

And you forgot to supply your guns with cannon fire.

This meant the Brits could quickly pivot everything from the north to the south and begin hammering the shit out of those floating batteries with even more white-hot balls.

Okay, let's go.

I mean, a simple answer to this is just send in the tens of thousands of infantry you have, but they don't.

They're worried that the British defenses are still too good, and they also don't know how badly they outnumber the British.

They aren't entirely sure.

Also, again, the Spanish military is wildly incompetent at this point.

This went on for hours until darkness began to fall, and the Spanish and French ordered the burning batteries to be destroyed and their crews bailed out by the supporting navy.

There's still the other batteries there as well.

The thing is, for whatever reason, the navy never went to the batteries.

The crews of the two batteries, over 1,000 men, spiked their own guns just like they were supposed to, which means setting them on fire in an enclosed space full of gunpowder and charges and sat on top of the burning batteries waiting for the rescue.

But the Spanish Navy never showed up to pick them up.

Do we know why not?

Nope.

Huh.

It seems if I was to follow the most likely reason is they were worried if they brought the Navy too close, the British would open fire on them, which they probably would have.

They were coming from the rock.

Yeah, they probably would have.

But after seeing what was happening, Elliot was like, this seems cruel.

Like, these men are like out of the fight.

They don't deserve to die like that.

So Elliot ordered British Marines to get into some rowboats and go out to the batteries to save the Spanish.

As they did that, one of the batteries exploded.

Oh, shit.

By all accounts, this is just about the largest explosion that anybody there has ever seen.

It was wildly powerful.

It sent a mushroom cloud a thousand feet into the sky.

What the fuck?

And it just atomized everybody in that battery.

The majority of the Spanish and French casualties during the entire siege that were not caused by disease were caused right here.

almost four years later from the beginning.

I mean, that makes sense because you've got, you said like, what, 700, 800 people on board that thing?

Yep.

When the first battery exploded, it killed everybody on board.

It wounded several British men who were on the rescue boats, but it also encouraged the men on the second battery to say, fuck this, and simply dive into the ocean and swim towards the British.

And if all of this isn't bad enough, in the confusion of the British rescue parties, the desperate Spanish and French crews looking for salvation, the old-timey nuke that they accidentally invented, Spanish Navy then rolled up and opened fire on both of them.

On their own guys.

On everyone.

Oh, brother.

See, this is interesting, too, because listening to sort of the way that this all played out, I'm like, if they had done a better job of planning it from a tactical perspective, this would have been an easy dub.

Like, yes, the Rock of Gibraltar is, you know, it's an extremely defensible landmark, but

the amount of

personnel that they had, just the overwhelming material advantage, they should have had this one in the bag, but they blew it.

Yeah, the easy answer is incompetence, of course.

On the French side of things, they did flex a lot of infantry support in that direction, but they were also worried about suffering massive casualties for their land forces, which, you know, surprise.

And that is why they kind of pumped the brakes on just an outright assault from the north, even though they wildly outnumber the British.

And I do think a ground assault probably would have just been met by Elliott by a surrender.

Like, this is the day that he would surrender.

They'd all just be sent home.

Right.

You know, but the French wanted to pulverize Gibraltar's defenses before sending them in, hoping that they would surrender in the meantime.

And the Spanish could not tactically maneuver their way out of a fucking paperback.

So they didn't even remember to supply their guns.

It's ridiculous.

This is the most like self-gunshot to the foot ass battle we've talked about in a very long time.

I mean, clearly these motherfuckers never played Advanced Wars.

Exactly.

Because the first time that you forget to supply your artillery in Advance Wars is the last time that you failed to supply your artillery in Advanced Wars.

We need to get these guys a Game Boy Advance is what we need to do.

That's what I'm saying.

It was clear that the grand assault had been a massive failure, and within the week, news of it got back to London, Paris, and Madrid.

It was obvious to both the Spanish and the French that their window had closed on this opportunity.

And despite despite throwing an army at it larger than either side had in the field anywhere in the world at that point, they just would not crack Gibraltar.

This is only further underlined by yet another third supply convoy that broke through and made it to Gibraltar.

It also just so happened to coincide with the British and American negotiations, kind of sort of finalizing what exactly the legal United States would look like.

Territorial boundaries.

Are they going to go into Canada?

And things like that.

Because remember, an important part of the American Revolution was we attempted to invade Canada.

Yeah, and got pushed the fuck back.

And then fucking half the Continental Army froze up there famously.

Yep.

And we did it again in the War of 1812.

America, 0 for 2 and Canadian invasions.

Specifically in the Revolutionary War, the U.S.

Continental Army and militias invaded Quebec.

Did not work.

But the French also wanted Quebec back.

And one of the things that the American revolutionaries did during the invasion of Quebec was trying trying to get Quebec Wallie guys to be like, see, look, we're trying to liberate you from the tyranny of the British.

Like the whole thing was framed that way.

And for a little while, it did seem like the British might concede Quebec to the French specifically, or possibly some kind of national project, but probably to the French.

However, at the news of the victory at Gibraltar, the British flatly refused to give up anything north of the Great Lakes.

As an extra fuck you to the three parties they were fighting against.

They're like, and you know what?

America's gonna pay us back for the shit that they owe us before the war.

One final effort from the side of Spain to get Gibraltar from uh from the British is my personal favorite.

That is, the Spanish kind of meekly offered to trade them Puerto Rico for it, really, yeah, and the British told them to fuck off.

You could have had British Puerto Ricans blasting sweet chiral line out of their massive chiraspeakers.

I mean, a world in which Puerto Rico is British and like Montreal is American is just an incredible thing to imagine.

Little did the Spanish know that about a hundred years give or take later, the U.S.

would come for Puerto Rico too.

The Americans, the Spanish, the French, all of them realized they truly had no more cards left to play and agreed.

It was officially signed in September 1783.

Gibraltar remained British and Quebec remained British.

And Puerto Rico, still Spanish.

Who would have thought?

They did manage to consolidate some things in Florida.

Minor victory there.

The siege ended in February, 1783, after three years, seven months, and two weeks.

Of the thousands of those killed over the course of the fighting, about 95% of them were dead by disease, which knew no side to this conflict.

The other 5% blew up on that battery.

Mostly, yeah.

Just to underline how solid the Gibraltar defenses were, over the course of this entire thing, only 333 British soldiers died in combat.

God damn.

This is despite the fact that the Spanish and the French fired nearly a quarter million cannonballs at them over the same timeframe, which, for comparison's sake, depending on which numbers you use, is more ordnance than was fired during the entirety of the American Revolution.

Wow.

All for nothing.

The end.

So, how you guys feeling about The Rock?

We need an adaptation with Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage.

I

am feeling that The Rock Financial is a great place to refinance my mortgage every time I go and see a Red Wings game.

But

that's not what we're talking about here.

The Red Wings, much like the French and the Spanish, putting up nothing but L's as of late.

That's right.

Also, a fun detail that I've just found is Elliot died in 178, 1790 from allegedly drinking too much mineral water from a local well.

Yes.

God damn.

He definitely got clapped by bacteria.

Ripped in hand.

My man drank too much sparkling water and died of a tummy ache.

He was the arch nemesis 200 and something years earlier of the Liver King.

He's like, I'm eating nothing but vegetables and drinking too much mineral water until I die.

Yep.

We do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you could support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us in the Patreon DMs.

You can ask us on Discord, which you'll also have access to if you become a supporter.

You can load it into a simple pudding and I will eat it and then I will answer it on air.

Nice.

I love my, I don't know what a simple pudding is, but it sounds mostly white, mushy, and flavorless.

I prefer a complex pudding myself.

I want to dig into a pudding so complex it tastes like MC Esher.

Joe, you really buried the lead on uh george elliot because uh what was his uh station before he was stationed at gibraltar oh i don't remember he was the governor of londonderry oh yeah yeah that's right

uh today's question is tell us a meaningless piece of lore from your history that is funny

In 2008, I was,

I decided to go to, there was a Mitt Romney rally.

If you're an American, you probably know who Mitt Romney is.

If you're not, you might not.

He ran for the nomination for president in both 2008 and 2012.

In 2008, he was defeated by John McCain for the nomination.

And then in 2012, he won the nomination.

Of course, he was defeated by Barack Obama in the general election.

In 2008, I found out that he was going to be going to do a rally in

my hometown of Grand rapids michigan and so i made a gigantic sign with i i traced the mitt romney campaign logo on it but then i changed it to say mick romlee um because i was just curious like what would happen and so i brought this sign to this event that he had going on and i thought it was going to be like a big thing in like an arena or something but it was actually just kind of in this little room there were maybe like 300 people in the room tops but i still had my big ass sign, right?

And so he came into the room and I was holding it up over my head.

And Mitt Romney takes one look at the sign, sees that it very clearly says Mick Romley.

And again, to give you a sense of the size of this thing, it's a sign that's like about as big as me.

And he looks at the sign, looks down, looks me in the eyes and mouths, mouths Mick Romley and is just very fucking confused.

And I'm like, yeah.

And then two days later, I searched for Mick Romley on Google and it brought up a sponsored ad for Mitt Romney, which means that he saw that sign and told his campaign team to go and purchase the ad word for Mick Romley because people were getting confused about what his name was.

Oh, that is good.

That's like the kind of like harmless, stupid shit that I love.

You don't really get it.

You don't get stuff like that anymore.

People are just so mean now.

I mean, he certainly deserved something meaner than that, but that's what I felt like doing at the time.

And it worked out pretty well.

He had binders full of Mick Romley's.

Exactly.

I don't really have like much kind of like pointless lore about myself.

I do meet like quite a lot of interesting people through work.

Recently, I met the guy who is the heir to the Mr.

Whippy fortune.

Mr.

Whippy is like, was the first kind of like ice cream

truck here in the UK.

It's like soft serve ice cream.

This guy's dad emigrated from Italy to the UK and started Mr.

Whippy.

At one stage, he was involved in like a gang war in Scotland over territorial beef over ice cream.

I was talking to this guy and I got told afterwards, like, oh yeah, he's the heir to Mr.

Whippy.

And like, I just thought Mr.

Whippy was like a generic thing.

But no, there is a guy.

who is an heir to a multi, multi-million pound fortune because of ice cream.

Shooters in the street.

Yeah, quite literally.

The territorial wars of like ice cream trucks are a big thing in New York City.

I've heard about that.

And hot dogs.

It's well known that like every guy who drives a Mr.

Softy truck has a baseball bat in the back just in case.

Try to think.

Oh, I mean, when I first went to university,

I was

pre-med for being a veterinarian.

And that is where I learned that I'm too dumb for this.

Um,

and I dropped out and joined the army.

And, uh, here I am.

Uh, I guess, I guess another thing, uh, would be is even back in the day, um, my, like, sometimes I think about like these little stupid things that would have wildly changed my life if they came to pass, right?

Uh, or maybe they did not come to pass.

Um, and that was uh, like I almost couldn't join the army back when I did because I had a lengthy criminal record as a juvenile.

Oh, yeah, you've told me about that, how you're just like boosting shit from random stores, like your, your copy of Final Fantasy VII, for instance.

That is correct.

Things out of cars.

Uh, I set some stuff on fire, a few minor class sessions.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're, if you're from Detroit, that's a devil's night class.

Yes.

Um, to the point that even under the waivers that they were giving people in 2005, I did not meet them.

Wow.

And they're like, well, do you really want to do this?

And I was like, look, man, I got nothing else.

Like, what process can we go through?

And he's like, I can make it go away.

And I was like, how can you, Mr.

Corporal Recruiter in some strip mall in Detroit, make this go away?

He's like, oh, don't worry about it.

He just lied.

As they commonly do.

Well, he didn't lie to me.

Like, normally they lied to you.

He lied to the government.

Oh, shit.

Because I later learned after years in the military that recruiters are actually under like massive amounts of pressure, especially back then, like to the point that recruiter suicides are quite common.

So they've got like quotas to hit.

Yeah, they had really high quotas to meet.

So he just made my criminal background.

He couldn't make it disappear, is the thing.

It had to be submitted.

So he just straight up forged one.

Yeah, which I'm fine saying because he later went to prison anyway.

Okay.

For meth-related activities.

That is.

I'm not entirely sure what it was.

That is

so fucking odd, Brad.

I got selected for this thing called hometown recruiting, which means like after you graduate basic training and your further training, they send you home.

So you'd be like, I joined the army and I'm back home.

Look at me.

It was a month off of before you have to report to your first duty station.

So I was like, fuck yeah, I'll do it.

I went and they were supposed to pair you up with the recruiter that recruited you.

So you could be like the father-son team of tricking high schoolers.

And I shut up like, Yeah, where's Corporal so-and-so?

I won't say his name.

I still vividly remember his name as well.

I was like, oh, prison.

I was gone for four months.

What happened?

He's like, oh, yeah, he was actually already under investigation while he was recruiting you.

I'm like, well, in retrospect, that makes a lot of sense.

But yeah,

that is my lore.

I actually have

a slightly embarrassing one.

Up until I think I was maybe 25,

I thought that like lather, rinse, repeat when washing your hair was bullshit.

So I would just use shampoo once, wash it out, and then just like get out of the shower after I'd done everything else.

Oh, you just did like,

this is bullshit sold to you by big shampoo.

Everybody knows the good way to wash your hair is simply dunk it in a bucket.

I mean, pretty much.

I mean, if I'm in a rush, I'm not going to wash.

I'm not going to scrub my hair more than once.

That shit takes too much time.

Yeah, washing your hair is like washing your legs.

It's completely optional.

Well, Josh, you have significantly more hair than both Joe and I combined.

So I can understand that.

You don't need to wash anything.

Just hang onions around yourself.

You'll be fine.

But that is a podcast.

Josh, you host other podcasts as you're the guest.

You go first.

Tell us all about your other podcasts.

You know what?

I would would love to.

I co-host two delightful podcasts, and I'm going to tell you about them right now.

The first one is called The Worst of All Possible Worlds.

It is a show where I, along with my co-hosts, Brian and AJ, talk about media.

Every week, it's just a different piece of media, and we talk about the narratives within it, both the explicit ones as well as the ones that you might have missed.

Our tagline is case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire.

So the show is exactly what it sounds like.

We have also had both of the illustrious hosts hosts that I am speaking with right now on our show.

We had Tom on to talk about a Spanish platformer called Blasphemous 2.

And then we had Joe on for actually a two-parter.

First half of that is free.

The second half is going to cost you.

We talked about Final Fantasy VII.

We do longer form episodes, so if you're the kind of person who is seeking real like deep dives into pop culture, you should find something to enjoy because our episodes are always at least two hours long minimum uh this past week we talked about thief to the metal age that episode was three hours um and yeah we we have fun you know we have fun and we've been doing it now for four years which is crazy it's crazy to think about right that like we're coming up on eight years now oh wow it's the only podcast you can listen to where all three of the co-hosts sound the exact same that's right that's right i disagree on that but i know i can tell the difference as well it's just, you know,

we'll get the ear for the pandemic.

We'll get over two-thirds of our listeners there by virtue of being able to tell us apart.

But yeah, that's the worst of all possible worlds.

The other show that I co-host is called Ill Conceived.

That is a show about natalism, which is the ideology that sees declining birth rates as like the most important policy priority in the world.

And we've been doing that now for a couple months.

I co-host that one with June, who you might know as Juniper on the various social medias.

And that one is more of, like, it's not a news show.

It's more like looking into the history of a given thing that is connected to natalism in some way, shape, or form.

So for instance, last week we took a look at a guy named Lyman Stone, who is this real like fucking freak who's trying to come up with ways to get more people to have babies now.

And the week before that, we looked at James Dobson, who is an evangelical Christian who was trying to to do that shit in the 80s and 90s.

So generally speaking, the way the format works is one week will be something that's a bit more of history, and then the next week will be something that's happening right now.

That is about an hour a week.

We've had a lot of success with that so far.

And if you're interested in like current events or the way that narratives shape culture, you might be interested in that.

That one's specifically looking at like political culture and society as opposed to media.

Yeah, also very proud of that show.

You should go check it out.

I am plugging shit.

This episode is already really long.

Go listen to Josh's shows.

Come play my pub quiz on a Tuesday evening in the Haggerston at 7.30 on Tuesdays.

Tom might not have things to plug, but I do.

You're already listening to the show, so thanks.

Support us on Patreon.

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And tell people that you list us, share our contents, leave reviews, and tickets to our live show on October 4th.

in Glasgow, Scotland.

Still available.

Check out the show notes.

We have links for the actual live show and the live stream.

So make sure you're clicking on the right one and getting the right ticket.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Check out Josh's shows.

And until next time, eat onions, fight the Spanish.

Eat onions, explode.