439: No Such Thing As A Finger Fish

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there's a theory that the Bronte sisters all died young because they spent a lot of their life drinking graveyard water.

You said graveyard water as though we're all familiar with it.

It was like spring water.

We've all seen it on the show, but still sparkling graveyard.

Yeah, well, no, you're right.

It's not a thing anymore, but I think graveyard water was a much bigger thing in the 19th century before property.

No, I just mean it's a lot of money.

There are a lot of crazes

before hygiene standards and before proper

water piping.

So, this is water that has happened to go through a graveyard.

It's filtered, yeah.

It's filtered

through

whenever you buy a bottled water and it says filtered, that's what it means.

Yeah, no, so they lived in this town called Howarth, which is in West Yorkshire, and it was an extremely sickly place, very low life expectancy, excrement excrement running down the streets.

I mean, you know, bad ventilation.

Your Yorkshire.

Sorry, yeah.

And also, the Bronte family home, the parsonage they lived in, right next to it had a graveyard.

And there is a...

And there.

It was very overcrowded as well.

And there is a...

strong theory or a strong suggestion it's possible that decomposing matter from the graveyard would have filtered into the water supply and that might have really banjacked the town's overall health.

Those who were using kind of public water sources.

Yeah, it definitely would have gone into the village, which is in like a valley.

But yeah, and presumably there weren't taps back then, so they must have been collecting water from somewhere.

So they lived in a parsonage and they had their own well,

the Bronte's.

And what I find really interesting is that the well was cleaned in 1847.

And that was the first time it had been cleaned in 20 years.

And the father of the Bronte's wrote that they'd taken eight yellow tin cans out of it.

That's how polluted it was.

But it was in 1848 and 1849 that Bramwell, Emily and Anne all died, so the year afterwards.

So the year after their well was out of use, perhaps.

Right.

So maybe they stopped using the well for a bit and then they started using the more common water that everyone else was drinking.

And then that might have made them sick.

Did they not think when they were drinking something that looked like Gatorade that maybe

that wasn't going to be good?

Because it's the only thing you can drink.

Yeah, really?

What do you do?

We actually say the Brontes died young, but you know, they lived at ripe old ages by comparison.

To be, well, not.

They lived to 29, 30, 31, and 39.

Exactly.

The average life expectancy, obviously, one has to account for the 40% of people who die in early childhood.

But yeah, it was 25.

And I reckon Charlotte at 38 would have seemed like an old hag by the time she copped it.

But yeah, all the others did die pretty young, except their dad, who lived lived at 84.

Wow.

It was a very sickly place.

And the town was inspected in 1850 by a man who was called Benjamin Herschel Babbage.

And

his findings basically were that it was just an extremely unhealthy place.

It was poorly ventilated.

Some people were living in cellars.

And it was their dad actually who got this guy in to check the water supply.

So it was the year after three of his children had died.

And he said, we need to do something about this.

Do you think after the first child died, he was like, oh, I must get this water checked.

And then the second kid dies, he's like, damn it, I really must get this water checked.

Well, the first one was Bramwell, who died of alcoholism.

Yes.

Actually, he had two daughters who died before that.

So they had two daughters who died like 14, 15, didn't they?

Which sounds very, which is very sad.

And they were in the school, which was right at the bottom of the hill, where the water definitely would have been pretty rank.

But Bramwell died of alcoholism.

But the pub where he drank in is the first place you get to after the...

If you look at the map, it's house, graveyard, pub and apparently they used to make their beer out of the water that came

out yeah so is it possible then that we've maligned him and he didn't die of alcoholism well he definitely wasn't alcoholic as well i think people people do say that he might have died of tb and he was an alcoholic but you know he might have died of other stuff as well so we might have unfairly maligned him there was opium involved as well i think yeah wasn't there it wasn't it was a concoction of stuff he wasn't having a very healthy life say that but it's always said that alcoholism drawn you know not the graveyard water yeah

i i am with dan here i actually think that the branwell myth may have been, you know, taken to the extreme of, like, this killed him.

And actually, I'm not sure we totally have evidence.

But Babbage's report was funny.

He was particularly appalled by the toilet setup in the village, which

consisted of two toilets that were shared each by like 12 families.

So they were out in the street, and he was appalled by the public view of them, which I don't think contributes to people's ill health.

Might poo that people could see you while you're pooing.

Yeah, he basically said, there's, oh, in fact, he said there's two toilets that are just on the public street in view of the houses and of passers-by whilst a third is perched upon an eminence commanding the whole length of the main street.

Have you ever been like have you ever been to like a restaurant or something that's on the top of a really high building and then sometimes they put the toilet and they have pretty much a window because there's nothing else can look in and you can poo and look out over the whole city.

I've never seen that.

I can't remember where I've been and done that, but it's really it's something.

It's quite something.

That sounds quite uncommon.

You said it as though it might be a standard thing in five buildings but when I think about it yeah no actually no my local Greg's has one of those yeah yeah yeah yeah you can sit in Greg's and as an eminence of the whole of south London yeah

so the the Bronte's in general they're putting them back together in a way are they well they're like other pretty much so basically all the contents of the house were sold off after Patrick who's the father Pop Bronte he died in 1861 and all the contents were sold off because you know you have a new parson who comes in and the furniture changes all that because he he was a

curate, vicar, priesty guy.

Not a priest.

Because he had six children.

But the Bronte Society, they've been putting the house back together, which is very exciting.

And they've been slowly, slowly buying at auction various bits of Bronte paraphernalia.

Oh, cool.

So there was a table that they wrote at.

One kind of normal, medium-sized darkwood table.

£580,000.

It's been bought for

being bought back.

But did they all write at this table?

I think a lot of them did.

I don't know if any key works were definitely pinned on that table, but it was the writing table.

That's a big table.

Yeah, do you think, like, as a writer that you are?

And we all are, really, do you think that really now we should get actually quite a nice ornate table?

Because in the future, they're looking at it and god, that table from Ikea was like, ah, yeah, what's the point of putting that in a museum?

Exactly.

I like Terry Pratchett's table, where he wrote most of his novels.

As soon as he passed away, his assistant Rob put a glass plate over the table so that every single scuff mark, every single

mug

wear is there now for all time.

It's a great idea.

Like chewing them underneath it.

Yeah, bogeys.

Another really cool item, I don't know if it was at auction that they had to buy it back or whether they just still have it, but Charlotte Bronte was given a bit of Napoleon's coffin, which is really cool.

How did they get his coffin?

He was dead.

Oh, yeah.

How did it, like, because he had about, but he had about seven coffins, I think, Napoleon.

He was inside multiple layers.

Like a Russian doll.

Like a Russian doll, yeah, yeah.

Really?

There was a two coffin.

It's quite awkward for Napoleon.

Poor guy.

Do you mean like a French pastry or something?

Come on.

Oh, did you say Shana got Napoleon's coffee?

Yeah, yeah, from her.

Because that's from her sexy Belgian tutor who she was in love with.

Really?

He was a married man.

So I don't think any impropriety ever occurred, but she loved him and they had quite a good friendship as well.

Because she wasn't the big Napoleon fan.

This is the great thing about the Brontes.

When they were younger, they actually wrote more words than when they were adults because they wrote these amazing books together, together, these fairy tales.

And

they created worlds, they created the world of Angria and Gondal.

And I think this was based on some toy soldiers that Bramwell got given by their dad, but they all played with them and they all claimed a soldier.

And Emily claimed Wellington, and then Bramwell claimed Napoleon, and they'd sort of like fight each other and stuff.

And then the other two claimed a gravy boy and a waiting boy, but I think they upgraded them at some point to the Antarctic Explorer's Parriot Ross.

A gravy boy.

A gravy boy, yeah.

Again, Again, just like I said, graveyard water, like it was a

gravy boy.

I don't think a gravy boy is.

You know, in American football, they have a water boy who brings on all of their drinks and stuff.

Well, I do now, yeah.

Yeah,

well, gravy boy, it's the same in cricket

on your cucumber sandwiches.

Yeah, yeah.

Just bring in some gravy.

Was she quite obsessed with Wellington, Emily?

I don't know how obsessed she was.

She just played him.

I think she was, and I think she met him later in life in his late line.

Napoleon was buried in a lot of coffins like a beef wellington.

Yeah, wasn't he?

That's an even worse one.

It doesn't make sense.

A beef Wellington doesn't have multiple pastry lists.

Pastry.

I suppose it is.

It is layered.

It's got a layer of mushrooms and stuff.

Yeah, he was covered in Ducksell's.

Just on their writing as kids and the cool stuff that they had,

I don't know if any of these remain, but they wrote in tiny books sometimes.

So some of their stories they wrote in books that were small enough for their dolls or their soldiers to read, which sounds so cool.

The writing is microscopic.

And I think there was one book that, in fact, we do have some of them because they're photos, and they're about like the size of the thumb, a human thumb, really.

So, we know there's one because actually, the Bronte house has bought one of them back

for a million pounds.

What?

A million pounds.

The tiny book or the tiny book.

I thought they're getting all the cash.

I don't know.

I have no idea how they're funding it.

Oh, actually, I do know how they might be funding it because the actual Bronte's themselves were funded indirectly through piracy.

So, wait, so Grandpa Bronte, he was a trader, but also he had plenty of dealings with Cornish pirates who committed actual murders, and a lot of his money, a lot of his estate, would have come from his nefarious activities.

That's cool.

And the Bronte sisters paid for their novels to be published, and they did a lot of that thanks to money they got from their aunt on that side of the family.

So basically, they were pirate-funded.

So you're saying that the current Bronte estate

has some sort of treasure chest that they're still

bookly themselves.

Where are they getting these millions from?

They pay for anything in doubloons, if you've noticed that, at the auctions.

I read an article about the Bronte Society who run the museum.

I don't know if it's the same people.

Yeah, it is.

But apparently, they made a loss last year of £100,000.

And actually, because not many people have been visiting, I think possibly due to COVID, they've been asking firms in the UK who use the name Bronte.

They're saying, well, you know, okay, fine, you're allowed to use it.

Nothing we can do, but can you not give us a bit of money for it?

And Richard Wilcox, who's the chairman of the Bronte Society, he said there are dozens of companies companies who are selling Bronte

stone, cooked chicken, outdoor clothing.

Have you never had a Bronte chicken?

Bronte fried chicken.

It's lovely.

It's been, how's it cooked?

It's sort of, they leave it on a moor for three days.

Yeah, it's very moorish.

And also spring water.

And what I found is that there is Bronte water that you can buy from the springs in Howarth.

No.

Oh, no, we've ruined their industry with this podcast.

And I just want to kind of balance it out to say that they are part of a company called Waterlogic UK, and they recently announced the world's first COVID-secure range of drinking water dispensers.

Okay.

Actually, weirdly, the Bronte Society themselves, just on Bronte merch, they sell a Branwell Bronte, I think it's a wine bottle supper or a corkscrew.

But given that he died of alcoholism there, I mean, it's

amazing.

That's what it is.

It's on the nose.

They do.

I wonder if they get a cut from all the companies then that are in this town where they grew up.

Well, that's what they're saying they don't and at the moment there's no legal reason that they should.

Because they've really gone for it haven't they?

They're like all the salons are like Jane Hare you know and stuff like that.

They've all

I love that so Charlotte Bronte was a teacher and in 1836 she started writing about her experience as a teacher and she's just so mean to the students.

It's amazing.

There's one extract which says am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fat-headed oats.

Wow.

Like, she did not like her kids.

Teachers listening to this and nodding a whole way.

Emily.

That was Charlotte.

Charlotte, sorry, sorry.

I have a theory about Bramwell Bronte, which is that he inspired a very famous film.

Okay, give us a clue.

Okay, it's to do

his.

Okay, no, no, I'm going to give you a clue first.

Otherwise, I don't think you'll be able to.

If he wants to stop someone and his mum shot someone,

oh, Jesus Christ, okay, you only know two films between you.

Andy knows,

it's avatar.

It's avatar.

So it's not, yeah, yeah.

He was green.

Yeah, yeah, blue, blue, blue.

I was thinking of the Hulk.

No, so he basically had this affair, we think, and this is partly based on the biography of Charlotte that was written by Mrs.

Gaskell, very interestingly.

So Patrick, the dad, commissioned Mrs.

Gaskell to write

Charlotte.

Who is Charlotte?

Famous author, famous British author.

author.

Did she have a first name?

Elizabeth, but she always goes by Mrs.

Bizarrely snobbish about that.

Like when she wrote to George Elliott once, she said, I love, love your stuff, George, but I wish I could be addressing a Mrs.

rather than a miss.

Given that she was writing to someone trading under a man's name,

an insane thing to say.

Also, don't upset George Elliott because you're going to get a big right-hand side.

She'll have that you.

And you will not come back from that.

But anyway, what we think is that Bramwell had an affair with this much older woman.

He was 25 and she was 43 and he was working as a govern- not a governess.

Governor.

A governor.

A governess.

Okay.

Tutor for her children.

Lydia Robinson.

Mrs.

Doubtfire.

Exactly.

I really thought you were going to get it there.

You know it.

So she's called Lydia Robinson.

And that's Bramwell Bronte's initials are BB.

And in the film, the very famous film, The Graduate, obviously, where Mrs.

Robinson is the older woman who seduces a younger man, it's Benjamin Braddock, initials BB.

Okay.

And the author of the original book, I don't think, ever commented on whether it was inspired by that.

But it was a famous affair between a young man and an older woman.

Charlotte had a superpower, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

She could see in the dark.

How cool is that?

Well, in the absolute pitch darkness.

Yeah, basically.

I mean, that was, there's stories that she was short-sighted, so short-sighted that if she was trying to even play piano, she couldn't read the sheet music.

It was that

bad for her.

But as soon as the lights went out, as soon as it was nighttime, her students said that she could read perfectly what was on the page when no one else could.

Right.

Okay.

It's a good fact.

It's a great fact.

Thank you.

We don't acknowledge each other's facts that often on the show, but when a truly good one comes up, I'm glad we did.

It sounds like she was an inspiring teacher who, you know,

taught her kids an imaginative story.

No, she could, she could do it.

Actually, I do buy that because I know that Anne, the youngest of the sisters,

she could hear things over 300 miles away.

She could breathe underwater to her.

And then their green brother Bramwell,

only when he got angry, destroy everything.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that if you swim too close to an iceberg, you can get sucked in.

Not in danger of it.

Not one of my top worries, I don't think.

It's worth remembering.

You never know when you might find yourself in that situation, Anna.

You're right, on Titanic 2 or something.

How do they do that?

Do they generate their own currents near them?

They do not.

In a way, they generate their own currents.

They're moving around a lot.

They're changing a lot.

Icebergs are melting all the time.

Lots of changes inside an iceberg.

And I'm especially talking about very big ones.

And when things are moving around, currents get formed.

And that's what happened.

And I read this in.

I was basically going through some old archives of an NPR radio show called Only a Game and I found this article from 2001 about someone called Jill Hyneth and she is one of the most remarkable people I've ever come across in the 20 years I've done this job she was the first person to swim inside of an iceberg.

There was a massive one that carved off from Antarctica.

It was about the size of Jamaica.

And she and her partner went to National Geographic and said we'd like to do do this article about diving through the caves of icebergs.

And they said, Wow, really, there are caves in icebergs.

And they went, Yeah, we think so.

And sure enough, they got some funding and they went and did it.

And the story of her going through this iceberg is remarkable.

My wife's gone to swim in an iceberg the size of a Caribbean island.

Jamaica?

Yes.

Extraordinarily, she went of her own accord.

Completely bizarre decision.

Yeah, it sounds absolutely incredible, doesn't it?

And some quite dodgy moments in there.

Every moment.

Every moment is dodgy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So, first of all, they are next to this massive iceberg and they jump into the water.

And the first thing that happens is you're jumping into ice-cold water.

And I don't know, I'm sure some of you might have done that before.

It really hits you hard and it can really take the breath out of you.

But in her case, she said it's like an ice cream headache, like the worst ice cream headache you've ever had is the first thing that you feel and then you go down and down and down and you see an entrance and you enter this iceberg and it's all blue like she says it's like a robin's egg the floor's red and orange and yellow all these amazing colors and then it everything goes wrong

and she and so she and her partner they're swimming through it and After a while of taking lots of video footage, they turn around to go back out.

But because it's a melting iceberg, because it's a living beast that's that's just changing shape all the time their exit shuts and they're stuck inside the iceberg and she's going i'm trying not to panic because if i start breathing too heavily every breath i take is a precious breath every move you make every move i make um no one's watching her which is so frightening and so she they just wait they patiently wait and then a new opening happens it's it's like a weird mirror labyrinth you know like something you would see in a weird fantasy movie a new opening happens and they manage manage to get out.

And then they just have to wait a while to acclimatize, don't they?

You can't just go straight back up.

And so the people on the boat are thinking, well, they're gone.

Yeah.

Because they've heard all these changes and this carving and bits have fallen off.

And the people on the boat are like, well, that's the end of them then.

Yeah.

But then they come back up.

They go up, they tell their story.

It's all going nice.

You'd think, that's enough.

We've explored it.

They go, let's get back in there.

Let's do it again.

So they go for a second time.

Well, what are the chances of that going wrong again?

Exactly.

I mean, it's not going to happen twice, is it?

Yeah.

It sounded like even there was a a scary moment at one point on this expedition when she resurfaced and the boat, I think, had drifted and she came up through a hole in the ice.

But the ice around her was so high, she couldn't see anything.

And you're in the middle of the Antarctic, and her boat's disappeared.

And I think the boat just happened to swing around, and she just glimpsed the stern.

Because they had to take the anchor up, and so it drifted while the anchor was up.

So they're nearly lost at sea.

basically in this moment.

So they get back on the boat and you think, all right, let's get back to home.

They don't go back a third time.

They go a third time.

They go a third time and this time they get stuck inside and in order to get out

She basically got up to a point in the iceberg where there was a there was a gap at the top for them to climb out But it was 130 feet above their heads So you're looking at a climbing wall basically that's unclimbable except yes and I couldn't quite get it because she's out of the water by this time So she's just climbing up the iceberg.

So she must be inside of the iceberg where there's a hole on the inside that looks like it's like a triathlon kind of thing.

You know, you do the swimming bit and then you do the climbing bit.

When do you do the cycling bit?

There's a bike at the top of the iceberg.

This is where the story genuinely turns a bit Brian Blessedy for me because I just think this is impossible.

But here's the thing, right?

This is solid ice wall, right?

So how do you climb ice wall?

And she thinks to herself, hang on, there's little animals that burrow themselves into the ice wall, which are creating natural handholds for me to do.

And apparently there's enough of these that she could scale 130 feet.

So there's a little fish exactly the size of her finger, which makes a little hole where it lives.

The fish finger, yeah.

Well the finger fish, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And they make holes in the iceberg and she can use them to grip onto and pull herself up.

So she climbs a, yeah, I know.

It's blessed.

This is sunny.

All the way up.

All the way 100 and 500.

There are fish living 100 feet up on this iceberg.

How do they get up there?

Who knows?

I guess if the previous fish have gone up there, then.

The icebergs flip over all the time.

Yeah.

Don't know.

Do we think...

Well, has there been cracks in the iceberg?

Oh, there's some cracks in her story.

And they all climb out this way, 130 feet up, and then they're back on the boat.

And then they slid down the iceberg.

And so they're sitting on the boat not long afterwards.

I think they're having some drinks and some food.

And then suddenly they just hear screaming from other people on the boat.

And there's huge cracking noises.

And basically, there's been such a melting point on the iceberg that it cracks in on itself.

And they go, well, if we were in there, we'd be dead.

We'd be squished in a second.

So then they go back again.

No, they don't.

But what a story!

Yeah, it is quite, quite an odd thing to choose to do with your life.

You must have to have a very unusual personality not to panic in all of these circumstances.

Like she did one other dive, which she described, and it was into a really, really small cave.

So she's a cave diver, basically, so underwater cave diver.

And she was taking a scientist down there with her, who obviously had been trained properly how to dive.

But the scientist got wedged in this tiny cave and panicked.

Luckily a tiny fish came and nibbled her out

and it was a really nice story because earlier in the dive she had found that fish and it had a thorn in its fin.

Yes.

And she pulled the thorn out and then the fish came back to help her.

Okay it's not a Bronte novel.

It's this is real life.

So she's wedged.

She's wedged and they have a guideline which is the only way you can find your way back to the entrance of the cave because you know it's full of other channels and tunnels and stuff.

So you'll never find your way back otherwise.

The guideline's broken which is the only thing to lead them back to the entrance somehow and i'm not quite sure how jill does this while she's trying to fix the guideline she loses her partner who was previously wedged in a rock yeah seems careless a bit of an oversight so she spends 73 minutes desperately looking for her partner while trapped in this cave no idea if she's going to escape

and also thinking oh god i've killed this scientist how awkward um but imagine the moment and maybe it's all worth it for this when finally she realized she has not only found her way to the entrance but she sees a little glimpse of light.

But there is waiting at the entrance the scientist, who apparently her mask is just full of tears because the scientist has assumed that Jill's dead and she's probably going to die too, waiting at the entrance for her.

And

she was alright, and she sent the weirdest thoughts go through your head.

Like when she thought she was going to die, you think things like, oh my god, I have to get home then.

My husband doesn't know how to do the taxes.

Wow,

that's an amazing story.

And also, it's given me a new respect for the word guideline.

Yeah.

You know, we're so used to hearing about the conceptual guidelines, the theoretical guidelines.

Government guidelines suggest it.

Yeah, exactly.

And actually, guidelines can save your life.

I was reading about what Heine studies in the other areas of her life, because loads and loads of cave diving, particularly.

And have you guys heard of the halocline?

No.

So she studies animals which are often found beneath the halocline.

And the halocline is a boundary between freshwater, which is higher up, and salt water, which is lower down.

And she says the boundary layer is as thin as a sheet of paper, but you can also see it when you're in the cave.

So as you go through it, everything goes blurry for a second because you've broken the

barrier between the two kinds of water.

It's like going through a mirror which takes you to a parallel universe.

It's exactly like that.

It's exactly like that.

And then as soon as you get down to the saltwater, everything snaps back into perfect clarity and focus.

And you look up and you can see the halocline above you.

But you meet the saltwater version of yourself.

Yes, yes, yes.

And then you have to climb using fishy ice holes downwards.

Yeah, yeah.

Early cave divers.

The first UK cave diver was in 1935.

And potentially this is the first world cave diver.

Quite laid.

That's what I thought, right?

I read in a few places this was the world's first cave diving and then a few others, it's first UK.

It happened at Wookiee Hole.

And it was a lady called Penelope Powell.

And she did it with a guy called Graeme Balcombe.

I think that, yeah, I think it is in the UK because you find lots of accounts of other people trying similar things around the world, and usually you just attach a hose to yourself and go deep in.

But definitely in Britain, and it's thought of as the birth of cave diving.

Yeah, as like a proper sport, basically.

Yeah.

So

Balcombe actually tried going into a different cave first, and he made his own massively long snorkel out of a hose pipe and a woman's bike frame.

And he almost died because that didn't work very well.

So

they upgraded their gear, in fact, when he went down with Penelope Mossy Powell, as she was called.

But it was.

Sorry, sorry, let's just scale back to that a second.

Penelope Powell.

Her nickname was Mossy.

Mossy.

And is she single?

That put her nickname in the 30s.

Mossy Powell, wow.

Mossy.

Do we know why she had the nickname?

She had just hair on the southern side of her body.

I'm not sure, but I know that you would have got along very well with her indie.

Anyway, they then at that point would have a hard hat, and and that would be attached to this hose called the diver's umbilical, which is basically a combined breathing hose and phone so that you could communicate with the surface.

So they went into Woogie Hole and they went, you know, many, many chambers in a long way, 170 feet they went in.

And the air pumps have to be manually operated at the surface.

So they were actually broadcasting on local radio.

Don't know why they didn't make this national.

Only local.

We'll be right back with wet, look, wet.

You can tune in in the Cheddar Gorge area.

It was an exciting time.

Anyway, so they were broadcast, but their air would only last about 50 seconds.

So they'd be saying, it was mostly Graham who did the talking to the surface.

And then about every 50 seconds, he'd have to say, actually, could I get some more air, please?

And then the people at the surface would have to pump air in.

Just one more thing on the Wookie Hole expedition.

You can actually see a painting that was done 84 years after the actual event occurred.

And it was done by a guy who's called Philip Gray, and he's an artist.

And he went down into the place where she went so he dove down with his with his painting equipment and a light and he did the painting down there it's the first of its kind you have to explain how so i'm guessing this is because because it was a bit odd i'm excited to hear your guesses i think you know the actual answer

he went 19 feet down so either he went down and there's a cave system where he could pop up and to dry but and he could illuminate it so he had everything let's say in a plastic bag ziplock absolutely and then he painted the painting there, put it put the painting in the bag, and then came back up, which I'm guessing must be the way.

He definitely painted it there.

He didn't go down, take a photo, and then paint it down.

No, he painted it down there.

If you were to use water paints, right, but you use salt water and you're in the

halocline, might it still work?

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's gonna be pretty blurry painting.

Is it possible the painting is just absolutely dog shit?

It looks pretty cool, actually.

I think it looks good.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I was looking at the world's deepest dive in Scuba, this is, and it was by Ahmed Gaba in the Red Sea in 2014.

And he went 1,090 feet down.

The dive took 13 hours and 50 minutes.

What?

The thing is, 13 hours, 50 minutes, how much of that do you think he was going down?

Oh, not very much because you have to slowly come back up because otherwise you've got the decompression stuff.

So he was coming back up for 10 hours, I think.

He went down for 15 minutes.

Amazing.

And then had to come back up for 13 hours and 35 minutes.

It's like when you're driving along the motorway and it's incredibly clear the way you're going and you can see the other side of the motorway and you just shock the block.

You think, oh, I've got to come back.

I'm only going down to the station.

I've got to come back through that.

And obviously, if he went quicker, then he'd get the Benz.

He'd die.

Yeah.

Do you know another thing that you can get from diving, which isn't the Benz, and isn't as dangerous as the Benz, but is nitrogen narcosis.

Oh, yeah.

Which sounds actually quite fun.

It's basically getting drunk,

and it's also known as the martini effect.

Divers compare it to drinking one martini for every 10 meters that you descend after 30 meters.

It doesn't really seem to cause much harm except to your judgment, which can be a problem.

So let's just work this out.

So after 30 meters,

every 10 meters, it's one martini.

This guy went 332 meters.

So it's basically like he had

30 martinis.

He was absolutely hammered.

Yeah, yeah.

He was seeing some weird.

My limit is two.

I was in the really nicely made martinis.

I think genuinely one of them gets me pretty too.

How do you like your martinis, Mr.

Bubb?

Oh, give a box.

Oh,

this is fine.

It's fine.

Where's the fucking olive?

Bubba looks at an empty jar of olives.

It came with 33 olives.

Wow.

That's incredible.

It is.

So there is a way to get around it if you don't want to be completely pissed pissed 300 meters underwater.

Oh, you drink a small glass of milk before you go down, don't you?

That just helps you.

Sline your stomach.

A big rose dinner and then pop down.

No, you use helium instead of nitrogen.

So normally diving equipment, the gas that you have is oxygen and nitrogen combination and the

ratio depends on kind of what kind of dive you're doing.

But weirdly, you can replace nitrogen with helium.

And apparently, we can kind of breathe that okay as well.

They don't quite know why this doesn't give you the narcosis, but helium is less fat-soluble, and it seems like the more soluble the gas, the more drunk you'll get.

And so, I guess.

It's pretty bad, though, if you're in trouble.

It's like, I've been the one in somebody.

I'm really, really struggling.

Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

Got someone out there.

I'm really stuck.

I'm getting sucked into this ice bag.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that every cup of mint tea you drink contains the essence of a hundred insects.

This is part of the study which was done by Trier University in Germany, a guy called Henrik Krehenwinkel.

He's an ecological geneticist, and basically what he was looking into is how can we monitor invasive pests?

How can we see if an insect is going endangered around the world?

One thought that came about is this new development, which has been around for a bit now, e-DNA.

We mentioned it years ago in our book of the year 2019 where we talked about a New Zealand scientist called Neil Gemmel going to Loch Ness and trying to look for the dandruff of the Loch Ness monster.

Basically the idea is that you take a little scoop of something, whether it's like water, I guess, tea in this case, and then you look very, very closely at all the molecules in it and you can find remnants of the DNA, can't you, of other stuff that once passed through the molecule?

And the E stands for environmental

things that have been in the area, like you might have breathed on it and given some of your DNA to it or something like that.

Exactly.

So one of the things that they thought they would test out is could you tell from taking a sample of tea from an area,

could you look through it with the eDNA method and work out how many different species have been landing on the plants, peeing on the plants, chewing on the plants, doing whatever it is on the plants.

And if you could do that and you could get that information, then you could look to, let's say, plants that are hidden in museums from the same area from years ago, and you would be able to tell, is there a decrease in the population?

Is there an increase?

So clever.

You could look at other, it's an interesting way of then looking at how pesticides can travel across the world on boats and so on and become a pest somewhere else you can then suddenly notice by testing tea leaves from say bali you'd be like hang on a second there's there's a sudden showing up of this invasive pest which they don't have here and they can get on top of it before it then takes over.

Is it clever or is it lazy?

Is it just a scientist saying, I could go to Bali or India and investigate this, or I could pop to Asda.

It could pick up some beach tips.

It could be both, can't it?

Often the cleverer thing to do is the lazy thing because you're saving resources.

Very good point, yeah.

But that is what literally they were doing.

They were popping to their local grocery stores and they were just buying teas from around the world.

I think it's what's amazing, because Trier, this university in Germany, right, that one of the reasons that this is such a good place to study this is that Trier has a specimen bank and the role of the specimen bank is just to collect leaves from different trees across Germany.

And they've been doing it for 35 years.

They've been doing it for decades.

I'm not sure what their original justification is.

And they come to

yeah they get it for a fee and they they freeze the leaves in liquid nitrogen so there's this german specimen bag which is just a load of leaves in liquid nitrogen i mean it's insane well and they've just gone we know this will come in handy one day and it has and it has yeah it genuinely has it's unbelievable yeah um the reason that tea is so useful is that if you take a leaf from a herbarium you know it's uh sort of samples of ancient plants that what they do is they keep leaves dark and dry basically to keep them in a kind of suspended animation and that is basically the same process as making tea because you're drying the leaves out, you're shredding them up, and you're just keeping them in kind of suspended animation in a tea bag.

And so that it's perfect to test that, as opposed to herbarium.

That's clever.

It's amazing.

And Craig Winkle, this guy, he says that probably.

Straight out of a Hans Christian Anderson novel every week.

He said, little boy, little girl, come to my tea emporium.

No, he didn't.

Follow the trail of tea bags I've left.

He said, probably 99.999%

or something like this of DNA which we extract is the tea DNA and only a tiny fraction of what's left is from insects.

And he says, which of course is good for tea drinkers because they want to drink the tea and not the insects.

So, you know.

No idea.

But he says that actually it's quite good to know that there's some tiny bits of arthropod DNA because that shows that they haven't used really loads and loads of pesticides.

Yeah.

So that's kind of clever.

Yeah.

And if you want to try it yourself, contribute to his research, he claims that you can dry your own plants.

Now, I don't know if he's actually accepting these specimens, but he says if you want to dry your own plants, and I thought this was quite cool,

you just need, you can get like a Ziploc bag sourced from some diver, presumably.

And then you dry plants out by just popping in one of those weird silica packets that you get inside.

I always eat those.

That's really funny.

EDNA.

Oh, yeah.

It floats in air.

If you take an air sample, there will be tiny, tiny amounts of e-DNA floating in it.

So, like, if someone comes into this room later today after we've gone home and they took a jam jar of air, they'd be able to get bits of our DNA from the colours.

Pretty much

it all.

It's amazing.

It's amazing.

But this led me on to another fact.

And this was actually sent to us by a listener recently called Andrew Ferguson.

So thank you to Andrew for this.

And you might find this fact familiar, but it's that on a windy day in San Francisco Zoo, strands of giraffe semen can be found floating on the breeze.

Yeah, I remember that fact.

Now that was posted on the QI boards by James 12 years ago,

and it's based on an interview with a zookeeper at San Francisco.

And I followed the link to the original interview with the zookeeper, and it's no longer on the internet.

They'll have suppressed that like Billy, won't they?

Because that will not do ticket sales any good.

But I bet that's one of the facts that we must have posted a dozen times on the internet.

After I found it, because it's amazing, and it's just taken a life of its own.

If you test the air in a zoo

with a jam jar, you can work out which animals are in the zoo by using EDLA.

What

how incredibly useful.

I'm always going to the zoo and not being able to tell which animals are there.

Well, you know, for instance, you could go to a zoo, get a jam jar, get a load of air, close the jam jar, take the air away, go to a PCR laboratory, and then it will tell you that they have giraffes there.

Brilliant.

Actually, brilliant.

Interesting.

That's really useful for when the sign is down, the giraffe enclosure.

London zoo's actually done away with the guides now.

They just hand you a jam jar on arrival.

It would be an incredibly good kind of like crap alternate zoo.

It's just the jam jar zoo.

If you cheap skate parents visit a zoo, you don't cross the barriers, you just scoop it into the jar, take it home with your kids, and go, look, there's giraffes in here.

Well, there are two studies that have found this, one in Denmark and one in England.

But one interesting part about it is that you can not only tell which species are in the zoo, but you can get DNA from the food that's fed to the animals.

So if you're feeding your giraffe like vole sausages, then it will collect the DNA from the voles as well, even though there aren't any voles in your zoo.

Wow.

And then you can get the zoo, I presume, shut down because

that feels like it breaches some rules, doesn't it?

A vole sausage.

It feels like it's an even better zoo now in the jar.

Because

you're getting more animals than you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't think...

Does anyone eat vole?

There's not much meat on a vole, I don't think.

No, you'd need to be quite desperate.

Peston's probably done it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you got other e-DNA stuff?

I'd have to say that.

Not good stuff.

Cool.

Great.

I've got some stuff about voles.

There was an area of the UK where they used eDNA in the water and they found that there must be some water voles there by looking at the e-DNA.

Oh, yeah.

And then a bit later, they put a kind of video camera up and found that there was water voles there.

So it just shows that it works.

Great.

Okay, that's good.

I thought you were going to say it was just drafts having a picnic in the summer.

Sorry, Colin.

I was looking at the relationships between tea and animals, you know, like tea pests.

And there's actually certain types of tea which rely on tea pests to be made.

There's the tea green leafhopper, which is one of the main attackers of the tea plant.

It also has lots of other names.

It's called the tea jacid or smoke boy or jumping boy.

And actually, you get special tea, which waits for the tea green leafhopper to attack it, because then tea releases these chemicals.

It releases very specific chemicals depending on what it knows is attacking it.

And the chemicals it releases when it's attacked by this creature actually make the tea taste quite nice.

So if you get it at the right time, you get,

for instance, something called dong ding oolong tea, which actually I think it's pronounced tung tongue-ding, but I like the idea of changing the phrase ding-dong, dong-ding.

It's like, you know, what's he called, Leslie Phillips.

Leslie Phillips.

If Leslie Phillips goes through that layer of salt water,

he goes, dong ding.

Dong ding.

If you need to know who Leslie Phillips is.

If you don't know who Leslie Phillips is, then why are you listening to this right now?

That's very good.

Anyway, apparently it tastes like honey.

Google HQ is going to freak their nuts when they see the spike on Leslie Phillips surfaces later on.

It's been a Leslie Phillips event.

The shothole borer

is a tea pest.

Shothole, I said.

Its Latin name is Ewellasia fornicatus.

Oh dear.

Do you know how it got the name fornicatus?

Anyone can guess?

It was the only, it was the first specimen found in the act of having sex.

Was it shagging the scientist as he discovered it?

No, it's because the word fornicate means arch-shaped.

Does it really?

It does.

Fornix in Latin means arch, and so it's nothing to do with fornication, as you guys thought, apart from that the word fornics also meant brothel.

Because brothels were often found in vaults.

Oh, wow.

And that's why we get the word fornication.

So if you're not.

So, if you're not actually in a vault, it doesn't count as fornicating.

I'm hearing a legal loop bowl here.

Your honor,

may I present the flat roof,

which exonerates my client.

One of the guys responsible for tea, particularly Assam tea, was Robert the Bruce.

Yeah, specifically a Scottish man called Robert Bruce.

Oh, God, sorry.

Middle name there, I don't suppose.

No.

He's just Robert Bruce.

He was a Scottish man who was in India in the 1820s.

His story is quite boring, actually.

No spiders involved, no battles.

He does share a moderately common name with great Scottish heroes,

but not the same.

Similar.

Similar.

Similar.

Yeah.

Great.

You saved us all a minute of time, actually.

No, thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

I was reading about ways that farmers try to avoid using pesticides and use nature or whatever they can in order to help their crops.

And one of the methods that's used is there's an army of ducks that people hire in order to eat all of the pests.

So quite famously in Cape Town in South Africa, there's a wine estate where they employ around 2,000 ducks that every morning they walk from their little duck homes all the way to the vineyard and the ducks spend a full day there just eating all of the worms and all of the pests.

Why don't they keep the ducks next to the vineyard so they don't need to walk all the way from their duck homes?

Well, it's the cost of accommodation, isn't it?

You've got to commute sometimes.

And you want to separate work from personal life as well.

They get up at 7 a.m.

They all march as one to work at 10.30.

They spend the day eating the snails and the pests back home by 4 p.m.

10.30 until 4?

Yeah.

Come on.

Oh, bloody hell.

I think they should, actually, the bosses should be tracking the web a bit more.

They get back home by 4.

They leave at 7.30.

No, no, no.

They get up at 7.

They go to work at 10.30.

They're back by 4.

So they're knocking off at 2.30, I'd say.

But here's the thing as well.

So these are runner ducks.

And so what it means is that they've got great speed on them.

So if they see a snail going for a leaf, they can get there.

But

an ordinary duck, there's no way it could catch a snail.

You need a special runner duck.

So here's the thing, though.

They have to hire, along with the ducks, to come with them, a bunch of geese who act as bodyguards to the ducks.

Oh my god.

Because this is a cartoon.

This is something I've seen on TVs.

This is the old woman who swallowed a fly, some warped version of it.

Who's guarding the geese?

The old woman who hired a duck.

What the fuck?

She hired a duck.

So the problem is that the ducks get spooked really easily if they're eating the snails and so on.

Let's say an owl comes by.

Right.

A geese's job is to scare away the owls and all the other animals that come in.

Because apparently, as soon as a duck sees an owl, it just freaks out and they all go scattering and running away.

It causes chaos.

So yeah, but here's the thing.

It's used for many different kinds of fields and farms.

But the one thing it's not used for is for tea leaves.

And it's because you have to pick something that the ducks themselves aren't going to want to eat.

And they apparently love tea leaves.

I cannot believe the climax of this story is that tea is the one thing that does not involve this very convolutive process.

And the really interesting thing is, this is nothing to do with what we're talking about.

It is.

This is a pest control, but they can't use it for tea leaves.

You know what I saved it a minute earlier when I'm talking about Robert the Bruce?

Oh my gosh.

No, look, it's a pest.

It's transgender.

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Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna.

My fact is that the first railway in Greenland was built to transport a meteorite.

Hmm.

First and one of the only, I think.

Lots of places say the only, but James, I think you might have found some other rogue railways in Greenland.

Oh yeah, found all sorts.

So there'll be the Greenland Railway section later.

But

this is a really interesting story, which I found after some seriously in-depth research.

Actually, it took me ages to get there, but eventually on the back of an innocent smoothie bottle.

Hannah.

Yeah.

Why are we getting our facts from innocent smoothie bottles?

I read this and I thought.

Because Anna's clearing on a side hustle advertising deal with Innocent Smoothie.

I'm not saying that it's any better or worse than other smoothies, but it wasn't where the fact came from, but it led me to it because it said in 1894, an explorer found a meteorite on the sensibly named Meteorite Island.

Funny, bit of humour from Innocent.

He decided to take it home, because it's the biggest ever, but weighing 58 tons, it took three years and a new railway to get it back.

While it got there in the end, this guy's story has taught us a lot, mainly that it's better to stick to the lighter things in life.

Innocent smoothies have 30% lighter on natural sugar.

This smoothie is a lot easier to carry home than a meteorite.

That's a shoe, Horn, isn't it?

Rockhorn.

That's a shoe.

Oh, it's an amazing fact that the Brontes all died from drinking graveyard water.

What that reminds us of, Innocence, is that actually life is not never-ending.

You should enjoy every second of it.

And why not enjoy the next few seconds by having this delicious, innocent smoothie?

I thought it was one of the best crowbars I've ever seen.

Actually, have you tried the innocent graveyard smoothie?

It's

an acquired taste.

A lot of body.

Anyway, so I thought, that's what the hell are they talking about?

That's absolutely loopy.

But then, no, looked into it.

And this was from an expedition in the 1890s into Greenland.

It was by the explorer Robert Peary.

And he was led by Inuit guides to a meteorite that people had been hearing about for almost a hundred years, but hadn't quite been able to track down.

So the Inuits knew where it was and used it a lot, as I'm sure we'll talk about.

And other Europeans had got there, tried to find it.

Eventually, he found it, and the biggest piece, which is called Anigito, was so heavy that he had to construct kind of a little railroad by laying down lots of timber and then putting steel rail tracks.

I think it was sort of two mini bits because he had to build one bit of railroad road to sort of push it up the hill.

Then they rolled it down the hill to the harbour.

And then, once on the coastline, then they had to build another railroad over a bridge that they constructed to get it onto the boats.

Wow, that's amazing.

He went to enormous lengths to steal this quite important artifact.

He does.

So that's one way of looking at it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's not a quick heist, is it?

It's quite noticeable.

Yeah, because he took all three, I think.

And I think are they still to this day at the American Museum of Natural History?

They're in different natural histories, I think.

One of them is.

The biggest one is in the American Museum of Natural History.

And there's tens of tons.

And his name means tent, doesn't it?

And then he took the other two slightly smaller ones called Dog and Woman.

Yeah.

And the people there, they had hammer stones and they would chip off bits of the ore and that would allow them to put tips on their spears and that kind of thing.

It was the sole source of metal, right?

In

the afternoon.

But yeah, he didn't.

He did steal it.

And when he got back to New York, he made a lot of money off of it.

He sold it for $40,000, which is roughly 1.3 mil in today's money, the equivalent.

But before he did that, when the boat docked, he'd set it up as like a circus thing where you would come and visit to see come see the meteorite.

And he would charge a quarter for every person.

it's probably more exciting than your jar of eDNA at the zoo

but still it's a big rock but 20 20 000 people went to see that and he charged them a quarter a piece to go and touch it or have a look at it and so that's about five thousand dollars at the time which again is about 150 000 so became very rich off his stolen item when he sold them he was he was selling them to raise the money for another journey north that's what he was using the money for yeah he was desperate to get to the north pole he was desperate to get to the north pole basically there were claims for a long time that piry was the first guy to get to the north Pole.

Yeah.

And those claims are not true.

He did not make it.

Oh, you're saying shortly, Howie.

I mean, I am on your side here.

Yeah, well, okay.

All right, let's put it this way, right?

His triumphant expedition to the North Pole, as we're called it,

was in 1909.

And the evidence is as follows.

The only people who witnessed him are four Inuquit people who were all sworn to secrecy and his manservant, Matthew Henson.

His diary was inconsistent.

He didn't record the readings that would have have proved where he got to.

He also was a 54-year-old man with no toes due to frostbite.

He would have had to manage three times the average speed the expedition had achieved earlier on under less difficult conditions.

That record has never been equaled in the history of Arctic exploration.

He would have had to travel 70 miles a day.

No explorer has ever covered this ground over the same number of days.

He didn't get there.

If he had got there, it's not even him who really did it.

It was Matthew Henson, who was his partner, who sort of got shunned from history and from that trip to the point where he was sort of seen as a manservant.

They were partners, and he was an amazing explorer himself, Matthew Henson.

It was because he was black that he was sort of not given the credit.

There's lots of thoughts about whether or not he got there, but Wally Herbert is the British expedition leader who went there to try and use the calculations to see if he managed it.

He claims that he didn't, but in the process of doing it, Wally Herbert then claimed to be the first person to do it.

Well, I think

Wally Herbert is definitely a legit explorer.

Whether or not his claim that Peary didn't make it is true or not is different.

I think he definitely made it.

But what's amazing is when you travel and you're trying to get to the North Pole, the problem is that you're on a moving body of land, aren't you?

The ice is just constantly moving.

So when Wally Herbert was trying to get there, you would take a reading of where you were after an hour and suddenly you were eight kilometers further away than you were because of the way the ice was shifting.

But the thing is, like, he was what?

At the very end, I remember reading, he was something like, was it like 130 meters from the north pole, and he was kind of on his hands and knees.

But luckily, some small fishes had made holes that he could drag himself.

So, one of the amazing things with Wally is that he, um, I think they even passed it at one point and not realized, like, when they were having a sleep, they sort of just they just like the drift took them over it.

Yeah, so they woke up and they realized that it was achievable to get to in the day.

So, they sent a telegram to the Queen saying, Your Majesty, we have got to the North Pole and the first British to do it.

Risky, because they haven't actually done that.

Because they haven't actually done it.

And the rest of the day became a chase to get there so that the Telegram wasn't a lie.

And they managed it, but just.

They only just.

It's good to set yourself these challenges sometimes if you've got a deadline.

I often say, yes, I've researched three of the four facts of this week's show.

That's all fine.

But it is in America.

It's very controversial because they, you know.

Well, Piri.

Well, Piri got there in a lot of people's opinion.

So don't say it.

Opinions don't get anything.

Well, you're going to be getting a lot of emails.

Podcast at QI.com.

Bring them on.

I'll be surprised if the emails make it to my inbox.

I imagine they'll stop about 70 miles short.

It was all kind of unedifying, I think.

It was that real desperation for fame and glory, and it was so competitive.

And, like you say, with Henson, Henson probably, if they did get there, Henson claimed to have got there first.

So Henson went for a stroll, I think, when they were at what they thought was roughly the North Pole.

And then Henson came back.

This is according to Henson's diaries.

Henson came back and was like, oh, wow, it's so cool.

I'm pretty sure I just wandered over to it, and I was the first person to be sitting on top of the world.

What a dick move.

He's about to go for a stroll.

You're just going to go for a quick.

Well, then, so Piri's like, what a dick move.

And so he snuck off, took two of the Inuit guys of the four, snuck off and found his own way to what was his own home.

You sneak off in a completely featureless environment.

That's almost more impressive, actually, to find a way of sneaking.

There's one big tree just hidden behind it.

Piri doesn't seem like a great guy in a number of ways.

It's weird because I haven't got that from you that you think that.

So one of the other things he did, and this really is the truly shabby thing.

So he persuaded in 1897, which was his,

that was the meteorite nicking

trip, heist,

he persuaded six Inuit people to return with him to America, kind of so that they could be put on stage as part of a lecture series.

Four of them died shortly after arriving of TB, and the youngest one was called Minnick, and he was adopted by an American family.

Minick was given an American name.

He was named Minick Peary Wallace.

And several years later, many years later, he was at the American Museum of Natural History and he came across some bones in the ethnographic department, which was his father's skeleton,

which Peary had simply sold to the museum as a kind of display piece.

Minnick obviously wanted and fought very hard to have the skeletons returned for a ritual burial.

The museum refused and Peary eventually paid for Minick to go home, but the family's skeletons weren't released and buried in Greenland until until 1993.

Yeah, but did you see that they gave him a fake burial first?

Yeah.

So when Minick came over and his father died, and Minnick said, I need to bury him with the proper Inuit rituals,

they gave him a bit massive log wearing sort of big furs, disguised as his dad.

Disguised as?

Sort of shopped ahead on his book.

Yeah, yeah.

They pretended it was his dad they were burying.

I guess maybe you don't get up too close.

Yeah.

So he thought he buried his dad, and it was a few years later, I think, when he's like, huh.

Can I tell you about another railway on Greenland?

Because this is all getting a bit dark.

Yes, yes, good idea.

Good idea.

There's basically a few that have been built, and they're mostly like small ones just to transport fish from

the fishing place to the place where people live.

They're not very big, you know, it's not like a huge railway going through the country.

But it's not a tiny one where like carriages for fish.

The fish sits in a tiny fish chair.

Yeah.

It's not that.

But there's a coal railway in Greenland and it's on Disco Island.

Which Disco Island is the second largest island island in Greenland after the main one.

It's one of the hundred largest islands in the world, but I'd never heard of it until this week.

Disco Island.

Can any of you guess how Disco Island got its name?

It's in Greenland.

I mean, this feels like another Fornican's trap, doesn't it?

I mean,

Disco.

It's completely circular.

It's shaped like a disc.

One theory?

The people there, they do the macarina.

That's where we got the macarina.

Yeah.

That's not a common theory.

And also the macarina.

Light bounces off the snow, much like a disco ball.

Very good.

Not a theory.

Rounded is a theory.

Another one is that it's short for Discovery Island.

Another one is that the mountains are quite flat on it, so they look like desks.

Desco Island.

Excuse me.

Desco Island.

But the most common is probably that it was named after a guy called Marmaduke.

He was an English explorer and whaler, and that it was originally called Ducky's Island, and then Duckho's Island, and then Dicko's Island, and then Dusko's Island, and eventually Disco Island.

Wow.

Okay.

So it's not the next Magaloof.

If anyone's gotten it on a map,

put the tickets.

So I got one more fact on Peary.

Explorer Robert Peary brought Vaseline to the North Pole to protect his skin from chafing and his mechanical equipment from rusting.

Yeah.

And I found this fact on a Twitter site called at VaselineFacts.

Which is, yeah, which is a great handle.

Unfortunately, it only lasted for three tweets.

You got the others?

Yeah, but they're not really that interesting.

So the word Vaseline derives from the German word Vasa, water, and the Greek word aleon,

olive oil.

Did they do the one about how in South America the movie Greece was called Vaseline?

Oh, they should have.

They should have, but no, they didn't.

They kind of just ran out after three.

And the only interaction that this Twitter account at Vaseline Facts had was just one response to their tweets, which after the one I just told you about how it got its name, someone just wrote back saying, didn't ask.

And

that was from at fuck Vaseline Facts.

Wow.

To be honest, if I'd set up and then instantly got a reply from at fuck Andrew Hunter, I would have stopped immediately.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can hear my podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All the previous episodes are up there.

There's links to our upcoming tour dates.

Do check them out.

If we're coming to a city near you, we'd love to see you.

Also, if you don't like the adverts that you heard over the course of this episode, guess what?

There's a new option to get rid of them.

You can join Clubfish either on the iTunes player.

There's an option where you can subscribe to that, or you can go to our new Patreon page where, as well as ad-free episodes, we're going to have things like bonus content where we do extra shows, where Andy curates the mailbag.

All the interesting questions and facts that you've sent in, we'll be answering.

That will be hidden in Clubfish, so do check it out.

It's going to be fun.

Otherwise, just keep listening here.

Podcast will remain free.

We'll be back next week with another one of these.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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