434: No Such Thing As Robinson Two-Soe

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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 Coverant Garden.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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 favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is Andy.

My fact is that the first man to use the word avocado in English was a pirate.

Avocado.

Avocado.

That just sounds like you saying it normally, though.

Wow, okay.

This is a guy called William Dampier, and he was an explorer.

He lived from 1651 to 1715, and

he was lots of things, actually.

He was a hydrographer.

He was a scientist, a writer, a naturalist, Royal Navy captain.

And we have a picture of him.

It's in the National Gallery.

It's the only 100% genuine portrait of a British pirate.

So he's, you know, he's quite...

Does he have a parrot on his shoulder?

Yep, eye patch.

He's biting a gold doubloon.

And

sort of making someone walk the plank.

Yeah.

No, I don't think he is.

I think he looks like a normal man.

But

he was a pirate, among lots of other things.

And he wrote this account of the avocado pear tree.

And that's in the OED.

And when you look under avocado, his entry is the first one.

He gave a little report about the avocado and said how nice it was.

How many entries are there for avocado then after his one?

Well, loads, because the OED sort of gives, they give a load of definitions.

When it's like cited instead of definitely, yeah, it's about five or six.

But I think there's only one definition.

I'm not sure you've got like the verb avocado in there.

This isn't the definition.

This is the citation.

Yes.

He actually has over a thousand entries in the OED.

Of all the things that he has in the OED,

I looked at them all where he's the first citation.

So the first example we have, he was the first person to use the word thundercloud.

Wow.

Which is quite good.

To frape the verb.

Facebook.

A frappe.

Is it a frappe?

He used the word meaning to bind bind tightly.

Soy sauce as well.

Soy sauce, which is my favourite.

Chopsticks.

Chopsticks, which are my favourite utensils.

And a lot of this is because, I guess, he was travelling so much.

And, you know, he was writing reports on his travels, and so he was coming into contact around the world with a lot of words not previously known to English.

So that's part of the reason why.

Well, I think that maybe even more amazing thing about him is that he had a great recipe for avocado, which involves smashing it to pieces and adding sugar and lime juice, i.e.

making guacamole.

He was such a hipster.

He gave us guac.

Although, the tragic thing about him is he wrote so much about guacamole that he was never actually able to afford his own pirate ship because he just spent so much money on the

front page as well.

So always start renting those ships, doesn't he?

So these words, he wrote quite a few books, but he had a very, very famous one, which was A New Voyage Round the World, which was a book that was so influential that Darwin took a copy of it onto the Beagle with him.

And, you know, is it this one book where we get a lot of these?

Most of them are from that.

That's pretty cool.

I think that was his main book.

I think he wrote lots of other random stuff, but yeah, that was his big one, wasn't it?

And it was really popular.

It was 1697.

And it was when he'd gone round the world for the first time, was it?

And then he went round another two times.

And it was full of food recipes.

He was a foodie.

He was a big old hipster foodie.

Barbecue, cum quat, tortilla.

And he included recipes of what was the best thing to do with them.

So he really recommended flamingo tongue, if you're ever in the market.

He said it's very good, it's lean and black, and it's neither fishy nor unsavoury.

Yummy.

He also ate armadillo, which he said tastes a bit like land turtle, if you're not sure.

Oh, like land turtle now.

He ate prickly pears, right?

Which is a type of cactus.

And he said that it turned his urine so red that it looked like blood.

Yeah.

Okay, well, I actually have some prickly pear candy at home.

So I tried some yesterday, and I'm yet to experience any red urine.

But I thought I'd bring you all some.

Oh no.

So urine?

Or is it a small vial James is getting out of here?

I've got some prickly pear candies that I thought you might want to munch on if you feel like.

Oh my god, they're delicious.

And they're very red.

They look a bit like Turkish delight, don't they?

I'm a huge fan of the show and tell element of the podcast now.

I really like James's experience corner.

That's good for the listeners.

I really enjoy them.

They taste a bit like fruit pastels, to the past.

Yes, exactly like that.

I'm really excited because I got these at Christmas and they've just been sat there because I didn't really want to eat them because they're made of cactus.

I finally got an excuse to.

They're so good.

He also used to eat sea turtles, but he had a preference for the ones that were grass-fed.

Is that an ethical preference?

Or you don't want the ones that are grain-fed and kept in cages?

Yeah, exactly.

No, he just said that they're the best of that sort, both in largeness and in sweetness.

So quantity and taste.

And it's just quite amazing to imagine that this guy, who was a pirate, let's remember,

was going around saying, can I get grass-fed turtle queens for Donat?

True, yeah, yeah.

He wasn't a very good pirate at first.

His first act of piracy was an absolute disaster.

So it was like the British government was giving him permission to take over Spanish ships, wasn't it?

Yeah, he was a bit more of a privateer, a sort of licensed pirate than a blackbeard.

The Spanish would call him a pirate for sure.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

From there.

The Spanish would call him a lot of things, wouldn't they?

Well, he and his fellow buccaneers, they attacked a Spanish fort.

It was very exciting.

They managed to take it over, but the townspeople had left with absolutely everything valuable.

So it was a complete disaster.

And lots of his voyages were failures, actually, financially, but he was always making observations, writing down recipes.

And it was basically long-distance book research that he was doing.

It's not what you've sent him for, is it?

I haven't got you any gold, but I've come back with Delia Smith-esque tones.

So, well, Delia Smith actually used to be

mercenary.

She was a sigma of fortune in the 80s, but a lot of that was recipe collecting.

Another thing that William Dampier did was he was the first British sailor to reach Australia.

He got there way before the first fleets got over there.

And weirdly, he has a few moments that we don't really give him the sort of acknowledgement for.

There's this weird passage in his book where he's in the Galapagos and he's looking at the turtles there.

And he's saying, oh, they look a different breed.

And I wonder if that's helping towards their mating and so on.

Just writes a few random lines, just sort of suggesting that there's sort of evolutionary benefit to the way that they're shaped, without naming that specifically.

But so he says these suit their environment because they look like this.

Exactly, yeah.

Got it.

Which is just so Darwinian.

And Darwin had the book.

Nice.

He became very famous, which is a nice, once his voyaging days were over.

He went to dinner with Samuel Pepys.

He lectured at the Royal Society.

And the last bit of Gulliver's Travels is based on his journeys in part.

Did he meet like a tribe of giants and all that stuff?

That's the second book of Gulliver's Travels, not the final book.

That's one's a bit more normal.

It just contains talking horses.

Well, he was in South America and he did see some horses there.

He said, here they have several horses.

But what is most worthy of note is a sort of sheep they have, which the inhabitants call Conera de Terra.

The creature is four foot and a half high, and they're frequently ridden by two of the lustiest men.

of the area, he said.

And he's almost certainly talking about llamas, we think.

So he's one of the first people to see llamas from the West.

Cool.

What a life.

It's very difficult when you read about him because he was in many ways quite a bad guy.

I thought it was a very good thing.

Oh, he is a Spanish person.

I've been talking to some of my friends in Madrid, and he did not go down well there.

He, as anyone in that period, it was nuanced to say the least, relationship with the natives that he met at various places and wrote some pretty awful things, for instance, about Australian Aboriginals.

As a leader, as well, he was pretty widely disliked.

We should say the thing maybe he's most famous for today is that he was also responsible for Robinson Crusoe, essentially, because Alexander Selkirk, who we think Robinson Crusoe is based on, was on his ship and hated him so much, or thought that he was very bad at maintaining the ship, and said, I think this ship's going to sink.

I'm not going to get on it until we fix it.

And I think it was Dampier who said, no, the ship's fine.

Yeah.

We can sail this ship.

So was this halfway through a voyage?

You mean basically?

Halfway through a voyage.

So basically, they were going around Cape Horn, and this guy, Selkirk, said, Don't go around Cape Horn.

It's a terrible place to go around.

There's always storms.

It's high winds.

It's like the middle of hurricane season or whatever.

We can't do that.

And then they went, well, we're going to do it anyway.

And so by the time they got through, all of the ships were a little bit bashed.

And he was like, these are going to sink on the way home.

Get me off here.

Get me to wherever the nearest island is.

I want to go to the nearest island.

And so they sent him to the nearest island.

And as he got in match, the other ships started to go away.

And he's like, I've changed my mind.

I've changed my mind.

And they were like pretending they couldn't hear him and sailed off.

What?

What?

Sorry.

You love it.

I read Robinson Crusoe a year or two ago and there's no mention at the beginning of it that he was a really annoying backseat driver.

It's very sympathetically presented in Defoe's book.

Well, to be fair, he had a bloody good point because the ship sank shortly afterwards and most of the crew died.

Even the rest of the world was annoying when the backseat driver turns out to be right.

That's really frustrating.

Didn't Selkirk then get picked up four years later on another ship that had dampier on it?

Yeah, he did.

Imagine that.

He's like, wildly talking to it.

But then when he got back on that ship, he realised and he was like, no, I want to be marooned again.

And they eventually talked him around.

As if he genuinely was.

That sounds like a joke, but yeah, he genuinely did say.

Set me off.

As they picked up Selkirk, they managed to find a Spanish fleet, didn't they?

And they managed to get a load of treasure from them, a load of booty, which meant Selkirk got a load of money and he could retire when he got back to Britain.

So he came home, he was very rich, but he couldn't quite readjust to society because he'd been on this island for however long, being a Robinson Crusoe guy.

And so he went to Scotland and spent 15 years living in a cave.

Oh my god.

Which feels to me like a missed sequel to Robinson Crusoe, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Robinson Crusoe lives in a cave.

I think it's got all the promise of a disappointing second series.

I got it like Robinson Tusso.

Yeah.

Is what I would call it.

Nice.

I like it.

Well, you write books now, can't you?

So, Dampier, the first person in the OED to mention the word avocado as we say it today.

But before that, they had different ways of saying the word.

So we kind of get it from the Spanish word.

People would say aguacata or aguacado and stuff like that.

You can see online a big list of all the early times when people mentioned this fruit.

They start in 1562, going to the 17th century.

And in 1660, they talk about this poem that was written by Abraham Cowley which mentions avocados but they don't say what the poem is.

None of the places say what the poem is and that really intrigued me.

I'm like, why are they glossing over this?

So I found this poem.

A fragrant leaf the aguacata bears.

Her fruit in fashion of an egg appears.

With such a white and spermy juice it swells

as represents moist life's first principles.

I said that's a completely flawed description.

Are we sure they didn't want the avocado?

I've never got white juice swelling out of my avocado.

Is there no spermy juice in your avocado?

No, am I not leaving it long enough to ripen?

They had different types of avocados.

The one that we eat now is a Haas avocado most of the time.

Right.

And this was an old kind of one that you would get.

And some of them were white and egg-shaped.

I think the main crime there is rhyming swells with principles.

Do you think?

Which is

not.

That's what offends me the most, apart from the spermy juice.

Do you know

there's a Haas avocado board who are are the official authorities on Haas avocados, which are the ones that almost everyone eats today?

And they have huge amounts of data on their website about avocado consumption.

US-based mainly.

So is that why that guy was following me when I went to my local organic shop to buy some avocados?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah.

Would you say it's very spermy, sir?

It's quite spermy.

Very spermy.

Too spermy.

They released a bit of research recently that they found that avocado shoppers divided into several distinct tranches.

The people who buy no avocados, first of all.

They're not really interested in avocados.

They're quite.

They're moderate shoppers.

Then they have mega shoppers who buy a lot of avocados.

But above them, there's a top tier ultra shoppers.

Wow.

How many do you have to be going through to get to an ultra shopper level?

I think it's achievable.

I go through six a week.

Stop it.

We do about the same in our house, yeah.

I think you guys might be a new category.

No, so ultra shoppers in America spend $100 a year on avocados.

Oh, I spend way more than that.

Well, there we go.

The ultra shoppers go to the shop 183 times a year, and one trip in seven, they buy an avocado.

Okay, well, I have a cardo, so I don't go to the shop.

Oh my god, it's a cardo named after avocado.

Oh my god, avocado.

All they say is avocado, isn't it?

Why does everyone use it?

It's avocado.

It's all replacement products.

We didn't have your pint of milk, is an avocado.

We didn't have a pint of milk.

What you've got is a bit spermy.

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

Ny fact this week is that there's a Puerto Rican island where monkeys roam free but the humans have to eat their meals in cages.

It's like Planet of the Apes.

It's like a reverse zoo.

Is it like Planet of the Apes?

It's like both the things we just said.

Yeah, it is like Planet of the Apes.

The apes keep the humans in cages in Planet of the Apes.

God, I always confuse it with 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Sorry, I haven't seen Planet of the Apes.

Sorry, we're getting sidetracked.

Yeah, so this is, it is like a reverse zoo, sort of, in that it's an island called Cayo Santiago off the coast of Puerto Rico, and it's a research centre.

It was started in the 1930s.

Basically, it's full of monkeys, and humans are not allowed to go there unless they are researchers.

And it's part of the discipline of it.

You really can't disturb the monkeys.

It has to be like they're living completely wildly.

They're rhesus macaques.

And so, if you're going to go and eat a meal, you can't just do it out in the open where you could get in their way if they want to, you know, cross your path.

So, they sit in a cage and eat their meal.

And the reason for it as well is because this is such a deadly island to humans.

If you go there, the reason it's a deadly island is because the monkeys there have herpes, a kind of herpes.

Sorry, it's a deadly island because monkeys are herpes.

Darling, I'm about to tell you: it's good news and bad bad news.

Wait, what's the good news?

The good news is I didn't catch it from a person.

Does it count as cheating?

What from a person?

Well, that brings me on to the bad news.

I have a question.

How am I going to catch herpes from a monkey?

Do I have to use the same toilet seat as them or what?

Well, no.

Why is it dangerous?

It's dangerous because they might use you as a toilet.

So

that's the problem.

They can transfer herpes via their urine.

So if it makes contact with you, they can transfer it via their feces.

And, you know, Reese's macaques love to throw feces at people.

So, you know.

So if you do happen to catch herpes and you need to go to your partner and say that you've got it, you can say, I caught it off a monkey throwing poo at me.

Exactly.

There's a legit reason.

Someone right now, I bet, is dealing with this dilemma on the way home.

You better have been on holiday to India.

Because me and you, Andy, once both held a koala, didn't we?

And they're riddled with chlamydia.

Yeah.

So that would be a reasonable excuse for that as well.

You could come home with all the STIs after a tour.

Blame it on.

The local animals.

And the gonorrhea is

from a millipede that I met in San Diego.

Really nice legs.

Really nice legs.

Just to wrap up, the reason that the cages are in place is because, for that reason, if you're eating your food, the monkeys will desperately want to try and get it off of you.

And so the cages are to protect you from getting herpes while you're eating your meal.

Okay.

The story of how they got there is amazing.

It's really cool.

So they were brought over from India in 1938 and it was for scientific purposes, wasn't it?

There was a scientist called Clarence Carpenter, which is a great name, who was responsible for bringing that, wanted to study the social groups and such like.

But the Second World War was about to break out.

So this ship with 500 monkeys on it...

This ship just must have been...

I want to see a movie about the journey.

Yeah, yeah.

Because they wanted to go through the Suez Canal, but they couldn't because tensions were high and the war was close to breaking out.

So they had to go around the southern tip of Africa instead, and it turned into a much longer journey.

The voyage lasted way longer than it was meant to.

It lasted nearly 50 days and he was on board with them all the time.

And have you seen the one photo of him on board?

No.

He's wearing a bathing suit.

It was quite odd.

I don't know if he was going for swims in the Pacific on the way over, but yeah, Clarence Carpenter.

Begging for herpes.

If that was a movie, I'd love to see it as sort of like a William Dampier pirate sort of trying to take over this ship that just turns out to have 500 monkeys.

So you've got the two stories kind of weaving in and out of each other, and it ends with a pirate attacking the monkeys and catching herpes.

The most ambitious crossover in movie history.

Gandhi was very much against them, wasn't he?

What against them taking them?

Against them taking the monkeys.

Life magazine did some articles when it was established.

And in one of them, they talked about Gandhi preaching against the exportation of India's sacred rhesus monkeys.

Yeah, and eventually they banned it.

Yeah,

not for quite a few years after Gandhi had died.

They used to have people living on there, so the first caretakers of the monkeys were this couple called the Tomalins, and they kept one of them as a pet called Pijita.

And yet, the rest of them, well, I don't know what's better, being a pet of two humans and stroked constantly and fussed over by them, or just being led to live your life, left to live your life.

But anyway, they that's a really philosophical question, isn't it?

Isn't it wonderful?

Are you happy with servitude?

Or would you like freedom?

Yeah.

When you put it like that, it's actually quite an idea.

But the bars of the cage are made of gold.

And, you know, there's a nice bed in the cage.

And

then on the other side, freedom.

Yeah.

Who of us can say what bars surround us?

Well,

you know, what compromises are.

I can say what bar surrounds me most nuts.

So I think the monkeys all had this conference, this chat, and they nominated Vegeta.

But Michael Tomlin sounded quite fun.

he would apparently regularly swim the one kilometre channel back to the mainland would drink a fifth of vodka i actually don't know what what is a fifth or well that's what

that's what eminem says in that uh stan is it he goes i just drank a fifth of vodka dare me to drive i think he says that who says that uh minem

i think so so it's obviously enough that you're going to be drunk i can't believe this guy michael tomlin is cooler than we are in that he gets Eminem slang about it.

He lives on a monkey island.

He's way cooler than we are.

What are you talking about?

I think American listeners will be writing in droves very shortly to explain exactly how much fifth is.

Just so we're clear, in the UK, we don't use

schema.

And this was in the 1930s.

Anyway, apparently it wasn't even vodka.

People just said that because he was Russian.

He actually preferred rum and coke.

So.

Okay.

Anyway, he'd swim over and then swim back, presumably hammered to the island where his wife was looking after the pet monkey.

These days, there are 2,000 Rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago, but also, I find this so creepy.

Almost all of them have tattoos.

Yeah.

Sorry, that's not the creepy bit.

It's a bit creepy.

It's a bit strange.

They haven't chosen to get a tattoo.

That's even creepier, arguably.

Is it?

Oh no, what's creepy?

What are they tattoos of?

They're not.

It's scientific stuff.

There's an iHeart.

No, sorry.

It's not scientific stuff.

Yeah, like

E equals MC Scud.

Yeah, yeah.

That kind of stuff.

Oh, sorry, that's not the creepy bit.

The creepy bit is that the island is also home to a collection of 3,300 monkey skeletons.

You mean the dead monkeys?

Dead monkeys.

Well, yeah, obviously the dead monkeys.

So what they didn't do is bring in the monkeys and say, what would they like around them?

What kind of furnishings can we have?

I get a fish tank.

You know, a skull often a skull.

You never have a dead fish in a fish tank.

You never have a giant dead fish that's coming in and asked.

It's creepy.

Okay, so the question is, why did they not take away the skeletons or bury them or what exactly?

And I guess, well, they still need them to study them, as in such a long-running research centre now that you can study generations going back, and you can obviously study the bones of the monkeys that lived there before.

But I think it would be creepy if they had a cool mausoleum full of all the monkeys gathered.

They don't have that.

No,

yeah, I don't think mausoleum makers are allowed on the island because I know that research project is going to get funding.

But that's a good scene for the Dampier Monkey movie, where that's where the treasure is buried.

It's like at the goonies, you know, the currenties.

Wow.

So, anyway, some food for thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want to see these sick tattoos that the monkeys have.

Einstein with his tongue out and his bicep.

They do, I mean, it is a really important island because they do discover stuff.

We haven't just dumped monkeys there and sort of forgotten about it.

And I think it's sort of like a rite of passage.

If you're a monkey researcher, I reckon if you said to your monkey researcher mates, hey, I'm doing a Cayo Santiago research project, then you'd be the coolest kid in town.

So some stuff they've discovered recently is that after any kind of trauma, scientists now think that we probably age by apparently up to eight years.

And this is based on

it's a spurious link, but that's what scientists do.

This is based on Hurricane Maria, that awful hurricane in 2017, that it killed a lot of people in Puerto Rico, didn't kill any of the monkeys, but totally destroyed the island.

So all the trees are blown down, there's no shade.

The average temperature on the island rose by eight degrees.

Oh my gosh.

Rough.

Because they take blood from the monkeys all the time for scientific reasons.

They had the samples before that they could compare to the samples afterwards, and they looked at lots of markers in the blood and the immune system and the proteins, and they found they showed signs of aging by about two years just from that hurricane.

Wow, because they were stressed about it.

What and humans live much longer and humans?

In human years, apparently.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's another monkey island which is in Liberia, which is a bit sad because it was a monkey island that didn't have any natural resources.

So the monkeys there had to be fed daily by the researchers.

So they would bring bananas over every single day.

But then in the 1990s, there was the war, and as a result, the research unit fled, and these monkeys were just left on their own.

And so they had no one to feed them except one guy called Joseph Thomas, who for the last 40 years has been going twice a day to this island with bananas and feeding these

beautiful monkeys who come into the water to him.

And he knows them by names like Mabel and so on.

Mabel and so on.

Mabel and so on.

Made examples.

Mabel's the headline.

Mabel.

Edith, Prudence, Aggie, you know, normal.

Very funny.

Did you hear how Joseph Thomas was recruited for the job?

I don't think so.

So this was in the 70s, and this was another research island.

It was set up by a woman called Betsy Brockman, and she was trying to find a vaccine for Hep B.

And she actually did come away with the vaccine for Hep B, although she's since said it's actually a bad idea to test on animals.

But at the time, she set this research island up in the 70s, And I think it was her who recruited Joseph Thomas because she went to him and said, I really want to learn to play tennis.

You're good at tennis.

I also need someone to help me on my monkey research.

And they made a deal where if he taught her tennis, he would work on her monkey research.

Now, I know that sounds

a very one-sided exchange.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, we'll do a deal.

If you do all this work, I'll also let you do all this work.

It was basically that.

You know, you know, there is an island where you've got lots of potential tennis partners you can go to.

Monkey tennis, anyone?

I've been to a monkey temple in

Nepal.

And that's another place where there's just monkeys everywhere.

They're just kind of running around and stuff.

And when I was there, you kind of have to keep hold of your stuff all the time because I saw a monkey stealing someone's mobile phone and their bag and then running to the top of a huge building.

And then the local, the guys who were kind of in charge had to come with a big stick and prod him, and then someone climbed up to get the mobile phone and stuff.

So, do you know?

This is something Ethan, our fellow researcher, told me yesterday,

that they know that mobile phones are more valuable than, let's say, something less valuable.

I don't know if they know an iPhone's more valuable than a Nokia, but they did a study at another monkey temple.

So you think you'd be completely safe if you went there, Anna, because your phone was made in 1983.

I've got nothing desirable for the monkeys.

You actually wouldn't recognise your phone as a phone.

They did this amazing study over, so they filmed monkeys for 270 days in bali at this one temple.

And they realized that when monkeys take something off you, they negotiate with you for food in exchange for it.

So they take your phone, and then if you give them two bananas, they give it back, or whatever.

And by watching them, they realize that you know the higher the value of the item, if they're still on a phone rather than a camera case, then they'll barter for more bananas.

Wow, that's really clever.

It's really good, isn't it?

It's incredible.

Terrifying.

Have you guys heard of Snake Island?

Oh, where is that?

It's off the coast of Brazil.

And it's called Ilha da Cuemada Grande.

And it's completely dominated by a special kind of snake.

Special kind of snake.

A particular kind of snake.

They're golden lancehead pit vipers.

Oh, gosh, they sound scary.

Dangerous, maybe.

They are dangerous.

They're venomous.

Their venom melts the flesh that they bite into.

And they evolve venom to incapacitate and kill the seabirds that land on the island.

They are not nice snakes.

They can climb trees, which helps them to eat the birds that they love to feed on.

And on this island, there is about one snake per square metre.

Wow.

What?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

A lot of them will be in the same square metre, though, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

It's not one every square metre, but nonetheless.

They're not perfectly arranged like on a chest.

They're playing a huge island-wide game of snakes and ladders.

Yeah, yeah.

It's very hard to win.

It just sounds completely terrifying.

Why would you stay there if you were a bird?

My great.

I don't think they're reading TripAdvisor and thinking, oh, I'll risk it.

Like, they're just flying and they end up there.

Yeah, but get back.

Tell the others.

I've been to a rabbit island.

Have you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Near Hiroshima, it's like just an island full of rabbits.

Wow.

It's not a research island.

There's just loads of rabbits there.

In Sydney, where I live,

we used to have a rabbit problem down in the northern beaches, Palm Beach, and you used to drive down at night and you'd put the headlights on of the car at high beam and you would just see what what were in the daytime empty fields just

like packed like they're at Glastonbury.

It's really honestly, it's quite scary because you walk down the street in this Japanese island and the rabbits just follow you because they're used to being fed by tourists.

And so you sort of turn round and there's 20 rabbits behind you and you kind of walk a bit faster and you turn around and there's 30 rabbits behind you.

That's really scary.

That is a good horror fan.

What STI did you get off there?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 14th century Italy, if you wanted to insult a nearby city, you would send all your prostitutes to take part in a running race around their walls.

I don't have any prostitutes.

Well, you've just been in a war, probably, with that city.

You probably picked up a few on the way, is the truth.

I didn't know I was into that.

So I saw this in a book called Running Through the Ages by Edward Sears.

And we're talking, so Middle Ages Italy, you've got loads of different areas owned by different people.

So you've got the Papal States, you've got Sicily, but then you've got places like Florence, Pisa, Siena, Lucca, Milan, Genoa, all those kind of city-states, you would say.

And from around the 13th century, for about 400 years, we seem to have this really odd tradition of whenever you're battling with another another city or you've beaten them and you want to celebrate that or you just want to you know stick it to them you would have a running race around their town and it's so weird and there were lots of different versions of this but one of the biggest insults was you would get a load of like mules or donkeys and then you would get all your sex workers either from your city or ones that you picked up through the war and you would just get them to race around

it did sound a bit like because armies as you say they would they would gather the sex workers and they would bring them along for the battles, even.

You know, if the armies were facing off, we would have them do races sort of in the front.

And they said,

that's why they're here, darling.

That's why they came when you brought them.

So this is all fake news.

I do.

This didn't happen at all.

The wives turned up to surprise their husbands one day and we came for the races.

Shit.

The point of it, as far as I can tell, is that it was a big collective screw you to the other city that you're.

That's it.

Yeah, yeah.

And so

they would do loads of different things so one of the things they did they would gather outside the city so you gathered outside the opposing city state then you would find the oldest tree in the area and you cut it down yeah which is a symbolic castration apparently i know and then they put the tree on a wagon and wheel it up to the city like just really up close like look that was your tree and this is your penis exactly yeah and then they would go to the stump of the tree and they would start minting coins on the stump

okay so i know i know the base of your castrated penis we're going to make coins and then then basically, what they were saying was, we're going to change the currency that you operate in.

We're minting coins.

And some of the coins would, I think, depict.

A picture of someone minting a coin on the URL on that tree.

Yeah, but it was this whole...

I think they'd show them being vanquished, wouldn't they?

Or they'd show humiliating scenes for the enemy, these coins.

But the tree thing does imply that there's a lot of explaining to do when you show them the tree in the city.

You have to say, this is your oldest tree, guys.

They go, oh, is it?

Okay.

Tell which was your oldest tree.

We've counted the rings.

We think it's pretty old.

It was your tallest tree, but that might have been a different breed.

Actually, that was.

Shut up, shut up.

And then one of them says, okay, so.

And then you have to say, no, but metaphorically, it represents us castrasing you.

I don't know how upset you're going to be.

This is starving.

Also, are you yelling to the top of the guys wall?

It's a hell of a complicated conversation.

We're sending messages on paper aeroplanes over the wall.

Look, forget the penis thing.

We're talking about the coins now.

It doesn't matter about the penis thing.

Moved on.

All right, raise the prostitutes.

Release the prostitutes.

Well, the thing with the prostitutes is it was slightly more literal in that they would often race around land in the city, even.

And so that you're basically saying, we can do what we want around here.

You know what?

You think that you own this place?

We can run our prostitutes.

I read an account of the prostitute races not being just for when you're sieging and at battle.

You would do it in

generally around town.

So like there would be kings who would use them to do it as a display just to show a sort of minority of society doing something a bit derogatory.

Humiliating.

Yeah, just to sort of push the point of like, I'm the king and I'm running this place.

And what's interesting about it is, so there was one that was done where the race would end up at St.

Peter's Square.

In Rome.

Yeah.

And so it was done there.

This is in the 1500s.

You don't get that these days.

I don't know if you've been to St.

Peter's Square, but the Pope is not going to like that.

So this is 1503.

and it wasn't just prostitutes who were part of the race.

It was, you know, elderly people were in it.

Children were in it as well.

They would all be naked, but the prostitutes would be wearing underwear.

It's very odd.

Underwear was very racy in those days, wasn't it?

Underwear, I think.

More racy than having your eye.

Genocide hanging out.

I believe because a lot of people didn't really wear underwear.

I'm going off memory here, but a lot of people didn't wear underwear, but prostitutes would wear them because it's a nice bit of

what might be.

Scantily clad is saucier than nude.

Yeah.

know.

Yeah.

It depends on context.

It does.

But you know, Adam and Eve, just innocent, pure first people alive.

Adam and Eve wearing a kind of

thongs made of leaves.

Suddenly sexy.

Yeah.

And that was the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Using the snake as a garter.

Yeah.

That's a sexy thing now.

Well, it depends if it's one of those pip vipers.

Yeah.

Finch melting.

So they weren't even half, they were just naked.

Or even half naked.

Because people do seem to be described as half-naked a lot.

Doing it.

And it's all too,

it's all just about insulting and humiliating, isn't it?

And I read quite an interesting description of why this was so common in Italy, these taunting.

And it's because, obviously, Italy wasn't Italy, the country until extremely recently.

It was just loads of city-states.

And so warfare was quite different to a lot of other places because it was just city-states against each other.

So it wouldn't be this lots of action on these big battlefields and seizing lots of territory.

It was pretty much just sitting there besieging a city.

So you just sat doing nothing for months on end.

So you had to think of other things to do to make them feel bad.

Like a sports day, yeah.

It's a sports day.

Beggar the spoon race, bring out the prostitutes.

They should do a sack race because you're trying to sack the city.

That's where it comes from.

That feels like a trick you play as a besieged city, persuade them all to climb into sacks.

It looks like the original Trojan has the Trojan sacks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

5,000 sacks.

And left out the front.

With heads.

The other really interesting thing in the source that you sent round, James, was about the ribbalds.

Oh, the ribbal.

Yeah.

So I didn't know.

If you get like the word ribbaled that we use today, so ribbled is in, you know, like rude, rude and raunchy, a bit of a ribbled joke.

Ribbolds back then were people in, like, low people in the army, seems like.

And they would do these races with the prostitutes.

Or I think they were sort of pimps as well sometimes.

So they were, I guess, tasked with sourcing the prostitute sometimes.

And they seemed to do kind of all the low stuff that other people, like the knights, wouldn't want to do.

So they would have to drop their pants in front of the enemy and shout swear words.

Well, it's very hard to drop a suit of armour.

It's like dungarees, you have to do it all over the shoulders.

It's so annoying going to the loo.

So they'd shout swear words at the enemy, and

they'd scale up the walls, responsibly with scaling up the walls, because they didn't really get given many good weapons.

And the pillaging, a lot of the pillaging, which is a bit ungentlemanly, the ribbals would do.

They were kind of like your first, they were like cannon fodder/slash first line of attack, right?

Yeah.

But yeah, really interesting.

And I did find it really interesting that they would be the pillaging because the knights couldn't really pillage because you were a knight, so you couldn't really do any of that stuff.

They could go in and they'd grab a load of stuff and then just gamble it away, wouldn't they?

Yeah.

Which I'm surprised because I think what it smoothed over, because I know that knights return from warfare with a lot of stuff that they've stolen.

I reckon they had a sharp word with the ribbalds after they'd done the purging and said, All right, hand some of that over, right?

Sure, you're right.

Surely the uh, the ribbolds were nicknamed the knights of shit

because they were just

absolute base grunts in the army.

Yeah,

darling, I've got a job, I'm a knight.

I'm a knight.

You definitely put the end of that in your business card.

The word knight will be very big.

The Ipang Palace is in China and there would be people, soldiers in armor who would kind of be sieging the palace and the people inside the palace would taunt them.

Why do you think they might do that?

To come towards the gates.

Is it because they're taunting them to get to the point where they pour the boiling oil on their heads?

It's close to that actually.

Okay.

It's quite close.

So the people inside are taunting the besieging positive as well.

Yeah, so you want to get your eye.

But it is getting them close, right?

Okay, so it's either going to be like spikes come up through the grounds

or they're going to then say, ha ha, the tree is actually that way.

You've got miles to run.

That's good.

They're wearing iron armor.

Oh, it's a magnet.

It's a magnet.

What?

The gate.

I kind of thought that was a joke.

The gate is a magnet.

No, not strong enough to suck them in our toes.

This is what the stories of the time say.

That their gates were made of lodestone, which attracted iron.

And so whenever the soldiers came near it, they would kind of be all over the place.

They couldn't move properly and stuff like that.

And so the people in the palace would go, ah, fuck you.

You can't even come close, can you?

God, so could you wake up in the morning one day, go outside your castle, and the nighttime commando army who tried to take over just plastered around the house.

Every morning you just scrape the knights off the wall, yeah.

It's not sticking them directly to it, which was actually your comedic version of that.

Actually, it just makes it more difficult for them to run around.

Oh, wow.

Would it feel a bit soupy?

That's a suggestion.

I mean, but no, this actually happens.

Well, I know, you know, when you put two pencil rubbers, I know it's like a weird force in between.

But there's no way, this Chinese propagandist who was making this up a thousand years ago or whatever, there's no way they actually had magnets strong enough that an entire army starts crumbling.

I gotta say, I didn't think Lodestone was a real thing.

Well, you can get magnetite, for instance.

What Chinese people would call lodestone in these accounts, we think probably was magnetite.

Oh, okay.

But it's interesting then if that came out as a rumor of being truth, because then if you were approaching the castle and you had your armor on, you might take it off, thinking, I don't want to get sucked up on the wall.

You'd start just feeling a bit awkward about whatever you were doing.

You know, when you can't move anything right, you know, you just, because you're feeling embarrassed.

Yes, so you'd start thinking, oh, well, this is probably the magnetite making me move awkwardly.

And then you move more awkwardly.

Yeah.

What?

Like a placebo effect.

Like a nocebo.

Yeah, like a nozzebox.

Like a nocebo.

Although I do like Dan's version better, which is you're worried about it, you take your armor off, and then you just get attacked.

That's clever.

Oh, did you?

You must have read that story, but if anyone didn't read that story a few weeks ago at Hadrian's Wall, it was one of my favorite news stories in years.

Please look it up because you need to see the visuals.

But basically, archaeologists were digging around at Hadrian's Wall recently and they found this volunteer, actually, volunteer retired biochemist called Dylan Herbert found a 40-centimetre-wide sort of block of stone with an engraving on it, which is a flawless cock and balls.

Like, it looks stunning.

The best a 12-year-old boy could master.

And underneath it, it has the word Secondinus Kakor, which is just like slang, Secondinus the shitter.

Just perfectly written there.

1700 years old.

And that's there.

Secondinus, that's how he's remembered.

And the BBC Article reported that the experts who uncovered this believe the phallic image alongside the quote adds to the force of the written insult.

Undoubtedly.

Imagine that.

Second Dina's like, we don't know anything about this person, right?

We know one thing.

That is the most successful bit of insulting history.

That's the dream of when you insult someone.

That's great.

Poor guy.

The guy, actually, the guy who found it, sorry, it sounds so fun finding it as well.

This old guy said, only when I removed the mud did I realise the full extent of what I'd uncovered.

And I was absolutely delighted.

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

My fact this week is that a member of the Romanov royal family, Prince Rostislav Romanov, lives in Hastings as a painter.

His friends and wife refer to him as the artist formerly known as Prince.

Brilliant.

That's very funny.

That's a wonderful little gag.

It doesn't work, does it?

Because he's never been a prince.

The Romanovs were gone a long time before he was born.

Yeah, but they were, absolutely.

But he and they still are trying to sort of suggest that maybe one day they can return, so they're keeping the titles and they keep it alive.

So is he technically a prince?

Does he call himself?

Does he style himself as a prince?

Yeah, he does.

I think he does interviews as a prince.

He talks about the royal family in exile they have as part of the romanov surviving family um a head who would be the heir apparent to any return that would be made of the family so yeah i i would say he is he is a prince so he was born overseas from russia um all of the romanov family had to leave um and as a result none of them have ever lived within russia apart from the ones who were brutally murdered by the bolsheviks of us yeah they're still

leaving isn't it

um nowadays he finds himself living in Hastings, where he is an artist.

You can go on his Instagram account.

Quite like his art, actually.

It's pretty fun.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah, and he does interviews occasionally to talk about his relationship with the family and what's going to happen one day and how they might return and so on.

Is he plotting a comeback?

It's worth a try.

I would say it's actually not worth a try.

I have to say.

I would not be wanting to invade Russia right now, I don't think, as an artist living in Hastings.

I wouldn't back my chances.

Well, here's the thing.

There are attempts occasionally to bring them back into power.

So we were just talking about monkey islands.

Someone actually tried to set up a Romanov island, and this

was the Pacific island of Kiribati.

And the idea was that they wanted to take over this island, turn it into a sort of a resort.

But they said, Could we revitalize the royal family and have them rule over here?

So, they tried to have monkey islanders.

It was a Russian MP.

Yeah, he was called Anton Bakov, and he was quite critical of the Putin government.

And Putin said, Bakov!

Yeah, and he wanted three islands.

They were uninhabited, so they would have been a great place to kickstart the whole Romanov dynasty again.

And the islands were called Molden, Starbuck, and Millennium.

Starbuck.

I know.

I don't know why.

Moby Dick thing or something.

There must have been a Moby Dick.

You would think Moby Dick thing.

And also, can we just pick up on Anna calling Starbucks a restaurant chain?

She says a lot about your standards.

Oh, Anna's taking me to a restaurant tonight.

Oh, great.

I wonder which one.

Just Just seven coffees for dinner.

That's what I have.

No, he wanted to make a kind of micro-nation, but I think the Kiribati government refused.

They said sovereignty is not for sale.

Well, he was also talking to the Gambia and apparently had support of Yaya Jame, who was in charge of Gambia at the time.

And that was to construct some artificial islands off the coast of the Gambia.

Do we know what his plan is after?

I see that that bit is easy enough.

You go to a tiny island where no one lives and you declare yourself the czar.

How are you going to then go from there to ruling Russia?

You've got to have a base.

I would argue that perhaps his long term might not even be to take over Russia.

It's just to have the Romanov Empire back.

Oh, it's a bit sad.

Imagine if you called back the Romanovs and showed them some crappy little rock in the Pacific and said, this is what your empire is.

Well, he also bought some land the side of the Vatican in Montenegro.

So he's training it in loads of different countries.

Okay, nice.

I like that.

It's like risk, you know?

You just plot yourself and it looks like nothing's going on and then suddenly a couple of moves and you've taken over the world.

I don't believe you ever won a game of risk.

Dan is playing risk and trying to negotiate for three uninhabited islands and Kiribati.

Yeah.

Prince Philip, linked to the Romanovs?

Yeah.

In fact, so linked to the Romanovs because when his parents got married, Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was at the wedding.

And his great-aunt Ella became a nun.

Prince Philip's great-aunt Ella became a nun and after her death became a saint.

And they were always rather proud that they had a saint in the family, which I think is fair enough.

Yeah, that's quite fair.

Do you know what she did?

What were her

saintly moves?

I don't know what her miracles were.

No, no, no.

That's all I know.

Philip was used recently, wasn't he, just before his death, for a blood sample to confirm the identity of what was this?

It was.

Bones of the Romanovs were contested, and the scientists were trying to work out whether they really were the.

I think

they were in Katerinburg, and they were attacked by the Bolsheviks, and

they killed all of this family but there was two of them who were supposedly breathing when they took the bodies away and there's a suggestion that those two had escaped.

Now when they found the bodies they found all of them apart from these two bodies and they tested them and they realised they were the Romanovs so that kind of gave fire to the conspiracy theory but then they found another two bodies nearby and that's the recent test that they did and they found that they were related to the Romanovs.

Because one of the supposed princesses lived for many decades, didn't she?

And always insisted that she was the surviving

daughter.

Oh, there was Anastasia.

Yeah, you were talking about the kids' film.

I actually didn't know about that film.

Anastasia was one of these two people, and

there was a hoax.

There was someone called Anna Randerson who claimed to be her.

Yeah, that's it.

That's who I'm at.

And she got really famous, I think.

Yeah, she did, yeah.

But it turned out she wasn't.

No.

It is strange being descended from defunct royalty, isn't it?

It's a very, very strange life.

There was an Asker Newsweek saying that London is actually the hot destination for most.

It's heaving with the family.

Throw a brick.

Well, I guess it's because

we haven't retained a royal family.

Most of the other countries sort of haven't.

It's also one of the really flashy royal families.

I think British people don't appreciate how

high

investment the British royal family is compared with the other European royal families.

Oh my god, they're so humble.

They've got a little cottage.

But there are only about half a dozen monarchies left in Europe, I think.

And the British one is the sort of biggest ticket.

It's a biggie.

Yeah, it's a biggie.

And people have been coming here since people started deposing royal families.

Obviously, it became very trendy from like pre-Second World War and then under communism, of course, in Eastern Europe, they didn't love having the kings and queens there.

I think King Zog of Albania was stationed at the Ritz for a long time after he was forced into exile.

Speaking of Zog, there is a crown prince of the Albanians today.

That is Lika Anwar Zog Reza Badowin Miziziwe Zogu.

And this is the person that should the Albanian royal family ever come back, he will take over.

It's quite a good name, isn't it?

I'd love to see him turning up at customs, basically, and opening his passport and then opening the next wing of his personal trampoline.

Do you think he has a concertina thing?

He has to wind little hands.

Windy little trumpet.

But it's really interesting because Anwar, part of his name, is named after Anwar Sadat.

And yeah, And Reza is named after Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was the last Shah of Iran.

And so he's basically taken all of these names from all the different deposed people and then put them into his name.

His parents have.

He basically lives in Tirana anyway, capital of Albania, and he has a little royal residence.

It's quite a nice house, but

it's not a mansion.

It's not a palace.

And when he opens his gate, he has a little yard there.

And inside the yard, it's all the unwanted statues from the last you know, hundred years that they got rid of when communism fell.

So, there's like a statue of Hodger and a statue of Lenin and Stalin and stuff like that.

It's funny that he's got them as the

well, they're like, Who's gonna want these?

And they looked at his name, and they're like, Oh, he'll want them.

And it's kind of that's kind of sad, isn't it?

Because, in a way, he's the final statue, you know.

He's a sort of purposeless one day, he'll just walk through the garden and freeze, won't he?

Oh,

that's a nice fairy tale.

That's really good.

Yeah, I really like, do you know of Princess Kamatari of Burundi?

No.

So she moved to France in the 1970s, and she did this because her father was assassinated, and then the King of Burundi was assassinated in 1972.

So she fled.

She went to France, where she became the first ever black supermodel in France.

Oh, really?

And there might have been others, but she was really the first one who was going on the front of magazines.

Yeah, and so on.

And she says that obviously it was her.

connection to the royal family that got her the gig because the magazines at the time were basically only putting on blonde hair, blue eye models, but she was brought on as a princess.

So she said, you know, I could have been black or blue or a crocodile.

They would have put me on because I was a princess.

And then people thought she was so beautiful that she became an actual model.

So she did that for years and years and years, but then she moved back to Burundi because she thought, you know what, I'm going to run for president.

So she set up a big campaign where she was going to try and become president of the country.

And I love that one of her priorities as the presidential candidate was to bring back the monarchy.

That was like a really bit.

Well, that's good if you're open about it, I think.

Yeah,

that's if you're obviously campaigning for it.

I was just looking at wondering what the weirdest fate of a descendant was, and I was reading about the daughter of Romanian King Michael I, who had to abdicate in 1947.

She's called Irena Walker, and in 2014, she was done for staging cockfights.

Really?

That's her life, man.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Wait, so when you say staging, you just mean putting them on.

You You don't mean like fixing them.

No, but very often fixed.

Yeah, but that's another level of illegality, isn't it?

Not only were you doing a cock fight.

It wasn't even fair.

She's very successful at it, it sounded like.

She used to charge spectators $20 each.

She lives in Oregon.

She lives in Irogon, in Oregon.

Brilliant.

Stop that.

Good stuff.

And what's her name?

Irina.

Irena.

Irena in Irogon, in Oregon.

And yeah, she charges people to watch roosters fight with knives attached to their legs, and the winners would get up to 18 grand.

The Greek royal family, they were abolished in 1974.

So they were exiled overseas.

And one of the princes, Prince Nikolaus of Greece, was discovered in 1995

working under a pseudonym as a production assistant for Fox News.

Really?

The channel.

And yeah, so he'd been working there as this production assistant.

And the only reason he was outed is because they were doing a story about his brother, Prince Nikolaus's brother, getting married.

And they saw there standing as one of the groomsmen, their production assistant.

That's amazing.

They're like, what are you doing here?

Oh my god, that's incredible.

I was reading about Crown Prince Otto of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor.

He would have been the Crown Prince of it.

Okay.

Is he current?

Is he alive?

No, he died in 2011.

At the age of, I think, about 99.

He was really old when he died.

So the Austro-Hungarian Emperor was dissolved when he was, I think, about seven years old.

But he was officially the King of Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Prince of Transylvania.

That's a good one.

It is a pretty good one.

His name was Franz, Joseph, Otto, Robert, Maria, Anton, Karl, Max, Heinrich, Sixtus, Xavier, Felix, Renatus, Ludwig, Guyan, Pius, Ignatius.

Was his dad Jacob Free Smugg?

Can I just say Maria in there is a weird one, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

I noticed that.

I think I didn't read the full thing when I was.

Just copy-paste it, and then when you're reading it out, it's like surprised to me.

Although maybe that was their excuse as well.

I didn't fully read this.

But also, he had Karl Max in his name.

Karl Max.

Yeah, he is.

Yeah, yeah.

But he, so he was, you know, seven years old.

The Empire is dissolved, which he's the crown prince of, technically.

Yeah.

So, um, and he had to kind of rebuild his life.

And he, you know, he learned seven languages.

He became an MEP, which I find interesting.

Really?

That's a fall from Grace, isn't it?

You're going to be prince.

That's an MEP.

That's a very good ballot as well, isn't it?

Yeah.

When you've got all of his name on.

He actually got the votes of about 17 different candidates because they thought it would have been a paper.

I'm going to vote for Maria.

And I love this bit of his history and in his life so he he he had a really interesting life um he helped organize the pan-european picnic of 1989 okay which is a little known bit of the end of the cold war and it was a it was uh on the border between austria and hungary so you've got you know free market west on one side and communist zone on in the east and uh thousands of people came and sort of gathered there to have a kind of cross-border picnic as it were and then actually 600 east germans just moved into austria they just sort of fled across the boundary

like Like during the picnic kind of thing.

Like, my boy, you'll ketchup.

Oh, you know.

Oh, sorry.

I was just running away from a wasp.

Yeah, yeah.

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 were said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at ShribeLand.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thingasafish.com all of the previous episodes are sitting up there waiting to be listened to we've also got links to the final leg of our nerd immunity tour up there go see if we're coming to a city near you and if we are come along it's an awesome night and we'd love to see you otherwise come back next week we'll be back another episode we'll see you then goodbye

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