Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I have increasingly
Speaker 2: gotten bad at opening. You would think normally when you
Speaker 2: do something thousands of times, you get better at it,
Speaker 2: but sometimes you just get worse at it, because how
Speaker 2: do you keep opening the podcast? You know, I've already
Speaker 2: done the what's cracking my peppers? We've already reached the
Speaker 2: highest highs that a man can reach, not just in
Speaker 2: podcasting but in life in general. So there's there's nowhere
Speaker 2: to go.
Speaker 1: But want to I want to try hello and welcome
Speaker 1: to Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 2: I don't think that. I don't think any podcast has
Speaker 2: ever opened that way?
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 2: Is that why we don't get awarts?
Speaker 3: I prefer ha dah.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was pretty I was like out of a
Speaker 1: Sandler status.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there you go, and he got to be in
Speaker 2: uncut gems. You know, maybe I'll get to be an
Speaker 2: uncut gyms. I could be. I could have a gambling problem, Sophie,
Speaker 2: I believe in me.
Speaker 3: I do believe that you.
Speaker 1: Could have a gambling problem. But we don't let you
Speaker 1: touch the money.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I can put it all on black, Sophie
Speaker 2: twenty one black. I think that's a roulette term. Anyway,
Speaker 2: speaking of roulette, every time we pick a new guest,
Speaker 2: it's roulette, except today, because today we have Jack O'Brien
Speaker 2: back on the pod, Jack the Guarantee, switch Jack the
Speaker 2: pro Brian.
Speaker 3: That's called a jackpot, and that is my catchphrase.
Speaker 2: Now it's nice.
Speaker 3: That's nice saying get back from the dead, and the
Speaker 3: dead you all forgot about him. Yeah. Of all the
Speaker 3: popular casino names that you could have associated with my name,
Speaker 3: roulette is definitely the closest, especially after you had just
Speaker 3: said twenty one. There's a game called black jack. I
Speaker 3: know they don't let you gamble, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, money, yeah, you got black jack.
Speaker 3: It's a jackpot. My name really slot slots in nicely
Speaker 3: with a lot of a casino lingo.
Speaker 1: Why have you not made a crypto because it's evil?
Speaker 3: Oh right right, I will tell you that is not why.
Speaker 3: It's a pure laziness and not willing to learn all
Speaker 3: the bullshit that goes along with it.
Speaker 1: I do feel like your co host Miles Gray could
Speaker 1: really sell amium coin. Oh hell yeah yeah, like come on,
Speaker 1: oh there it is, it's there. You did it.
Speaker 3: We did try and soft launch ZiT coin, and everybody
Speaker 3: thought it was a joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I tried to launch bastard coin. You just
Speaker 2: wound up making the president a lot of money.
Speaker 3: Basically what we all do every day. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, that that is kind of the point of everyone
Speaker 2: else in the country now speaking of making a lot
Speaker 2: of money doing evil things. Australia, that's the ship this week.
Speaker 2: It's an Australian bastard. Our Ozzie listeners have been begging
Speaker 2: for years, why not, Why don't you ever talk about
Speaker 2: Australians So many of us are terrible. It's always been
Speaker 2: my understanding that Australia is sort of like Texas, the
Speaker 2: country in a lot of ways, but just with fucking
Speaker 2: desert racing replacing guns and kangaroos replacing whateverdillos.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think anything replaces kangaroos. Anyway,
Speaker 2: We're talking about a lady named Eliza Frasier this week.
Speaker 2: That's our our bastard. And so Eliza is a lady
Speaker 2: who gets shipwrecked and then tells a bunch of lies
Speaker 2: about how the Aboriginal people on the island that she
Speaker 2: is shipwrecked on treat her, and those lies wind up
Speaker 2: cascading and playing a role in a lot of genocidal bullshit.
Speaker 2: So she's the bastard this week, and also the colonial
Speaker 2: state of Australia is a bastard. But it's a fascinating
Speaker 2: story about a place that I knew nothing about before
Speaker 2: I started reading about this. So we're gonna have a
Speaker 2: good time, Jack, you did to hear about some genocide.
Speaker 3: I the West? Mate. By the end, I will get
Speaker 3: here one good syllable of an Australian accent.
Speaker 2: Well, it's okay because Eliza comes from this era. She's British, right,
Speaker 2: Like she's a major figure in Australian history. But like
Speaker 2: the Aussies hadn't really figured out that accent yet, right,
Speaker 2: they were still just British people on a different place.
Speaker 3: They're not workshop people. I like the idea that they
Speaker 3: were just like intentionally in a room somewhere. That is
Speaker 3: kind of what happened with the received pronunciation, right, the
Speaker 3: British accent.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, a bunch of rich guys sat around in
Speaker 2: a room.
Speaker 3: Yeah. In Shakespeare in Time, the British accent sounded like
Speaker 3: the Baltimore accent, Like it was just kind of like
Speaker 3: engine birding and.
Speaker 2: Everyone sounded like a character in the wire.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah that sounds about right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yen's going down to see Shakespeare at the Globe.
Speaker 2: That that's exactly how Shakespeare sounded.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's so much of your tb or not to be.
Speaker 2: Yes, thankfully, Denzel's version of Macbeth really really delivered on that.
Speaker 3: But then they were like, we should sound fancy, and
Speaker 3: that's where we got to receive pronunciation. I don't think
Speaker 3: this is like exactly what happened. I don't think they
Speaker 3: had like a meeting where they were like, should we
Speaker 3: fancy it up? But they were just like it kind
Speaker 3: of sounds cool when we talk like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've missed you, buddy.
Speaker 3: My accent works so good. You've missed me and my
Speaker 3: accent work.
Speaker 2: That's also part of the the thing is like we
Speaker 2: could be shitty to everyone who doesn't talk right because
Speaker 2: they didn't go to Eton or wherever. Yes, why you
Speaker 2: have like received if you if you know British people,
Speaker 2: they can always tell you, oh yeah, that guy's rich,
Speaker 2: just by like hearing him. I know, whereas in America
Speaker 2: everyone just sounds like a California now.
Speaker 3: As we did it.
Speaker 2: Joe all up, speaker, let's talk about Eliza Frasier and
Speaker 2: this series of genocides. It's great stuff. Now, this is
Speaker 2: also kind of a story about conflicting versions of events
Speaker 2: can sort of spread through popular media because one of
Speaker 2: the things that's happens here is this lady gets rescued
Speaker 2: from being shipwrecked and starts telling a story that she
Speaker 2: changes several times, and a whole industry arises around telling
Speaker 2: that story because there's just a lot of money in
Speaker 2: lying about this, because it gets white people titillated, and
Speaker 2: so there's just a whole it like literally like a
Speaker 2: like it's almost like its own cinematic universe of lying
Speaker 2: about this lady being shipwrecked that starts out in the
Speaker 2: mid eighteen hundreds. It's very fun. But every version of
Speaker 2: events starts the same way, which is that Eliza Fraser
Speaker 2: sets sail on a boat called the Sterling Castle in
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty six. Her husband is the captain, and according
Speaker 2: to most versions of the story, although not all of them,
Speaker 2: she is Preger's, which I don't think i've ever set
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 1: I hate it, I.
Speaker 3: Really love it.
Speaker 2: I'm getting mixed reacts.
Speaker 3: The goosebumps that I have on my arms right now
Speaker 3: are because it felt so good and natural. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: Preger's Preger's McGregor's.
Speaker 2: Bereggor's McGregor's off. Only her last name had been McGregor.
Speaker 2: That would really have worked.
Speaker 3: I'm sure one of the people on the on the
Speaker 3: ship was named McGregor.
Speaker 2: It's god, anytime there's a British ship at sea, there's
Speaker 2: a McGregor somewhere on that motherfucker. So in May of
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty six, several months after setting sail, the Sterling
Speaker 2: Castle runs aground, not all that far from an island
Speaker 2: that at that point Europeans called it the Great Sandy Island.
Speaker 2: It's going to be called Fraser Island. Uh and uh
Speaker 2: yeah yeah yeah right. They name it after this lady
Speaker 2: who lies about it. It is to this day the
Speaker 2: world's largest sand island. So it's it's a pretty sizable island.
Speaker 2: It's about one hundred and eighty six miles north of
Speaker 2: Brisbane and today it's called Gharri. It is spelled k
Speaker 2: apostrophe j r I and if you go to like Wikipedia,
Speaker 2: it'll say it's pronounced gury or gury like g U
Speaker 2: r r i E. But I pulled up a video
Speaker 2: of like people who come from like the tribes that
Speaker 2: are indigenous to the island saying it, and they say
Speaker 2: it more like ghuri.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: So that's how I'm going to try to say it.
Speaker 2: Because they're rter than Wikipedia. It's also possible that maybe
Speaker 2: there's some like dialect differences and people. Yeah, anyway, I'm
Speaker 2: going to try to call it gary because that's what
Speaker 2: it sounded like in the video that I saw.
Speaker 3: Is Sandy Island like just sand? Is that uncommon? I guess?
Speaker 3: Is my question? Like I've been to islands that have
Speaker 3: sand on them, but like I did not realize that
Speaker 3: they were.
Speaker 2: It's common, but not for them to be this big, right,
Speaker 2: Like there's a bunch of sandy islands, but the Great
Speaker 2: Sandy Island is the biggest. One thing you got to
Speaker 2: give the first name Europeans give it is that it's
Speaker 2: at least accurate where they're like, well this is a
Speaker 2: fucking huge sandy island. Son of a bitch is big.
Speaker 1: Jack Imagine island but like more sand yeah.
Speaker 3: Well like even Sandier yeah, and even Sandier Island the
Speaker 3: sand you could call it the sandyst island the sandiest
Speaker 3: of Anakin Skywalker would hate this fucking island as a colonizer,
Speaker 3: I guess makes sense, so that people have been living
Speaker 3: on Gari for a very very long time, and at
Speaker 3: least some of what I've read, although I always take
Speaker 3: like European anthropology about Aboriginal people, a lot of which
Speaker 3: is written in like the sixties and seventies, with a
Speaker 3: grain of salt here, a lot of that kind of
Speaker 3: stuff that I've read said that in antiquity, at least
Speaker 3: the people who lived on this island did not conceive
Speaker 3: of a world outside of this island and this little
Speaker 3: chunk of the mainland that they kind of moved between,
Speaker 3: because they were like a lot of the people who
Speaker 3: lived on Ghari lived on Gary like part time and
Speaker 3: then would be on the mainland near the coast part time,
Speaker 3: would kind of move between the two right based on
Speaker 3: like the what kind of food was available in what season.
Speaker 3: Not uncommon around the world, most people who were like
Speaker 3: quote unquote hunter gathers or whatnot, were more like semi
Speaker 3: nomadic right where they would have places that they would
Speaker 3: like settle down in places where they kind of would
Speaker 3: grow food, but they would also move around based on
Speaker 3: you know, what the climate's doing and what kind of
Speaker 3: you know, food is available different chunks of the year. Anyway,
Speaker 3: I should start with some deep history of this island,
Speaker 3: which is again very imperfect, but it's it's better than
Speaker 3: not doing it at all. The peoples who lived on
Speaker 3: this island tended to pass on knowledge orally through song,
Speaker 3: So we don't have a complete understanding of their history
Speaker 3: because not all of the people who knew all of
Speaker 3: the songs survived to pass them down, right, because there's
Speaker 3: a genocide, right, But we do have quite a lot
Speaker 3: of information from these people in that restitution shadow by
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 2: Yes, a sizeable amount of their records, like we have
Speaker 2: their records of their very first European contract contact, which
Speaker 2: has been passed down four hundred like several hundred years
Speaker 2: through songs. Human beings have lived on what is today
Speaker 2: Ghari for more than fifty thousand years. There's no real
Speaker 2: way to get much more precise than that. And human
Speaker 2: civilization on the island in fact predates it being an island,
Speaker 2: because until about six thousand years ago it was still
Speaker 2: directly connected to the Australian mainland. Rising sea levels put
Speaker 2: an end to that in the fertile climate and bounty
Speaker 2: of aquatic protein enable it to support a meaningful permanent
Speaker 2: population of like several thousand people. Most casual histories of
Speaker 2: Ghuri tend to emphasize the isolation that the people there
Speaker 2: had from other groups of people. This does not seem
Speaker 2: to be entirely accurate. By the time Europeans arrived there,
Speaker 2: there were three broad tribal groups on the island, one
Speaker 2: of them the Bochola, which is usually spelled butcha La,
Speaker 2: but there's like three different spellings that are all correct
Speaker 2: because it's like an anglicization, right. So the Bachola lived
Speaker 2: on the mainland across from the Great Sandy Strait and
Speaker 2: in the central part of the island, right, so they
Speaker 2: would kind of go between different like the mainland and
Speaker 2: the island. And then there's the Dulungbara who occupied much
Speaker 2: of the south, and the Nulungbara in the north. And
Speaker 2: I was not able to find pronunciations for those latter two,
Speaker 2: so I'm doing my best on those. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 2: I've got Bachola right to some extent. Ghuri like occupation
Speaker 2: of Ghuri varied with the season. Mullet fishing was the
Speaker 2: major source of food, and during the height of the
Speaker 2: harvest there might be as many as three thousand people
Speaker 2: on the island, right, and then it's kind of like
Speaker 2: a snowbird situation, where like your full timers are a
Speaker 2: smaller chunk of the population. I don't think they had
Speaker 2: our vs. But otherwise that's more.
Speaker 3: Like anyways, Eastern like East Coast retirees are living the
Speaker 3: most similar lives to indigenous peoples of long ago.
Speaker 2: But right, right, traveling Florida and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, going between the Jersey Shore and Florida.
Speaker 2: I mean there are some ways in which that's right, right, right, people,
Speaker 2: like the idea that people would just live one place
Speaker 2: all the time is new.
Speaker 3: It is, And it's also like not that book The
Speaker 3: Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and Weng Grove, like
Speaker 3: they talk about how one of the key freedoms that
Speaker 3: they used to have that we don't really have as
Speaker 3: much anymore and don't really value is just the ability
Speaker 3: to be like, well this sucked, and like leave down,
Speaker 3: Like that was always the thing that people were just
Speaker 3: able to do, and then like entire communities would just
Speaker 3: like move if things got shitty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like it sucks here. Let's go calling
Speaker 2: himself King timed to bounce. Yeah yeah, Oh if only
Speaker 2: we could still do that. Buy an RV, become free everyone.
Speaker 2: That's the message of this podcast, Live on the Road.
Speaker 2: You know, there's no downsides. Everyone I know who lives
Speaker 2: in an RV is happy. It always goes well, it
Speaker 2: never goes badly. RVs are well made, they don't break immediately.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you the amount of times Robert suggested
Speaker 1: we get in a podcast.
Speaker 2: I think I think we should get a fleet of
Speaker 2: RV Could I could be a podcast commodore, Thank you Jack.
Speaker 3: Yes, just like a moving podcast studio. You just need
Speaker 3: like a small podcast studio to justify it, and then
Speaker 3: everything else is just sorry. Sophie is so mad at
Speaker 3: me for entertaining this.
Speaker 2: Like, oh, I love this idea we can cook lizards
Speaker 2: over open fires, Like mad Max. I think it's a
Speaker 2: good idea.
Speaker 3: It's just a thing that I can't get my wife
Speaker 3: to agree to, and so I'm like, oh, you should
Speaker 3: expense it.
Speaker 2: I mean, people, a lot of people are really hesitant
Speaker 2: to let their children live in a roaming RV. Come, okay, excellent, no,
Speaker 2: very good. So most of the sources I have found
Speaker 2: identify the islands Gari's first contact with Europeans as coming
Speaker 2: with the arrival of the notorious Captain James Cook. That said,
Speaker 2: there's evidence of several centuries of a regular contact with
Speaker 2: Europeans prior to James Cook showing up. This would have
Speaker 2: begun with Portuguese sailors around fifteen hundred, and there's evidence
Speaker 2: of some trade or other exchange of materials in Spanish
Speaker 2: lead that was found on the island, also dating from
Speaker 2: around fifteen hundred. It's a little hard to say. There's
Speaker 2: also like clay pipes that were made by the Dutch
Speaker 2: that would have come from the sixteen hundreds, but we
Speaker 2: don't really know. Does that mean that those people like
Speaker 2: Europeans were landing on the island and training directly, or
Speaker 2: that people who lived on the island who we know
Speaker 2: went back to the mainland periodically throughout the year. We're
Speaker 2: trading with other different groups of Aboriginal people who were
Speaker 2: themselves trading with these other Europeans, right, we don't really
Speaker 2: know that. As one of my sources, an article by
Speaker 2: the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes this could simply be
Speaker 2: yet evidence of trade between Gari and people with other
Speaker 2: parts of Australia. Over the generation, some of the peoples
Speaker 2: of this island developed a spiritual cosmology and a set
Speaker 2: of rituals around death that would later get them slandered
Speaker 2: as cannibals. And this is again something that I found
Speaker 2: in sort of anthropological studies. I don't think this is
Speaker 2: something that is known to at there's some debate on this,
Speaker 2: but there's some evidence that here, as well as in
Speaker 2: other places, when people's loved ones died, there was a
Speaker 2: degree of funerary cannibalism practiced, right. And another thing that
Speaker 2: was done that we know that was done was that
Speaker 2: like when people's loved ones died, they would be skinned
Speaker 2: by their family members before being buried, leaving what was
Speaker 2: called the true skin behind, which is like, as best
Speaker 2: as I can tell, like the fascia underneath your skin,
Speaker 2: which is kind of a shade of white.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's this like white colored substance between your skin and muscles.
Speaker 2: And as a result, white skin became associated with the dead. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is like part of a ritual for you know,
Speaker 2: burying your loved ones, and this kind of like whiteness,
Speaker 2: and when they see white people later they will be
Speaker 2: associated with the dead right and with death. Not entirely wrong,
Speaker 2: not entirely accurate. Kind of a helpful coincidence, yeah, in
Speaker 2: some ways. Yeah, As a paper from the Anthropological Museum
Speaker 2: of Queensland, edited by doctor Peter Lower describes, after this
Speaker 2: ritual was finished, quote, certain sacred portions of the deceased
Speaker 2: had been ceremoniously consumed by relatives. Carefully executed funeral rights
Speaker 2: would ensure that the spirit, like a cold wind, left
Speaker 2: the body before it was interred. According to Aboriginal informant Geyerbau,
Speaker 2: the Butchalla believe that on the following day the spirit returned,
Speaker 2: then the relatives would accompany it to a certain rock
Speaker 2: at bari Eba, which bore the impress of the foot
Speaker 2: of Bahraal, their ancestral being left behind when he had
Speaker 2: leapt out over the sea on his way to the sky,
Speaker 2: and from which place the spirits of their dead also
Speaker 2: followed him to the sky country. Two men, specially posted
Speaker 2: one at either side of the rock, would watch for
Speaker 2: the spirits release. If they witnessed the spirits jumping off,
Speaker 2: they would light a fire to make smoke in order
Speaker 2: to prevent the spirit from coming back to frighten the people.
Speaker 2: They believe that everyone went to the same place, and
Speaker 2: that apart from their homeland and the lands of other tribes,
Speaker 2: they knew there was no other place. So again, this
Speaker 2: is like you know, some older anthropology, but it corresponds
Speaker 2: with a lot of other stuff in history right now.
Speaker 2: And there's some controversy here because allegations of cannibalism, not
Speaker 2: just for the people of Ghari, but for like all
Speaker 2: of the different Aboriginal peoples in Australia will be used
Speaker 2: by Europeans as justifications for some pretty hideous acts of genocide,
Speaker 2: which has led to understandable pushback by modern day descendants
Speaker 2: of these people to assert that this is not an
Speaker 2: or accurate characterization of their ancestors. And usually what the
Speaker 2: Europeans are accusing them of doing is like hunting and
Speaker 2: eating white people right like a as like a predatory act.
Speaker 2: And this is like basically, all of these accounts are
Speaker 2: our lives, and we'll talk a little bit about how
Speaker 2: a lot of these lives come up that said funerary
Speaker 2: cannibalism was engaged in by many peoples of this area
Speaker 2: and all over the world. It is in fact nearly
Speaker 2: a universal human practice if you go back far enough
Speaker 2: anywhere on Earth. This is not the act of consuming
Speaker 2: people for food or even eating defeated enemies, both of
Speaker 2: which you can find different civilizations engaged in throughout history.
Speaker 2: Funerary cannibalism is something very different, and you might best
Speaker 2: compare it to something that many people in the West,
Speaker 2: including some people that I know, do today, which is
Speaker 2: having their body composted. It used to soil to grow things. Right,
Speaker 2: there are services people use that for today, and there's
Speaker 2: there's something kind of powerful here, both in a refusal
Speaker 2: to totally let go of a dead loved one and
Speaker 2: a desire to keep a piece of them alive with
Speaker 2: you in some way. Funerary cannibalism was a common practice
Speaker 2: in England about fifteen thousand years ago, and evidence of
Speaker 2: similar practices has been found in Ireland and Germany, in
Speaker 2: the UK and Russia, Belgium, Portugal, basically everywhere. Right, you
Speaker 2: can find evidence of this in almost every like human
Speaker 2: civilization on Earth if you go back far.
Speaker 3: And it kind of seems like a somewhat sophisticated idea,
Speaker 3: the idea of like you are turned into energy, like
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily like dust to dust, as the Whites
Speaker 3: like to say, you actually could be turned into energy,
Speaker 3: and you know, you became a part of us that
Speaker 3: a plant grows out of that gets eaten. And you know,
Speaker 3: I will say also as somebody who grew up in
Speaker 3: a strict Catholic household, cannibalism is not uncommon in the
Speaker 3: Western world, like they live for people who don't know Catholicism,
Speaker 3: Like they believe that they're you know, they're they're doing
Speaker 3: the sacrament up on the altar. Uh, they ring a
Speaker 3: little bell and at that point, the bread and wine
Speaker 3: literally turns into Jesus' like body and blood. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: that's what they think is happening. Yeah, I've tasted it.
Speaker 3: It's not Actually I don't want to anything for anybody,
Speaker 3: but it's uh yeah yeah, So I don't know, like
Speaker 3: like having fantasies of cannibalism that are supposed to be
Speaker 3: literal cannibalism at the center of your spiritual beliefs. But
Speaker 3: then every.
Speaker 2: Right, the way they do it's bad though. Is it
Speaker 2: just like a small piece of like a love That's
Speaker 2: what it sounds like based on the reading that I've done. Uh,
Speaker 2: And I mean it varies from place to place.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Again, this is something that we found evidence of in
Speaker 2: every continent, right, so, like you know, different and different
Speaker 2: groups of people probably had different attitudes is like which
Speaker 2: parts and how you do it, But it's a thing
Speaker 2: that occurs basically everywhere, right, And so this real practice
Speaker 2: is going to be part of like what gets spun
Speaker 2: out into these lurid stories of like predatory cannibalistic behavior
Speaker 2: that are one of the pretexts for the genocide that's
Speaker 2: going to come, right, Which is why talking about this
Speaker 2: at all. There's a lot of aspects of this that
Speaker 2: are really problematic, and there's some other real practices that
Speaker 2: get misinterpreted and exaggerated. For one thing, infanticide, right, there
Speaker 2: were like during times of starvation, and again this is
Speaker 2: not just something that Aboriginal people did in Australia. This
Speaker 2: is something all throughout human civilization. When everyone is starving
Speaker 2: to death, sometimes you kill a newborn baby because it's
Speaker 2: not going to be able to survive. Right, Yeah, Like
Speaker 2: we are talking about people who are living and with
Speaker 2: wildly different margins than we can conceive of, and the
Speaker 2: purpose here is not cruelty or some dark ritual which
Speaker 2: is again what it often got spun out that they're
Speaker 2: doing this for some sort of magic purpose. This is survival, right,
Speaker 2: there's simply not enough food.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Everyone who has ever lived has relatives, if you go
Speaker 2: far back enough, who had to make choices like this
Speaker 2: because it's it's hard to live as a fucking like yeah,
Speaker 2: and almost like a.
Speaker 3: Mercier kissing in some cases, right, like like they're going
Speaker 3: to starve to death.
Speaker 2: I don't know if we're going to live. This baby
Speaker 2: certainly can't, right, and so you you know, but what
Speaker 2: you have is you have these people who are calling
Speaker 2: themselves anthropologists, these Europeans traveling you know, through the continent,
Speaker 2: and who find evidence of this, and they're not really anthropologists.
Speaker 2: They're usually just like people with who are kind of
Speaker 2: rich and so decide they do that as a hobby
Speaker 2: and they wind up having their own biases or their
Speaker 2: own bigotry, and they just kind of like weave this
Speaker 2: story into ongoing narratives about how dangerous these people are, right,
Speaker 2: And so this thing that's like, well, yeah, sometimes people
Speaker 2: who are starving have to make hard choices gets turned
Speaker 2: into something else. I found an article on aboriginal Cannibalism
Speaker 2: in Queensland on the University of Queensland's website, written by E. G.
Speaker 2: Heap in nineteen sixty seven, so this would have been
Speaker 2: published at close to the peak of days of racist
Speaker 2: anthropology on this matter. And even in this article the
Speaker 2: author repeatedly points out how incredibly thin the actual evidence
Speaker 2: is for many of the cannibalistic practices that were claimed
Speaker 2: to be universal. Quote Thomas, who's one of the anthropologists
Speaker 2: in this period, recorded a case on the Gascoyne River
Speaker 2: in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was eaten and
Speaker 2: killed and eaten by a native who decoyed her away.
Speaker 2: She was very plump. The object of killing her was
Speaker 2: to acquire this desirable quality. Bleekel, who's another scientist, also
Speaker 2: referred to rare cases of the killing and eating of
Speaker 2: a young girl on a special ritual occasion. But his
Speaker 2: information is not documented. And that's the thing that you
Speaker 2: find over and over again is like, here's this lurid
Speaker 2: claim of someone being like eaten for this like ritual purpose.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence that this happened, right, Look.
Speaker 3: It's actually no.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we got to put this in some art, some
Speaker 2: newspaper articles, right yeah. And it's the same thing with
Speaker 2: like these claims about the killing and eating of white
Speaker 2: settlers by by these people, right, like, where a lot
Speaker 2: of these claims there's simply like not any evidence of
Speaker 2: there's evidence of like sometimes like people will be killed
Speaker 2: and their bodies will be left out and animals will
Speaker 2: get to them. But people will be like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: they must have been eaten after they were murdered, right, Like,
Speaker 2: stuff like that happens a lot too. I presume there
Speaker 2: are some cases of like people eating parts of defeated enemies,
Speaker 2: and because that happens in various parts of the world,
Speaker 2: so maybe that's the case. But again, over and over
Speaker 2: again reading this paper, it's just here's this like lurid
Speaker 2: story and there's no evidence.
Speaker 3: Those animals are so fucked up, I can't believe they
Speaker 3: did that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the explanation behind the dial ato paths.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, right, like monster must have eaten them. Their
Speaker 3: tongues were missing, yeah, eyes were missing. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: those are the soft there's animals.
Speaker 2: And they're hungry because it's snowy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when I looked into this paper more because like
Speaker 2: I found a bunch of cases where it's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's a larid story and he says and there's no evidence.
Speaker 2: So I decided to look at more into some of
Speaker 2: the sources for this paper who were making claims about cannibalism.
Speaker 2: And a major source in this paper is a woman
Speaker 2: named Daisy May Bates. Bates was an Irish woman and
Speaker 2: again a self taught anthropologist who expressed a mystic the
Speaker 2: best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds, oh sorry, in the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: and early nineteen hundreds, and she's this mix of this
Speaker 2: kind of like paternalistic sympathy towards aboriginal people, right, but
Speaker 2: also a lot of bigotry. And she becomes maybe the
Speaker 2: primary source during this period of claims about cannibalism. And
Speaker 2: it sounds reliable, sounds reliable. It's one of those things,
Speaker 2: and this is awful. What's frustrating. Discard everything she says,
Speaker 2: because she is one of the only sources of like
Speaker 2: ethnographic research we have on some some of these groups
Speaker 2: of people from this period of time. But we also
Speaker 2: know that she lies a lot. And in fact, I
Speaker 2: found historian Bob Reese is like, she does good work
Speaker 2: in some things quote with the notable exception of cannibalism. Basically,
Speaker 2: you can't listen to anything she says when she brings
Speaker 2: up cannibalism, right, like the stuff she has to say about,
Speaker 2: like languages and stuff that's useful with the second she
Speaker 2: brings up cannibalism, turn your brain off. She's full of shit,
Speaker 2: which kind of makes me question the other stuff. But
Speaker 2: I'm not an anthropologist like her, so baits this. This lady,
Speaker 2: this cannibalism obsessed lady is a monarchist and an anti
Speaker 2: union activist as well, so I'm not primed to like her.
Speaker 2: She seems to have grown up obsession, act like she's
Speaker 2: one of these people. Maybe I'll do another I might
Speaker 2: want to do an episode on her at some point.
Speaker 2: She's got a long history of like lying about her background,
Speaker 2: like pretending to have come from a different place than
Speaker 2: she did and be a different person that she is.
Speaker 2: And she's got like she's obsessed with cannibalism. Kind of
Speaker 2: later in life it becomes One historian describes it as
Speaker 2: a fixation, which gets worse as she ages and she
Speaker 2: starts to suffer from dementia. So she's like continuing to
Speaker 2: work as an elderly woman getting increasingly crazy and obsessed
Speaker 2: with cannibalism.
Speaker 3: She could literally be the president right now. Yes, monarchist, racist,
Speaker 3: like fucking making things up about her background, like was
Speaker 3: she a time traveler?
Speaker 2: No, No, she's just a very modern figure administration from dementia.
Speaker 3: Jesus, he would have made.
Speaker 2: Her the fucking ambassador to Australia.
Speaker 3: Believes that she's qualified to do a job that she
Speaker 3: is in no way qualified.
Speaker 2: To do, honestly iconic, so ahead of her time. I
Speaker 2: talked to you a little bit earlier about how some
Speaker 2: like some of these peoples during times of starvation would
Speaker 2: practice and fans decide right, which is again the thing
Speaker 2: you see all over the world. Baits is the person
Speaker 2: who spins that into claiming that they're doing infant cannibalism, right,
Speaker 2: and she is the primary source in this period, is
Speaker 2: like claiming that that is a thing that's happening. She
Speaker 2: writes dozens of articles in newspapers about this practice, and
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty came claimed to have received the bones
Speaker 2: of a baby that had been cooked and eaten by
Speaker 2: its pregnant Aboriginal mother. Right the bones were you want
Speaker 2: to guess what the bones came from?
Speaker 3: Ooh dog cat?
Speaker 2: Ah, you were close your quest Jack, Yeah, fucking cat bones.
Speaker 2: She's lying about a cat bones being a cannibalized baby,
Speaker 2: speaking of eating cats. Don't do that. Listen to these ads.
Speaker 3: I thought the advertiser was.
Speaker 2: Hello Fresh as a new product line. We're back and
Speaker 2: our lawyers have sent I I'm not a loud to
Speaker 2: accuse HelloFresh of serving cat meat.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: You know, until the court case finishes one way or
Speaker 2: the other, we can't prove that they ate cat meat. Uh,
Speaker 2: certainly can't prove it. And you know, are their allegations
Speaker 2: that they serve cat meat are now absolutely now there
Speaker 2: are for sure your cat. We can't prove it.
Speaker 1: Your cats just sent me a text message and they're
Speaker 1: uncomfortable with this conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well they do look delicious.
Speaker 3: O my god.
Speaker 1: Leaves the diamonds best friend.
Speaker 2: Although well they've gotten fat lately. You know, they have
Speaker 2: a good diet.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying, yeah, I think they look great in
Speaker 3: your meen.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's I am.
Speaker 3: And when Sophie says they look great, she means they
Speaker 3: look like big cartoon hamlegs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's what they look to me. I didn't
Speaker 2: have breakfast today, so I'm just I'm just looking at
Speaker 2: everything that way.
Speaker 3: So, by the way, it's three in the afternoon, everybody,
Speaker 3: just so you know what, what kind of hours Robert
Speaker 3: Keeves the audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're aware by this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: For an example of the kind of shit Baits was
Speaker 2: writing in newspapers at this period of time, here's a
Speaker 2: direct quote from her. I use the word cannibal advisedly.
Speaker 2: Every one of these natives was a cannibal. Cannibalism had
Speaker 2: its local name from Kimberly to Ucla and through all
Speaker 2: the unoccupied country east of it, and there were many
Speaker 2: grisly rights attached there too. Human meat had always been
Speaker 2: their favorite food, and there were killing vendettas from time immemorial.
Speaker 2: In order that the killing should be safe murderers, slippers
Speaker 2: or pads were made Emu feathers twisted and twined together,
Speaker 2: bound to the foot with human hair, on which the
Speaker 2: natives walk and run as easily as a white man,
Speaker 2: and running shoes their feet leaving no track.
Speaker 3: So what does that have to do with Like, she's
Speaker 3: just describing things that they have, like tools that they
Speaker 3: have and being like, yeah, I'm sure they have like
Speaker 3: shoes that allow them to move quiet, because that's useful
Speaker 3: when you're hunting or in war. She's just like that
Speaker 3: must be because they are trying to eat people.
Speaker 2: And like, again you can find like actual debate between
Speaker 2: you know, actual anthropologists about the different kinds of cannibalism
Speaker 2: that may or may not have been practiced here. No
Speaker 2: one agrees everyone was a cannibal. It was not the norm.
Speaker 2: It was not wildly common, it was not certainly not
Speaker 2: like your favorite it was normal, right, like whether it
Speaker 2: was practiced in some groups or not. Again, there's there's
Speaker 2: argument there, but it was like what she is saying
Speaker 2: is a complete lie that she's made up because she's
Speaker 2: gone crazy, and it's very racist.
Speaker 3: They like cannibalism so much, they like try and marry it.
Speaker 3: They weren't very cannibalism. It's their best friend.
Speaker 2: She she would have married cannibalism. Yes, yes, she's she's
Speaker 2: a cannibalism influencer. Yeah, like what Joe Rogan is to
Speaker 2: fucking iyahuasca, this Baits Lady is to cannibalism and allegations
Speaker 2: of cannibalism.
Speaker 3: So frustrating that he is the psychedelics person.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, I've done way more fucking.
Speaker 3: You're so much better at psychedelics, thinking you need to
Speaker 3: take it back. This is this is our psychedelics guy,
Speaker 3: not fucking Joe Joe Roe, Jesus Christ. Did you see a.
Speaker 1: Special forget being the Joe Rogan of the Left? Robert's
Speaker 1: the Psychedelics of the Left.
Speaker 3: The psychedelics guy. Yeah, I could take steroids.
Speaker 2: I believe in me. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Did you see his stand up special? Or better yet,
Speaker 3: did you see the elephant Graveyard analysis of his stand
Speaker 3: up special? No, I will send that link to you.
Speaker 2: I assume it's a literal elephant graveyard you're talking about.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna look in that more.
Speaker 3: That's the name of the channel. But they just like
Speaker 3: go through there like we're really excited about Joe Rogan's
Speaker 3: stand up special and then just like go joke for
Speaker 3: joke and they're like, oh, no, show, what.
Speaker 2: Things have gone downhill? Since? What was he? He wasn't
Speaker 2: on The Man Show?
Speaker 1: Was he fear Fact here?
Speaker 3: No fear Factor? It was Adam Carolla?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was on that show with Andy Dick.
Speaker 1: Frankly, too much time on Joe Rogan, continue with the script.
Speaker 2: Please, anyway, speaking of Andy Dick, the Andy Dick of
Speaker 2: old timey European colonizers was Captain James Cook, who was
Speaker 2: the first Englishman to enter the recorded history of the
Speaker 2: people of Ghari. In seventeen seventy, he first sighted the
Speaker 2: island and reported spotting several people on the shore. He
Speaker 2: regarded them all as Indians, and he gave the island
Speaker 2: the name Indian Head. So this is its name after
Speaker 2: the Great Sandy Island. So we go from well, that's
Speaker 2: at least accurate too. Okay, we're just being racist now great,
Speaker 2: He in a colleague debated whether or not because again
Speaker 2: there's like notes taken on board the ship, and the
Speaker 2: notes are that James Cook is debating with like a colleague,
Speaker 2: whether or not the skin color of these people meant
Speaker 2: they were a new race of humans. He was kind
Speaker 2: of tripped up by their hair, which he was surprised
Speaker 2: to see was quote very much like ours. Wh yeah,
Speaker 2: out of the same stuff, yeah yeah, wow, the same
Speaker 2: kind of hair as same dang hair.
Speaker 3: Do you remember this article that we did at Cracked
Speaker 3: about like the great explorers and all the just insane
Speaker 3: lies that they told, like, well, because.
Speaker 2: You you have to be out of your mind, and
Speaker 2: if you're not out of your mind when you start
Speaker 2: becoming an explorer, the months you spend dying at sea
Speaker 2: are going to make you lose your mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they would be. Like I saw the person like
Speaker 3: one of them was. I think they said they have
Speaker 3: like eyes where their shoulders were, and like mouths in
Speaker 3: the middle of their between their niggas.
Speaker 2: The anthropophagy, I think are the is the name of
Speaker 2: those that circulture.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: I still think they're real somewhere, but they just live
Speaker 2: I saw one down the street from them as a kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, they just live here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 2: These are just like the world's best liars, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess I would as a successful imagine because you,
Speaker 2: like you wind up in like the center of like
Speaker 2: a European capital, effectively in the center of their entire
Speaker 2: media ecosystem. And you're like, so, have any of you
Speaker 2: guys been to China? All right, I'm gonna just say
Speaker 2: some shit. Nope, I get I can I can make
Speaker 2: you guys believe anything.
Speaker 3: Good news for me? They me as a God. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh so. The Butchola are the tribe that Cook
Speaker 2: most likely saw first because they saw him as well,
Speaker 2: and we have This is one of the things I
Speaker 2: find so interesting about how kind of how much fidelity
Speaker 2: there is with their oral tradition, how good it actually
Speaker 2: is at at getting down history. We have their record
Speaker 2: of seeing him right. So he's writing, he's got people
Speaker 2: on his boat writing about seeing these people, and we
Speaker 2: have them singing about seeing his ship. Per an article
Speaker 2: by Fiona Foley, Ala artist and scholar right for the
Speaker 2: Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. The Boschula people
Speaker 2: were unique because not many people in the world would
Speaker 2: be aware. They created a song recounting what was happening
Speaker 2: when the ship passed by our country on May twentieth
Speaker 2: of that year. The song takes place on a volcanic
Speaker 2: headland of Ghari to the known in Bochula as Takiwaru.
Speaker 2: What I love about this song are the layers of
Speaker 2: metaphors contained within one verse. The ship rose out of
Speaker 2: the sea like a cloud and kept near land for
Speaker 2: three or four days. One day it came in very
Speaker 2: close to Takiwaru, and they saw many men walking around
Speaker 2: on it. They asked each other who are these strangers?
Speaker 2: And where are they going? So you actually get like
Speaker 2: a little bit of you know, like this record of
Speaker 2: like a conversation of both sides of it in this stase,
Speaker 2: which is fairly rare when you're talking about story like
Speaker 2: things like this, like first contact between you know, in
Speaker 2: a digitous group and Europeans that you have like both
Speaker 2: sides of like the very first conversation about seeing each other,
Speaker 2: which I find really interesting.
Speaker 3: And frequently they're like, and why do these guys smell?
Speaker 3: Like shit? Yeah? Wow, the terrible why Like all the
Speaker 3: European settlers just smelled. I mean, first of all, the
Speaker 3: living off of boat.
Speaker 2: Like they're over the side of this thing, right.
Speaker 3: Just yeah, at first they're shitting over the side of it.
Speaker 3: Rob By the end they're just like, I really am
Speaker 3: so hungry, I can't even get up to the edge.
Speaker 2: Every one of those sailors is like eighty percent GRDA
Speaker 2: by body weights, Like they're just just stomach aller.
Speaker 3: And like and swollen gums. That's the what ninety percent
Speaker 3: of their body weights from? Man? Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 3: like even you know, I remember the that article that
Speaker 3: I was talking about, like Marco Polo is one of them.
Speaker 3: Is like whole claim to fame was going to China
Speaker 3: and like becoming a great ruler in China and like
Speaker 3: helping them fight a war. And you can go like
Speaker 3: they were a way more advanced civilization, the most advanced civilization.
Speaker 3: They had a they had a printing press at this point,
Speaker 3: like well well ahead of your and so you can
Speaker 3: like go go back and look at their written record
Speaker 3: and like it's just crickets as far as bar goes.
Speaker 3: But we, you know, we just trust whatever. The random
Speaker 3: guy who you know sailed around the Bend and then
Speaker 3: just like came back five years later and was like
Speaker 3: China ever heard of it? Great?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, nope, Okay, I'm just gonna say, shit, now,
Speaker 2: this is why I'm an Iban buttuitas Stan and not
Speaker 2: a Marco Polo Stan.
Speaker 3: There. Yeah cool, you always have book.
Speaker 2: Him up, kids. He's cool. So he probably also did
Speaker 2: some fucked up shit. Man, I'm not gonna lie. So
Speaker 2: Fiona here, who's this Butchulla, scholar and artist who I
Speaker 2: just quoted from, describes Cook's attempts to classify the denizens
Speaker 2: of Gari in his decision to name the island Indian
Speaker 2: Head as quote the first evidence of British racialization in Australia,
Speaker 2: and cites Jody Byrd's book The Transitive Empire, which describes
Speaker 2: this as part of a process that allowed the Empire
Speaker 2: to quote facilitate, justify, and rationalize the state sponsored violence
Speaker 2: that tear lane and resources and sovereignty from indigenous people. Right,
Speaker 2: And I think that it doesn't start with the actual
Speaker 2: colonization or with even the legal code. It starts with
Speaker 2: this guy on a boat trying to racially categorize this
Speaker 2: people and taking the name of their island away from
Speaker 2: them and making it kind of a racist copy. Right
Speaker 2: that that's the start of the process of racialization that
Speaker 2: ends that well, it leads to genocide. It doesn't end there,
Speaker 2: but that's a part of it. Right. So this was
Speaker 2: just the beginning of a long process of colonial violence,
Speaker 2: and a major chapter in that history brings us back
Speaker 2: to the person who is the subject of these episodes,
Speaker 2: Eliza Fraser, right to set up the rest of this
Speaker 2: so that we could talk about old Eliza. She was
Speaker 2: possibly born Elizabeth Slack in Worksworth, Derbyshire, and baptized on
Speaker 2: the first of June and seventeen ninety eight, although that
Speaker 2: is debated. One writer in the nineteen thirties described her
Speaker 2: as coming from the Orkney Islands, and there's a number
Speaker 2: of people who will claim she came from the Orkney Islands,
Speaker 2: but there's not evidence of that. A great grandson of
Speaker 2: hers in New Zealand disputed this, arguing that she was
Speaker 2: born in Ceylon in modern Sri Lanka, where her parents
Speaker 2: lived at the time. We do not know for certain.
Speaker 2: The article I found claiming that she was born Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Shack in Derbyshire was like a Derbyshire website claiming her
Speaker 2: as like a native daughter of the town. So I
Speaker 2: don't know. Maybe they have a little bit of an agenda.
Speaker 3: Anyone famous, you know, we don't care. Why let's just
Speaker 3: get someone famous.
Speaker 2: We're scrape in the bottom of the beryl in Derbyshire, Derbyshire.
Speaker 3: Let's go to the genocide insiders. Let's yeah, we don't
Speaker 3: have anybody lost.
Speaker 2: The article really gives her like a pass on some
Speaker 2: things that I would not. But anyway, we don't know
Speaker 2: for sure, although it does look like Derbyshire is one
Speaker 2: of the likelier ones. We do have evidence that she
Speaker 2: came from at least modest means, and enjoyed a good
Speaker 2: education for her time, by which I mean as a
Speaker 2: woman she learned to read and write in childhood, which
Speaker 2: you know, you're not super poor generally. If that's happening
Speaker 2: in England at this period.
Speaker 3: Men thought that that was scientifically and physically impossible.
Speaker 2: It's starting to change. By the time she'd been seventeen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, is still pretty dark days for that. She
Speaker 2: may have had a husband and at least one child
Speaker 2: with someone else before she married Captain James Frasier. Maybe
Speaker 2: not again, kind of some conflicting reports there, but she
Speaker 2: marries this the sea captain whose boat, the Sterling Castle,
Speaker 2: depending on again who you read, was either a crumbling
Speaker 2: death trap or a relatively state of the art ship
Speaker 2: for its time. The captain himself, her husband, is described
Speaker 2: as either a pompous, fat old bore much of demand
Speaker 2: by shipowners who had managed to overensure their vessels. In
Speaker 2: other words, this guy's so incompetent you you hire him
Speaker 2: to be a run your ship, to drunk drive your car, right,
Speaker 2: if your insurance is good, He's going to drunk drive
Speaker 2: your boat into oblivion. So that's one Claime about him.
Speaker 2: I've also heard him described as urbane in his manners
Speaker 2: and an attitude and features what is deemed a handsome man.
Speaker 2: So either he was a drunk old boy who will
Speaker 2: crash a ship, or he was like a handsome, you know,
Speaker 2: polite and competent sea captain. You'll hear both stories. He's
Speaker 2: been dead a long time. I simply don't know.
Speaker 3: Love how mean the conflicting thing like the yeah, right,
Speaker 3: a big fat idiot who is dumb shit, Yeah, sucks
Speaker 3: shit at his job. And then like there's obviously the
Speaker 3: self edited Wikipedia entry where it's like urbane in his.
Speaker 2: Manner, right, yeah, he was, like I was handsome as shit.
Speaker 3: Picking up subtle things about how attractive he is.
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, his dick game, Like yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: whole whole Wikipedia subcept suckset there. Yeah he was speaking
Speaker 2: of dick game. He was fifty four and Eliza was
Speaker 2: thirty seven when they left London on October twenty second,
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty five, so there's a bit of an age
Speaker 2: gap here. Now, as as is the norm for European parents,
Speaker 2: they have no interest in parenting their and leave them
Speaker 2: behind in Orkney to be watched over by a local
Speaker 2: Presbyterian minister, which was the style at the times. Hey, kids,
Speaker 2: we're going on a boat for like a year. We
Speaker 2: may die or not. This minister's going to be your
Speaker 2: dad and mom.
Speaker 3: Now hang out with a priest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this guy's gotta be in charge. Good call parenting
Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds. Most accounts will say that Eliza
Speaker 2: was pregnant when the vessel departed, although again there's some
Speaker 2: dispute on the matter. The sterling made it to Sydney
Speaker 2: the following May. So it sets out in October and
Speaker 2: it makes it to Sydney by May and offload supplies
Speaker 2: it had brought from England, which you know, this is Australia.
Speaker 2: So the supplies are rum wine, beer, pickles, mustard. You
Speaker 2: know the necessities, right, all the things Australians need to survive.
Speaker 2: Starting with rum wine and beer. It picks up other
Speaker 2: goods and charts a course to Singapore. And the route
Speaker 2: to Singapore with these goods that it picks up in
Speaker 2: Sydney is going to take it past Moreton Bay. Unfortunately
Speaker 2: for everyone aboard, this takes them near the Swain Reefs,
Speaker 2: which is a treacherous piece of sea for competent helmsman
Speaker 2: to navigate, and some of the evidence suggests Captain Fraser
Speaker 2: and his men may not have been the very best
Speaker 2: seaman England ever produced, which you could also say, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to make that joke. So the ship
Speaker 2: ran aground on the reef and the crew of nineteen
Speaker 2: got into two lifeboats. Captain Fraser, his wife, his thirteen
Speaker 2: year old nephew, and several other sailors, including a guy
Speaker 2: named Robert darsh who we'll talk about later, got into
Speaker 2: one leaking longboat, and everyone else got into a Pinnas,
Speaker 2: which is a slightly nicer boat. Both boats traveled together
Speaker 2: for a time and they split their supplies between them,
Speaker 2: which included brandy and beer.
Speaker 3: But no water.
Speaker 2: So again they've got little beer. Now you don't want water,
Speaker 2: you know what water in this boat.
Speaker 3: He just want some brandy and beer and some pickle
Speaker 3: with mustard, if you right. Shit, we dropped that stuff
Speaker 3: with the Aussies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So they're just like drunk in the heat in
Speaker 2: the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them.
Speaker 2: So everyone is slowly dying on these rescue boats. They
Speaker 2: don't really know where they are. They do have guns though,
Speaker 2: so they're they're drunk and disoriented, but heavily armed. The
Speaker 2: nearest settlement to them is about three hundred and seventy
Speaker 2: miles south of where the Fraser ran aground. But navigation
Speaker 2: was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one particularly right, yeah, right, right,
Speaker 2: No one's a master sailor here, right, We're not talking
Speaker 2: about people who are great at what they're doing now.
Speaker 2: In their defense, this is also difficult because Captain Fraser's
Speaker 2: longboat is constantly taking on water, so they're baling it
Speaker 2: out twenty four to seven while they're on it. Also
Speaker 2: adding to the difficulty is that his wife goes into
Speaker 2: labor on day three because it's pretty stressful having your
Speaker 2: boat sink and then being on a longboat. So per
Speaker 2: the most common accounting of the story, she delivers the
Speaker 2: baby underwater because again the boat is constantly sinking and
Speaker 2: the baby dies almost immediately, which geez, it's probably I
Speaker 2: don't have trouble believing that if she was pregnant, because
Speaker 2: babies don't do well in these conditions.
Speaker 3: Being born underwater during a shipwreck, yes, bad way to
Speaker 3: have a baby. To people who have only consumed alcohol.
Speaker 2: Only source of galleries are beer and brandy. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know what happened. How did the baby not
Speaker 2: make it? If she did give birth and have the
Speaker 2: baby die, it's kind of amazing she lived right like
Speaker 2: this is it does point to her being physically pretty resilient.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now this is not part of the story. Part
Speaker 2: of why people doubt whether or not Cheerly was pregnant
Speaker 2: is that when she first gets rescued, she does not
Speaker 2: talk about having a baby. She doesn't talk about this
Speaker 2: in the first or second version of events that she dictated.
Speaker 2: Later writers would only say that she she avoided this
Speaker 2: until her story had gone eighteen hundred's viral quote, probably
Speaker 2: through modesty. In other words, she didn't what it was
Speaker 2: kind of shameful to talk about, so she didn't initially,
Speaker 2: But she also does when she starts raising a bunch
Speaker 2: of money, So there's some bid. Did she just make
Speaker 2: this up to kind of get sympathy, because she definitely
Speaker 2: does some of that, right, we really don't know. Two
Speaker 2: days later processing this in several other traumas, Captain Fraser
Speaker 2: was finally forced to put his failing boat ashore to
Speaker 2: find water. Eliza would later claim that she figured out
Speaker 2: how to get fresh water by lowering her skirt into
Speaker 2: a crack and ringing enough water out of it to
Speaker 2: fill their containers. She does lie about almost every part
Speaker 2: of this story, and I don't assume this is true,
Speaker 2: just because, like, well, this pretty obvious way to get water.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to guess other people on these boats
Speaker 2: had more experience foraging for water than her, So I
Speaker 2: don't know if she had to teach all of them this.
Speaker 2: But they didn't have dresses on though, right, and they
Speaker 2: didn't have dresses at any rate. They fill up their water,
Speaker 2: they finally have water, and they continue their journey until
Speaker 2: they run out of water again. Eliza claims that she
Speaker 2: was able to survive on seawater, but all of the
Speaker 2: men got sick when they tried. And this is definitely
Speaker 2: a lie because you simply can't survive on seawater.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, that's a superpower. That's like her being like
Speaker 3: and then I just that just flew to the island.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I levitated above the leaky boat. Yeah, you cannot
Speaker 2: survive on seawater. It's generally three or four percent sodium.
Speaker 2: Obviously drinking some like if you've ever gone swimming is fine,
Speaker 2: but your kidneys need fresh water to process out all
Speaker 2: of the sodium, and if you do not have fresh water,
Speaker 2: you will get sick. Don't try to live off of seawater.
Speaker 2: They're sort of traveling around the islands off that coast,
Speaker 2: you know, periodically stopping when they need more water, trying
Speaker 2: to find food, and eventually they wind up off the
Speaker 2: coast of what was then called Indian Head, right based
Speaker 2: on what Captain Cook had called it. The indigenous people
Speaker 2: are still calling it Ghari. But Captain Fraser doesn't want
Speaker 2: to get on the big island because number one, he
Speaker 2: thinks it's a chunk of the Australian mainland. But number two,
Speaker 2: he's been told everyone here is a cannibal, so he's
Speaker 2: like scared of they can see people, and he doesn't
Speaker 2: want to get close to people because he thinks they'll
Speaker 2: eat him. One day, though, the pinnace, which is the
Speaker 2: second boat with them, goes out to find water, while
Speaker 2: the longboat kind of waits by the shore and it
Speaker 2: never comes back. The people on it do eventually find
Speaker 2: their way back to civilization. I don't know if they
Speaker 2: just abandoned Eliza and her husband. Maybe because they found
Speaker 2: them annoying.
Speaker 3: They're so annoying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there is some evidence.
Speaker 3: History changed based on like how annoying someone is. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the survivors were like, yeah, she sucked for a different
Speaker 3: podcast looking into the day Lincoln was assassinated, and like
Speaker 3: the only reason that ulysses As Grant wasn't there was
Speaker 3: because ulysses As Grant's wife found Mary Todd Lincoln annoying. Yeah,
Speaker 3: completely changed the course of history.
Speaker 2: You know, folks, you have to follow your instincts. If
Speaker 2: you think someone's annoying, you're definitely gonna die if you
Speaker 2: go out to a party with them.
Speaker 1: Never underestimate having that one annoying friend that you keep
Speaker 1: around just to avoid assassinations.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the whole reason the guy you created Family
Speaker 2: Guys survived nine to eleven. If I'm remembering correctly, had
Speaker 2: bad vibes about a flight turned out to be a
Speaker 2: bad flight to be Yeah, I don't remember if that's
Speaker 2: exactly what happened, but he definitely was supposed to be
Speaker 2: on one of those flights.
Speaker 3: They're like, he keeps doing the quagmire voice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're one.
Speaker 3: Stop saying giggity giggity man.
Speaker 2: No, they would let anybody on flights back then, as
Speaker 2: as evidenced by nine to eleven happenings.
Speaker 3: Right, what a time.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So anyway, they get abandoned off the coast of Gari,
Speaker 2: and you know, they spend about a week kind of
Speaker 2: sailing around the coast because again they're scared of the cannibals,
Speaker 2: and they managed to like live off of limpets that
Speaker 2: they tear off of rocks before eventually getting desperate enough
Speaker 2: that like, fuck it, let's try our luck. We're going
Speaker 2: to die either way. It's kind of I said earlier.
Speaker 2: They think they found the mainland. We don't one hundred
Speaker 2: percent know if they know this is an island or not,
Speaker 2: but most accounts will say they thought this was somewhere
Speaker 2: on the mainland that was just isolated from European civilization.
Speaker 2: They are met very quickly by five locals with spears. Now,
Speaker 2: contrary to all these myths that Captain Fraser had believed
Speaker 2: that these people were cannibals, these folks, these Butchola people
Speaker 2: see strange white people come aground and they show up
Speaker 2: with food. Right, They're like, you guys look like shit.
Speaker 2: You are obviously dying. We've watched you sailing, We've watched
Speaker 2: you like boating around the coast, trying to eat liftoff
Speaker 2: of limpets. You're clearly dying. I don't know why you
Speaker 2: didn't come for help earlier. Here's some food, right, This
Speaker 2: is very obviously a humanitarian gesture. But even in modern
Speaker 2: casual accounts like this write up I found in Great
Speaker 2: British Life, which is the one that wants to take
Speaker 2: credit for her coming from Derbyshire, this humanitarian gesture is
Speaker 2: often described as like gross and savage. Quote the Machola
Speaker 2: people approached them with decomposing kangaroo meat. When a sailor
Speaker 2: ate some they took some of his clothing and like
Speaker 2: what man number one? They don't have refrigerators right, like
Speaker 2: this is this happens in like the winter, so it's
Speaker 2: not a great seat. They don't have a lot of food,
Speaker 2: like this kind of going off like kangaroo meat is
Speaker 2: the best they can do, and it's better than you
Speaker 2: were able to do for yourselves, like this is a
Speaker 2: this is a nice thing.
Speaker 3: They approached them with fruit that had brown spots on y.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fuck, and like they give him food and they're like, hey,
Speaker 2: can I try on your clothes? Like, I haven't seen
Speaker 2: anything like that. It's weird. It's a pretty normal thing
Speaker 2: to do. You're meeting some very culture. Can I try
Speaker 2: that hat? I've never worn a hat?
Speaker 3: What is that? Yeah, to this day, athletes exchange jerseys, right,
Speaker 3: you know, it's a thing that's done, and it's not
Speaker 3: a sign of war. It's a sign of like, hey,
Speaker 3: this is silly.
Speaker 2: When I met you, you gave me some rancid kangaroo meat,
Speaker 2: although for a different reason that we don't need to
Speaker 2: get into.
Speaker 3: And then we exchanged shirts.
Speaker 2: We did exchange shirts. Yes, that was more to Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was a weird hallucinogen. Yeah, the rant of kangaroo meat. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you get making in the high meat, you trip
Speaker 2: off of it. Yeah, that's right. Look it up, folks.
Speaker 2: So not long after this, eight of the remaining men
Speaker 2: who had gotten like landed with Captain Fraser and Eliza
Speaker 2: either try to leave or like walk off to try
Speaker 2: to find a town to get rescued for everyone else,
Speaker 2: or they just dessert. We don't really know. Crewman Harry
Speaker 2: Yolden is the source of the claim that like we deserted,
Speaker 2: and he blames Eliza for making them desert right quote,
Speaker 2: she was a terrible liar and the most profane, artful,
Speaker 2: wicked woman that ever lived, and this does comport with
Speaker 2: some of her later behavior. Although other crewmen alleged that
Speaker 2: Yolden was the problem and he stole a bunch of
Speaker 2: water that like, way more water than he was supposed
Speaker 2: to be drinking, both of these could be true. Maybe
Speaker 2: they both sucked right. He Also, Yolden also called Eliza
Speaker 2: a she captain, which is him insulting both her and
Speaker 2: her husband.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he sounds like the worst it's possible for everyone
Speaker 3: to such stirring shit in the middle of the life
Speaker 3: and death thing, just like shit stirring on a new level,
Speaker 3: being like, oh well, I guess we should listen to
Speaker 3: our captain our wife. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the same time, I do think that you should
Speaker 1: now address me as she captain, as she captain, because
Speaker 1: it's kind of grown on me in the last thirty seconds.
Speaker 2: I don't feel like you need to gender captain. Like
Speaker 2: it's not an inherently masculine or feminine work.
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's kind of a flow to it. She.
Speaker 2: It's like calling somebod a she person. You don't really
Speaker 2: need to do that. That just kind of sounds fucked up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So Eliza alleged that Yolden at one point threatened to
Speaker 2: throw the captain overboard while they were still on the boat.
Speaker 2: I don't know, uh, And also, depending on how competent
Speaker 2: Captain Fraser was, this may have been an understandable move.
Speaker 2: I can see a version of the story. We're throwing
Speaker 2: him overboard might have been the best thing for everyone
Speaker 2: at any rate. After they are rescued by the bachola,
Speaker 2: the group splits up and Darj Yolden and four other
Speaker 2: men head for where they think is Moreton Bay. But
Speaker 2: Moreton Bay is on the mainland, so again they don't
Speaker 2: really know where they are. Eliza her husband good navigators.
Speaker 3: We're gonna head over to Sydney.
Speaker 2: It's like east, and I think East is left, so yeah,
Speaker 2: we'll just try that.
Speaker 3: They've been at sea, like offshore, sailing around the island
Speaker 3: for the past like few weeks, and now I think.
Speaker 2: I say they're bad at this.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it's hard, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: I haven't tried to navigate this way without access to
Speaker 2: a backup land. Eliza, her husband, and four other men
Speaker 2: go south with the bachola. Right now, most of them
Speaker 2: have guns, but they become separated at some point, or
Speaker 2: several of them become separated at some point. It's a
Speaker 2: little bit unclear exactly what happens. All of these stories
Speaker 2: are kind of different, but Eliza and her husband wind
Speaker 2: up living with the batola for several months, and the
Speaker 2: first thing that she reports the Patrolla show them how
Speaker 2: to do is dig a hole in the sand so
Speaker 2: that it fills with water and then add leaves from
Speaker 2: a local shrub to improve the taste. Right, So again,
Speaker 2: they're like trying to teach them how to survive. They
Speaker 2: are attempting to do a humanitarian things, right those monthster like, oh,
Speaker 2: you guys are always you're dipping your filthy clothing into
Speaker 2: water to like, no, this is how you get nice
Speaker 2: clean water.
Speaker 3: Patiently teaching them how to not die. She's like, oh
Speaker 3: my god, they're trying to kill me.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, Eliza admits that they did this, but she
Speaker 2: also claims they demanded clothing from the men and beat
Speaker 2: one of them when he refused. And here's how John Wright,
Speaker 2: the author of that Derbyshire Life article, describes what happened next.
Speaker 2: They're dwindling numbers made the Aborigines. Again, that's not Aboriginal
Speaker 2: people preferred terb but this is how he writes it
Speaker 2: bolder in the exchange of clothing continued until they were naked.
Speaker 2: The men were led away, leaving Eliza naked apart from
Speaker 2: some trailing sea grape plant she tied around her waist.
Speaker 2: Aboriginal women took her to their camp, prodded her and
Speaker 2: pulled her hair. They gave her a baby to breastfeed
Speaker 2: as its mother was sick, and painted her body with
Speaker 2: charcoal and lizard grease to make her skin darker. Now
Speaker 2: this is largely wrong. It's based on a mix of
Speaker 2: three different accounts left by Frasier and several subsequent books,
Speaker 2: one of which is fiction based on her story. Some
Speaker 2: of these details are true, but are missing important details.
Speaker 2: For example, the story about them painting her with charcoal
Speaker 2: and grease is likely true, but they didn't do it
Speaker 2: to make her skin darker. There's substantial documentation that the
Speaker 2: Bochola used charcoal to treat wounds, rubbing it into like
Speaker 2: an injury as a sav or ungwin perhaps mixed with herbs, right,
Speaker 2: and this can actually be effective. You don't have better
Speaker 2: methods right available, Like this is a thing that the
Speaker 2: Beachola and other people do. So this account and other
Speaker 2: accounts are like, oh, they did it because they wanted
Speaker 2: to make her skin darker like theirs. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: she was probably covered in cuts because she'd been shipwrecked
Speaker 2: and at sea for months and they were trying to
Speaker 2: treat her injuries.
Speaker 3: Blackface was actually their idea. It's not something that we
Speaker 3: do on our Yeah, they actually came up with the now, yeah,
Speaker 3: because they thought it was cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It looks to me like they were again trying to
Speaker 2: teach her how to have clean water and deal with
Speaker 2: her injuries so she doesn't die. And also, the story
Speaker 2: about being forced to nurse is not in either of
Speaker 2: Eliza's original accounts, and she in fact does not bring
Speaker 2: this up at all until she gets back to London,
Speaker 2: which is like the third version of the story she gives,
Speaker 2: which is also when she adds the part of the
Speaker 2: story that she gave birth on a lifeboat. So again,
Speaker 2: maybe she was just embarrassed to talk about it earlier,
Speaker 2: or maybe she knew that this. She was raising money
Speaker 2: off of the story at this point, so maybe she
Speaker 2: just knew that like, oh, adding in that they made
Speaker 2: me breastfeed one of their babies. That's going to really
Speaker 2: like be freaky to all of these like white British
Speaker 2: people that like, I was made to do this. I'll
Speaker 2: just throw that into the story too. She would also
Speaker 2: later claim to have been given the job of maggot
Speaker 2: picking right, otherwise picking like maggots out of injuries, and
Speaker 2: maybe she was that's the thing you need, you're going
Speaker 2: to have people do, and they have her work, not
Speaker 2: like in a mean way, but because you don't survive
Speaker 2: as a group of people living this way unless everyone
Speaker 2: does stuff right. In general, she alleges beasteal treatment from
Speaker 2: the Butchola, who, by her accounts, forced her and the
Speaker 2: other survivors into hard labor and beat them when they
Speaker 2: failed to work at a sufficient pace. Now it's important
Speaker 2: that we take a second here to look at how
Speaker 2: the Bachola would have seen these white people at this
Speaker 2: point in time. They have had very little contact with Europeans,
Speaker 2: and their traditional concept of the world was a lot
Speaker 2: smaller than it would become. Since part of their funerary
Speaker 2: ritual involved skinning the dead, which left them looking white.
Speaker 2: They interpreted the first white people they saw as something
Speaker 2: like ghosts returned to corporeal form. Right, these are the
Speaker 2: ghosts of our dead who have come back to us.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's at least, you know, an anthropological account that I found,
Speaker 2: and it was common. Some of the evidence for this
Speaker 2: is that it was really common in this period for
Speaker 2: stranded whites who like wound up on the island to
Speaker 2: get adopted into different bands on Gari after one member
Speaker 2: of a tribe or another would be like, oh, I
Speaker 2: think this is the returned spirit of like my husband
Speaker 2: or my kid, right, And so that was kind of
Speaker 2: like the way that they rationalized what they were doing
Speaker 2: and sort of you know, what was going on under
Speaker 2: the hood here. Another thing that's happening in this period
Speaker 2: is that, you know, you've got cities like Sydney, which
Speaker 2: are European cities and thus have European prisons, and sometimes
Speaker 2: convicts will escape these prisons on mainland settlements and they'll flee,
Speaker 2: and some of them will wind up on these islands
Speaker 2: and they will be taken in by the Bachula and
Speaker 2: other tribes. And again the same kind of justification is
Speaker 2: used when someone arrives a nineteen seventy seven paper in
Speaker 2: the Journal of Occupational Papers in Anthropology noted quote. The
Speaker 2: most likely to have reached the island first was James Davis,
Speaker 2: who ran in March eighteen twenty nine and subsequently joined
Speaker 2: the Bachula on the Mary River. Although initially known to
Speaker 2: coastal Aborigines as Dunnbot, meaning small one, among the Bachula,
Speaker 2: he became Thorimbi, the reincarnated son of a tribal elder
Speaker 2: killed in battle some years before. Again to tales of
Speaker 2: Davis's exploits are sparse, for he was a particularly taciturn
Speaker 2: individual who remained tight jawed about much of his fourteen years.
Speaker 2: Experiences as a wild white man. David Bracewells for Bossi
Speaker 2: earned him the name want or Talker, but it was
Speaker 2: not until his fourth abstention from Warreton Bay after July
Speaker 2: eighteen thirty nine that he actually mentions having passed over
Speaker 2: to Fraser's Island, called Gari by the natives, right he
Speaker 2: spells at Karina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Kai,
Speaker 2: where he remained for nearly a year. His impression was
Speaker 2: that its inhabitants were very numerous, he thinks thousands, and
Speaker 2: at their great fights he has seen them, covering the
Speaker 2: beach for four miles in extent. Finally, John Failey, called Gizburi,
Speaker 2: after a long trek from Armadol to the Mary River
Speaker 2: via the Bunyel festivals in the Black All Ranges, moved
Speaker 2: with the Aboriginal people of White Bay for almost twelve years,
Speaker 2: helping them to plan raids against early White settlers, before
Speaker 2: being retaken by Lieutenant Bly and his Native mounted police
Speaker 2: in December eighteen fifty four. Fayhee, it seems, became the
Speaker 2: most totally incorporated of all the fugitives into Aboriginal lifestyles,
Speaker 2: passing through the Bora ceremony and bearing upon his body
Speaker 2: the Musgara scars and the Eppelate Bora marks on the
Speaker 2: white shoulder. After enduring the brutal privations of convict life,
Speaker 2: each of these escapees testified to the comparatively kindly treatment
Speaker 2: they received from the Aboriginal people. In John Fahy's case,
Speaker 2: his Black kinsmen fought bitterly with the Native troopers to
Speaker 2: prevent his recapture. Upon his return to Sydney, However, officialdom
Speaker 2: casually awarded Fayhee a year's imprisonment on the roads and
Speaker 2: chains and forgot him. This is like fascinating story of
Speaker 2: like these people who have been tossed out by their
Speaker 2: own culture and like you have no value, but like
Speaker 2: being chained to a gang, working on the roads or
Speaker 2: locked in a cage, and they're adopted as members of
Speaker 2: the family by some of these groups. I find that
Speaker 2: particularly the case of Fah where he's like helping them
Speaker 2: raid at like white settlers, and they're like fighting, you know,
Speaker 2: tooth and nail to the death to stop him from
Speaker 2: being recaptured. They like, you know, ritually scar his body.
Speaker 2: They take it's it's I wish we knew more about
Speaker 2: that guy. It's an amazing story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all of these interpretations where it's like and they
Speaker 3: thought we were ghosts and were like it's like but
Speaker 3: then all of the stories when people when they're living
Speaker 3: side by side, it's always people love to like go
Speaker 3: join the tribe and like are accepted in.
Speaker 2: It seems to be a mix. Like some of these
Speaker 2: people do go back and forth. A couple of these
Speaker 2: guys go back several times, will like try to make
Speaker 2: it in Europe and then head back to the tribe.
Speaker 2: Like some of them have like families that they will
Speaker 2: periodically leave and then come back to So it is
Speaker 2: like a it's like a complicated, for sure exchange here,
Speaker 2: but certainly like like especially the case of Fahy, this
Speaker 2: guy who is like, oh you know what these people rip,
Speaker 2: I'm going to help him kill like these colonizers, right,
Speaker 2: sounds like and then yeah, dies abandoned in a chain
Speaker 2: gang by the British authorities. Yeah. Real bummer, real bummer.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Like fascinating stuff and the fact that it's
Speaker 2: one of those things. One of the things I find
Speaker 2: interesting that we'll talk about more in part two is
Speaker 2: this belief that like these people with white skin are
Speaker 2: like returning spirits, isn't going to last. Right, This is
Speaker 2: a belief that exists primarily when they have not had
Speaker 2: a lot of contact with Europeans. They don't keep believing
Speaker 2: that forever, right, Like, it becomes very clear as they
Speaker 2: have more and more Oh no, no, no, these are
Speaker 2: these people are something else, and they're kind of a
Speaker 2: problem for us, right, Like, this is something that changes
Speaker 2: because this is not a static culture. Right, They're capable,
Speaker 2: like any culture, of adapting to times because they're people, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this isn't just like this is the thing they believed.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, this was like a belief that existed
Speaker 2: at a period of time and changed after contact with
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 3: Right on first pass. They were like, they look different.
Speaker 3: There must be a reason for this.
Speaker 2: Oh no, there's yeah, kind of like our dead people.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're like, you know, this is something that happens.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like when you think about like the
Speaker 2: what they had in access to information wise, it's not
Speaker 2: an a logical conclusion to come to initially. So and
Speaker 2: again it's important here at this point, as we kind
Speaker 2: of close this episode out, that I make two acknowledgments.
Speaker 2: The first is that even though the vast bulk of
Speaker 2: the evidence suggests that the people who took in Eliza
Speaker 2: and her husband and shipmates were trying to be kind
Speaker 2: and welcome them in essentially as members of the family,
Speaker 2: this still would have been disorienting and terrifying for Eliza
Speaker 2: and her shipmates, and not just because they're racist, because like,
Speaker 2: you don't know these people language, you don't understand entirely
Speaker 2: what they're trying to do. It is a scary situation,
Speaker 2: even if you're not a bigot. It's like scary because
Speaker 2: you can't communicate direct with these folks, and some of
Speaker 2: them are going to get angry at you, right, like
Speaker 2: because you're not good at hunting and gathering, and you're
Speaker 2: kind of dragging the rest of the group down and
Speaker 2: taking away resources of them, right.
Speaker 3: And you're like another mouth to feed. You're like that baby.
Speaker 3: They're like, God, can I he just fucking bashes ahead
Speaker 3: in with a rock, right could? I? Like, it's what
Speaker 3: are we doing here? Right?
Speaker 2: And like, like many cultures, like there is like corporal
Speaker 2: punishment if you're not pulling your weight, maybe you get smacked, right,
Speaker 2: you get yelled at, or you get smacked, right, Because
Speaker 2: that's just like a thing that's not in common with people,
Speaker 2: and these folks are not They're like children, right like
Speaker 2: you have to they can't. They're not learning how to
Speaker 2: do anything fast enough, and they require a lot of
Speaker 2: food to keep alive.
Speaker 3: So many wacky misunderstandings and understandings, and also just these
Speaker 3: people this is the starving time of the year, so
Speaker 3: you have to also keep in mind when members of
Speaker 3: the Bachola are doing stuff like smacking them for not
Speaker 3: being good at gathering food, they're starving actively because it's
Speaker 3: the starving season, Right, you go hungry at points in
Speaker 3: the year regularly because it's just kind of hard to
Speaker 3: live this way. They gave me a spanking on my
Speaker 3: little bottom, these savages.
Speaker 2: Right, And when we talk about like, yeah, maybe they'd
Speaker 2: get smacked, you know, smacked around or hit or something
Speaker 2: for not doing a job correctly, that is the same
Speaker 2: in the culture they came from. The most common phrase
Speaker 2: to describe how the British Navy is held together in
Speaker 2: this period is rum sodomy and the lash otherwise keeping
Speaker 2: them drunk, letting them fuck each other and whipping them
Speaker 2: until they're bloody when they don't perform at the expected level, right,
Speaker 2: Like Captain Fraser would have whipped people on his ship.
Speaker 2: So the fact that they are also being subject to
Speaker 2: probably some corporal punishment when they fuck up is not
Speaker 2: like alien to them, right, Their own culture does this.
Speaker 3: He's like, but not me, Yeah, Captain Fraser.
Speaker 2: Sometimes people you know, smack each other. It's not uncommon.
Speaker 2: This is not bachola thick. So the worst that we
Speaker 2: might say then about the beatola is they expected these
Speaker 2: guests or ghosts or whatever however they saw them to
Speaker 2: pull their own weight, and they weren't afraid to, like,
Speaker 2: you know, chastise them if they put the group in danger.
Speaker 2: Much of Eliza and the European world's horror at her
Speaker 2: treatment is going to come from the fact that the
Speaker 2: Beatola they didn't It's not that they treated her as
Speaker 2: a slave or as a captive, but they treated her
Speaker 2: like an equal, and for the rest of her life,
Speaker 2: Eliza Fraser is never going to forgive them for this,
Speaker 2: and neither are the Europeans. Jesus, that's all coming in
Speaker 2: part two, Jack.
Speaker 3: That sounds like it's going to be a really fun
Speaker 3: part two without any horrifying information to learn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's all good. From here. They start a
Speaker 2: dance troop smooth yea, they dance it out, they open
Speaker 2: a B and B together. Yeah, it's great. It's all
Speaker 2: gonna be good. All right, Jack, You anything to plug.
Speaker 3: I do, Robert, thank you so much for asking. I
Speaker 3: co host a show called The Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray,
Speaker 3: also a guest on this show in the past. We're
Speaker 3: on there every like every weekday. I believe that can't
Speaker 3: be right. That's too many, too many damn shows. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Monday through Friday we drop at least an episode, so
Speaker 3: you can find me there, and I'm on Twitter at
Speaker 3: Jack Underscore O Brian and on blue Sky at jack
Speaker 3: Obi the number one because I didn't get on Blue
Speaker 3: Sky fast enough.
Speaker 2: Right right, Well, either get on Blue Sky or don't. Honestly,
Speaker 2: I think we've all had enough social media at this point.
Speaker 2: Maybe light your computer on fire.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting idea.
Speaker 2: Burn your own house down with all of your electronics
Speaker 2: in it, except whatever electronics you use to listen to
Speaker 2: this podcast. Don't stop listening to this podcast. Accept this advice.
Speaker 3: Obviously, burn down your neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, let's end on that note.
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