Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Speaker 1: Producer Dave is out there somewhere in spirit, which means
Speaker 1: it's short stuff. Hamona hammana plus tax plus what my
Speaker 1: friend Mereth used to say, hammona hammana plus tax? Is
Speaker 1: that not a thing? No? What's Hamona hammana mean? Hammona hammeda?
Speaker 1: Is this kind of like an old val Vaudevillian thing.
Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure what it means or where it
Speaker 1: came from, but I always associated with like old timey
Speaker 1: vaudeville stuff. It. As I was saying Vaudeville, I was like,
Speaker 1: oh god, I feel like maybe like Jackie Gleason or
Speaker 1: Laurel and hard not Laurel and Hardy Abin Costello, maybe
Speaker 1: from a minstrel show, right, Yeah, but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's like a exclamation and of excitement or um looking
Speaker 1: forward to something. All right, Well, I see Jackie Gleason
Speaker 1: on the internet, so hopefully we're covered. You see Jackie
Speaker 1: Gleason on the internet say okay, good good, let's just
Speaker 1: get going. So yeah, this is a short stuff, Chuck,
Speaker 1: and we're never going to be able to end this now. Um,
Speaker 1: we're talking today about Brazil, the country that was first
Speaker 1: landed as far as Europeans go, by a guy from
Speaker 1: Portugal named Pedro Alvarez Cabral, right, And he landed there
Speaker 1: in d and things went pretty poorly for the local
Speaker 1: populations as a result. Yeah, and I think Cabral was
Speaker 1: one of those people that Brazil had always celebrated as
Speaker 1: the first European to show up there, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: this is our person, and let's celebrate this person. And
Speaker 1: then in the seventies something happened. I don't know where
Speaker 1: you found. This is very interesting, but something happened to
Speaker 1: kind of put that all in doubt. I found a
Speaker 1: contemporary New York Times article about it. I don't remember how,
Speaker 1: but I did, and I said, by God, this is
Speaker 1: a gift from Zeus himself. So here's what was happening.
Speaker 1: For a while. There were fishermen off of Guanabara Bay
Speaker 1: near Rio who for years had been fishing and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we'll pull up our fishing nets a lot of times,
Speaker 1: and we'll get these jars in our nets, and we
Speaker 1: think this might just be like the local native tribes
Speaker 1: used to offer these up um, you know, before Cabral
Speaker 1: actually landed on the scene and maybe these are ancient,
Speaker 1: who knows. And then in seventy six a man named
Speaker 1: Jose two Shara was diving there brought two of them
Speaker 1: to the surface and said, I think these are really
Speaker 1: really really old. Yeah, and not just really old too,
Speaker 1: because that could have been accounted for by the native tribes.
Speaker 1: But they were in a shape that people hadn't seen before,
Speaker 1: and uh to share, I brought them ashore and I
Speaker 1: guess handed them over to the navy, I think, who
Speaker 1: kept them um in a tank of sea water for
Speaker 1: a very long time, um until they were they were
Speaker 1: they caught the attention of a guy named Robert Marks,
Speaker 1: who went on to become I don't know if he
Speaker 1: was or not by this time. I think he was
Speaker 1: fairly famous, but he wanted to become a world famous,
Speaker 1: deeply renowned h underwater archaeologists. In fact, he's known as
Speaker 1: the father of underwater archaeology. But he caught wind of
Speaker 1: these jars being found and had to look at him,
Speaker 1: or got his hands on some pictures of him. And
Speaker 1: so these are not supposed to be here. These are
Speaker 1: not some local Brazilian jar. These look a lot like
Speaker 1: Roman emphora and Roman amphora were jars that were used
Speaker 1: very famous like vase jars with the double handles at
Speaker 1: the top um. They were used by Romans, Phoenicians and
Speaker 1: Greeks back around on the turn of the last millennia.
Speaker 1: And there's no good reason that these should be here
Speaker 1: in this bay in Brazil. Yeah, so after first thinking
Speaker 1: it might be a hoax, he did say, thinks they're real,
Speaker 1: and let me get some other divers and go down
Speaker 1: there and check out and see what's going on. And
Speaker 1: about ninety ft down, sure enough, they found about two
Speaker 1: hundred uh intact and broken amphora and they were he said,
Speaker 1: they were kind of concentrated in an area about the
Speaker 1: size of three tennis courts. And he's like sure, and
Speaker 1: he said, there's no real there's no way that these
Speaker 1: were planted here. He said, you know these things, some
Speaker 1: of these were like five ft under the mud. We
Speaker 1: had to dig him out with our hands out of
Speaker 1: the mud. And there's just their barnacle encrusted. Some of
Speaker 1: them have coral, and this coral was killed off like
Speaker 1: thirty or forty years earlier. So there's no way these
Speaker 1: were planted down there anytime. Recently. Yeah, he became pretty
Speaker 1: convinced that it wasn't a hoax UM and his suspicions
Speaker 1: were backed up by an expert that he enlisted from
Speaker 1: U Mass named Elizabeth will who was an expert in
Speaker 1: ancient Roman m f A, which is like that is
Speaker 1: a that is a very specific um focus of study.
Speaker 1: But she basically she looked at the type of them,
Speaker 1: looked at their manufacturer, like the what they She got
Speaker 1: her hands on some of the samples that to Shara
Speaker 1: had brought up, I think UM and she said, not
Speaker 1: only are these Roman m f A, I can tell
Speaker 1: you exactly where they were made and roughly win and
Speaker 1: she traced the design of these particular m for you
Speaker 1: to a place called kas ko u a s s
Speaker 1: Um in what is now present day Morocco, and the
Speaker 1: Coas M four A of this design were being made
Speaker 1: around the third century um CE, so about twelve hundred
Speaker 1: hundred years before uh Pedro Alvarez Cabral showed up in Brazil.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so Marx puts that together and says, all right,
Speaker 1: I have a theory. He said, they used to have
Speaker 1: boats back then and ships that could make you know
Speaker 1: that certainly could have traveled over here from the Mediterranean,
Speaker 1: and I think what might have happened is they were
Speaker 1: blown off course maybe and they ended up kind of
Speaker 1: shipwrecking after they anchored off Rio. Maybe there was a
Speaker 1: big storm or something that drove this ship onto a reef,
Speaker 1: and these jars just kind of ended up here, and
Speaker 1: and no one knew that they were here until these
Speaker 1: fishermen started pulling them up. Yeah, So I mean that's
Speaker 1: a pretty good assumption, especially considering that these jars are
Speaker 1: spread out over about a three tennis court size area
Speaker 1: that's maybe the size of a Roman ships hold. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's possible since they had seaworthy ships. But the
Speaker 1: thing is, as if that were true, that would totally
Speaker 1: rewrite history like it was how there used to be
Speaker 1: vague legends about how Vikings made it to North America,
Speaker 1: and um, we suddenly found that settlement, I can't remember
Speaker 1: the name of it, Um that that was a Viking
Speaker 1: settlement in North America that said unequivocally they had been
Speaker 1: here before. This would basically be like that, But there
Speaker 1: had been no legend before it. Knowing had any any
Speaker 1: idea that the Romans had made it to Brazil in
Speaker 1: the third century. UM. So this was a complete It
Speaker 1: required a complete revision of history. Even if it was
Speaker 1: just this tangential fleeting contact between one small group of
Speaker 1: Roman sailors in um prehistoric Brazilian tribes. Uh, it's still
Speaker 1: was a big deal to to find these things there.
Speaker 1: All right, maybe we should take our break and come
Speaker 1: back and talk about the response of Brazil right after this.
Speaker 1: M alright, so Marx has this theory, he's got these jars.
Speaker 1: The Brazilian government steps in and they don't say, this
Speaker 1: is amazing, thank you. Why don't We're gonna have a
Speaker 1: press conference and here's a podium and we want to
Speaker 1: hear all about it. They said, you know what, you're
Speaker 1: shut down. We're shutting down your operation. We don't like
Speaker 1: the looks of this. Uh. He he started excavating, excavating again,
Speaker 1: I think in eighty three or was that the first one, No,
Speaker 1: that was the second time. The first time was when
Speaker 1: he found him and said he found like a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred of them and that they were spread out
Speaker 1: over the tennis court. This is when he returned the
Speaker 1: next year to really excavate the site in earnest and
Speaker 1: he also found out that the navy, the Brazilian Navy
Speaker 1: like literally covered this stuff but dumped a bunch of
Speaker 1: fil dirt over the site and said, you know what,
Speaker 1: we we think you're a plunderer. We want to keep
Speaker 1: it from being plundered, and we covered it up, and
Speaker 1: you're banned. You can't even come into our country anymore. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was accused of having stolen artifacts from other sites
Speaker 1: in Brazil and selling them on UH European auction houses,
Speaker 1: essentially on the black market, but out in the open um.
Speaker 1: They had just been basically stolen from Brazil. That's a
Speaker 1: huge accusation to level against somebody. But apparently the Brazilian
Speaker 1: authorities were convinced enough by it that they actually banned
Speaker 1: him from Brazil and shut down all UH marine archaeological
Speaker 1: excavations in the country. There was just all like a
Speaker 1: blanket band on them because they had just been so
Speaker 1: I guess rattled by the perceived theft of of relics.
Speaker 1: The thing is is, you know, if if um Robert
Speaker 1: Marx had been anybody else, just some dude, it would
Speaker 1: have um, you know you you it would have been
Speaker 1: easy to buy that that had happened. But he really
Speaker 1: had a good reputation, especially by the end of his
Speaker 1: life in two thousand nineteen. Right, Yeah, he was knighted
Speaker 1: in three countries. He Uh. He wrote the UNESCO Laws
Speaker 1: about underwater archaeological digs, and he was a book writer.
Speaker 1: I think he's kind of the the granddaddy of underwater archaeology.
Speaker 1: He was very much not a plunderer of things. So
Speaker 1: it seemed like Brazil was being a jerk. It does.
Speaker 1: So that seems like a bit of a twist that
Speaker 1: they would literally cover up this history rewriting site. And
Speaker 1: at the time, in that New York Times article, I
Speaker 1: think Robert Marks suspected that it was because they were
Speaker 1: so venerating of cabral Um that they couldn't stand the
Speaker 1: idea of somebody, some other Europeans having beaten him there
Speaker 1: by hundreds of years. The thing is, it's entirely possible
Speaker 1: that the Brazilians didn't cover up that site, and that
Speaker 1: there wasn't two hundred of those amphora, and that there
Speaker 1: was no Roman galley that sunk in Brazil. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: a it's possible none of this happened at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the real cool twist here, is
Speaker 1: in there was a diver or a free diver name
Speaker 1: a Medico Santarelli, and America said, Hey, you know all
Speaker 1: this hullabaloo about these M for a, these are mine,
Speaker 1: These are replicas, and I buried these out there to
Speaker 1: try and age them. Dropped sixteen of these things out
Speaker 1: there to age them, and that's what they are. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He'd spent some time in rome Um and had kind
Speaker 1: of fallen for M four A. They were his thing,
Speaker 1: kind of like how some people collect different outfits to
Speaker 1: put on their concrete geese that they keep out in
Speaker 1: the front yard. This guy was into amphoury like that
Speaker 1: the thing is is okay? So Americo Santarelli claimed that
Speaker 1: those were his M four A. After this world famous
Speaker 1: underwater archaeologists had declared that there were two hundred of
Speaker 1: them buried five ft beneath the muck that a U
Speaker 1: mass expert had declared that they were made from Coassu
Speaker 1: in Morocco in the third century. Um. This guy says, no,
Speaker 1: they were mine, and there were only sixteen of them,
Speaker 1: and I dropped them there in the sixties. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the one thing I couldn't reckon with. Were there not
Speaker 1: two hundred? Was that just b s. Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the end of the Usual Suspects.
Speaker 1: If you go back and look at all of the
Speaker 1: evidence we have, almost almost all of it is coming
Speaker 1: out of Robert Marx's mouth. He's the one who saw
Speaker 1: the two D M. Four A. He's the one who
Speaker 1: said that they were spread out over a few tennis
Speaker 1: court sized fields. He's the one who said they were
Speaker 1: encrusted by barnacles. He's the one who's sang in a
Speaker 1: barbershop quartet and skok Illinois. That's exactly right. And when
Speaker 1: you go back and you look at this, you say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, there's there's not really much other evidence.
Speaker 1: There's that to back up this idea that he has,
Speaker 1: aside from him saying all this stuff. And I think
Speaker 1: the most telling thing about how they actually were Americo
Speaker 1: Santarelli's sixteen and four that he dropped in the Bay
Speaker 1: to age Um is that Robert Marks has kind of
Speaker 1: dropped the whole thing that nothing. There's like, the whole
Speaker 1: thing goes cold after that. Yeah, isn't that weird? It
Speaker 1: is very weird. He even wrote a book in that
Speaker 1: was about prehistoric contact between Europe and the America's And
Speaker 1: as far as I know, he didn't mention the jars
Speaker 1: in the bay in Brazil, and that's that's that, as
Speaker 1: far as I'm concerned. You know, I think since we
Speaker 1: mentioned Usual Suspects, we should shout out friend of the show,
Speaker 1: Kevin Pollock, one of the stars of Usual Suspects in
Speaker 1: a role where he gets to play the rare heavy
Speaker 1: And Kevin has a great in prov comedy showing your
Speaker 1: network called Alchemy This. Yeah, that is a great show.
Speaker 1: And actually he has a cameo in our book too.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what part we talked about, but there's
Speaker 1: one of one of the footnotes is about the live
Speaker 1: show in l A where he brought us water because
Speaker 1: we said we were thirsty. He brought us water up
Speaker 1: on stage. That's right. And he also played the role
Speaker 1: of Christopher walk In in my movie Crush April Fool's
Speaker 1: Interview a couple of years ago that delighted a lot
Speaker 1: of people and angered few. Hey man, if you're delighting
Speaker 1: and angering at the same time, you're doing something right.
Speaker 1: So hats off to both of you for the love. Pollock, good,
Speaker 1: good dude, good dude. Um. Well, I think that's it, right.
Speaker 1: You got anything else about Kevin Pollock or Brazilian jars? No,
Speaker 1: I want to get my hands on one of these. Well,
Speaker 1: just start diving and you will find one in Brazil
Speaker 1: off the coast of Rio uh. And since I said
Speaker 1: that everybody that means short stuff is out, stuff you
Speaker 1: should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
Speaker 1: more podcast It's My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. H m hm