240-The Shark Papers
Futility Closet
Greg Ross
4.8 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1799 two Royal Navy ships met on the Caribbean Sea, and their captains discovered they were parties to a mind-boggling coincidence that would expose a crime and make headlines around the world. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the shark papers, one of the strangest coincidences in maritime history.
We'll also meet some Victorian kangaroos and puzzle over an expedient fire.
Intro:
Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a symphonic poem for 100 metronomes.
In 1935 a 7-year-old Berliner fell in love with Adolf Hitler.
Sources for our feature on the shark papers:
Edgar K. Thompson, "Tale of the Nancy Brig," Mariner's Mirror 56:1 (January 1970), 97-104.
D.A. Proctor, "Notes: Michael Fitton," Mariner's Mirror 79:2 (May 1993), 206-208.
Edward Warren Guyol, "The Navy, the Shark, and the 'Nancy' Brig," Harper's Weekly 52:2708 (Nov. 14, 1908), 29.
W.J. Fletcher, "Michael Fitton," Temple Bar 114:5 (July 1898), 350-364.
Clinton Vane de Brosse Black, Tales of Old Jamaica, 1966.
Edward Rowe Snow, Marine Mysteries and Dramatic Disasters of New England, 1976.
Sir Philip Manderson Sherlock, Jamaica Way, 1962.
Caroline Rochford, Forgotten Songs and Stories of the Sea, 2016.
Xavier Maniguet, The Jaws of Death: Sharks as Predator, Man as Prey, 2007.
Julia W. Wolfe, "Shark Tale of Jamaica; Old Papers at Kingston Tell a Strange Sea Story of 1799," New York Times, April 20, 1941.
"Pirates Convicted by Shark," [Burnie, Tasmania] Advocate, July 2, 1935.
"The Shark That Ate the Papers of the Nancy Brig," Otago [New Zealand] Daily Times, June 12, 1920.
"The King's Dominion of the Islands: Major and Minor West Indian Notes," United Empire: The Royal Colonial Institute Journal 7:4 (April 1916), 271-276.
"Odds and Ends," Wide World Magazine 1:5 (August 1898), 554-560.
"Miscellaneous," [Portland, Maine] Eastern Argus, June 5, 1833, 1.
Henry Baynham, "Fitton, Michael," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Jan. 3, 2008.
Listener mail:
Angus Trumble, "'O Uommibatto': How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed With the Wombat," Public Domain Review, Jan. 10, 2019.
"The Kangaroo in England," Country Life Illustrated 3:72 (May 21, 1898), 617-618.
David J. Travis, Andrew M. Carleton, and Ryan G. Lauritsen, "Regional Variations in US Diurnal Temperature Range for the 11–14 September 2001 Aircraft Groundings: Evidence of Jet Contrail Influence on Climate," Journal of Climate 17:5 (2004), 1123-1134.
This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Bob Seidensticker.
You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss.
Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website.
Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.
If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Futility Closet Podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. |
| 0:14.5 | Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from music for metronomes to a love letter to Hitler. |
| 0:21.8 | This is episode 240. I'm Greg Ross. |
| 0:24.6 | And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1799, two Royal Navy ships met on the Caribbean Sea, |
| 0:30.8 | and their captains discovered that they were parties to a mind-boggling coincidence |
| 0:34.9 | that would expose a crime and make headlines around the world. |
| 0:38.9 | In today's show, we'll tell the story of the shark papers, one of the strangest coincidences |
| 0:43.5 | in maritime history. We'll also meet some Victorian kangaroos and puzzle over an expedient fire. |
| 1:01.6 | At the end of the 18th century, England and France were at war, and each of them prohibited neutral nations from doing business with the other. In the West Indies, British ships |
| 1:06.5 | patrolled the Caribbean to intercept any vessels that might be trading with French islands there. |
| 1:11.4 | In early August 1799, two Royal Navy ships, the ferret and the sparrow, were patrolling the |
| 1:17.2 | Mona passage between Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo. When a week passed and they'd made no |
| 1:22.0 | captures, they separated, but their commanders, Michael Fitton and Hugh Wiley, agreed to meet again |
| 1:27.2 | off Jack Mell and Santo Domingo |
| 1:28.8 | at the end of the month. The ferret made its way west, met no suspicious ships on the way, and was the |
| 1:34.6 | first to arrive at the rendezvous point at the end of the month. At dawn on August 30th, its lookout reported |
| 1:40.1 | that the sparrow was six miles away and approaching, so Fitton signaled it and invited Wiley |
| 1:44.8 | to join him for breakfast. As Wiley was rode over from the sparrow, Fitton sat on the taff rail |
| 1:50.2 | and looked about him. Cattle boats from Venezuela passed this way regularly, and Fitten wasn't |
| 1:55.0 | surprised to see a dead bullock floating in the water some distance away. A group of sharks were tearing |
| 2:00.1 | at it. To pass the time, |
| 2:01.7 | while he waited for Wiley, Fitton ordered his men to pull the bullock alongside the ship. |
... |
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