Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Despite existing for hundreds of thousands of years, we humans have only scratched the surface

of what we know about our planet.

There remain lands that have gone untouched, depths that we have not reached and mountains

that we have not climbed.

The Earth is still keeping secrets after all this time, but the more we explore and investigate

it, one thing becomes clear.

There are places that humans were not meant to go.

Like Swalbard.

Located in the Arctic Ocean between Norway and the North Pole, Swalbard is an archipelago

that was first discovered by Dutch explorer William Barons back in 1596.

Barons had set out in search of the Northern Sea Route, a shipping path through the Arctic

waters that wasn't officially conquered until 1878, but he had high hopes.

In his journey, he spotted Spitzbergen, the largest of Swalbard's islands, which made

up over half of the archipelago.

Nine years later, an English ship made contact with another island in the cluster called Bornoia.

It became a hot spot for walrus hunting.

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