This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMau.

There must have been a moment when William Walker was running through the jungle.

His feet blistered, his clothes soaked through his sweat.

His face still bleeding from that shootout at the abandoned lumber camp a few miles back along the river.

There must have been a moment as the British Navy and the Honduran Army closed in.

When William Walker marveled at the life that had brought him there.

He was born in Tennessee in 1824.

And young William was small and perotious.

He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville.

He was 14 years old.

He spent 15 and 16 studying medicine in Scotland and Sweden, Germany and France.

By 19 he was a Philadelphia doctor with a degree from Penn.

A couple of years later he had a law degree.

Soon after that the doctor turned lawyer, turned journalist.

He started a paper in New Orleans before heading out to San Francisco,

where he worked as a reporter.

And where he decided he was going to start his own country.

Now this was sort of the thing to do in the early 1850s.

The newspapers like Walker's New Orleans Crescent were filled with riveting stories of small

groups of Americans landing on some beach on some Caribbean island and trying to take over.

They were called filibusters from a Spanish word for pirate.

And yeah, that's where the political term comes from.

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