Episode 162: A Strange Land

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts.

A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.

Music

Ruth and Sylvie from Daniel Hart’s score to Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
The Walk from Bernard Hermann’s score to Tender is the Night
Reflector by Bing and Ruth
Requiem from Nico Mulhy’s score to How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Under Siege from Warren Ellis’ score to Mustang
Spaces in Time from Per Nargard and the Stavenger Symphony
Theme de l’eau from Hikaru Hayashi’s score to The Naked Island
Bus Ride from the score to Wildlike
Duke Ellington playing Single Petal from a Rose

Notes

There’s quite a bit written about Isaac Israel Hayes. You can find his own account of his trip to find the non-existant, open polar sea here.
I owe the Detroit newspaper quote to this excellent article by Albin Kowaleweski.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.
0:03.9	Isaac Israel Hayes imagined there be more.
0:07.6	But when he was in his late 20s, you can picture him, thin and fit, good eyebrows,
0:13.5	his hairline receding early, a mustache but no beard, though that will change.
0:18.8	He was growing tired of his life as a country doctor among the low green hills of Chester
0:23.2	County, Pennsylvania. Worry of its routines and predictable rhythms, another birth,
0:28.8	another fever, another farming accident. And the only relief he found from all that monotonous
0:34.3	humanity was in imagining another world. The one at the top of this one. He read obsessively
0:41.4	about the Arctic, and he would thrill its stories of explorers pushing further and norther,
0:46.6	and he grew jealous of these men. Adventurers and sea captains outtaming the world,
0:52.4	living live so much grander than the one he was living, and so he left his behind.
0:56.9	He became a shipboard surgeon and a boat bound for the ice, searching for the lost expedition
1:03.6	of Surgeon Franklin. This was a common type of polar expedition then, then being the 1850s.
1:10.0	A ship would go off exploring the northernmost latitudes, would set sail to great fanfare,
1:15.0	to crowds cheering, waving from the docks as their heroes disappeared over the horizon.
1:20.4	And then their heroes would disappear, and other heroes would set out to find them.
1:25.1	And a lot of them disappeared too. Isaac, Israel Hayes, set sail on a ship,
1:29.6	captained by Elijah Kent Cain. It was a golden age for the three named men, who believed he had a
1:35.2	bead not only on the probable location of the missing Surgeon, but a grander quarry still.
1:41.6	The entrance to an inland sea, a body of liquid water beyond the ice, kept warm by the jet stream,
1:48.6	and kept secret by the ice itself. The Cain expedition found neither.
1:54.2	Franklin ships wouldn't be discovered for more than 100 years, nor would his crew,
	...

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