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Tail End · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
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  Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Homer's Iliad is one of the oldest and most widely
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  Speaker 1: read literary works in the Western world. The epic poem
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  Speaker 1: tells the story of a ten-year war in the ancient
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  Speaker 1: city of Troy. For centuries, most modern readers assumed the
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  Speaker 1: poem was pure fiction, and the city of Troy was
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  Speaker 1: just as fantastical as the ancient Greek gods who populated
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  Speaker 1: the story. But in the 1860s, a German businessman named
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  Speaker 1: Heinrich Schliemann believed the Iliad was more than just a legend.
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  Speaker 1: He thought that it actually referred to a historical war
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  Speaker 1: fought between real Bronze Age cities that simply hadn't been
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  Speaker 1: discovered yet by archaeologists. Now, Schliemann had no archaeological training,
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  Speaker 1: but he did have a lot of money and a
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  Speaker 1: lot of free time. So in 1870, he decided to
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  Speaker 1: find the proof himself. Schliemann had made an acquaintance of
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  Speaker 1: a British diplomat and amateur archaeologist named Frank Calvert, who
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  Speaker 1: had previously argued that the ruins of ancient Troy were
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  Speaker 1: were buried under a hill in Turkey known as Hisarlik.
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  Speaker 1: Calvert had never been able to secure funding for the
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  Speaker 1: excavation because no one believed his story. But Schliemann did,
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  Speaker 1: and with the help of Calvert's old crew, he set
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  Speaker 1: out for Hisarlik and started digging. Schliemann was so sure
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  Speaker 1: that the ruins of Troy lay deep beneath that hill,
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  Speaker 1: and so desperate to find them, that he didn't want
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  Speaker 1: to waste time by digging slowly and carefully through the
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  Speaker 1: many layers of earth. Instead, He used dynamite to blast
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  Speaker 1: a huge trench right down to the bedrock. And then,
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  Speaker 1: once that trench was open, Schliemann and his crew spent
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  Speaker 1: years excavating the site, searching through the dirt and rock
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  Speaker 1: for any sign of ancient civilization. It was slow to
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  Speaker 1: begin with, but in May of 1873, Schliemann finally stumbled
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  Speaker 1: upon what appeared to be a large piece of copper
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  Speaker 1: embedded in the ruins of a stone wall. As he
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  Speaker 1: brushed the dirt away, he realized that it wasn't actually
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  Speaker 1: copper at all. It was gold. He had discovered a
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  Speaker 1: trove of gold jewelry and other precious artifacts that he
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  Speaker 1: believed to be the wealth of King Priam, who ruled
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  Speaker 1: Troy during the Trojan War in Homer's poem. Schliemann was
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  Speaker 1: so excited he couldn't contain himself. He smuggled the treasure
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  Speaker 1: out of the country and presented it as confirmation of
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  Speaker 1: his theory. He was the first person to prove the
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  Speaker 1: existence of ancient Troy, or so he thought. Schliemann was,
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  Speaker 1: in fact, the first person to correctly identify where Troy
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  Speaker 1: was located. But unfortunately, his fantastical belief in his own
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  Speaker 1: theory proved to be his undoing. By blasting so many
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  Speaker 1: layers of dirt so recklessly, Schliemann had inadvertently destroyed thousands
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  Speaker 1: of years of artifacts from other settlements that had occupied
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  Speaker 1: this location over the centuries. This made it harder for
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  Speaker 1: later archaeologists to establish exactly how old the items that
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  Speaker 1: Schliemann found actually were. But modern studies eventually found that
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  Speaker 1: the treasures that Schliemann had uncovered were actually came from
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  Speaker 1: about a thousand years before the period associated with the
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  Speaker 1: Trojan War. They were artifacts from a much older settlement,
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  Speaker 1: what we now call Troy II. The ancient city described
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  Speaker 1: in Homer's Iliad, known today as Troy VI, was built
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  Speaker 1: on top of the ruins of this old settlement many
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  Speaker 1: centuries later. In almost every trace of Troy VI, the
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  Speaker 1: city that Schliemann had actually set out to find had
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  Speaker 1: been permanently destroyed by his own dynamite. In 1902, French
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  Speaker 1: colonizers in Hanoi found themselves at war. Their enemy was fast, clever,
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  Speaker 1: and multiplying. But the enemy wasn't the local population. It
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  Speaker 1: wasn't even human. It was rats. At the time, Vietnam
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  Speaker 1: was part of French Indochina. Governor-General Paul Dumère wanted Hanoi
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  Speaker 1: to become a monument to French superiority, and so he
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  Speaker 1: built imposing government buildings, wide boulevards, fancy villas, and miles
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  Speaker 1: of new sewers. But the improvements were not shared equally.
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  Speaker 1: The European Quarter received running water, toilets, and elaborate sewers.
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  Speaker 1: The densely populated Vietnamese neighborhoods, on the other hand, were
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  Speaker 1: left with basic drainage that could overflow during the rainy season.
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  Speaker 1: Unfortunately for the French, rats did not respect that segregation.
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  Speaker 1: The new sewers offered protection from predators and were filled
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  Speaker 1: with waste from above that served as food. It gave
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  Speaker 1: Hanoi's rats the perfect place to reproduce, along with a
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  Speaker 1: highway into the European Quarter. And soon, rats began emerging
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  Speaker 1: through the plumbing of French homes. And clearly, this was gross,
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  Speaker 1: but it would soon also become deadly. You see, scientists
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  Speaker 1: had recently established that infected fleas carried by rats helped
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  Speaker 1: spread bubonic plague. And in 1902, the disease reached Hanoi.
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  Speaker 1: A French military doctor, Vincent Ruffiandi's, later wrote that Hanoi's
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  Speaker 1: first confirmed case was a Vietnamese employee at a tailor shop.
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  Speaker 1: Investigators found numerous rats dead inside the business and suspected
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  Speaker 1: that infected animals had arrived in fabric imported from Hong Kong.
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  Speaker 1: All told, the plague caused 14 known cases and eight
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  Speaker 1: deaths in Hanoi that summer. And so the colonial government
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  Speaker 1: struck back. Beginning in the spring of 1902, it hired
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  Speaker 1: Vietnamese laborers to enter the sewers and kill as many
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  Speaker 1: rats as possible. Naturally, the French did not go into
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  Speaker 1: the sewers themselves. The workers were paid according to the
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  Speaker 1: number of rats that they killed, and the totals were
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  Speaker 1: absolutely wild. From April 26th through May 1st, they turned
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  Speaker 1: in 7,985 rats. But they were apparently just getting started.
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  Speaker 1: A few weeks later, on May 30th alone, they killed 15,041.
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  Speaker 1: And then just a couple of weeks after that, on
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  Speaker 1: June 12th, they reached an official single-day record of of 20,114.
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  Speaker 1: That's more than 20,000 rats killed underneath one city in
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  Speaker 1: one day. And it still wasn't enough. The sewers seemed
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  Speaker 1: to contain an unlimited supply of these rodents. Even worse,
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  Speaker 1: French residents began complaining about the sight and smell of
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  Speaker 1: the Vietnamese rat catchers who were emerging into their neighborhoods
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  Speaker 1: carrying piles of dead animals. The laborers were protecting these
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  Speaker 1: residents from the plague, but some colonists apparently considered the
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  Speaker 1: workers to almost offensive as the pests were. Since the
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  Speaker 1: professional rat catchers could not solve the problem, the government
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  Speaker 1: expanded the hunt. Any resident could now earn a one-cent
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  Speaker 1: bounty for killing a rat. To collect the money, they
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  Speaker 1: only had to present the rat's tail. This was because
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  Speaker 1: officials realized that requiring entire carcasses would leave the government
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  Speaker 1: responsible for disposing of mountains of rotting rats. But there
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  Speaker 1: was one major thing that they hadn't considered. A rat
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  Speaker 1: was does not actually need to be dead before someone
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  Speaker 1: cuts off its tail. Officials began seeing tailless rats running
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  Speaker 1: through Hanoi. People were apparently catching them, removing their tails,
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  Speaker 1: and then setting them free. This was human ingenuity at work.
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  Speaker 1: A living rat could produce more animals, which in turn
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  Speaker 1: could provide the hunters with more tails. And of course,
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  Speaker 1: as humans are wont to do, they extrapolated out this
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  Speaker 1: thinking into an even bigger racket. Colonial health inspectors reported
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  Speaker 1: discovering people raising rats on Hanoi's outskirts specifically to collect
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  Speaker 1: the bounty. There were now rat farms in Hanoi. The
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  Speaker 1: government had transformed rat control into a promising new business.
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  Speaker 1: The more rats the city produced, the more money an
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  Speaker 1: enterprising resident could make. Realizing that it was paying people
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  Speaker 1: to intensify the rat problem rather than to fight it,
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  Speaker 1: the government canceled the bounty. And all of a sudden,
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  Speaker 1: the rats had won. Plague returned even worse in 1903.
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  Speaker 1: Officials reported 159 cases and 110 deaths among the Vietnamese,
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  Speaker 1: along with six European cases and two deaths. Dr. Rufi
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  Speaker 1: Andes believed that the Vietnamese total was likely several times
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  Speaker 1: higher because families concealed illnesses and deaths to avoid French intervention.
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  Speaker 1: Further outbreaks followed, but rats remained a problem long after
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  Speaker 1: it all began. The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre is brought
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  Speaker 1: up a lot in modern economic discussions about what are
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  Speaker 1: known as pervasive incentives, or rewards that fuel continued bad behavior.
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  Speaker 1: But the story is also a damning example of colonial abuse.
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  Speaker 1: The French rebuilt Hanoi to prove their superiority and then
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  Speaker 1: sent Vietnamese workers underground to protect French homes from a
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  Speaker 1: danger that their own sewer system helped them create. The
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  Speaker 1: government thought that they could buy their way out of
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  Speaker 1: a problem. But curiously, all their money did was buy
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  Speaker 1: a mountain of tails. I hope you enjoyed today's guided
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  Speaker 1: tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created
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  Speaker 1: by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched
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  Speaker 1: and written by the Grim & Mild team, and produced
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  Speaker 1: by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the
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  Speaker 1: people who make it over at grimandmild.com slash curiosities. You'll
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  Speaker 1: also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosities
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  Speaker 1: hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well as
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  Speaker 1: ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an ad-free option,
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  Speaker 1: consider joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but
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  Speaker 1: without the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn more
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  Speaker 1: and sign up over at patreon.com slash grim and mild.
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  Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious.