Endless Thread - The Cursed Manuscript

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

A 17th century monk using a nom de plume pens what could have been the blockbuster of its time: a teenage boy embarking on an epic voyage to the Americas. But, due to a series of bizarre circumstances, it was never published... until now.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Emery, I recently learned that you were not a big fan of scary movies, and so without further ado, I would like to play you a scary movie clip. Oh, good. Death doesn't like to be cheated. Excuse me? What's that supposed to mean? You all. Just be careful.

Okay. Thanks for the advice. Creepy guy. Any idea of where this is from? I'll give you a hint. It is a franchise. The only scary movie franchises I can think of right now are scream and saw. That would be no and no. Okay. We're talking final destination.

Have you heard of these? Yes. All right. So this is the series of movies, five of them actually, where a series of, small group of people avoid a big disaster and yet are still cursed to meet the same fate, aka death one by one, in increasingly terrifying and or hilariously gory ways. Okay, I would very much like to know how final destination one, two, three, four, and five relate to the story you're about to tell about a Spanish adventure in the 1600s?

Okay, here's the thing. We're about to talk about a mysterious manuscript that is hundreds of years old. Check. And said manuscript was mysteriously unpublished until now. Check. And part of that might be because of a deadly curse. Rumored curse. Right.

Rumored curse. Which we will get into. This book, apparently written by a monk under a nom de plume and almost never published, tells an epic story, both in the book's pages themselves, but also in what the book tells us about this particular moment in history. You ready for a history lesson, Amory, that includes pirates, pine, Apples, Peruvians, and the greatest economic engine of the 1600s, a silver mine called Potosi? Lay it on me. But we need a title. This is a book we're talking about after all, right?

Yeah. So, okay, the book is called The Orphins Story, but let's call this episode the cursed manuscript. All right. You've got my attention. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online community. called Reddit. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. I'm here with my producer and co-host Amory Sievertson and we're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

Okay, Amory, since you're technically on vacation this week because you also just got married this week, I'm gonna tell this one and you get to kick back and listen. Great, I have the popcorn. Go for it. So I got interested in this story from an intriguing Reddit post in R-slash books, which, which is a subreddit about the thing you think it is about books. And the title was, well, it was really long.

The post itself needed an editor. The post reads, in part, after 400 years lost, cursed novel of Spain's imperial age is finally published. So why did it take four centuries to publish this manuscript? Well, we're going to explore with the help of pineapples, pirates, Peruvians, and the great silver mine, Potosi. Now, every manuscript, whenever it was written, needs two things to become a book. It needs a publisher, in this case an organization in Spain dedicated to preserving Spanish history,

and it needs an editor. My full name is Belinda Carin Palacios. I'm Peruvian, but I live in Switzerland. And I study Hispanic literature. Belinda Palacios came into possession of this manuscript in a pretty straightforward way. She was in the midst of her PhD, and she needed to tackle an unpublished text in her area of study that might result in some new information. So she asked around, and an old teacher of one of her professors sent her three options. Two were mostly poetry.

The other was prose. The prose version was called Historia del Werfano, or the orphan story. And so I wrote this teacher back to thank him and to tell him that I was choosing the or And then that was when he told me that I must warn you, but the novel is cursed. So you must know that people who worked on it before have died. And I thought that he was joking. So I continue with the work. A few years later, I was talking to a professor from New York.

And she told me the same thing. And she also told me that apparently three people have died working on the work. the manuscript, like one from a strange disease, another one in a car accident, and the other one, I don't remember what happened to him. The New York professor who told Belinda about the three people who supposedly died working on this cursed manuscript is Raquel Chang Rodriguez. Raquel is a specialist in colonial letters in the Andean region and in Mexico at the City University of New York, CUNY.

She had followed the fates of these people who had died. Legend developed by the manuscript being embrugas, as we say in Spanish, witched. Witched. Of course, that didn't stop Belinda. It was strange. But I continued to work, and I just told my best friend to go and burn the manuscript if I died during my PhD. So Belinda continues to work on the manuscript.

Hey, she's not a huge believer in curses. And also, this manuscript is fascinating. partly because of when it was written and what was happening in Spanish literature in the 15 and 1600s. One of the things that is happening is that this new world, the Americas, might as well be another planet for most people in Europe. Even though a growing number of Europeans are going, the voyage takes a really long time, a lot of people who go never come back, those that do bring crazy stories. And some of the people writing at the time are mixing real crazy stories with an idea from medieval literature. The idea that the edges of the earth are places inhabited by monsters.

So the Spanish were sure that in this new world, they will find monsters, like mermaids and amazons and men with doghead, and enormous sea monsters and giants. So they kind of invented their own version of America. And that's really interesting because it teaches much more about the European medieval mentalities than about America itself. The Europeans were bringing their literature baggage with them across the ocean or something like that. Yes, exactly. They were bringing their own mythology and point of view. Another thing at play here, a new rule for books in the new world.

thought it would be better not bringing fiction or writing fiction in the colonies because that could, like, confuse the indigenous people. They thought they wouldn't be able to distinguish fiction and reality. It's important to understand this backdrop when we look at the story in the book itself. You've got this fantastical mix of real stories and myth, and then you've got this pretty paternalistic policy that starts to be in for forced by the king, a policy of not publishing New World fiction. Here's the thing, though. When it comes to creative writing, you can try to stop it, but

writer's going to write, one way or the other. And a lot of people wanting to write novels during this time about the New World pretend they are writing history, biographies, autobiographies, when they are really writing historical fiction, which is how we get the Historia part of the Orphan's Story. Also, how we get to this guy, Neil Anthony Messer. He's a former PhD student who was also pretty familiar with this cursed manuscript. The main character is never named. He's called the Werfano, which in English would be the orphan. Obviously, he didn't have a lot of money.

He decided to go try his handout in the new world, see if he could make a living. And he left Spain, according to the narrative, when 14 years of age, which is kind of hard to believe taking that kind of ocean voyage when you're 14, going to a completely new place. He gets to the new world and initially as a soldier, he participates in parts of the conquest of Central America. The orphan is described as it's kind of a bizarre mixture, but he's kind of a strong man and a religious and a soldier.

It said he could like crush walnuts or nuts with his bare hands and he would like break plates over his head. And he said he could. dent a helmet, just punching it. He gets shot by a poison arrow, and he gets in other fights, and he escapes. He goes down later to Peru, gets in more trouble. Some kind of romantic indiscretion is not really described. He has to flee from Trujillo in northern Peru.

He goes to Lima, and he also goes into hiding in an Augustinian convent for a few months for some other indiscretion. While he's in this convent, the orphan decides to become. a monk. And this plot point of the story, the monk part of the orphan story, is really interesting. The author's nom de plume is Andres de Leon. And manuscript editor Belinda says this book, which tells the epic tale of an orphan who goes voyaging, fights pirates, and decides to become a monk, was written by a monk. His whole name is Martin de Leon and Cardenas. He became a monk. And then he went to Peru when he was around 26 years old.

This monk, who Belinda thinks is the real person who wrote the manuscript, has his own incredible story of going across the Atlantic and back during a meteoric rise through the Catholic Church, a religious connection that may also explain why this manuscript is supposedly cursed. More on all of that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out. about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so this novel written in the early

1600s, was written under a fake name. But one prevailing theory is that it was written by this Spanish monk, who, like the traveler in the novel itself, took a journey across the Atlantic to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But in addition to that, some of the writing in the book itself comes from a strong religious perspective. Here's Neil, the doctoral student we were talking to a minute ago. In a number of the tales, he talks about the heretics and how it's interesting when the pirates attack the orphan ship in the Caribbean Sea,

and a number of the pirates are killed, and it says that the ocean itself kind of spits them out on the shore because it can't stand having these heretics kind of floating about in it. But even with hints like that, there's still debate around who authored the orphan's story. Really, there were a lot of people, making this trip at the time, as dangerous as it was, and a lot of them were writing. But as Belinda noted, a lot of that writing is straight-up fiction.

So we wanted to get a better idea of everything we are still learning about this era. We called up a historian who seems to know like everything about this era. Daniela Blychmar is a professor at the University of Southern California studying the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, which she says is this huge transitional period in global history. One of the things that Europeans were tripping about were all the plants and animals that they had never known existed or seen.

She actually makes the argument that this era was the first global age. The world is getting bigger because new places are getting, quote, discovered by European powers, but at the same time, it's getting smaller because the world is increasingly connected, in part, by writing.

Part of what is interesting is that we think of these period as, oh, the Gutenberg press, the spread of print, absolutely, but authors wrote by hand. And then sometimes that got into print and sometimes they didn't, but we have lots of manuscripts that were never printed at that time. But the reason they were written is because people knew that it was a viable thing to do with your personal experience, to turn it into something that would interest readers.

But one thing that readers and authors became very, very interested in is what was true. And that word true wasn't really a big sort of keyword before. But in really, really, but in the mid-1500s, all these books start being called the true history of this, the true narrative of that. And that's because travelers to the Americas are writing books where they describe things that people say, like, this is too incredible. I cannot believe it. Like, there's a fruit that comes out of a spiky plant that has green spikes on top and that is very prickly. But if you cut it, it's bright yellow and it tastes amazing and it's very juicy and they call it a pineapple. And people say, get out of here.

No way. Too crazy. The pineapple's too crazy. Too crazy because there's no refrigeration. You cannot get it to cross the ocean. See? There's our pineapples. Told you I was going to give you pineapples.

And so travel narratives and narratives about places far away where amazing things happen become this huge thing because people can't go there. Right? Today we can, you know, I can snap a photo with my iPhone and I can show you exactly where I went. But back then, you know, somebody would leave and they would come back 20 years later and tell you these stories of what they had lived through.

Yeah, this almost sounds like the blogosphere. of its own time, like people describing their own experience and, and, like, realizing that that's a way to, I don't know, get their experience out into the world is to write things that are sort of intensely personal. In a way, absolutely. But what they are experiencing is not the everyday. It's not the blogosphere of, this is what I cook in my kitchen every day. Oh, sure, sure, sure. It's the blogosphere of, I travel to Mars, and I'm sure you've heard of this planet called Mars. And let me tell you, what? But I live there that you never will. And so it's this virtual experience, this virtual voyaging through the words and the images that people who have been there bring back. The orphan story is smack dab in the middle of this virtual voyaging, which is why the people who have studied it, the ones who are still alive, say it's tale of a teenager crossing the Atlantic and becoming a soldier and fighting off pirates and then becoming a monk. his old age, could have been a huge bestseller at the time.

Because not only is it telling this incredible life story of the orphan and describing this new world with all this crazy detail, the book is written as a true story. Except it's not. As the manuscript editor Belinda hinted at, the orphan story is basically historical fiction. The thing is, is it's incredibly convincing historical fiction. Why? Belinda says access. And this access is another argument for the book being written by a Spanish monk.

It has to do with how the Spanish crown collected information about the new world from across the ocean. During this time period, Spain had competition on the global stage from England. There's this ongoing war between the two countries' armadas, never really declared, but it was a really big deal. And a growing source of Spain's power is the Americas, which is why the crown wanted very detailed information. about its colonies across the ocean in the form of questionnaires filled out by religious leaders in these new colonies. And Spain wanted this information to be secret. They asked for every detail related to the geography, the crops, the rivers, lakes, plants,

everything. And actually, this task to collect this information was given to the bishops. And the bishops should collect the information and then send it to the crown. But it was not a public information. They were official on secret papers, and they were not supposed to be published or even seen by regular people. And that was, again, in order to protect the colonies from other countries. What Belinda discovered was that detail in the orphan's story

matched all of this secret information being gathered by Catholic clergy in the colonies, information that regular people didn't have access to. Daniela explains this with a history lesson. You know, one of the interesting things is that 1492, we think of as the year that, you know, Columbus arrives in the Caribbean. But in Europe in 1492, that wasn't the big news. The big news was the end of the religious war between the Catholic kings of Spain and the Crusades. The last crusades, right? No, not the Crusades, but the Reconquista.

Actually, you're wrong. I'm going to fail you on that quiz. Damn it. But you tried. Yeah. Was that the 1100s? Maybe I'm a couple hundred years too late. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, so what happens is that Spain is not a unified country. Spain is a bunch of kingdoms that are becoming unified through religious war. So what you have is. a Spanish administration that is profoundly, profoundly bureaucratic, creating rules, rules about everything, about governance, even about urban planning. So I'll say that as a historian, it's a dream to study the Spanish America as a Spanish

empire because they were so bureaucratic that anything got set down in paper and three copies were made, each to be filed in the appropriate place. So they left the paper trail that is just beautiful. Because of this beautiful paper trail that at the time this Spanish monk had exclusive access to, the orphan's story is uniquely detailed in its descriptions of places and events. And specifically, it has a ton of information about Peru and Peruvians. All during this time period that Daniela says is truly a pivotal era in world history. So you have this incredible ethnic mixing.

You have this cultural mixing. you have religion having been established. You have people who are third generation American born of mixed parentage, who are third generation Christians. And in the Andes, what you have is the rise of the Cerro Rico, the rich mountain of Potosi. And that is the most amazingly mind-blowing fortune is the most productive silver mine found and exploited,

and it pretty much fuels the global economy. The rich mountain, Potosi, that silver mine we've been promising to talk about, is described in the orphan's story. Daniela says this is one of the most important places in the world than the 1600s, more financially important than London or Milan. It had a bigger population than those cities as well. 160,000 people living in a place with an altitude above 13,000 feet. Potosi was the engine of the global economy at this time.

It was really the silver that came out of that mine ended up in Asia, in Europe, and it really made the world go round. I'll also say that it became so well known that there is an idiom in Spanish to say something is where, a lot of money. You can say, it's worth a potosi. And that's an idiom that comes from the 17th century, when it was a way you just refer to crazy, fabulous wealth. This incredible wealth that was coming out of a mountain in a place that to Europeans was remote and dangerous. Also, the rivalry between Spain and England that was turning into

all-out war on the open seas. All of this is how we return to another of our P-words, pirates or privateers. who in many cases were essentially in the employ of England trying to disrupt Spain's hold on the Americas. In one story, Belinda says the orphan disguises himself as a poor person to avoid the attention of pirates who overtake his ship. In another story, the book's hero plays a key role in a pirate siege on Puerto Rico by advising the Spanish to sink ships in a harbor to blockade against the pirate attack. This story is one of Belinda's favorites in the book. Because when I was working on the manuscript, I found out in the case of Puerto Rico, he took a letter that the governor of Puerto Rico wrote to the crown.

And he copied the whole letter. And he changed the name of those real persons by the orphan. So I guess because it's really interesting to read, but it's also a great example of how this novel was created. But here's the thing. This story, this fantastic, sometimes familiar epic odyssey that is the orphan story, which was published just recently four centuries after it was written, will never actually know who wrote it. The most likely suspect, Spanish monk Martine de Leon, never copped to it.

Why? Well, maybe because he was a rising star in the Catholic Church, and this dabbling in historical fiction could have destroyed his career. He was only in Peru for five or six years in his mid-20s. When he went back to Europe, the King of Spain made Martin Archbishop of Palermo in Italy, where he died at the age of 70. Remember the rumored curse, the one that supposedly killed three people working on this manuscript before Belinda took it on?

There was the guy who died in a car crash, the guy who died from a strange disease, and then the other guy who died in a way that Belinda couldn't remember. Well, here's that perfect. from CUNY, Raquel again, talking about the first two. It's just kind of a hearsay type of thing. Bonino was not a youngster when he began to study the manuscript. And William C. Brian, whom I knew, he wasn't in old age, but he was no youngster either. So, but it just, it was unfortunate that neither were able to complete what he was doing.

But wait, what about that third guy? You ask. Belinda couldn't remember how he had supposedly died. She had also tried to reach out to another person who had worked on the cursed manuscript, but she couldn't find him. And she feared the worst. The good news, this third person who supposedly died and the Ph.D. student Belinda searched for. They are the same person. That person, well, we did find him. And you heard from him already. Okay, my name is Neil Anthony Messer. I currently live in Indiana, Pennsylvania, about an hour east of Pittsburgh. I originally got my doctorate in colonial Spanish-American literature. Our buddy Neil did his dissertation on the orphan story, in part because he was into pirates. No word on how he feels about pineapples, but I'm going to guess he's pro. So, maybe not cursed.

Or maybe the curse has been broken now that the orphan's story has been published. But maybe that's not the most interesting thing about this novel of surprisingly accurate historical fiction anyway. Maybe it's about understanding the period itself. Here's Daniela again. There is a line that historians love to quote, which goes, The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. And it is true.

But that said, I think that there's a lot of things that sort of resonate between that period and this period. It was a period of enormous. enormously fast technological development. The printing press was a major shift, the scientific revolution. So there was profound technological change, profound interest in exploration and discovery, in novelty, in things that are new. There was a huge economic imbalance.

So we talk about the 1% today. Well, this was a time when the region, which were getting richer very, very quickly. And there was a lot of economic mobility due to the world becoming bigger. It was a time where things happened faster. And people really thought we are living in a new era. Yeah, I keep thinking of like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk

and like all these people who... SpaceX. Yeah, and like all these people who are sort of kind of considered explorers and disruptors and like people who are harnessing technology. and wealth and power to like do all of this stuff that we're now also kind of trying to reckon with the fallout of that and the time that you're telling me about feels similar in that way. Absolutely. And it felt, I think, for people at the time, exciting and promising and also reckless.

Okay, Emery, cursed or not cursed? You believe in curses? Hmm. When they benefit me. Is that fair to say? I'm going to go with not cursed. Cursed by the fateful circumstances of history and the perennial challenges of the publishing industry.

Yes. But also kind of a fascinating story about this intense period in time for the Americas and for Spain. The first global age, according to Daniela. I think part of what's really interesting about this manuscript is apparently what it doesn't tell, which is the side of the story of the people who were in Peru before the Spanish arrived.

Right. And Danielle said something about this that I thought was powerful. I think that there was enormous devastation of indigenous communities without a question. I think that for a long time, some scholars took this to mean that indigenous cultures had been sort of devastated to the point of having no impact in colonial society. And what we have come to know is that was not the case, that indigenous traditions were a huge part of colonial society and that colonial society was much more mixed than it was previously imagined to be or supposed to be

by people who weren't all that happy about that. And so we are very interested in doing justice to the experience of all historical actors of everyone who live there and trying to rescue their stories from, you know, the vaults of time and trying to see how they saw the world. Rescuing their stories from the vaults of time to see how they saw the world. I like that. And the need to do that rescuing of stories is a good reminder

that when looking at this stuff, you have to consider the source. In this case, a nom de plume, possibly a Spanish monk, But someone who is close enough to these adventures to tell them. It helps to paint the picture, but it's not the full picture. It's like a brush stroke. True. Emory, now I'm going to go practice cracking walnuts with my bare hands and denting armor with my fists like the orphan.

All right, good luck with that, bud. I'm going to need it. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when she learned about the quote-unquote discovery of pineapples, was like, Whoa, dude. Iris Adler is our executive producer,

and when we asked her if she wanted to voyage across the Atlantic with us, she said, Unexpected. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, who heard about mermaids and giant sea monsters and muttered to themselves. Dolphin conspiracy. Our web producer is Megan Kelly,

and when she hears Ben trying to be funny in our episodes, she knows it's all... Dad jokes. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, who, when we tell stories from Spain's golden age, makes sure we... Ask us to... Even though you don't always hear his voice, it seems important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Swartz can also say that endless thread is

Something I Made. Extra production assistance from James Lindbergh. Our intern is Josh Luckens. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Detramentalist for this week's artwork. It's called Voyage of St. Brennan. Also, by the way, if you want to read the orphan's story in Spanish, head to the publisher. That's La Fundacion Jose Antonio. Castro, forgive my terrible Spanish pronunciation. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.