Futility Closet - 045-Crossing Africa for Love

Episode Date: February 8, 2015

When Ewart Grogan was denied permission to marry his sweetheart, he set out to walk the length of Africa to prove himself worthy of her. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll find out whether Ewart's romantic quest succeeded. We'll also get an update on the criminal history of Donald Duck's hometown, and try to figure out how a groom ends up drowning on his wedding night. Sources for our segment on Ewart Grogan's traversal of Africa: Ewart Scott Grogan and Arthur Henry Sharp, From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa From South to North, 1902. Edward Paice, Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of Cape-to-Cairo Grogan, 2001. Julian Smith, Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, 2010. Norman Wymer, The Man from the Cape, 1959. Martin Dugard, The Explorers, 2014. Brian O'Brien, "All for the Love of a Lady," in The Best of Field and Stream: 100 Years of Great Writing from America's Premier Sporting Magazine, 2002. "One Incredibly Long Church Aisle," Times Higher Education, June 15, 2001. "A Man Who Did Derring-Do," Telegraph, March 31, 2001. Listener Ed Kitson directed us to this letter from Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, dated May 7, 1822, in which she writes, "I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for." And listener Alex Klapheke sent us a copy of Swiss criminologist Karl-Ludwig Kunz's 2004 paper "Criminal Policy in Duckburg," from Images of Crime II: Representations of Crime and the Criminal in Politics, Society, the Media, and the Arts, edited by Hans-Jörg Albrecht, Telemach Serassis, and Harald Kania. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Price Tipping. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 45. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn about Ewart Grogan, who set out in 1898 to walk the length of Africa to win the hand of the woman he loved. We'll also get an update on the criminal history of Donald Duck's hometown and puzzle over how a groom ends up drowning on his wedding night.

Here's a Valentine's Day story for you. The first man to walk the length of Africa, the whole length of it from south to north, did it to get a girl. His name was Ewart Grogan, and he came from a good family. His godfather was the British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. But he had sort of a contrary or bold streak in him. At Cambridge, he had one tutor who he decided was smug, and so he herded sheep into the man's rooms when he was at dinner, thinking he was out to dinner just for the evening.

In fact, he'd gone to London for the night, and when he returned, the sheep had eaten most of his carpet, his tablecloth, and his prized aspidistro. And his rooms reportedly stank like a shearing shed for weeks, so he couldn't live in the apartment any longer. So that got Grogan kicked out of Cambridge, and he wasn't live in the apartment any longer. So that got Grogan kicked out of Cambridge, and he wasn't sure what to do with himself. He wound up going to what's now Zimbabwe in 1896 to help defend the town against a native uprising in the Second Matabele War. And while he was there, he became acquainted with the British businessman and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, who had grand dreams of sort of

imperializing Africa, sort of developing the whole continent under British influence. And that had a big effect on Grogan. One of Rhodes's dreams was to connect the whole continent with a railway and a telegraph all the way from Cape Town in the south to Cairo in the north. He hadn't really started even surveying the route for that yet, but Grogan hoped to be involved in that. One of the routes he was considering was to go up the western fork of the Rift Valley through the middle of the continent and then down the Nile. But before Grogan could offer himself to Rhodes for that service, he came down with a very bad fever. He almost died and was invalided home, back to England. In England, his doctors recommended he go on an extended sea voyage to help in his recuperation. And a friend of his from Cambridge named Eddie Watt invited him to come and stay with his family in Napier on the North Island of New Zealand.

So he went there, and there he met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt, who was one of Eddie's sisters. and there he met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt, who was one of Eddie's sisters. She loved him back and they wanted to marry, but her stepfather stood in their way. When Gertrude's father had died, James Coleman came to control the inheritance, which was big. Gertrude was a direct descendant of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, so you can imagine they had a lot of money. She lived in a 40-room villa overlooking the Pacific. of money. She lived in a 40-room villa overlooking the Pacific. And the reason that Coleman opposed their union was that really Grogan had nothing to offer her. His family was respectable, but he was at this point just a university dropout who'd been a soldier. Coleman dismissed him as what he called

a useless fortune hunter drifting down the river of life without a rudder. So Grogan, standing there in the drawing room, he was asking for Gertrude's hand and Coleman was turning him down. fortune hunter drifting down the river of life without a rudder. So Grogan, standing there in the drawing room, he was asking for Gertrude's hand and Coleman was turning him down. Always in the back of Grogan's mind had been this notion of helping Rhodes to survey Africa. So he said, suppose I prove myself by being the first man to walk the length of Africa. Would that help change your mind about you? And we have the actual account of their exchange there, thanks to Grogan's nephew. Coleman said, I can only presume that you're trying to be funny. If so, I do not appreciate it. Grogan said, oh no, sir, certainly not. I'm

quite serious, never more so. Coleman said, then you must be a fool. You mean to say that you really contemplate crossing the entire continent of Africa. My good man, do you realize what that would mean? Grogan said, perfectly. Coleman said, then tell me, how would you propose to cross the jungles of central Africa? They are impenetrable. Stanley managed to traverse certain districts by water, but he took an armed guard of several hundred to beat off the native tribes. There are no rivers, not even ox wagon transport in many of the areas you would cross. You'd have to travel largely on foot. What chance would you stand? Surely you don't place yourself above Stanley. You would need a small army to see you through. That would be your only hope. And Grogan answered, I don't agree, sir. On the contrary, a large

expedition might arouse suspicion and antagonism and would probably fail on that account alone. Anyhow, I mean to try. After all, if I fail, nothing is lost. On the other hand, if I succeed, well, I shall hope to have proved worthy of your stepdaughter. So Coleman agreed to this, and Grogan set about trying to realize this plan. So he didn't tell the stepfather that there was this other goal about helping to survey for the railroad. He was just saying, if I can do this amazing feat, then I would prove my determination or my steadfastness? Both, I think. I mean, I don't think he kept it a secret that this was part of Rhodes' dream,

but it was still, no one had ever done this, and a lot of people thought it was literally impossible for anyone to do it. So even if he'd shared the notion that this was part of Rhodes' plan, it was still very impressive. Anyone who managed to do this would be really accomplishing something. So as I say, one of the proposed routes for this train and telegraph through Africa went up through the Great Rift Valley following the western branch. Basically, it curves through Central Africa in a progression of what are called the African Great Lakes. So what Grogan would do is survey this route for roads and in so doing become the first person to

transect the continent from one end to the other. He took a crash course in surveying and headed to Africa. And there's a little asterisk we have to put on here, or perhaps a big one. What he didn't do was go to Cape Town in South Africa and go all the way up through the continent in one go. During the Rhodesian War in 1896, he'd been on an expedition that had gone from Cape Town up into Portuguese-controlled East Africa, and he was going to count that as already having been accomplished as the first leg. He used to count that retroactively. Yeah, so he didn't, we can't say he crossed the whole thing in one go, but still. But he did do it, okay. He still had the hardest part easily ahead of him, and that was still between 4,000 and 5,000 miles, so it was

still a major accomplishment if he could pull it off, and very dangerous. They were going to use canoes and steamboats as much as possible to negotiate their way up across the lakes, but there was still a lot of walking to do, and he'd have to cover all of that on foot with the assistance of porters. So he started off into the bush and jungle at age 24 in 1898 and faced all kinds of hazards. You can imagine too many to detail in here. I'll link to his book in the show notes. But here's a list of what he faced on the journey. Lions, crocodiles, volcanoes, malaria, headhunters, hippos, dysentery, buffalo, drought, 400 miles of swamp, and cannibals,

whom he described as half a dozen gentlemen of anthropophagic proclivities on supper intent. He became the first white man to see Lake Kivu. He surveyed the east coast of Lake Edward, and he skirted the 15,000-foot Rwenzori Mountains, which were capped with snow. He was constantly sick, and he and his men were reduced at one point to eating pelicans and storks, and he found himself traveling toward the end through the almost impenetrable Sud in southern Sudan, which he described as, quote, a desolation of desolations, an infernal region, a howling waste of thorn and stones. So finally, after two and a half years of struggle,

he stumbled out of the bush and met Captain Dunn, who was the medical officer of a British exploratory expedition that was trying to cut a navigable waterway through the upper Nile, which was all clogged with weeds. Dunn was astounded to see him because he had not imagined there was another Englishman anywhere within hundreds of miles. And at this point, Grogan was starving and ridden with fever and his supplies of both food and ammunition were completely gone. The two of them shook hands

and then began the single most British conversation in the history of human civilization. Dunn said, how do you do? Grogan said, oh, very fit, thanks. How are you? Had any sport? Dunn said, oh, pretty fair, but there's nothing much here.

Have a drink. You must be hungry. I'll hurry on lunch. There was a tradition on the continent that it would seem too personal to ask someone who they were or where they came from. So this guy comes staggering out of the bush half dead and you're like, oh, how are you doing today, sir? Yeah. And it wasn't actually until they'd almost finished lunch that Dunn thought he might venture asking who he was or where he'd come from. What the heck he's doing there. So the whole thing had lasted two and a half years and covered a distance of almost 5,000 miles in the end.

And he arrived in Cairo. Dunn took him down the Nile to Cairo in February 1900, and Grogan wired Gertrude. He wrote, Have reached Cairo. My feelings just the same. Anxiously await your answer. Make it yes.

Love, Ewert. And she wired back, My feelings also unchanged. Am waiting for you, Gertrude. He was 26 years old, and now he was instantly a celebrity. In England, he met Queen Victoria and Henry Morton Stanley and told them his story, and he became the youngest man ever to address the Royal Geographic Society, which later named him a fellow.

He wrote a book about the adventure, which was published in 1902 and became a big seller, and he inscribed a copy of that to James Coleman, the stepfather who had stood in his way and who now agreed that he could marry Gertrude. So on October 11th, he and Gertrude were married at Christ's Church in London before a crowd of hundreds of people. Eddie Watt led his sister down the aisle. Grogan wrote, it's a long way to Tipperary, but it's a damn sight longer away from New Zealand via the Cape and Cairo to my ultimate Hulie Gertrude. At last she was mine. And they remained married until Gertrude died almost 43 years later. Cecil Rhodes said, the amusement is that a youth from Cambridge should have succeeded in doing what

the ponderous explorers of the world had failed to do. Grogan had a long and storied career after that. He went on to become a politician and an entrepreneur in Africa, largely in Kenya. After Gertrude died, he founded a children's hospital in Nairobi, which was for a long time the finest children's hospital on the continent. Founded that in her name in 1947, and then he died finally in Cape Town in 1967 at age 92. But he's still best remembered for that trip in his 20s, cutting through the hardest, most difficult part of Africa to help survey this transcontinental railway, which was never ultimately realized by Cecil Rhodes. I will close with an excerpt from his notebook that I just liked. The day after he met the astonished Captain Dunn at the headwaters of the Nile, he found himself in a boat being carried back down the Nile toward Cairo and civilization,

and he wrote this in his notebook. The transition from ceaseless anxiety and hungry misery to full-bellied content and tobacco-soothed repose had been so sudden. I was as a man who, after a long time staggering in the dark, is suddenly thrust into the full glare of sunlight. Nothing to do but sit and be carried along towards clean shirts, collars, friends, all that makes life a joy. How many people realize what all these things mean? How many people have ever caught the exquisite flavor of bread and butter the restful luxury of clean linen the hiss of schweps one must much hippo meat alone save one's sole shirt from contact with water as from a pestilence lest it fall to pieces and drink brackish mud for days to realize all this that's a really nice valent Day story. Yeah, I thought so. I was

thinking, as you were reading it, I was thinking he was gone for two and a half years and Gertrude probably couldn't hear from him all that time. No, in fact, when he was taking his leave from her, he promised her that she wouldn't hear from him. He said, I won't bother you unless I can actually pull this off. So the first she heard from him was that wire from Cairo. Two and a half years later. Yeah. I think it's sweet that she waited all that time. She had faith in him. We'll have a link to Ewart Grogan's 1902 book, From the Cape to Cairo, in our show notes at futilitycloset.com.

We're sending out a big thank you this week to Theodore Warner, our newest super patron, who has pledged $10 an episode in our Patreon campaign. It's supporters like Theodore and all our other patrons who are helping us to keep the show going. Right now, we're a little more than halfway to the goal we set for continuing the show. We really appreciate all the contributions we've gotten so far, but we still need some more help. Greg and I put in many,

many hours a week researching and creating the podcast, so if you enjoy it and you want to see it continue, then we need your support. Please consider donating to our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or look for the link in our show notes. in our show notes. In episode 43, I posed a list of unanswered questions from my research that I wasn't getting anywhere on and asked for help from the listeners, and some came through, and so I just wanted to sort of follow that up and tell you what I've learned. One of my questions was that my notes indicated that at one point, Jane Carlyle, the wife of the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, had written to him once in a letter the interesting phrase, I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for, but I hadn't been able to find the letter in which she'd written that. And listener

Ed Kitson wrote in, thank you Ed, with the answer. She'd written that to him before they were married actually on May 1822. She had written him a letter mentioning, among other things, that apparently she had planned to write a tragic novel and was beginning to waver in her dedication to that goal. So the passage from that letter that contains the sentence reads like this, I have neither genius, taste, nor common sense. I have no courage, no industry, no perseverance. And how in the name of wonder never did write the tragedy. I spent all my time in riding on horseback, dressing three times a day, and singing Italian airs and playing at shuttlecock. And in fact, she never did write the tragedy. She never wrote novels or developed her literary ambitions beyond writing letters,

which is a shame because she's now accounted one of the finest letter writers of the 19th century. So it sounds like when we heard the quote out of context, it sounded almost like a really depressive or like almost mentally ill thing to say i mean we're i'm not the kind of person i took myself for sounds like some major crisis of personality yeah out of context i just that's why i didn't treat me yeah i just wondered what she was saying when she wrote that so it sounds like she meant it in a somewhat more light-hearted kind of way than it sounded yeah and this letter is facetious but uh to some degree too but but she never was, never did go on to write her novel. And she married, this was in 1822, she went on to marry Carlisle in 1826, four years later. And it turned out to be unfortunately a very unhappy marriage. Samuel Butler famously wrote, it was very good of God to

let Carlisle and Mrs. Carlisle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four. Anyway, that's where that phrase comes from. The other one I wanted to follow up on is, I had mentioned I'd been chasing forever a paper called Criminal Policy in Duckburg, which is the hometown of Donald Duck. Apparently a criminologist had made a study of crimes in Donald Duck comics, and I'd been completely unable to find the paper. Well, listener Alex Klopik chased it down in the Harvard Law Library.

Thank you, Alex. The Harvard Law Library. And sent me a copy of it. It's a paper called Criminal Policy in Duckburg, which was published in 2004 by the Swiss criminologist Carl Ludwig Kunz. And what he did was what I thought he did, which was go through Donald Duck comics, both in 1952 and 1995, to compare criminal trends in Duckburg. And I'll give you a summary of his findings. In the 12 issues in 1952, Kunz counted 182 offenses. That's every second page, or for a typical reader, a new offense every minute. And he breaks these down.

In 1952, there were, of the criminal offenses, offenses against life and limb made up 35% of the crimes in Duckburg, offenses against property made up 27%, and offenses against personal freedom made up 12%, and he goes on down the list. Just to give you examples, offenses against life and limb included things like attempted homicide and bodily injury, offenses against property were things like theft, fraud, and vandalism. And offenses against personal freedom were things like assault, coercion, and deprivation of liberty. I am pained to report that offenders tend to be male ducks.

I guess I don't know enough about these characters to know their character traits, but Donald Duck alone committed 46 criminal offenses in 1952. Uncle Scrooge committed 13, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie committed 12. I'm used to thinking of them as rather innocent. Yeah, well, now I'm trying to figure out if there's like a profiling thing like male ducks. We should start profiling male ducks. Species profile. Or, I don't really remember the comics very well, but were there that many female ducks?

There were some. I'll get to that in a second. Oh, okay. And there are other... There are mice. There are female ducks, but... They're chiefly, I think, ducks and mice, because Mickey Mouse... Oh, ducks and mice. Donald Duck committed 46. Mickey Mouse in 1952 committed only seven criminal offenses. Oh, so specifically male ducks. Yes. I see. Not just male ducks, but male ducks. Yeah, they're bad news.

There's nothing like organized crime in 1952. Kunz does write, we counted two environmental offenses and just one violation of the Atomic Energy Act. I don't know what that is. And he says, and what about Uncle Scrooge's involvement in white-collar crime? Well, it isn't amplified, but it provides the background for some episodes. He points out, which I'd never thought of before, is that in comics and in cartoons, there are no consequences.

If somebody hits you with a frying pan, you don't stay permanently injured. Right, yeah. He says no one is ever seriously harmed in Duckburg, so as a result, at least in 1952, crime is usually a way to vindicate your honor. I mean, that's usually why you're doing it. I see. Which you just can't secure that permanently. He writes, He writes, finally, it is remarkable that more attacks against personal freedom, such as assault, coercion, and deprivation of liberty, happen in episodes with Mickey Mouse.

Whereas the Duck Family's episodes show often unspecified infringements, such as defamation, criminal trespass, and drastic disciplinary measures. Apart from that, the different kinds of offenses are equally distributed among the mice and the ducks. So that's 1952. Then he did the same thing in 1995, where the breakdown is like this. Offenses against life and limb is 35%, which is the same. Offenses against property is 28%, and offenses against personal freedom are now 23%. The biggest changes from 1952, he says, are there's a significant decline in offenses against life and limb committed by women, or I guess we should say females, a drop by 58%.

So that goes to what you were saying. So there are females, but they're law-abiding. Yeah. They became more law-abiding. And I don't know what to make of this. Attacks against property were very rare in 1952, but they now make up the majority of delinquency in 1995. And the most significant change is that in 1995,

perpetrators are now described vaguely as foreigners and criminal organizations or this shadowy bad guys out there instead of each other um the individual offender is an unspecified criminal ducks though are still bad news yeah he says indeed the ducks and their friends still commit an overwhelming part of the criminality 277 offenses whereas their opponents are responsible for merely 154 criminal acts. So, why the change, he says, is basically it reflects

a change in the zeitgeist of society in general. Not just among ducks and mice, but it just reflects the prevailing climate in the readers of these comics. In 1952, Duckburg was concerned with largely internal problems with the ducks and mice trying to extend their influence within the community.

But by 1995, criminally, it had become sort of this frightening everyday occurrence that everyone was sort of more worried about. That seems almost backwards to me because I would have thought in the 50s there was the whole concern with, like, the Soviet threat and, you know, these external threats. You would think so. Yeah, interesting. But he says criminality now in 95 is something evil, frightening, and imported from abroad. So much so that Mickey Mouse cleans up his act and becomes a private detective.

Ah. And that brings him into conflict with Donald. This is sort of the last point he makes. Mickey wants to sort of wear a white hat, and Mickey is not above occasionally breaking the law himself in the service of that goal of trying to bring order to Duckburg. But Donald is just a loose cannon, and he writes, Donald's slight infringements are seen as legitimate means to ensure his slice of the cake because of the potential business recovery as a background. But he remains a pedicure rental, so he's still sympathetic

because he doesn't go too far. But he's still willing to do anything to advance his cause, whether it's lawful or not. So I'm going to take the perhaps controversial stand here of claiming that Donald Duck is a public menace. That's vigilantism is what that is. We can't have that. Kunz writes, Donald sets his own sense of injustice against the public's sense of injustice. He prefers to handle problems his way as long as it's everyday criminality. For this, Donald doesn't need any help from police or the judiciary. So thank you to Alex and to Ed for those contributions. And if you have any questions or comments about the show, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

This week it's my turn to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg's going to give me some odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure it out asking only yes or no questions. Ready? Okay, let's try. This is submitted by listener Price Tipping. A man and a woman get married. After the wedding, the wife goes to their home, and the husband stays at the reception for some time he then goes home where he drowns in front of his wife she does nothing to help him how did he drown and who was the man

oh this is a real person yes like somebody i would have heard of yes oh okay all right. So this is a real person. So let's start with the country that they're in. Okay. I can start that with that? No, I can't start with that. You can. Does this take place on Earth? Yes. Okay. Just starting. I can't start with the country. Could I start with the time period? Yes. Okay.

The time period. 1900s. No. 20th century. The 19th century. No. The 21st century. No.

The 18th century. No. Okay. Earlier than the 18th century. Yes. Yes. Okay. Just making sure.

The 17th century. No. Is this AD? No. Oh, okay. BC. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yes. Oh. Just making sure. The 17th century. No. Is this A.D.? No. Oh, okay. B.C. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yes.

Oh, it is A.D. Okay. Okay. Are we like really early, like the Roman Empire early? Yes. Oh. Is it in the Roman Empire? I'm going to say yes, but I don't want to mislead you.

Maybe that's why country would be difficult because, okay, they're not exactly the same like they are now. Sometime around the Roman Empire, though? Yes. Somewhere in that general part of the world? Uh, yes. And this is somebody I would have heard of, the guy. Who drowned? Um, all right.

Uh, bleh. Okay. A man and a woman get married. A man and a woman get married. A man and a woman get married. After the wedding, the wife goes to their home, and the husband stays at the reception for some time. He then goes home, where he drowns in front of his wife. She does nothing to help him. Does she want him dead?

No. Is she prevented from helping him? No. Does he drown in a bathtub? I don't know why I'm thinking that. I'm thinking of somebody else. No, that's a good guess. No, but I don't know if they had bathtubs so much back then.

Well, I guess they had Roman baths or something. Okay, do they live someplace where there's ice and ice is involved somehow? No, good guess. Okay, I'm trying to think what he drowns in. Does he drown in water? No. I'm thinking a vat of wine. Does he drown in a vat of wine?

No. Something like a vat of wine? You're really imaginative. No, I wish I could say that. Okay, he doesn't drown in water. Does he drown in something so that drown is kind of misleading? It's like particulate matter, like sand or... No.

Okay, so he drowns in a liquid. Yes. Yes. But not water, not wine, not some kind of alcohol. Some kind of beverage? No. Drowns in his own blood? Yes.

Okay. All right. Is he murdered? No. He's not murdered. He drowns in his own blood. Was he ill before they got married? No.

Would you say he dies of an illness? No. Drowns in his own blood. I mean, is this, oh, he's not like a vampire or something, right? You come up with great guesses. It wouldn't be his blood, exactly. Drowns in somebody else's blood while celebrating the wedding. Drowns in his own blood, was not ill.

You would not say he died of an illness, but he was not murdered. Those are correct? That's all correct. Okay. Does his wife do something that contributes to his death? No. What makes you drown in your own blood and it's not an illness and it's not murder? I don't know.

Does he suffer some sort of injury or accident? Yes. Yes. and it's not an illness and it's not murder. I don't know. Does he suffer some sort of injury or accident? Yes. Yes. An injury involving something sharp? No. An injury involving a hard object? Yes.

Okay, a hard object that he slams into or bangs into? Yes. Okay. Does it matter what part of his body he hits on this hard object? Yes. His head? Yes. Okay. He hits his head on a hard object. The floor? No. A piece of furniture? No. A part of their house? Yes. Something inside a house? Unknown. You don't know. You can't answer. Inside a tent. Inside a tent. Tent tent tent pole yes so he comes home is he drunk or does that yes he is drunk he comes home and he hits his head on a tent pole and drowns in his own blood now i still have to figure out who he is uh there's more to that than that and why does

his wife do nothing to help him there's a little more it. I won't make you guess who he is, but I'll tell you afterward. Okay. Okay. Um, all right. So, okay. There's more to it than that. Do I have to figure out why the wife doesn't help? I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to figure out. Um, what part of the puzzle am I not addressing? After the wedding, the wife goes home and the husband stays at the reception for some time. Getting drunk. Yes. But would I have to figure out why he stays at the reception? No. Do I have to figure out why he stays at the reception? No. Do I have to figure out why the wife goes home? No.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing on you. You've got most of it. Okay. Husband and wife get married. She goes home right away and it doesn't matter why. Right.

He stays at the reception and it doesn't matter why. Right. But he's drinking. Yes. And he comes home drunk and is there something about the setting that I need to

figure out? The time and place? No, no. What would actually... If you came home drunk and banged into a tent pole, what would actually induce you to drown in your own blood? That he passes out? No, he doesn't pass out. I guess I assumed he passed out or was

incapacitated. Well, I guess you've got a mystery. He bangs his head and he's drunk. I thought you're not going to be very... What kind of injury does he have, specifically? Oh, like I need to figure out what part of his head that he hits? Yes. His mouth? No.

I was assuming the brain part of your head? No. No, okay. His nose. Yes. He breaks his nose. Yes. And then drowns on his own blood.

That's basically it. And the wife does nothing to help because she doesn't know how to help? This actually happened in AD 453. This is how Attila the Hun died. Oh, you're kidding. He died of a nosebleed. This is Price Tipping's explanation. This is a real event which happened in AD 453.

The couple are Attila the Hun and his wife Ildiko. The story, according to the Roman historian Priscus, is that after a rousing wedding feast, a very drunk Attila staggered into his tent and ran into a large tent pole, which knocked him on his back and gave him a nosebleed. Because of heavy alcohol consumption, alcohol is a blood thinner and anticoagulant, the bleed didn't clot,

and he lay in an alcoholic stupor until he drowned in his own nosebleed. The marriage was likely not a voluntary one on the part of Ildiko, which would explain why she didn't help him, though a more charitable interpretation could say that she was simply terrified or unsure of what to do. Yeah, I'm not sure that it would occur to you what to do in that situation.

But anyway, that's a huge irony there, that such a fierce man as Attila the Hunt died of his own nosebleed. Well, that was actually very interesting. Thanks so much to Price. Yes, thank you for submitting that. And if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to use, whether it's about Attila the Hunt or not, and whether people die or not, because we have had some. Yeah, for some reason these are always morbid. I don't know why. But we have had some where people don't die. Anyway, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futilitycloset.com That wraps up another episode for us.

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