Futility Closet - 245-Jeanne Baret

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a sesquipedalian correspondence to a dissertation on writer's block. This is episode 245. I'm Greg Ross.. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. The first woman to circumnavigate the world did so dressed as a man. In 1766, 26-year-old Jeanne Baret joined a French expedition,

Starting point is 00:00:37 hoping to conceal her identity for three years. In today's show, we'll tell the story of her historic journey around the globe. In today's show, we'll tell the story of her historic journey around the globe. We'll also hear Mark Twain's shark story and puzzle over a foiled con artist. Jeanne Baret was born in the summer of 1740 in Houton in the Loire Valley. We know very little about her early life except that she was an herb woman, schooled in the largely oral lore of curative plants. Sometime in her early 20s, she met the distinguished naturalist Philibert Comerson. She was gathering plants where he was botanizing. His wife had died recently, and they found a shared interest in the natural world.

Starting point is 00:01:18 They became lovers, and by 1764, she was pregnant. The local townspeople disapproved of a liaison between a young woman and a widower, so in late 1764, they moved pregnant. The local townspeople disapproved of a liaison between a young woman and a widower, so in late 1764, they moved to Paris, where she gave birth in December. She was 24 and he was 36. Comerson wanted nothing to do with the child, so they gave it to a Paris foundling hospital. All this would be unremarkable enough, except for what happened next. In November 1766, France was reeling from its losses in the French and Indian War, and Louis XV wanted to restore the nation's prestige and expand his empire by launching an

Starting point is 00:01:50 expedition to circle the world, to be led by the renowned admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. This would be both the first French circumnavigation of the globe and the first by any nation that would include a professional naturalist to record the plants and animals that it encountered around the world. Cumerson put his name forward, and with his reputation, he was virtually assured of getting the position. He made no plans to include Baret because that was out of the question. Women were forbidden on board ship under French royal ordinances, and the journey would take three years. But it appears that the two of them began discussing a plan privately. Comerson was allowed a servant who could assist with the botanical work

Starting point is 00:02:26 and serve as a personal attendant. Baret would have been the obvious choice for that role if she hadn't been a woman. Commerson wrote to his friends and family, who began suggesting nephews and other relatives for the job, but there are no records that he pursued those candidates. That suggests that he and Baret were already discussing a bold solution to their problem. There were many examples in the drama and books of the time of women posing as men. Even Joan of Arc may have helped to inspire them. Baret was evidently an ordinary-looking woman, strong enough to do

Starting point is 00:02:53 physical work but thin enough to hide her shape in oversized men's clothes if she bound her breasts, and her features were not distinctively feminine. With the right clothing and a rough haircut, she could pass as a clean-shaven young man. That would be dangerous. She'd be alone among scores of men on the expedition, isolated at sea for long stretches of time, and if the adventure fell apart, she might be left to fend for herself anywhere in the world. Commerson drew up a will in which he left her 600 livres if he didn't survive the voyage, and together they left Paris by coach on December 15, 1766, headed for Rochefort on the western coast. Two ships would make up the expedition. The first, carrying Bougainville, was already headed to the Falkland Islands. They would board the second,

Starting point is 00:03:34 L'Etoile, and meet him in Rio de Janeiro. When they reached the ship, Commerson pretended that he'd been unable to find an assistant who pleased him and had settled on the last candidate who presented himself on the day before leaving port. She gave her name as Jean Barret. It turned out that Commerson had brought too much equipment, so the captain, François Chenard de la Giraudet, offered them his own cabin. That was a stroke of luck. No other servant slept in the same cabin as his master. The two of them would share a room 15 feet long and 30 feet wide at the stern of the ship, and this also meant Barret could relieve herself privately in the quarter galley off their cabin rather than sharing the communal commode off the officer's wardroom.

Starting point is 00:04:11 So if they hadn't had this stroke of luck, she would have had to have used a communal bathroom with the other men for three years, and they were hoping that they could just somehow get away with this. Yeah. Part of what I like about this story is that this is 250 years, a quarter of a millennium ago now, and there's just a lot we don't know. Yeah. But I agree, it just seems crazy that they expected

Starting point is 00:04:32 they could get all the way back to France and just step off the ship and kind of wink at each other. I don't know, I can't answer that. According to shipboard etiquette, she could walk on the foremost deck, the fo'c'sle. That was the only deck permitted to her, and she'd be scrutinized closely there, but still, it began to look as though life aboard ship might be tolerable. On February 1st, 1767, after six weeks' anchorage

Starting point is 00:04:53 at Aix, they made sail for Rio de Janeiro. Baret and Commerson were immediately seasick. Commerson felt somewhat better sitting on the poop deck with his back against the mizzenmast, but Baret was restricted to the fo'c'sle and the cabin, where she had a choice between a swaying hammock and the heaving deck. And the ship's surgeon, Francois Vives, was already suspicious. He wrote in his journal, After a few weeks, the calm that had descended was troubled by a rumor circulating among the men concerning a girl in disguise on the ship.

Starting point is 00:05:20 Everyone knew where to look. It was undoubtedly our little man. The world of the ship was 102 feet by 33, and it carried 116 men. Baret spent all her time in the cabin, which in Vives' eyes would have meant that Comerson was guilty either of sodomy or of cohabiting with an illegal woman. Perhaps spurred by these rumors, at length, Lajuro de demanded that Baret sleep with the other servants. She did that, but she did it with a loaded pistol. Vives, the suspicious surgeon, wrote, In the morning, she retreated again to Comerson's cabin. Comerson had an ulcerating sore on his leg, and they pleaded that she needed to attend to him. But the suspicions continued, and Lajura

Starting point is 00:06:04 de' demanded an interview with Baret and announced the result to the crew. Vives wrote, Trying to show all our suspicions to be groundless, the false servant insisted that he was not a woman, but was rather one of those individuals from among whose ranks the Ottoman emperor chooses the keepers of his harem. In other words, a eunuch. That was a desperate story, but it worked. It implied that Baret had a traumatic past, and it discouraged further questions. The captain gave her permission to sleep again in Comerson's cabin. Vives was still suspicious, but the only way to settle the question now would be to expose Baret physically, and ordering that would invite chaos. Now they were approaching the equator, and according

Starting point is 00:06:39 to a time-honored naval tradition, they'd mark it with a ceremony called crossing the line, a sort of nautical baptism. Anyone on board who hadn't previously crossed the equator would be put through a sort of hazing ritual to initiate them into the kingdom of Neptune. About a quarter of the crew on L'Etoile were first-timers, and when they crossed into the southern hemisphere on March 22nd, they were variously dunked, beaten, and chased around the ship by the more experienced sailors. Baret was one of them, but where the others were naked, she insisted on wearing her clothes. Her confession to being a eunuch won her some sympathy here, but it probably also would have led some of the men to satisfy their curiosity by groping her. They reached South America and met up with Bougainville in June. With the two ships together

Starting point is 00:07:17 now, they needed only to reprovision before heading to the Pacific. But Commerson and Barré found enough time to strike out into the countryside to look for unrecorded plant species that might be useful in agriculture or commerce. On these jaunts, they discovered the ornamental vine bougainvillea, which is now popular around the world. The discovery is usually attributed to Bougainville or to Commerson, but certainly Barre was present when it was found. That discovery actually came back to bite Commerson, who was placed under house arrest and confined to his cabin for a month. That may be because Bougainville had given orders not to go beyond the bounds of Rio, and the vine had been found further afield. Or it may signal that Bougainville had seen through Baret's disguise and was punishing Comerson for his deception. One month was the customary

Starting point is 00:07:57 punishment for bringing a woman on board. If Bougainville thought Baret was a woman, why didn't he just throw her off the ship? According to biographer Glynis Ridley, there seemed to be three reasons. It would have been inhumane, they needed her scientific talents, and it would have reflected badly on La Giraudet, the captain of L'Etoile, who had accepted her on board. The expedition entered Rio de la Plata on July 26, 1767, and anchored in the Bay of Montevideo, the last landfall they expected to make before entering the Strait of Magellan. anchored in the Bay of Montevideo, the last landfall they expected to make before entering the Strait of Magellan. The hull was leaking, so they needed to re-caulk, and Baret and Commerson went botanizing while this was done,

Starting point is 00:08:36 filling the captain's cabin with 20 to 25 boxes of dried exotica, probably several hundred plant species. They sailed out of Rio de la Plata on November 14th, almost a full year after Baret had left France, and entered the Strait of Magellan on December 4th. It would take them until January 25th to make the difficult passage, and while their careful progress often reduced them to a standstill, that gave Baret and Commerson time to go ashore and explore the natural world as the men on the ship took soundings. After observing her on these trips, the sailors referred to Baret as Commerson's beast of burden. Whatever they thought about her sex, they acknowledged that she did work that would exhaust any man. Commerson's leg was still troubling him, so he directed her to climb rock faces and scramble down slopes to bag specimens, and she had to carry the heavy, cumbersome wooden plant presses that they used to preserve botanical specimens.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Phoebus wrote, After seven weeks of careful navigation, they reached the Pacific and passed into largely unknown waters. They reached the Tuamotus on March 21st and then Tahiti in April. It seems that Bure's sex came to light here, though the records are so fragmentary that it's hard to tell exactly what happened. Apparently, when she reached the beach, the Tahitians immediately recognized her as a woman. They surrounded her, she screamed an appeal to a French officer, and the scream gave her away. This is a bit hard to follow in the records that have come down to us. Bougainville's own journal says, But he didn't actually write that until May 28th, about six weeks after they'd left Tahiti.

Starting point is 00:09:57 And the other expedition members who were keeping journals say that the revelation took place in New Guinea in July, more than three months later. There, one of the French observers wrote, they have discovered that the servant of Mr. Commerson, the doctor, was a girl who, until now, has been taken for a boy. Either way, Bure's identity was revealed conclusively somewhere in the Pacific. One reason it's hard to understand the details is that there seems to be some face-saving involved. If the officers had known or guessed much earlier that there was a woman aboard, which seems at least possible, then no one wanted to acknowledge that now, since it was against the rules. Even Comerson said he was as surprised as anyone by the revelation,

Starting point is 00:10:30 which can't possibly be true. Baret had lived with him in Paris for two years before the voyage and borne him a son. He was claiming that he didn't know she was a female. I guess he had to say something. There was nothing for it but to go on. Baret's ruse had lasted, at least nominally, almost a she was a female. I guess he had to say something. There was nothing for it but to go on. Baret's ruse had lasted, at least nominally, almost a year and a half. She continued to wear men's clothing, since she'd brought none for a woman,

Starting point is 00:10:53 but she stopped binding her breasts. They sailed on from New Guinea on July 26th, through the seas of Saram and Banda and into the Moluccas, Dutch territory. Baret and Commerson gathered plants there as well, and the expedition headed for Java, then Batavia, and finally crossed the Indian Ocean to Ile-de-France, now Mauritius, a remote island off Madagascar that we've managed to visit three times now on this podcast. There, Commerson was delighted to find that the civil administrator was Pierre Poivre, a fellow botanist whom he'd met in Paris two years before. The two of them hit it off,

Starting point is 00:11:22 and Poivre invited Commerson and Baret to move into his official residence. They accepted, and the expedition departed Pourlouis on December 12, 1768, without them. There may have been several reasons they left the expedition, but the most compelling was that Baret was now three months pregnant and might go into labor before she could get back to France. That was a reason for Bougainville to want to be rid of her. A woman, even a pregnant one, might be smuggled off the ship when they got home, but a birth at sea couldn't be hidden and would raise questions as to why the rules had been broken. So Baret and Commerson made a home on Mauritius, where eventually they spent seven years. She gave

Starting point is 00:11:57 birth to a son in early 1769, but she seems to have left it in the care of a friend on the island for reasons we don't know. Commerson finally died on March 13, 1773, leaving Barret alone on an island in the Indian Ocean 10,000 miles from home. She was 32 years old. She and Commerson had spent seven years amassing a collection of 6,000 plant specimens, but a new administrator impounded the house, reasoning that since its contents had been amassed while Commerson had been on the government payroll, the collection belonged to the French government. The governor ordered that it be returned to Paris on the first suitable ship.

Starting point is 00:12:31 Baret was not legally Commerson's widow, so she couldn't enter the house. In the eyes of the law, she was only a servant, so now she had nothing but the clothes she stood in. Commerson's will, which she knew about, would have covered her, but there was a catch-22. Without access to the money from his estate, she had no way to return to France to claim it. She was probably homeless for a period of weeks, but somehow she managed to scrape a living, and in 1774 she married a soldier of the Royal Comtois Regiment, Jean d'Aubernay, and with him she returned to France. When she set foot there, in late 1774 or early 1775, she quietly set a historic record,

Starting point is 00:13:06 becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. If her husband knew this, it was only because she told him. Otherwise, she alone knew what she'd done. She spent the rest of her life with him in his hometown of Saint-Oléier in the Dordogne. In April 1776, she received just over 600 livres from Commerson's estate, which was more than six times the average yearly wage of a servant in those times. She was 35 years old. She bought a house and some land in Saint-Olié, and in 1785, the Minister of Marine gave her a pension of 200 levers per annum for her services to science. She never saw the botanical collection again. More than 6,000 items

Starting point is 00:13:41 that Commerson had hoped she would catalog were never systematically organized and evaluated. Today they're held by the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She never visited it. She died on August 5, 1807, at age 67. Nearly 120 species of flowering plants had been named after Philibert Commerson, but none was named after Jeanne Barre. Commerson had intended to name a tree after her, but it was later found that that genus already had a name. She did win a distinction in 2012 when a wild cousin of the potato was named Solanum Barretiae by biologist Eric Tepe of the University of Utah. He said, given the importance of her work

Starting point is 00:14:16 and the singular nature of her achievements, Baret has clearly made a sufficient contribution to the field to deserve a species named after her. That's noteworthy, but it still seems hardly adequate to honor a woman whose boldness and courage had carried her literally around the world in the 18th century. Even her contemporaries saw that. The prince of Nassau-Sigan, a nobleman who was part of Bougainville's expedition, had written in his memoirs, the men discovered they had a girl on board the Etoile, who disguised herself in men's clothing to work as a servant to Monsieur Commerson. Without casting any aspersions on the naturalist for having retained her for such an arduous voyage, I want to give her all the credit for her bravery, a far cry from the gentle pastimes

Starting point is 00:14:53 afforded her sex. She dared confront the stress, the dangers, and everything that happened that one could realistically expect on such a voyage. Her adventure should, I think, be included in a history of famous women. Our show really relies on the support of our listeners to be able to keep going. We just wouldn't be able to commit to the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to support us in a more ongoing way, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get access to outtakes, extra information and discussion on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on what

Starting point is 00:15:50 Sasha, the Futility Closet podcast, has been doing lately. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link at the website. And thanks again to everyone who helps support the show. We wouldn't still be here without you. Gmail spam filter has been eating some of our legitimate email. Unfortunately, Gmail purges the spam folder after 30 days, so once we realized this had been happening, we didn't have a way to see if we'd missed any emails from more than 30 days ago. We do try to respond to almost all the email we get, so if at some point you sent us some email and we didn't respond at all to it, there's a good chance that we didn't receive it. We're really sorry that we might have missed some emails from some of you, and we will be checking the spam folder now going forward.

Starting point is 00:16:51 In episode 237, I talked about the TV show This Is Your Life, where the subject of the show would be caught by surprise and then have their life documented on air, largely through the appearance of numerous guests who had known the person at various points in their life. Daryl Murphy wrote, Dear Futilitarians, I heard you mention the old show This Is Your Life on the most recent podcast and had to pass on this wonderful Sid Caesar send up from his show back in the 1950s. Carl Reiner as the host, he and Mel Brooks and Neil Simon among the writers, and Caesar and Howard Morris killing it on stage. This is still one of the funniest TV sketches of all time. And Daryl sent a link to a YouTube video of a 1954 skit titled This Is Your Story, which was a clear spoof of This Is Your Life and is said to be Sid Caesar's personal favorite sketch. When we had talked about This Is

Starting point is 00:17:43 Your Life in episode 237, we'd mentioned that we were pretty sympathetic to the idea that not everyone might enjoy being caught off guard and then having their life documented in front of an audience. Apparently, this idea had also occurred to these writers, as in the skit, Caesar, playing the very surprised guest of honor who happens to be sitting in the audience is adamantly against being the subject of the show, and he fights off the host, runs away, and has to be chased down and carried onto the stage by several men. He does eventually reconcile himself to the proceedings, helped by the appearance of his extremely beloved Uncle Goopy, and the two are so overcome with

Starting point is 00:18:21 emotion at being reunited that they have to be repeatedly dragged away from each other. And the sketch goes on from there. It does sound mortifying. I wouldn't want to be the center of that much attention. Yeah, I think that's what we said when we talked about this before. I don't think either of us would particularly have enjoyed the experience. Although the idea of one TV show parodying another doesn't seem particularly remarkable to us now,

Starting point is 00:18:43 an article in the New Yorker says that in 1954, this was something rather new, and notes that even mocking movies was still novel enough that a few months earlier, when they had spoofed From Here to Eternity on Caesar's show, not very amused Columbia Pictures had sued NBC over it. Wow, sued them. Yeah. There are many who agree with Daryl that this sketch is a classic, and The New Yorker says that it produced what is probably the longest and loudest burst of laughter, genuine laughter, neither piped in nor prompted in the history of television. And, of course, we'll have a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to check it out for themselves.

Starting point is 00:19:21 A couple of our listeners let us know about the similarity of the story on the shark papers from episode 240 and a story written by Mark Twain. Russell Amanzati wrote, Hello, Greg, Sharon, and Sasha. I love the story in episode 240 about the papers found in the belly of a shark in 1799. It immediately brought back to mind a story in Mark Twain's Following the Equator. It's titled Cecil Rhodes's Shark and His First Fortune Equator. It's titled Cecil Rhodes's Shark and His First Fortune. As you may know, Cecil Rhodes was a monumentally successful businessman and politician in South Africa. He's known today mostly for giving the name to Rhodesia, the country now known as Zimbabwe, and for the Rhodes Scholarship. He was a great man in Twain's

Starting point is 00:20:00 time, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see him today as a rather ugly racist and imperialist. According to Twain's no doubt apocryphal story, Rhodes got his start by finding a note in the belly of a shark indicating that the Franco-Prussian war has begun. With help from a wealthy broker, he corners the market on wool and makes his first fortune. In those days before telegraph service, a shark could have, at least in theory, traveled from Europe to Cape Town much faster than any ship carrying the news. The book was written in 1897, almost a century after the story you told, but I find it hard to believe that Twain wasn't inspired by the tale of the Nancy and the Sparrow. Thanks for your wonderful podcast, one of the bright spots in my week. And David Neal in Australia let us know that he actually had a Botter-Meinhof

Starting point is 00:20:46 moment, like we had discussed in episode 236, when hearing the story of the shark papers. He says, When your podcast came out, I had just read Mark Twain's non-fiction-slash-fiction story about Cecil Rhodes finding useful info inside a shark. I doubted the truthfulness of this tale, but wondered if it was based on the story you featured. So thanks to Russell for the helpful link to the book in Project Gutenberg, and to David for including the relevant excerpt in his email. Deeply in debt, Twain had embarked on a year-long lecture tour of most of the English-speaking parts of the world in 1895, and published Following the Equator in 1897,

Starting point is 00:21:25 a mostly non-fiction work of social commentary written in the form of a travelogue. A bit oddly and perhaps confusingly, this book did include at least two purely fictional stories, one of which was the one about Rhodes and the shark. Cecil Rhodes was born in England and lived most of his life in South Africa. However, Twain's story is set in Australia, probably because the story works better the further it is from Western Europe. In the story, in 1870, a rather young and broke Rhodes tries to convince the most prosperous wool broker in Sydney to help him buy up the entire wool crop, as Rhodes has insider knowledge that France has declared war on Germany, and as a consequence, the price of wool is quickly rising in England. The broker

Starting point is 00:22:05 doesn't believe him and says that he's read the most recent newspaper from London, brought on the fastest ship in the service, so the news is only 50 days old. Rhodes insists he has more recent news, only 10 days old, and the broker declares him a maniac until Rhodes produces a copy of the London Times from 10 days ago, along with some buttons and a memorandum book, all of which Rhodes had recovered from inside of a shark. Rhodes presumes that someone in possession of all these items was swallowed by the shark in the Thames as the last entry in the book is listed in London. He doesn't conjecture how the person ended up in the Thames to be swallowed by a shark. So that is Twain's fictional account of how Rhodes made his first fortune, and it really struck me how it hinged on his managing to have news that was only 10 days old, which just tickled my imagination today when news from anywhere on the globe that is 10 hours old might seem a bit outdated.

Starting point is 00:22:56 Yeah, that's a completely different world, I mean, in every way. To think you have the latest news because it's only 50 days old. That's funny, too, that they're right, that the stories are so similar. They're such odd stories. It'd be surprising if they weren't related, but I'm sure Twain's version is much more well-known now than the original. That's very possibly true, yeah. And I give a lot of credit to Twain for the imagination behind the story, whether or not

Starting point is 00:23:23 it was inspired by the 1799 events. I wasn't able to determine either way, whether it had been or not. If anybody else knows, please let us know. And Johan wrote to us about the puzzle in episode 241, spoiler alert, saying, I have a different solution to the tissues

Starting point is 00:23:39 instead of shoes puzzle. I have also ordered shoes online and gotten worthless paper. This because the shoes were bought as charity and sent to a homeless shelter and I got a thank you letter. So I thought that was a much nicer reason than participating in a fraudulent review scheme. I like that.

Starting point is 00:23:55 Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate how much we learn from our listeners. So if you have anything that you'd like to add, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And we promise to do our best to make sure that we actually get to see it. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation. We're going to see if I can figure out what's actually going on asking yes or no questions. This is from listener David White. Many years ago, my grandfather bought a washing machine from a man who promised it was in good

Starting point is 00:24:32 working order. When the machine turned out to be a lemon, my grandfather demanded a refund. The man promised to give it to him, but again swindled my grandfather by writing him a check that bounced. Eventually, my grandfather was able to resolve the matter favorably by giving the con artist even more money. How did that help? Okay. Did this really happen to his grandfather? Apparently so.

Starting point is 00:24:55 Oh, David, you have to write in and let us know if this really happened. I hope it did. It's a good story. Okay, by giving the con artist even more money. Was the money he was giving the con artist going to somehow get the con artist in trouble? No, I wouldn't say that. Okay. Because I was thinking, I don't know, give him counterfeit bills and let him spend them and get arrested or, okay. Did he give the con artist counterfeit money?

Starting point is 00:25:20 No. He gave the con artist legal tender? Yes. Legal tender in the country he was in? Yes. Does it matter what country this is in? No. Anything else about the location matter? No. Anything about the specific time period? No. Okay. Because if it was his grandfather, it could have been, I don't know, during a war or something and somehow that's germane. Okay. Okay. All right. Does it matter that it was a washing machine? Could it have been a car instead of a washing machine? Yes, it could. It could beane. Okay. Okay. All right. Does it matter that it was a washing machine? Could it have been a car instead of a washing machine?

Starting point is 00:25:46 Yes, it could. It could be anything. Okay. And he gave him a, the shady guy gave the grandfather a check that bounced, meaning he couldn't cash the check at the bank. Right. Right. But then David's grandfather gave the guy money.

Starting point is 00:26:04 Yes. Bills? Doesn't quite matter now. Whether it was bills or coins. Right. But money as opposed to a money order or a check or something? Or does it not matter? It doesn't really matter.

Starting point is 00:26:20 Okay. Does it matter what he was giving him the money for? Okay. Does it matter what he was giving him the money for? I think I'm going to say yes. Okay, and read the end of it again. What happened when he gave him more money? He resolved the matter by giving him more money? Something like that?

Starting point is 00:26:38 Eventually, my grandfather was able to resolve the matter favorably by giving the con artist even more money. Even more money. Did he receive any money in return? Yes. I don't want to lead you off in the wrong direction. Yes, he did. But not directly from the con artist.

Starting point is 00:26:55 That's right. Okay. He received money in return, but not from the con artist. Oh, was he working with law enforcement somehow? No. Oh, shoot. Was he working with some other entity or group? Yes. Yes. Someone else who had a grievance against the con artist? No, I wouldn't say so. Someone who was doing some kind of investigation? No. doing some kind of investigation. No.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Huh. And I'll say, just to help this along, the con artist wasn't present when the grandfather found this solution. The con artist wasn't present. Right. But the grandfather gave him more money and resolved the matter. By resolve the matter,

Starting point is 00:27:43 did the grandfather feel that he'd been compensated adequately for the whole situation so that he wasn't out any money now? Yes. But he was compensated by a third party? Yeah, I'll say yes to that. By another group or entity? Yeah. Okay. Would you say it's one other person that compensated the grandfather? Yeah, for simplicity, yeah, we can say that. One specific other person. Does this specific other person have a relationship to the con artist? Yes. Are they...

Starting point is 00:28:13 Okay. I'll say this happened shortly after the check bounced. Shortly after the check bounced, somehow the grandfather was able to get money from a person who has a relationship with the con artist. Are they related by blood? No. By marriage? No.

Starting point is 00:28:33 Prior history? Yes. They have a business relationship. They have a business relationship. It happened very soon after the check bounced. Very soon after the check bounced. Like, did he find out that the check bounced. Very soon after the check bounced. Like, did he find out that the check bounced while he was at the bank? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:49 So this happened at the bank? Yes. So he's at the bank, and the check bounces. Oh, was the con artist a famous person, and the signature on the check was worth something, so he sells the check? No. Am I on the right track in any kind of way? No. Yeah, no, you are.

Starting point is 00:29:04 You're actually closer than you think. Okay, so the grandfather— He's at the bank. He's at the bank. He tries to give the teller a check. And she says there aren't sufficient funds in this account. Okay. And then the grandfather does something.

Starting point is 00:29:16 He thinks quickly and does something. Right. Is the teller the one who gives him money? Yes. Does she want the check for some reason? No. She's sympathetic to the grandfather. Okay. No. She's sympathetic to the grandfather. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:29 Huh. She gives him money out of the con man's account somehow? You're nearly there. Um, she gives him money out of the con man's account. When the machine turned out to be a lemon, my grandfather demanded a refund. The man promised to give it to him, but again swindled my grandfather by writing him a check that bounced. Eventually, my grandfather was able to resolve the matter favorably by giving the con artist even more

Starting point is 00:29:52 money. So was the check for, say, $100, and he didn't have... He only had $80 in his account, so the grandfather gave the bank $20 to put in the con artist's account so then he could cash the check for the $80?

Starting point is 00:30:07 Yes. Oh, so he wasn't like entirely out. He was still out a bit, but... Yeah, whatever he had to pay. Okay. When my grandfather... David writes, when my grandfather tried to cash the check at the bank where both he and the crooked appliance seller had accounts, the teller apologetically told him that there

Starting point is 00:30:21 were not enough funds in the man's account to cover the check. Of course, she couldn't tell my grandfather exactly how much money the man had in his account, but she indicated that it was close, just not quite enough. In a flash of inspiration, my grandfather announced that he wanted to deposit a gift of exactly $1 into the other man's account. And by the way, is there enough in his account to cover this check? With a twinkle in her eye, the teller said, no, sir, that's just barely not enough. Another gift of a dollar. How about now? No, another dollar gift. With a smile, the teller told my grandfather, why, sir, it appears there are sufficient funds to cover your check after all. At which point my grandfather

Starting point is 00:30:51 cashed the check, cleaned out the crook's bank account, and left the bank whistling. Oh, wow. Thank you, David. Thank you, David. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our fabulous listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com,

Starting point is 00:31:23 where you can find a donate button and a link to our Patreon page. Thank you. topics we've covered. If you have any comments or feedback for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was all written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 245-Jeanne Baret

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