Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Coconut Cult

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Why we love short stuff - because we can tell stories like this one. A man goes to an island to start a commune of sorts that subsists entirely on coconuts. It didn't go well.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's other Josh, who's basically fast becoming,

he's gunning at Jerry's heels, I would say, Chuck, wouldn't you agree? Well, I think at the very least, he's the new Frank the Chair. For sure. He may soon be the new bird, the bobbing bird. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

At any rate, we're glad Josh is here. He's almost two inanimate objects. Right, exactly. We just ate up about a third of our time, so we're gonna have to remove the ending from this one, okay? Yeah, this one is interesting, because I read the original New York Times piece from 1905 or whatever.

Ooh la la. Very different than the story we get here in a lot of ways, so. Oh, I can't wait to. Who knows? Let's just, I'll just point out what the New York Times article said compared to what we have in front of us. Do it like a cranky IT guy.

When I say something, just be like, wrong. Well, who knows? Okay. It is in New York Times, but I don't know what their standards were like in 1905. I don't know either. I don't know if they're peddling fake news back there. Right. So there's this article from How Stuff Works

that we found does a really good job of placing this in context in the world. And saying that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vrishka, which means tree, which gives all that is necessary for living, which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot about

what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying you don't need anything else, but this one tree, that's how great this tree is. Yeah, and that's also just a slightly fancier way than saying Webster's defines blank. It's blank. A little bit. A little bit. It's definitely fancier for sure.

It's got like cursive everywhere. But the whole point is that coconuts are pretty fun and good to eat and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It turns out, though, that the Sanskrit saying is quite wrong. Like, it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist on coconuts.

And there was actually a guy who was born in 1875, named August Engelhardt, who basically proved that. And inadvertently, it wasn't his intention to prove that the Sanskrit term was wrong, but he actually took it to heart and tried to live exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed was coconuts and sunlight

and ended up living on, I don't want to say a deserted island, but certainly a sparsely populated island, living and dying there to spoil the ending. Yeah, this is interesting mostly to me because it was when it happened. He was born in 1870. Like, if this happened in the 1970s, it'd be like, sure.

Of course. It happens all the time. But this guy was born in 1875 in Germany. And then after college, sort of became, well, there's a lot of debate on whether or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that, he became very much into the Laban's reform,

which is life reform movement. Basically, what you would think of these days is like a very 60s hippie American thing. They were doing, I guess, in Germany in the early 20th century. Yeah, I took it to be kind of like a prototype for Goop. For who? For Goop, going with Paltrow's site.

Oh, good Lord. Yeah, that's kind of, I mean, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and what you could find on like some of the sites that Goop endorses and Goop itself, especially if you take into account this book that he wrote, it sounds a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days.

You gotta quit saying Goop. Goop. So in 1898, he wrote a book called A Carefree Future, Colon, The New Gospel, Semi-Colon. That's rare. Glimpse into the depth and distance for the selection of mankind. Comma.

Comma, for the reflection of all. Comma. For consideration and stimulation, and he should have just put an exclamation point at the end just to cover all the spaces. He missed that Oxford comma after consideration though. But it was a kind of a kooky book. He talked about life, his lifestyle

and what he believed his version of the Laban's reform was. And then he also wrote poems about coconuts. Yeah, like Mother Coconut, The Coconut Spirit, How to Become a Coconut. Those were titles of some of the poems and tracks that he included in this book. And like, it's really hard to overstate just how much faith this guy placed in the coconut

as the source of not just life, but health. And it was based on some somewhat unfounded ideas. So it tied in very much with an idea that he had that the sun was the source of all life in the universe. And that coconuts grew on coconut palms toward the top, just like the brain in the human head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun, coconuts are closest to the sun,

ergo, the coconut can care for the brain and everything else you need in life. And that was it. Yeah, that probably would have been the end of his story had he not had a substantial amount of money. Right. I was about to say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative.

So he had some cash all of a sudden. He bought 185 acres of land on a tiny little island called Kabakan off of Papa, what is now known as Papa New Guinea. And he took along 1,200 books, got rid of most of his clothes and went out there and lived by himself. Well, not by himself because there are indigenous peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only white German there. Right.

The whole jam was that he had either heard or figured out that humans had evolved in the subtropics between tropical cancer and tropical capricorn. And that's what we were basically evolved to, that's where we were evolved to be. So the idea of living in like a house and driving a car, eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet,

but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. The idea of just basically living in a boxy cubicalized stuffy life was antithetical of how we were designed by evolution or natural selection or even God if that's your bag, right? And so he moved to this island so that he could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts,

living how this guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live. And from what I can tell, he fully expected to basically be free of all disease and any kind of terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way that it ended up at all. No, because first of all, coconuts, you cannot live on coconut alone.

They do have a lot of good stuff in there. They have good carbs and fat and stuff like that. But they lack a lot of vitamins, notably B12, B6, A, K, calcium, and protein, there's a little bit of protein about three grams or so. But that's not very much protein. So if you're gonna eat enough coconuts

to supply your body, and he was about five foot eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly less as time went on, obviously. He would have had to been eating between 14 and 18 coconuts a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean, if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked on an island,

reading some books, you got time to eat 14 to 18 coconuts a day. So he could have, but it's not clear that he knew he needed to eat that amount. And it's also not clear that he would have responded to that information, so he didn't. And he started to wither away, which as you said, probably would have been

the end of the story, had this guy actually not managed to convince other people through his book and then through correspondence with them to come join him. And so people started to show up on this island. And we'll talk about what happened after that, after this. Let's talk about what happened after Spring Festival. back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

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about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, stuff you should know. All right, so this is where the New York Times story has diverged already.

Okay. They wrote an article and everyone, if you don't know that the New York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's pretty boss. So there was an article called Failure of a Womanless Eden in the Pacific Dash,

a strange story from the South Seas. That's a great title. As the New York Times tells it, only two people joined the Son and Norton cult, the Order of the Sun cult. This article that we have says, and I'm inclined to go with ours because, you know, investigative journalism has gotten better

since 1905. Well, yeah. But the New York Times said a boat showed up in the end that he was thought was going to be full of like 20 people and there was only two guys. The rest of the people got word that the island was full of cannibals and decided not to show up, which if that's wrong,

it sounds like it was completely made up by the writer because our thing says that about 15 people showed up and took their clothes off and were basically like, let's do this. They did agree on the two dudes, though. One guy's name was Einrich Eukens. He was 24 years old, he was a vegetarian and he was a way down with this.

And the other was a very famous person, actually, or at least medium famous in Germany. At the time. That's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzau and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of the Lutzau Orchestra in Berlin. Right, so Eukens and Lutzau basically showed up from what I understand and said, we're here,

we're very enthusiastic for this, let's eat some coconuts, they took their clothes off, they started to live this way. But there were two big problems. For Eukens, it was that his body did not take to this diet despite from what I understand being a vegetarian if not a vegan ahead of time, right? Still, the coconuts got him, maybe he had an allergy,

maybe he got too much sun, who knows. But he died, this article from How Stuff Works puts it, he dropped dead within weeks of showing up and starting this coconut subsistence. The New York Times confirms that. Okay, good, all right, so we've got a fact, we've unearthed the fact here, it's double, double sourced. Unless Our How Stuff Works article

used that New York Times as a source. That's how facts get generated. And then the other guy, Lutzau, the conductor, he was doing fine and apparently he got along with August Engelhardt, the leader of this cult. But he also, they had varying tastes in music and that actually created a bit of tension between the two. Yeah, apparently Lutzau, or I'm sorry, Engelhardt hated

Betzett, I think Lutzau loved Betzett. And it says that Lutzau brought his music collection. The only thing I can figure is that he brought over, he was a violinist as well, that he brought a violin. I don't know, he could have brought like one of those cranky gramophones. Maybe, you know. Or maybe a bird with a beak like Flintstone style.

Or maybe a person dressed like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah, maybe he did bring records. A bird. I mean, August Engelhardt brought 1,200 books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player. Sure. So maybe that's what happened.

But the way the New York Times described it is they started getting into arguments about music. And because it was just the two of them, according to that article, it's gonna get a little crazy after a while. Right. Lutzau was like, I don't wanna spend the night hit next to you tonight.

And he applied for permission supposedly with Engelhardt to go spend the night on a missionary boat that was nearby at one of the others. There was a bunch of islands around. And I guess Engelhardt granted him this. He went on board this boat. He spent the night. He refused to eat any of the food that they had.

And apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting back to his coconut paradise. And he died. Yes, he died. And if there were... So if two people showed up, 100% of the visitors died. But even if there were more

in this House of Works article is right. Because this guy carried this guy, August Engelhardt, he carried on even after these two deaths for more than a decade beyond that New York Times article. So maybe more people showed up afterward and that accounts for the discrepancy. But as this House of Works article tells it, more people showed up, more people died

from things like dehydration, heat stroke. And then this one, this is tough to swallow. If it is true, then there is a creator God who does take pleasure in messing with us. But somebody died from being hit by a coconut. Somebody in the coconut worshiping cult died from being killed or died from a coconut injury. Which happens?

Sure, it does, it does. But I mean, imagine traveling from Germany in the 19th century, early 20th century, showing up to eat nothing but coconuts and then dying because a coconut hit you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic. So August Engelhardt himself died too,

but he hung on for a really long time considering he had the true grit of somebody who really would have just eaten coconuts from what I can tell. Yeah, I mean, there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time from people who I guess were nearby. And he looked awful. He looked like he would expect someone to look.

Sure. They describe him as a bearded bag of bones. There were lesions on his body. It was clear that he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York Times tells it, he eventually was one of these missionary boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto a boat

where he fought them physically as best he could while they tried to care for him. It's probably not much. No, until he jumped off the boat to swim back to the island where he died. According to our article, and perhaps further more accurate research, he did go on that boat.

He was kind of nursed back to semi-health and then left again, went back to the island, survived until 1914. And then because of World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war, released from camp when they realized he was mentally ill. They were like, wait, what is this about coconuts you're saying?

And he carried on apparently until 1919. Okay, all right. When he died at the age of 44, weighing less than 70 pounds. So this guy did this for like maybe 20 years-ish. Yeah, I mean, 18 years. That's impressive, man. Hats off to this guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story of August Englehart.

You can learn more about him on How Stuff Works. They wrote this article. I also want to just throw my two cents in and say I would put pretty decent money on the idea that Englehart spent at least a significant amount of time married to a coconut on that island. Probably so.

Well, with that, everyone, we bid you adieu from Short Stuff. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.