UNCOVERED: Obscure history facts - The Untold Story

During WW2 the British were making a hasty retreat from Norway. Initially they were going to destroy 10 land based Hurricane planes so that the Germans couldn't capture them, but they seemed too good to waste so a plan was made to land them on the British carrier HMS Glorious and bring them to England.

There were just two problems: The landing speed of the Hurricanes was too high for the carriers length and the planes had no arresting hook.

The solution discovered by pilots was to place a 15lbs *sandbag* in the tail of the plane which allowed it to brake harder and make a full stop on the carrier. All 10 Hurricanes landed on the carrier.

There is stone-carved Norse graffiti in Istanbul.

Helen Keller had a robust adult career as a socialist activist and was a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.

>"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease." —Helen Keller, 1911

Apparently not much has changed in a hundred years.

The US tried to purchase Greenland from Denmark after WWII.

During the Spanish American war an American ship fired cannons at a Spanish owned island. None of the cannon balls did any damage. The governor (I think) rowed out to the ship to apologise to the captain for not returning the salute as they had no cannons/gunpowder. The captain then had to explain that they were at war and he had actually been attacking the island. The governor surrendered. The American fleet had more pressing places to be and couldn't leave a military presence at the island but luckily there was an American citizen who lived there and he said he would take care of the place in their absence.

Martin Luther King Jr and Anne Frank were born in the same year. Which is odd given we associate them with different periods of History.

There was a group of Irish Catholic troops that defected from the American side to the Mexican side during the Mexican American war. American Army was full of protestants, who treated the Catholics pretty poorly. They decided to defect and join the Mexican troops, who were primarily Catholic.

That pirates were the only government of New Providence in the Bahamas for eleven years from 1706 to 1718. Merchants came from all over to trade rum, gunpowder and ammunition for stolen goods (and make a huge profit) and pr*stitutes came from all over the world to make their fortunes. (By making a lot of pirates.).

The Wei of ancient China (iirc, these stories come from about 400 CE) had some contact with The Land of Wa, which we call Japan. During voyages and such, they would have what is called a 'Fortune Keeper.' It's a guy who would not bathe, not eat meat, stay away from women, and generally act depressed all the time.

The idea is that he suffers all the horrible things that could go wrong so that way it doesn't affect the voyage. When he gets back home he gets rewarded with gold, women, food, slaves, the works. If something goes wrong...they k**l him. Because clearly he wasn't doing his job.

The only person to make a confirmed k**l with a longbow in WWII was an officer called "Mad Jack" Churchill. He believed all officers were improperly dressed without their swords, took a German outpost captive with a broadsword and a revolver, and joined the commandos because he thought it would be fun.

Jan Baalsrud was part of the Norwegian resistance. He was the only one (of eight) to escape capture during a failed mission to destroy a German air control tower at Bardufoss.

As wikipedia tells it :

*"Jan and others swam ashore in ice cold Arctic waters. Jan was the only soldier to evade capture and, soaking wet and missing one sea boot, he escaped up into a snow gully, where he shot and k****d the leading German Gestapo officer with his pistol. He evaded capture for roughly two months, suffering from frostbite and snow blindness. His deteriorating physical condition forced him to rely on the assistance of Norwegian patriots. It was during this time in a wooden hut at Revdal, which he called Hotel Savoy, that Jan was forced to operate his legs with a pocket knife. He believed that he had blood poisoning and that drawing the blood out would help. Not long after that Jan was left on a high plateau on a stretcher in the snow for 27 days due to weather and German patrols in the town of Manndalen, Kåfjord, his life hanging by a thread. It was during this time while he lay behind a snow wall built round a rock to shelter him that Jan amputated nine of his toes to stop the spread of gangrene, an action which saved his feet. After that it was thanks to the efforts of his fellow Norwegians that Jan was transported by stretcher towards the border with Finland. Then he was put in the care of some Sami (the native people of northern Fenno-Scandinavia) who with reindeer pulled him on a sled across Finland and into neutral Sweden, where he was safe at last. From Saarikoski in northern Sweden he was collected by a seaplane of the Red Cross and flown to Boden*".

My favorite involves a bit of knowledge on pirates and how they operated.

While everyone knows that pirates flew a pirate flag, most don't know that every pirate flew their own version (Calico Jack is the pirate that flew the skull and crossbones). This was how most pirates could be identified before they attacked. Most also don't realize that the black pirate flag was not the flag that was predominately flown. Typically they wouldn't fly any flags or would hide under a nearby countries colors instead. Once they decided to attack another ship or harbor, they would generally run up a solid red flag. This was basically a warning shot saying "if you surrender now, we won't k**l you." The black pirate flag that has all of the fame associated with it was the last flag that would be flown. After the red flag had been shown for what the pirates deemed a necessary amount of time (usually the time it would take them to close the distance between them and their target) they would fly the black flag, which basically said "it's too late to surrender. we aren't taking prisoners, sorry friend"

Anyway - I told you all of that to tell you this story.

Black Bart (Captain Bartholomew Roberts) was one of the more well known and feared pirates of the ages. If you haven't heard of him, he's right up there with Blackbeard in infamy. In June of 1720, Black Bart sailed into the large harbor of Trepassey with his black flag flying. Naturally, everyone in the harbor panicked because Black Bart was not the kind of guy you f****d with. His ship was extremely well armed and his crew had seen years of battle. In fact, he was so feared, that all 22 merchant ships in the harbor abandoned ship. They could have easily defeated him in battle as 22 vs. 1 is a pretty one-sided affair, but no one wanted to risk a tangle with Black Bart.

**TL;DR** Black Bart captured 22 merchant ships and over 100 fishing boats without firing a single shot all based on his reputation.

For an additional fun fact, pretty much every pirate you've ever heard of was only active in a roughly ten year span (1715-1725). Most pirates were only active for 2-3 years.

There was a caravan owner in Persia who was robbed of his goods. He took his complaint all the way to Nader Shah, the monarch at the time. Nader Shah asked the merchant where the robbing took place and when the man revealed it was by a certain tree, Nader ordered his men to whip and flail the tree every day. After about a week of this the thieves were so scared that a man would go to such great lengths just to harm a tree that they put all of the possessions back.

African mercenaries hired by Portuguese traders and missionaries fought for the Japanese in Korea during the Imjin War (1592-1597).

They even show up in a painting depicting the Chinese military withdrawal from Korea!

Australia fought a war against Emus...and lost.

Benjamin Franklin was banned from parties during the Constitutional Convention, because he loved to gossip at them and the CC was supposed to be a secret.

Growing up, my dad would read me a story from an old National Geographic about Glacier Girl. A P-38 Lightening that when returning home from a mission with it's squadron and two B-17s had to make an emergency landing on a ice field. All pilots and crews survived and the machines were left to history. The Nat Geo article was about the research, finding, and excavation of the planes. Turns out only one that wasn't crushed by the 200 some-odd feet of ice was this P-38. It was a favorite bedtime story of mine.

**YEARS** later, a relative died who was from rural Kentucky, specifically Middlesboro, Kentucky. It's a very small town in Appalacia, about a mile from the Cumberland gap. As we were heading home after the funeral, we saw a tiny sign on the side of the road that said, 'P-38 Restoration Site' and my dad and I being big historical flyboys, wanted to stop and check it out. Through sheer coincidence it was the Glacier Girl that I had learned about in my childhood. And this was the place where they took it after they removed it from the ice. It was amazing the condition it was in! There was still 1942 air in the tires! At the time it was still being worked on but now it is in flying condition and a very rare plane. I don't believe many types of that P-38 survived the war.

Not sure if this counts, but the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) is one of the most fascinating events of the 19th century. And I never even knew it happened until taking a Chinese history class in college. Basically what happened was a Chinese scholar failed his exams a bunch of times, went crazy and decided he was Jesus's brother, aka the son of God. He gathered supporters in southern China and basically took over the entire country in a few short years. However they failed to capture Beijing, and internal drama + a very b****s peasant army eventually brought an end to the conflict. After an estimated 20-60 MILLION PEOPLE DIED! In WW1 38mil people died, just to put it into perspective. And the American Civil war, fought during roughly the same time, saw 1.2 million casualties.

Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, was married to at least 34 women. Some as young as 14 years old and many who were already married to other men. He was known to send men away on missions for the church and then marry their wife while they were away.

The monopods/dufflepuds in Chronicles of Narnia are based on creatures described in Pliny the Elder's "Natural History" (in turn based on citations from other authors).
As a kid, I had always thought they were C.S. Lewis' own invention. When I read the Natural History, I was blown away at how many books I've read have drawn from it. Even more surprising were all the entries that have been investigated and found to be accurate and traceable to places and things that still exist in the modern world (the floating islands is the most fun & amazing, although the dog-k*****g cave is pretty cool too).
It's just awesome to think that this book that was written nearly 2000 years ago, without the type of access to data that we have today, could still have so many entries with more-or-less valid information in them.