Short Stuff: Did a shipwreck double the size of the United States?

0:04 Hey, welcome to the short stuff. Chush, Chuck, Jerry Date, Let's go back in time.

0:11 Do you know who else is in the room with us?

0:13 Uh, Jerry Murphy.

0:16 No?

0:16 Do you know who wrote this article?

0:18 No? Not you? Okay, Yeah, because I was gonna say I didn't even know about some of this stuff.

0:26 Yeah. This, uh, maybe the densest three pages I've ever seen written was written by our old colleague Kristin Conger.

0:35 Conger. That's right, seriously incredibly well written.

0:40 Congs did a great job, and Kristin is thankfully still around in the podcasting biz. She has her great show, Unladylike that she used to co host with Caroline, but eventually Caroline left and Conger kept doing it by herself and it's it's still great. Still around, she has a ladylike book, and we I think the world of Conger, so still support her.

1:03 Please, Way to go Conger, and way to go for this article, because it really is incredibly well done, especially for something she probably wrote in a day maybe a half.

1:13 You know we used to crank these out, Yeah we did.

1:16 So. The whole story starts in nineteen ninety three, that's where Conger put it, and I think that was the right place, the right way to go out on the Gulf of Mexico. There's a guy named Jerry Murphy who was a fisherman there and he was trawling in the Gulf of Mexico and when he brought the net up, there was some debris in it. He just assumed were rocks at first, but I guess he took a closer look and we're like, those are silver coins that are fused together because they've been underwater for so long. Hot damn, that's right.

1:49 So he did what anyone would do. He got in touch with an attorney. He said, can I keep this stuff? And then he contacted history experts and said where did the things come from? And then about a year after that, they finally said, hey, dude, do you know what this is. This is from the ruins of the El Cazador or the Hunter, and this is a ship that disappeared in seventeen eighty four after it set out from Veracruz, Mexico, with nineteen tons of Spanish currency, which was silver reels at the time.

2:24 Yeah, they were newly minted, even there was apparently a mint in Mexico, and they were headed to New Orleans, and at the time you were like, well, why does Spain care about New Orleans? Spain care about New Orleans because that was the capital of the Louisiana colony owned by Spain at the time. Sure you thought it was France. No, there was a period where Spain owned Louisiana and there was during this time. And the reason they sent nineteen tons of silver coins to New Orleans was because New Orleans currency had recently become devalued. There was a lot of counter fitting going on. There was a lack of hard currency around, so they were bringing this hard currency to pay the soldiers, to pay government officials, and it

3:09 went down. I can't imagine being King Carlos the Second and being like, are you kidding me? We lost nineteen tons of silver coins forever?

3:21 Yeah, And so King Carlos was like, I imagine face palmed and said, oh God, is this Like, is Louisiana even worth all this? You guys?

3:31 He said, I hate mondays he.

3:34 Did Ian Garfield, it was it's so far away. We lost all this money we just wanted from the French a couple of decades ago, Like, do we really want to be in the Louisiana business anymore. And so well, we should back up a little and just explain who he was. He was a cousin to King Louis the fifteenth of France. I said, twenty fifth, just a little behind the scenes there, Josh corrected me. It was off in. In seventeen sixty two, Louis seeded the Louisiana territory to Carlos with a Treaty of Fontainebleau. And it wasn't because they were family. It was basically he wanted to keep Louisiana out of the hands of the Brits.

4:17 Right better in the hands of a cousin that's ruling another country than in the Britz, who he has no friends with, you know. So now Louisiana and New Orleans is under Spanish rule. And it was actually a pretty smart move because after the Seven Years War ended, King Louis had to seed all of the Louisiana territory east of the Mississippi to the Britz as part of the treaty, except New Orleans. And the reason New Orleans is such a plump was because if you wanted to move goods from one place to another, there were no railroads there were no stage coaches. You did it on the river, and the Mississippi in particular was a very, very valuable river because it went from the top of the continent to the bottom. And if when you got your stuff

5:06 down in New Orleans, you could prepare for a seagoing ship, put your goods on that and now from the Gulf of Mexico, you can take that stuff and sell it anywhere in the world.

5:15 That's right. Another reason New Orleans is a plum is because it's New Orleans. It's sure one of the great American cities. Man, I love New Orleans. I love that city. It's it's been too long. I need to get back there.

5:26 It is. It's a cool city. It's it's almost like it's got its own vibe, you know, like there's no other place like it.

5:32 No other place like it. And one of the friendliest. Like if you're open to life and you go to New Orleans, there's a fifty percent chance you're going to end up in a stranger's home, like eating dinner with them or something.

5:45 Those are high odds.

5:47 All right, speaking of high maybe we should take a break and we'll be right back after this, all right, So New Orleans is there. It's a very hot shipping port. That's one of the pros for sure. One of the downsides is is tons of mosquitoes, meaning a lot of yellow fever, a lot of smallpox. But it was great real estate, obviously, you know, with that port right there.

6:37 So around that time, because of this, France starts looking back at New Orleans and Napoleon is in power by this point seventeen ninety nine, and he was like, man, I really want to get into the West, and New Orleans is pretty great. Man. They got the mouth of the Mississippi right there, and if I can control New Orleans then that would be really great for my interests on that side of the world.

7:02 Right, So he goes back to Spain and he's like, hey, I would love the Louisiana territory back. What do you say, I give your son in law the throne of Tuscany, right, and you give me back the Louisiana territory. And so Napoleon and the King of Spain came up with the Treaty of San Ildefonso, which in English is the Treaty of Saint PHONSI, and France suddenly had the Louisiana territory again.

7:32 That's right. But around the same time there was some in French owned Hispaniola, which was Haitian, the Dominican Republic is what we would call that today. They were like, they were farming sugar and coffee and tropical produce. So that was all great, you know, for the French and for Napoleon getting New Orleans with me, and you could trade that stuff much easier or much more easily, and so he was like, this is all going to come together. However, the enslaved people there had other ideas and they led what is the only really successful slave revolt in history.

8:10 Yeah, the Haitian Rebellion led by Dussaint Lovertire, which I was like, yes, that's going to be an episode, so everyone put it on the list.

8:19 O good.

8:20 But this was in Haiti, which at the time was Saint doming Do Minge, I don't remember how to say Dominge. Yeah, And Saint Domingue was far and away the crown jewel of France's economic holdings over in the West, right in the West Indies. And so even if you had New Orleans without the country that was producing all the stuff that you were going to take to New Orleans and then ship around the world. You're just basically your whole Western economic empire that Napoleon was going to build is just out the window. So he said, you know what, I don't think we really need Louisiana anymore. The Brits are knocking at the door again. I'm gonna have to fight them. I'm sick of those guys. I need some quick money. Let me see who wants to buy the

9:08 Louisiana territory. And in walk Thomas Jefferson reading a Bible, he edited himself.

9:15 That's right, and Napoleon was like, I turns out I also hate Mondays, And Thomas Jefferson said, you know what, I love Mondays and I love Louisiana and I love New Orleans. So TJ comes in, It's like, I don't want to fight with you guys, so why don't we just see if we can work this out in a friendly way. So he sent James Monroe down there to the French government to buy just New Orleans at this point for like three million bucks. He's like, that's as high as I'll go.

9:45 Not a penny more. I'm not going to pay a lot for this territory.

9:49 That's right.

9:50 So so Monroe goes and talks to Napoleon and is like, what do you think? And Napoleon goes, how about this. Here's my counter offer. You have to buy all of the Louisiana territory. And James Monroe dropped his tea cup. Luckily there's somebody there at catch you before it shattered on the floor. He said, for fifteen million dollars, and James wonn Road did the mathro quick in his head and he's like, that's less than four cents an acre, and he said sold.

10:22 He said sold. Yeah, so he signed over to Jefferson and you know, of course we did a whole episode on the Louisiana purchase. It was a good one, yeah, the needy, gritty details, but that basically doubled the size of the country. And then, you know, when I looked at this article, and I might title it this too, like how did a shipwreck double the size of the United States? At the end of my first read through, I was like, but wait, how did that happen? Again?

10:48 I guess the idea is had that shipwreck never happened, Spain would have been able to deliver their silver and maybe would have stayed in the Louisiana business exactly. Okay, Yeah, so I got it.

11:01 Yeah you did. And I feel like we did Conger's article some justice.

11:07 I hope. So, like I said, it was a really great article and Kristen's awesome.

11:11 Yep. It was kind of one of our drunk history style short stuffs.

11:17 That's right, except we're not drinking because it's two fifteen.

11:21 Yeah on a Thursday.

11:23 Even that's right.

11:25 At any rate, I think short stuff's out, guys.

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