The King's Rhinoceros

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When the ship left harbor the morning of January 25th in the year 1516, the crew was expecting an uneventful voyage from Lisbon to Civitavecchia, the port serving the city of Rome. Mild weather, calm seas, an easy journey, but an important one. The ship was carrying a gift from the King of Portugal to the Pope. A gift so rare and precious that nothing like it had been seen in Europe for centuries.

Sailors are superstitious and there are certain kinds of cargo they'd rather not carry. Bananas were considered evil, flowers were unlucky, but this gift meant for the Pope? This was something else entirely. Some of the men kept their distance from it if only because they were unsure how to behave in the presence of a living, breathing unicorn.

A creature straight from legend. But it wasn't a unicorn chained to the deck that day as the ship was violently tossed by howling winds and towering walls of water. It was a rhinoceros. That ship went down. All souls were lost. The rhinoceros might have survived. Those animals can swim. But it was unable to break free of the heavy iron chains that shackled it to the heaving deck of the ship.

The King was deeply grieved by the loss of the rhinoceros. And maybe also by the loss of the sailors, though history didn't exactly record that part. So I guess we're going to have to give his majesty the benefit of the doubt. Have the beast hauled from the depths. Well done, sir. What's the point of being the king if you can't make crazy demands like that?

And they got a small beam of light again. True. Stuff. Once upon a time when the world was so much more vast and unknown and unknowable. A time before maps and satellites and mass communication shrunk it all down. Back in the days when things we take completely for granted were the most exotic mysteries. People would stand in line for a glimpse of a creature like the rhinoceros.

Today, there are five species of rhinoceros left in the whole world. The Javan, the Sumatran, the greater one horned, the black and the white rhino. And there are fewer than 28,000 rhinos left on the planet Earth. The news is really dire for a subspecies of white rhino. There are only two northern white rhinos left alive, both in captivity.

There are lots of reasons why this strange and magnificent creature is vanishing from our planet. Loss of habitat, poachers, climate change, wars and civil unrest. Plus, as their numbers decrease, so does any chance of genetic diversity. Earth's remaining rhinos are super vulnerable to disease, starvation, drought. Not to mention the risk of being slaughtered for their horns.

It wasn't always so grim for the rhinoceros. In fact, until people showed up, rhinos were having a big time. They ranged all over the world, including right here in North America. Rhinos are part of a class of critters known as charismatic megafauna, which is exactly what you should be putting in your bio on the dating apps, because who wouldn't be intrigued by that?

Long before the rhinoceros became famous in Europe for its bizarre and exotic appearance, it actually called the place home. The only prehistoric European rhino that got famous was the woolly rhino. Not at the same level of superstardom as its buddies, the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, but still sort of iconic.

Yet it was only one of more than 100 different species of rhino that spanned more than 50 million years. Rhinos came in so many different shapes and sizes, and some were the biggest land mammals to ever exist. It's been anywhere from three and a half to five and a half million years since the rhinoceros roamed North America.

But Europe was a different story. Europe was home to one of the coolest prehistoric rhinos ever, the elasmithyr. These animals were truly enormous with a massive single horn. They were kind of weird too from a genetic standpoint, probably because the elasmithyr split off from the rest of the rhino family about 55 million years ago.

There were five different species of the elastomerium rhino, including one that got nicknamed the Siberian unicorn. It was as big as an elephant, weighing in at nearly 10 tons. It had longer legs than your typical rhino. It galloped like a horse. Unlike other species of rhinos, its molars never stopped growing. You know, like rodents.

Its front feet were bigger than its back feet, and it had a large hump of muscle on its back. It disappeared along with a slew of other megafauna during the mass extinction at the end of the Pleistocene era, just 1.8 million years ago. That left only nine species of rhino in the whole wide world, four of which roamed the European continent.

All four of those resembled the rhinoceros we know. Two of those, the Merckx rhino and the narrow-nosed rhino, were the most prolific, and if not for the extinction that rocked the late Pleistocene and early Holocene eras, those European rhinos would probably still be here. The Holocene, by the way, was about 10,000 years ago.

Deep time is hard for us humans with our curious but simple little brains. Plus, do we even really get the whole concept of extinction? I'm not so sure we do, because if we did, we might be a little more freaked out than we are by the fact that experts believe we are smack in the middle of Earth's sixth mass extinction.

Oh well, past the cheese doodles, right? What are you gonna do? Every party has to end at some point. And the party for the European rhinoceros was long over by the time King Manuel I ascended to the throne of Portugal in the year 1495. He didn't wear the crown for long, just 26 years, but King Manuel accomplished a lot in his short reign.

It was King Manuel's generous sponsorship that made it possible for the explorer Vasco da Gama to discover the sea route that linked Europe to India. Hello, spices and silks and precious gems. And of course, who controlled it? Portugal. And his majesty, King Manuel, who went on to finance the voyages of other explorers like Pedro Alvarez Cabral, who discovered Brazil.

The Portuguese, under the king's direction, were building forts and capturing lands and cutting deals on their way to establishing a breathtaking overseas empire. Portugal, the little country that could and did, and made King Manuel the first insanely wealthy in the process. King Manuel was a religious man, in a way. He had big faith, that's true, but he had even bigger ambitions and saw no conflict between the two.

He did the basics like funding missionaries, building churches and cathedrals. Sometimes his faith even guided his actions, like how he made life easier for the Jews in Portugal. Prior to his taking the throne, the Jews had been kept in what amounted to slavery. Then King Manuel turned right around and sold the Portuguese Jews out in an attempt to suck up to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

King Manuel wanted to marry their daughter, Isabella of Aragon, but the Spanish monarchs were gross anti-Semites who were like, yeah, no. So King Manuel issued a royal decree stating that all Jews must be baptized or banished from the country by a certain date. As that deadline loomed, King Manuel issued another royal decree that stated that all Jews were now Christians.

New Christians was the name given to these forcibly converted Jews and no one was allowed to hassle them for a period of 30 years. When the Lisbon Massacre went down, bloodthirsty mobs murdered thousands of their own neighbors on suspicion of being Jewish, King Manuel was furious. Every leader of that riot was tracked down and executed on the king's orders.

And he also got the girl, though a happy ending was not to be. Isabella died in childbirth just one year into the marriage. Two years later, King Manuel married Isabella's younger sister, Maria. King Manuel's devotion to his religion inspired an outrageously over-the-top tribute to the newly ordained Pope Leo X. The king's plan was twofold, win the pope's favor with lavish gifts and show the pope and the watching world the wealth and power of Portugal.

So it's the first Sunday of Lent in the year 1514 and King Manuel is out to impress. He sent a huge delegation of nobles and courtiers and military leaders to Rome in a gesture of obedience to the Vatican. The members of Manuel's court were dressed in crimson and velvet, trimmed in gold. The Persian horses were the finest to be had.

Everywhere you looked was sunlight gleaming off polished metal and leather. There was a whole rainbow's worth of tropical birds on hand. Monkeys chattered, cheetahs prowled inside their cages. And all of that was nothing compared to the centerpiece of King Manuel's tribute to the new pope. The gift that King Manuel sent to Rome that day was a rare white elephant.

His name was Hanno. The elephant was four years old when he was shipped to Portugal from India, a journey of thousands of miles. The elephant spent six months at sea, lashed to the deck, exposed to every kind of weather. In an attempt to protect his skin from the salt spray, the elephant's handlers, they're called mahouts, rubbed the giant beast with oil.

But Hanno, taken from his mother, was alone. This strange world where even the ground beneath his feet pitched and rolled and refused to behave couldn't have been more alien to the elephant. Poor Hanno had been snatched from his home and family to be a status symbol for a wealthy man. There was no greater gift for a monarch in the world than an elephant.

And King Manuel was delighted with Hanno. He doted on the elephant. So it couldn't have been easy for the king to part with his beloved pet. But he made the decision to give the animal to Pope Leo X. First, the sea voyage from India. Then the shorter but no less traumatic boat ride from Portugal to Italy. Then the long walk along roads whose hard surface left Hanno's feet scraped and tender.

What you have to remember is that in medieval Europe, most people had never even seen a drawing of an elephant, much less the real thing. There hadn't been a living elephant in Italy since the fall of the Roman Empire. The crowds that gathered that day were massive. People were everywhere, leaning out of every window, crammed onto every rooftop.

The clamor of voices was deafening. Countless hands snatching at the creature's leathery hide. Poor Hanno was an elephant, but he wasn't a big guy, about four feet tall at the shoulder. And he was moving very slowly. Today, we understand that animals are intelligent, sensitive, sentient creatures. What did Hanno make of the throngs of people pressing him on all sides, the noise and racket, the pain of the abrasions on his feet?

The grand procession made its slow way through the narrow and twisting streets of Rome, heading for the Castel San Angelo, where the Pope was watching and waiting. What happened next sounds make-believe, but there were hundreds of witnesses that day, poems were written about it, about how Hanno the elephant suddenly stopped, dropped to his knees, paused, then flung his enormous head back and trumpeted three times.

Then Hanno dipped his trunk into a nearby trough of water, and to the delight of the crowd, sprayed everyone, including the Pope. In the Belvedere, before the great pastor, was conducted the trained elephant, dancing with such grace and such love, that hardly better would a man have danced. And then with its trunk such a great noise it made, that the entire place was deafened.

Stretching itself on the ground to kneel, it then straightened up in reverence to the Pope and to his entourage. That's the poet Pasquale Malaspina. Now the whole point of this outlandish spectacle, and the gift of Hanno, was to ensure that Pope Leo X would have King Manuel's back. Europe was facing the standard political conflicts that humans were always cooking up, and the King of Portugal knew that the Pope would be a most powerful ally. He must have felt pretty good about the plan, when he saw the open delight on the new Pope's face. The pontiff was in love with his new pet elephant, and you can tell by the effusive letter that Pope Leo X sent to King Manuel after Hanno's arrival. It was the elephant which excited the greatest astonishment to the whole as much from the memories it evoked of the ancient past, for the arrival of a similar beast was fairly frequent in the days of ancient Rome. One is almost tempted to put faith in the assertion of the idolaters who pretend that a certain affinity exists between these animals and mankind. The sight of this quadruped provides us with the greatest amusement, and has become for our people an object of extraordinary wonder. Hanno settled into his new life in Italy. Every member of Pope Leo's court adored the elephant, and he was very much fussed over. Hanno appeared in processions all over Rome, drawing huge crowds of awestruck spectators. Problem was, no one in Rome knew anything about elephants, and Hanno, so far from home, fell sick just two years into his new life. The papal physicians did for Hanno the elephant exactly what they would have done for a person with his same symptoms. First, a good blood letting. This was followed by a strong purgative. That's a fancy word for laxative. People back then were really, really into enemas as an all-around cure for pretty much everything.

The trouble was, Hanno wasn't constipated. His symptoms were respiratory. So as the elephant labored to breathe, the papal doctors gave him a laxative infused with gold. Nothing but the best for Pope Leo's pet, even though their best turned out to be the worst for Hanno. The elephant died at six years old, far, far short of the 60-year lifespan of his kind. Pope Leo the 10th grieved, and King Manuel the first. Uh-oh, not good. Not good to give the Pope an elephant, only to have the man weeping at his grave just two years later. As Pope Leo buried Hanno beneath a courtyard at Vatican, where he remains to this day, King Manuel was brainstorming a new present for the Pope.

Her name was Ganda. She was exotic and magnificent, an animal every bit as rare and special as Hanno himself. But Ganda was no elephant. Ganda was a rhinoceros. Ganda had arrived at the court of King Manuel the first as a gift from Sultan Muzaffar Shah the second of Kambe. That's on the coast of western India. It was meant as a diplomatic gesture, the kind no one can ignore. And there was no ignoring Ganda. She was the first rhinoceros to set hoof on European soil since the Roman Empire.

And people streamed into Lisbon for a peek at what to them seemed the most impossibly strange monster. This is the second time in the story that the Roman Empire has come up and we might as well give it the attention at once so that it'll settle down and quit interrupting. Here's the deal. The ancient Romans were fascinated by both elephants and rhinos. The Roman historian Pliny wrote in the first century AD that the animals were the most bitter of enemies and in any battle the rhino was likely to win. King Manuel the first had heard those stories too.

So he thought let's test this. The king pitted a young elephant from his menagerie against his new rhinoceros and sat back to watch. The elephant took one look at Ganda and bolted which left the question of who might win the fight unresolved but answered the question of who in that room was the smartest. Elephant one, king zero. Now maybe you've heard that the Romans made gladiators battle elephants and rhinos at the Colosseum. That is not exactly true. The Romans made the animals fight each other while the crowds went nuts. Oh my god the way I could just go off on a tangent about the Colosseum which inspired our modern stadiums because there are so many fun details. Here's just one. The Colosseum has multiple entry and exit passageways and the Romans called those passageways vomitoria and that's where we get our word vomit. Isn't that good? Anyway the menagerie of animals kept at the Colosseum also included lions and tigers, crocodiles, hippos, giraffes, hyenas and more including all sorts of exotic and colorful birds. It was a show of the emperor's power and wealth that he could summon the strangest and exotic creatures in the world to roam. And don't you know that each emperor felt that he had to outdo all the others before him in dreaming up these flashy spectacles and so it all got weirder and weirder and weirder until the empire collapsed. I know that in the movie gladiator 2 Lucius Aurelius played by Paul Mescal rides into battle a strider rhinoceros but that is not based on any historical fact. Gladiators fought each other not the animals. The animals were mostly just for dramatic effect except for the poor critters chosen for the mock hunts. Spectators bout lost their togas in the excitement of watching archers and chariots barreling around the arena in pursuit of their terrified prey and worse the Romans really got off on watching animals fight each other. In one case they tied a bear from northern Europe to an African lion and terrorized the pair with fire until they fought. It was also a common practice to starve animals before setting them loose in the ring to fight to the death. It's true that gladiators might be set against a big cat with only a shield and a sword but elephants and rhinos were far too precious to be wasted like that being harder to come by and all and let's just say it wasn't unheard of for a particularly nasty criminal to be fed to a hungry beast while the crowd roared its approval and this scene played out thousands and thousands of times over 500 years of the Roman empire. Oh I can't listen to this it's animal cruelty. Okay just a thought if we directed our rage at the people who do the bad things instead of at the people who tell us about the bad things they did we might be slightly more effective as a society but human nature. Anyway back to Ganda the rhinoceros the first of her kind to make an appearance on the continent in centuries after four restless months aboard the ship the Nossa Senhora da Vida Ganda found herself the star of Lisbon and in the kind of wild plot twist that history loves to serve up Ganda also became the most famous rhinoceros in art history. The German artist Albrecht Dürer never made it to

Lisbon to see Ganda with his own eyes but he was fascinated by the tales told by those who had Dürer set about making his own pen and ink drawing and then printing it as a wood cut. It's an amazing piece of art especially when you realize that the artist had never laid eyes on a real rhinoceros before he made it. Not that the drawing was strictly accurate it wasn't.

Dürer drew the animal as armored but literally. Dürer showed the thick folds of its skin as at the seams. Dürer gave the creature its trademark horn but placed it on the animal's back. The skin was scaly instead of smooth. Was that an artistic choice or the dermatitis the poor thing was afflicted with after its long and unpleasant sea voyage from India? Bottom line Dürer's rhinoceros oozed steampunk charisma and was hailed as a most accurate depiction of the century and this was the inscription on the back of Dürer's print. On the first of May in the year 1513 the powerful king of Portugal Manuel of Lisbon brought such a living animal from India called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the color of a speckled tortoise and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose which it sharpens on stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. The elephant is afraid of the rhinoceros for when they meet the rhinoceros charges with its head between its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach against which the elephant is unable to defend itself.

The rhinoceros is so well armed that the elephant cannot harm it. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, impetuous and cunning. I mean the way we just make stuff up right? Now who can say if King Manuel the first would have been willing to part with Ganda if his first gift to Pope Leo the 10th, Hanno the elephant, had lived? But the king didn't allow sentiment to get in the way of his political strategizing. Pope Leo the 10th had been born in Medici, one of Italy's most powerful wealthy and prominent families. Any alliance with the Medici's was a good one as far as the king was concerned. The fact that Pope Leo the 10th also happened to be God's representative on earth didn't hurt either. The decision was made to gift Ganda to his holiness. Ganda was dressed for the trip in a green velvet collar with a gilded chain. Around her neck were garlands of roses and carnations. We began our story on the deck of the ship carrying the king's rhinoceros to Italy. It was all just a terrible accident. The sea is an unpredictable mistress as every sailor knows and she could turn on you in an instant. It all happened so fast. The crew was fighting to keep the ship afloat, fighting for their lives. The rhinoceros must have been panicked, bellowing, pulling and pulling against her chains. No one meant for her to drown. The sailors themselves had no idea when they set out that morning from Lisbon that they would never again see the man. It's terrifying to know how quickly the sea can swallow a ship, how quickly a raging storm can vanish over the horizon, leaving behind calm waters speckled by debris.

There were no survivors that day. When the news reached King Manuel the first, he was distraught. A message was immediately dispatched to his holiness in Rome, sharing the tragic news of Ganda's death. The papal response was basically, really? But the pope was looking so forward to meeting the rhinoceros. And this is really a bummer and not at all what his holiness wanted to hear, you know. In other words, the response King Manuel got was a little on the frosty side. The pope wanted his rhinoceros and just like Veruca Salt and Willy Wonka, he wanted it now. What could the king do but dispatch his men to the spot where the ship had wrecked? Haul up whatever you can, the king ordered.

But do not return until you have the body of Ganda. It was a tall order, combing the waters off the coast of Liguria in search of the body of a drowned rhinoceros. You wouldn't expect a mission like that to be successful. But I'll be damned if those sailors didn't somehow manage to find her and drag her massive waterlogged body to the surface. Were you thinking that the king just wanted to give his rhinoceros a proper burial? Maybe in the royal gardens, a shady spot under a tree where the king could visit sometimes and remember her magnificence. Wouldn't that be a nice ending to the story? Here's what happened instead. Upon heaving the carcass of the rhinoceros onto the dock, the king's men had decisions to make. She was already decomposing and exposure to the air and sunlight was only going to speed that process up. So they set about removing her hide so that it could dry. They saved her skeleton, setting the bones aside. When Ganda's hide was sufficiently cured, they carefully sewed it back together and stuffed it with hay. Did the final result look like a giant cockamamie football or like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Probably. Because these would-be taxidermists took one look and then went and fetched parts of her skeleton and tried stuffing some of the bones inside in a wretched attempt to make it all seem more lifelike and realistic. What I would give to see this with my own eyes because you just know that it had to look insane and horrible and like absolutely nothing that had ever existed on earth.

This new Ganda, let's call her Ganda 2.0, was packed up and once again sent by ship to the Medici Pope. Leo the Tenth's response was furious. He demanded that Ganda 2.0 be shipped straight back to Portugal. And perhaps this is the moment that King Manuel the First regretted the decision to send the badly taxidermied rhino to the Vatican without giving them a warning that Ganda was no longer quite herself. Who knows? The ghastly, hideous thing that had once been the magnificent rhinoceros was returned to Lisbon. An insult for an insult. Wars have been started for less.

What neither man knew, though, was just how little time they both had left. Six years after the debacle with the rhinoceros, Pope Leo the Tenth died of pneumonia on December 1st, 1521. King Pope Leo the Tenth is remembered mostly for his total and complete failure to halt the Protestant Reformation. Hell, he probably helped it more than he hurt it.

King Manuel the First is remembered mostly for helping establish that trade route to India and for the Portuguese colonization of India and the Americas. And Ganda, the rhinoceros, she's been immortalized by the artist Albrecht Dürer and by the country of Portugal. Ganda also inspired the first sculptural depiction of a rhinoceros in Europe.

A bust was made of her head and her front feet. Stoneworkers building the Bellum Tower, which stands guard over the port of Lisbon, paid tribute to Ganda as well. The tower was under when the rhinoceros took Portugal by storm. They carved her likeness into the base of one of the tower's turrets. She's been worn down now by time and weather, but you can still see her today. And the Bellum Tower is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Empires rise and empires fall.

Kings are crowned and kings are buried. Even popes, for all their inside connections to the big guy, can't escape death. The lives of Hanno the Elephant and Ganda the Rhinoceros may have been brief, but they sure lived up to the term charismatic megafauna. And if the ancients got it right, it's a far more noble thing to walk this earth as a rhinoceros than it is as any king or pope. Having let go of passion, delusion, having shattered the fetters, undisturbed at the ending of life, wander alone like a rhinoceros. People follow and associate for a own ends and impure. Wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, imagine growing yourself a human brain, a miniature little brain in a petri dish. And then that teeny tiny brain starts developing in unexpected ways. How, what, and why in the world are we creating these little brain organoids? Brain in a jar on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Heather Elizabeth and Don Morgan. So Sherry, this is a fascinating story. And I think equally fascinating would be how you came upon this story. Well, I had read that Albrecht Dürer made that famous image of the rhinoceros without having ever seen a rhinoceros in real life.

And I thought, well, that's one of those apocryphal stories that isn't true, right? Like an urban legend. Because if you look at the image of the rhinoceros that Dürer drew, I mean, it's a rhinoceros, right? Except that it has rivets and bolts and stuff. It's very steampunk and it's amazing. And it is an incredibly important piece of art. But the idea that you could get so close to a rhinoceros without ever actually having seen one. I mean, can you imagine if Dürer was alive today and could be a police sketch artist, like he would be the greatest, right? So I thought it was not true. And I don't know what made me. I was bopping around working on something else. And I stumbled across a little thing about endangered rhinoceroses. And I sat there and went, you know, I wonder if it's true about Dürer. And that's where the whole story took off.

And I kind of loved, you know, I understand why there's a podcast called, that Dan Carlin does, a history podcast Dan Carlin does. And some of his episodes are six hours long. And people go, how can you have a six hour long episode, but I totally get it because of the interconnectedness of everything. Like, do you know that you could do probably six hours just on the connection between the empire that was Portugal and a lot of people living today don't realize that Portugal was an empire, but it was. Yeah. So that with the spice route, Glasgow to Gama, like all of these things, and the Medici's, oh my gosh, the grip, the iron, icy grip that the Medici family held in terms of power, and the way that the papacy and the of the Vatican was interwoven with these powerful families and monarchies, and not at all pure as the German snow as like you might hope. So all of these things are interconnected, and you can total hardcore histories in the name of Dan Carlin's show. But anyway, all of these things are super interconnected. And you could go on and on, right? And, and maybe understand the whole world a little bit better at the end of it. But what I really loved about this particular story was King Manuel is the man responsible for the first elephant and the first rhinoceros walking on European soil since the fall of the Roman Empire. That's, that's kind of neat, isn't it?

It is. Wasn't it Hannibal who went into Rome and did it aboard on top of elephants? So then something else that was fascinating about this was I didn't know that rhinoceros roamed North at one point along the way. Because I had, you know, it wasn't until this past year that I found out that elephants used to roam here. I had no idea. I always thought it was something that was over in Africa and India. I had no idea that they roamed around in North America as well.

I do know that rhinoceros, if I remember correctly, from what I've read about them, they are not like elephants in their demeanor. They are, there's nothing cuddly about a rhinoceros where elephants have this, they have this soft side. A lot of them have this soft side and, and they're very smart and very sensitive and intuitive and all of those things.

But rhinoceros, when they were talking about sending out, I was like, I don't know about that. I don't think that's going to work out. Well, elephants were used in combat. And if you remember the episode of True Word Stuff we did about the rampaging elephant in Valdosta, Georgia. Right. Remember that one? So we touched a little bit on war elephants and the ancient Romans. They loved a war elephant. You know, it's gosh, I need to get my brain to stay on one track. I apologize, y'all.

My brain's all over the place. But, you know, the Roman Empire held for 500 years, which is more than double what the American Empire is currently enjoying. And their power, they were, they were a force to be reckoned with. I mean, even to this day, we're unearthing Roman coins, Roman ruins in the United Kingdom. There was just a discovery the past couple of days, as we were working on this episode of yet another ancient Roman site being excavated in the United Kingdom. And so elephants were like a great big deal.

But with the fall of the Roman Empire, and, and, you know, war and famine and the Dark Ages and they disappeared off the European continent. And we really have King Manuel to thank for showing the people of definitely Portugal and Italy, that these mythical beasts were real. Because at the time that Ganda was being sent to Portugal from India.

People didn't believe that rhinoceroses were ever once real animals. They thought they were mythical unicorn beasts. And there's something powerful in that. So stay with me for a second. Um, we talked about this a lot on True Weird Stuff, how quickly people forget, how quickly what was real becomes legend and story and myth. And then we look at it and we go, well, that's completely, that's just a story that none of that ever really happened.

But in so many of those legends and stories and myths is, you know, there's a foundation of truth that like a game of centuries old telephone, you know, the people pass down these stories in the oral tradition, they didn't have cameras, right? So, you know, you had to take it on faith that this is what we're telling you a rhinoceros or an elephant looked like. We just we have very short memories, very short memories. And it's a shame that we're burning it all to the ground, because what we don't know about our own history and the history of our planet, man to be able to learn some of those things, like the fact that rhinoceroses used to prowl around North America. Well, Sherry, I will tell you something that I noticed about this episode and how it relates to previous episodes of True Weird Stuff. In this episode, we had a revisiting to enemas, elephants, bloodletting, laxatives, and the Black Death. These are all things that have shown up in previous episodes of True Weird Stuff. The thing that I want to know is who thought it was a good idea to take this rhinoceros from the depths of the ocean, bring it back up and try to taxidermy it and thought that was going to be some. I wonder was the thought, look, we said we were sending this. We weren't kidding. We were. But this is what happened. Or were they thinking that would I mean, I just I can't imagine that anybody went along with this and thinking this was a good idea. Well, I mean, thank you. And thanks for joining us for this episode, because that's kind of like nailing it. Right. So there was there.

This is the this is the question. This is the where the story really pivots because Manuel, King Manuel had decisions to make. And I think he made the wrong one here. Right. But you have to remember that the Medici Pope, even though Pope Leo was not Pope Leo, the 10th wasn't like, the employee of the month and in the Pope world. And he really did jack up the Protestant Reformation. But the Medici's were so powerful. And the Medici family, these powerful families, you know, like it's a joke that Italian families have, you know, you have four sons, one has to be a priest. Right. One's got to be a cop. Right. Well, you know, these wealthy, powerful ruling families that are ancient, it was a big deal to get one of their own into the Vatican. And so and the Medici's were not to be trifled with. And King Manuel didn't get to sit astride a global empire by being a halfwit. Like he was really a hell of a politician. And he just felt like he needed to get something back into the Vatican with his name on it. Because Hanno, and it's not the king's fault that Hanno the elephant died. I mean, dear God, the elephant had like some sort of lung infection and they're giving it laxatives and bleeding it. The poor thing didn't have a chance. Right. So the king, I guess, figured we've got to replace this beloved pet that the Pope was crazy about. You guys, that elephant is buried at the Vatican today. That elephant is still there. Right. The Pope was obsessed with his little elephant.

I say little because Hanno was relatively small as an elephant, but still, you know, damn big compared to the Pope. So the whole thing with, you know, Ganda dressed in her green velvet with her golden collar, a wreath of fresh flowers around her head. She must have been so beautiful to see the fact that she died. Double plus not good because we can't get another rhinoceros.

We've got to go to India and we've got to bring one. It's just a hot mess. And I think that the king did not imagine that the finished product of that ghastly taxidermy job would be as bad as it was. But as you know, because we even did a weird taxidermy episode way back in the early days. Right. Taxidermy is both a skill and an art. It's both the skill and the skill comes from understanding the way that an animal's an animal's put together, the way that its skeleton is constructed and the musculature, how the animal moves. There is if you remember our taxidermist who we talked with, Matt said, it's so hard to get the face right because if the face is wrong, everything's wrong. Right. And a rhinoceros was super complicated.

And even if these were skilled taxidermists, you have to remember these people had only ever seen one rhinoceros in their whole lives. And it was this one. And it was like it was it was staggering. It would be like if somebody showed up in your town with a brachiosaurus, something you thought was long gone or had never existed. Holy crap, there's a dinosaur. So when they set about to taxidermy Porganda, they were really stuck in a bad spot. She'd been submerged in the ocean and bloated and every bad thing you can imagine. And they got her skin off. They got her hide off and cured it. But now they've got to reassemble her. They have no books. They have no photographs.

They are recreating this animal based on memory and a wing and a prayer. And it was the accounts of what this poor thing looked like. You just cannot even believe. And when it was all said and done, I don't know why the king of Portugal didn't go. Oh, God almighty, we cannot send this to the Vatican. But he didn't. When they're when they're doing all this, where they see each other, who's trying to do with us? I was the king, the king. He wants us to do this. Really? All right, fine. I guess we'll listen. I don't believe this. OK, fine. Boy, it looks like crap.

But he said that's what he wanted. All right, fine. That's what the boss wants. Oh, can you imagine how scared they were? Because what happens what happens in the in stories like this when you displease the king? Does it does it typically end well? No, it does not. I mean, off with their heads. These poor I think about these these people struggling and scrambling to reconstruct this bloated, drowned rhinoceros. And my heart just breaks. It would be it would be so scary. You're you have no picture. You have no reference point except your your memory of having seen it a handful of times. This was the fifteen hundreds, right? Yeah. Can you imagine the enormity of the operation of them actually going back down into the depths of the ocean to get this and then bring it up? That was one of the things I thought about. The other was this whole bloodletting thing. So they're doing it in the fifteen hundreds by the seventeen hundreds in this country. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was one of the founders of the country, he's still doing that bloodletting thing. Yeah. In that 200 years, did not somebody put their hand on their chin and you know, this bloodletting, maybe this isn't working as well as we thought.

It is wild. It is. It is only recently, I mean, very recently that we've made the kinds of leaps and breakthroughs in medical science that enable people to survive cancer. And look at the look at the extraordinary things we've been able to do with like implants to give hearing to babies that were born deaf. Like there are so many magical and marvelous and wonderful things that we've been able to do. They're all recent. They're all recent. Like, let's start at like, let's be generous and say 1940. Okay. Prior to 1940, we were bleeding people, putting leeches on them and giving them laxatives.

It's amazing. It's amazing how new our knowledge is. And you know what's even more amazing about how new our knowledge is, is how right now people are like, you know what would be good? Let's go back to the dark ages because that's kind of where we are right now in this particular moment. But I dare not say more in case they come for me in the unmarked vans. So back to Ghanda.

These people were terrified of displeasing the king who was terrified of pissing off the pope. And they had no idea what the hell they were doing. Do you think even a skilled taxidermist could recreate an animal that he may have seen or she may have seen twice? In the 21st century, they it would be difficult. I mean, you figure 600 years ago. I mean, they did their best. I mean, how, how the hell they found the rhinoceros and brought it back up? All of that. Also, can I just say a little bit about the pope?

The pope seems to be concerned with a lot of things that don't have anything to do with what I would consider to be pope duties. That is, you know, the salvation of souls, you know, the spreading of a spiritual message, that sort of thing. I, I, I, what I'm about to say, I in no way am impugning all the popes. No, not absolutely not doing that. But you have to remember that the Vatican, the pope was like a leader, like a world leader, like a king or a queen, right? It was a very political job. And that's why these powerful families like the Medici's wanted their own people to sit on the throne at the Vatican.

And that meant that being the pope was no guarantee that you were a truly holy or godly or faith filled person, right? Yeah. You might just be a political operative or a pawn or what we call a useful idiot. And I'm not saying that was Pope Leo the 10th, but, you know, you, you got the job because we need one of our own on the inside. Now, Pope Leo the 10th for all of his, you know, and there's a lot. He really did have a soft spot for animals and he really was like over the moon for Hano the elephant. And I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea what the pope, that pope's relationship to the kingdom of heaven was. And we also have no idea what the pope might have done to King Manuel the first if the king had done what you suggested and sent an emissary to the Vatican to say your holiness, Ganda has drowned. She's been lost at sea.

Like how might history be a little different? Who knows? Right. But here's what I do know. A story like this should not be forgotten for no other reason than it's batshit. The shipwreck, the taxidermy. I think it really is. Why would you want to? Why would you want to lose track of something this good, right? It's really nuts.

So what were you not a little bit surprised like so King Manuel? Remember that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain? What do we mostly know them for as American school kids? We don't mostly know. I mean, Christopher Columbus in fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Yeah, they financed. Right. They financed Christopher Columbus's voyages. This is how powerful these these European monarchies were back then. So here's King Manuel and he wants to marry their daughter, Isabella of Aragon, which I know you're thinking, oh, was it love?

Probably not. It was more forging a giant political and geographical and financial alliance because the Spanish monarchy was I mean, they were like so powerful and so connected and they had their hands in everything. So there's King Manuel and he's done a bang up job of turning Portugal into a freaking empire. Like people today would be like Portugal, really? Yeah, total empire. But how can he make his power? How can you consolidate his power and grow it?

I know he'll marry the daughter of the Spanish monarchy and he'll become asshole buddies with the Medici's through Pope Leo the 10th. Do you see it now? Do you see it? So when Isabella of Aragon, who was by all accounts beautiful and kind and blah, blah, blah. When she died in childbirth, the king was bereft. Who did he marry shortly thereafter? Her sister.

Yeah. So his second wife was another daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella because marriage back then, yeah, it was nice if you find love, that'd be great. But it was about other things, especially at this level. So when you factor all of that in, you go, hmm, that taxidermy rhinoceros was a bad call, but I kind of understand why you made it.

In this case, a rhinoceros was more than a rhinoceros. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I understand it. It's just that practically. I know it's so good. I mean, it's so outrageously short sighted. Usually by the time we finish an episode, there's a person or maybe a couple of people in that story that I have decided to put in my little basket of love because no one else ever loved them. Right. In this story, I'll give a damn for any of these people, except for those poor taxidermists that were terrified of having their heads taken off if they didn't get the job done. But the animals. Well, the idea that you're going to. Oh, the horrifying things of watching animals fight each other to the death. I could not do that. Do you know what I found out that they used to do in the Roman Coliseum? Just as an aside, they used to fill it with water and have ship battles. Dude, thank you. That's one of the many little details that I had to kick out.

I almost took Max, I almost took the stuff I wrote about the Coliseum out of the episode, but I felt like it was important to have it in so that you would have some understanding of what the Rome because all of this ended when the Roman Empire fell. You had to understand that during the Roman Empire, animals like the ones we're talking about were part of the whole spectacle. They were part of how the empire showed its great wealth and reach and power. And so a lot of a lot of what we know happened in the Roman Coliseum is horrific.

But it makes me crazy when people go, well, I just can't listen to this. It's animal cruelty. Well, you need to listen to this. It's refusing to listen to this that gets us into trouble over and over again as a species. Because when we're, I'm not going to hear this. They were mean to that elephant. Yeah. And you know what? Your refusal to hear about how they were mean to the elephant means that in another generation or two, they're going to do it again. That's what we mean when we say history repeats and rhymes and echoes. That's what we're talking about. That's what we mean when we say, I know it's hard to hear, but you have to hear it. Because if you don't, when it happens again, it's happening for the first freaking time. And maybe we could maybe we could evolve and grow. Maybe we could prevent certain atrocities if we knew that they had happened before. But I digress. The history of just the history of elephants, the Venn diagram of elephants and humanity, that sliver in the center is a glimpse into hell, what we have done to elephants as human beings. Now, here's the good news about that. We have done horrible things to incredible animals for centuries. But today, what are we trying to do? We're trying to do better.

Because we know we understand the awful things that we did in our ignorance. We look back at our ancestors and we go, well, that was some shit, but they didn't know. Okay, but now we do. And so we're doing better. We don't have them in the circus. And now there are certain parts of the you're always going to have that. I was thinking about the buffalo in this country, how the buffalo almost went extinct. And with that small gene pool, we've still been able to, you know, take them from the brink of extinction. And maybe perhaps it's something that can be done with the rhinoceros. I wasn't aware. I wasn't aware that the situation was as dire as it is with rhinoceros, that there's only 28,000 left. And only two northern white rhinos, two on the whole planet. Two, one, two, that's it. Yeah, the situation is dire. And I understand, gosh, there's an awful lot to pay attention to. And things flying at you every minute of every day.

And it's overwhelming sometimes, the weight of all of the things that need our attention. But this is one, yeah, yeah, we're running out of rhinos. And we are in the middle, people don't like to hear this. This is another thing nobody wants to hear that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event. And in the history of the planet, as we know it, our grasp of the day something's going extinct. Now, it might be like a specific kind of fruit fly that's native only to the rainforest or a kind of nematode that lives in exactly one lake. And so people go, hi, yeah, what are you going to do? But when when you reach the moment where you only have two white rhinos left on Earth, now it's just too frickin late. It's just too late.

Well, we're all in here. We're gonna watch them go. Interconnected to as far as our survival, all of us, with the animals and everything, we're all interconnected. So it's important to to note this. It's important to try to stop it. And to recognize, to your point, that interconnection, we, you know, we see ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, you know, it's the most intelligent creatures on Earth, which, I kind of have an argument with most days, but we we think we're invulnerable and we're not.

We are dependent on little tiny things that are invisible to us. Look at the awareness now that we have about pollinators, that we can't grow food if we don't have pollinators. And if the pollinators are threatened, like if the if the bee population collapses the way the certain species of rhinos have collapsed, what happens? Then what? In our in our arrogance and our cockiness and our pride, we we've been shitty stewards of of our natural world. We just have Sorry, I know that for some people that's, you know, woke, but you won't be waking up in a world without the diversity of animal and plant life that we currently are trashing because you'll starve. Like, I don't know any other way to say it. I mean, I mean, through the course of time, there are certain animals that have gone extinct, you know, all the animals that went extinct before humans came along. But if we can prevent humans from causing it, please, let's do.

Well, we were so arrogant, again, that we think that it would be impossible for us to go extinct. And that's, that's a foolhardy position to take. It's not impossible for us to go extinct. One of these days, maybe we should do an episode on what happened to the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens make it through. And they didn't. Right? That would be and there's there's all this like, you know, missing link stuff. But I just read an article the other day, Max, that was so, so, so super interesting. They have isolated the gene responsible for speech. And they think that Homo sapiens, that gene turning on and being expressed, and allowing us to develop speech, which allowed us to develop communication, and eventually culture.

That gene was missing for Neanderthals and Denisovans and some of the earlier hominids that Homo sapiens, we made it through, because we learned how to communicate with each other. Could you just not sit and cry at how cool that is? It is because I had always heard that we thought that the Neanderthals were stupid, but they weren't.

They weren't. No, they weren't. The very thing, this is about to get all kinds of poetic up in here. The very thing that is tearing the fabric of civilization apart, the proliferation of propaganda and hate speech across digital platforms, the very thing that enabled us to break through and survive and thrive might be our undoing. Isn't that kind of neat to think about?

Speech, the ability to communicate. It's almost a gift and a weapon. It's almost like a fable that's come to life. It is. Isn't this the most fun thing that we get to do all week long? It is. Sherry, may I say, yes, it is. Sometimes, when I finished this episode, I was so, so melancholy for days afterward, because I couldn't stop thinking about Hanno the elephant and how his feet were just bloody from walking endless miles on those hard Italian roads. And then Ganda the rhinoceros, they led her aboard that ship dressed in velvet and gold and covered in fresh flowers.

And when the storm came, how frightened she must have been. And if they just would have unshackled her, she would have probably survived. Because rhinos can swim. I mean, we don't know for sure. Right. She could have been pulled under by a rogue wave. We don't know. But she went down with the ship in a terrible panic. What was supposed to be the most wonderful day turned out to be the worst day. And all I could think about was Hanno trudging along, scared out of his mind, people grabbing at him with his feet bleeding and Ganda going down with the ship and all those screaming, terrified sailors like. You know, it made me think an episode on the Donner party will be a good palate cleanser.

Sherry told me just recently was the anniversary of them being rescued or discovered or whatever happened. Yeah. In fact, so this episode is going to drop on like Friday, the 21st of February 2025. And I do believe that February 19th is the anniversary of the of what was left of the Donner party being rescued. And, you know, the Donner party, like we all have the cartoony idea of the Donner party. It's a way more complicated story. Maybe we should do an episode on that.

You know, I enjoy a good cannibalism tale as much as the next girl. But this one was this one broke my heart in a way that, you know, sometimes stories about people, they're sad and everything. But you're like, oh, well, we're going to do people going to people. But there's something about these two animals. Yeah, no. And then on the other hand, here's what else you can say about Hanno and Ganda.

Destiny handpicked them for an incredible feat. Hanno, the first elephant in Europe since the fall of Rome. Ganda, not just the first rhinoceros in Europe since the fall of Rome, but the inspiration for a profound piece of art and the most famous rhinoceros in art history. Yeah. None of us are going to live forever. Maybe that's not so shabby.

Can I tell you a lingering question that I have about Hanno, the elephant, and that is that they gave Hanno laxatives. And I'm wondering what were they using? Because I'm guessing Hanno was getting lots of roughage in his diet already. So then what are you adding to that that would be considered a laxative in the 1500s? Well, you know what is interesting to think about? Did they know about roughage and fiber? Because I don't think my father knew about roughage and fiber.

And he didn't come from 700 years ago or whatever. And okay, so if you thought the taxidermists being watched by King Manuel of Portugal, terrified out of their minds that if they didn't stitch this thing back together, they were going to be executed. Now I want you to come with me to the Vatican, where the Pope's physicians, they were not veterinarians, were shoving an enema tube into Hanno. Did you think about that? That these were people doctors, not animal doctors? Anything come out yet? Huh? All right, we'll keep trying.

And here's how much the Pope loved that elephant. And remember now, the Pope is a Pope. So he comes from, you know, epic amounts of money. They sat on their hoards like dragons. The Pope goes, how's Hanno? Oh, he's not any better. Let's get some gold up there. They gave the elephant a laxative infused with pure gold. I will remind you that as they were shoving gold up that elephant's rectum, there were people outside the walls of the Vatican who were starving to death. And that's what happens when you are a Medici Pope.

You've got lots of money and lots of power and nobody's ever said no to you. And you know, on the flip side, he loved Hanno very much and wanted him to be well. I guess we should investigate when we're veterinarians in Venice because it clearly wasn't. No, it wasn't. Clearly. So and then I did like how the Pope, Pope Leo the 10th and King Manuel the first, they died within less than two weeks of each other. Wasn't that a little bit of an irony, too? And a reminder, a reminder to us all. Yeah. Nobody's going to live forever. And, you know, you're going to be lucky. I think that we were so comfortable. We've we've enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity, which is unlike anything, you know, in the scope of human history.

I don't think we've realized how lucky we are to just come home from work and watch TV and, you know, die of old age. Because for most of human history, that just wasn't true for anybody, including Hanno the elephant and Gondor the rhinoceros. Now, something I learned from this writing this episode was how revered the rhinoceros was in India, going all the way back to the very beginnings of culture. And what does that tell you?

There were so many rhinoceros, so many different species, and they were everywhere. And now they're almost gone. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll switch it up next week. Because this one did feel like this one did feel like a fable, didn't it? This one did feel like a children's bedtime story. Next week, we're going to come rocketing into the present in a way that's going to feel a lot like the future. We're going to be talking about organoids, brain organoids, specifically. We're going to be talking about growing tiny miniature human brains in Petri dishes. What happens when we leave those brains alone to develop? And I don't want to give it away, but it's really unsettling. And then what do we do with those brains, those little tiny brains?

What are we doing with them? Well, we're doing a lot of good. We're learning a lot about all sorts of organic and structural diseases of the brain. We're learning about maybe we're going to find a Parkinson's, for example. And one of the ways we're going to do that is we're going to take that little brain out of the Petri dish, and we're going to transplant it into the brain of a living mouse. And we're going to watch what happens. How does the mouse change when it's got a hybrid mouse person brain? And if that sounds like science fiction, hold on to something because it's science fact. And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening. Max, is this the 100th episode? I think this is the 100th episode. Well, then I think it's a good one.

We are on top of it, aren't we? You guys, in all seriousness, if you've listened through this point, let me again shower you with our gratitude. We are so busy with our day jobs and working on this we forgot to remember if this was the 100th episode. I think this is because I think the first two were like, coming up, we've got this. And so I think this is indeed the 100th episode, Sherry. Well, I'm really glad that we picked this one because I love that the 100th episode was about these magnificent animals and this fairy tale, true story, and not about, you know, a man eating his own leg. How about you?

Yeah. The man eating his own leg will be in the future episodes. Please, I have so much to look forward to, Sherry, so much to look forward to. Thanks, y'all. We appreciate you being here. We'll see you next week. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. Now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff.

Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

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