Holy Shit, Special Order 191!

On September 13, 1862, Barton Mitchell was moseying around a hilltop when he came across an envelope. Inside were three cigars wrapped in a single piece of paper. "Lucky me," Barton presumably thought as he unwrapped his prize, perhaps assuming the paper was a birthday card or something.

But then he saw the writing. It wasn't a pithy, jejune greeting. It was a thoroughly detailed ten point list...of orders. Confederate orders. Not just any Confederate orders, either. They were explicit movement orders for every high-ranking officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. And Barton Mitchell just happened to be a Union soldier. Naturally, he slackened his jaw, allowing the cigar to fall dramatically to the grass. Probably.

Artist's Rendition

Then he took the orders directly to his commanding officer, who sent it up the chain, person by person, until it reached Major General George B. McClellan, who practically jumped for joy and said, "Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home."

Two weeks later, largely thanks to the intelligence gleaned from Special Order 191, the Union won a strategic victory at the Battle of Antietam, which brought the Confederate offensive to a grinding halt and proved a significant enough turning point for Abraham Lincoln to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation. While the war had always been about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation stated without question that freeing slaves in Confederate territory was now a strategic goal of the Union.

Along with posing in a most dignified manner.

Arguably, the Civil War could have gone differently if Barton Mitchell hadn't stumbled upon such a valuable piece of information. In fact, there's a lengthy series of alternate history novels that base their point of divergence on that very event. The tiniest mishaps, like using the wrong paper to wrap your cigars and then leaving them behind, can be what Gandalf called "the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains."

He would actually fit in pretty well, given the facial hair.

Holy shit.




"LostOrdersCramptonsGap112611" by Wilson44691 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch

"Lincoln and McClellan 1862-10-03" by Alexander Gardner - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cwpb.04351.

The Two Towers still by New Line Cinema. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

Holy Shit, Derinkuyu!

Derinkuyu is a town and district in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The district overall has a population of just over 20,000. It wouldn't be a particularly remarkable place, except there's something underneath it that attracts some attention. Something about 60 meters beneath the surface.

Or, in American units of measurement, a little over half a football field underground

It's another city. Not one that was buried underneath constant construction like you'd find in London or Rome. A city that was designed and built under the surface. That's not entirely unique, but given the fact that it was built in the Eighth Century B.C. and is the largest underground city ever built, it's pretty goddamn spectacular.

The Derinkuyu Underground City could house the entire modern population of the District of Derinkuyu. If it wanted to. It's pretty much over being populated by now and has moved on to be a sort of retro-touristy kind of place. It's something of a hipster in that way. But you wouldn't understand, it's pretty underground.

HA!

The city had room for over 20,000 people, as well as grain stores to feed them all and housing for livestock. There were market districts, warehouses, stables, and more carved into the rock under Derinkuyu. There were even heavy stone doors that could block passages in case of invasions.

It was probably built by the Phrygians, but it's been used and even expanded since then by various Persian, Greek, and Turkic cultures as a dwelling place or a refuge. Today, it's a tourist attraction. If you're ever in Central Anatolia (and really, why wouldn't you be?), you can check it out yourself.

Now, I'm not going to say the Phrygians only found the city and it was originally constructed by dwarves fleeing from Durin's Bane in Khazad-dûm...but I'm not going to say that wasn't the case either. Because I like to keep some hope alive.

The entrance probably looks like this. I hope.

Either way, it's a massive, sprawling city that is completely invisible if you look at it like any normal person would. And that's pretty damn cool.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Richard Parker!

In 1838, Edgar Allen Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In doing so, he set off a strange sequence of events that freaks out literary snobs and nautical enthusiasts alike. The events are centered around a character named Richard Parker.

In the novel, several sailors are left adrift at sea after a terrible storm incapacitates their ship. It's more complicated than that, but that's the important part. After a few spots of false hope, one of the sailors -- a man named Richard Parker -- suggests that, in order for any of them to survive, one of them will need to be killed and cannibalized. They draw straws, and Richard Parker is the unlucky victim.

Tragically, he only remembered his sweet fishing pole after they set upon him with knives

A few years earlier, a similar situation had played out in reality. A ship called the Frances Spaight sank in the north Atlantic, and the survivors practiced cannibalism when it became clear that they would starve otherwise. Given how close the event was to when Poe was writing, there's a decent chance he found some morbid inspiration in reality. Here's where it starts to get a little bit weird.

In 1846, eight years after Poe's novel, another Frances Spaight sank. One of the victims of this shipwreck was a man named Richard Parker. That's enough to be a little odd, but it's not quite freaky. Not yet. Not until 1884, when another ship went down (not a Frances Spaight this time), and a 17-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker was counted among the survivors.

I mean, I say survivors. But he only lived through the initial disaster. It was decided, like in the book, that one of them had to become food for the others. And, like the book, that one turned out to be Richard Parker. As a sidenote, this case ended up setting a legal precedent that murder is super not okay, even if you're murdering someone out of desperation for food.

It's even less defensible if you're just kind of hungry. And violently psychotic.

I guess the moral of this whole story is that, if your name is Richard Parker and you're about to set sail on a ship called the Frances Spaight, you are woefully uninformed and will surely be eaten by your fellow sailors. Of course, Yann Martel didn't see it that way. In an effort to speak out for the Richard Parkers of the world who had been victims of the sea, he named the tiger in Life of Pi after them all. Spoiler alert, it turns out the tiger may have actually been a metaphor for the main character eating one of the other survivors of a shipwreck.

I'm sorry, what was that about drawing straws?

Vengeance, right?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Voynich Manuscript!

In 1912, Wilfrid Michael Voynich was visiting Italy and stopped by the Jesuit-owned Villa Mondragone. Desperate for funds, the Jesuits were surreptitiously selling off some of the supposedly rare and fantastical items in their collections. Voynich, being a bibliophile, opted to purchase a bizarre illustrated codex written in a script he didn't recognize.

In almost every situation that starts like this, it would turn out that the codex was an elaborate ruse. A hoax put together for attention or, in this case, money. Once carbon dating and academic scrutiny stepped in, it would be proven to be a recent creation, and the Voynich would go home with that burning humiliation you get when you fall for a scam.

What kind of world is this where you can't trust Nigerian royalty anymore?

This was not every situation, though. Everyone from codebreakers to archivists to historians looked at the Voynich Manuscript and were completely baffled. Carbon dating puts its creation somewhere around the early 1400s, so if it's a hoax, it's really goddamn old one. And it's one that involved a downright grueling amount of work.

The language and script of the manuscript are completely unknown but there are patterns to it that suggest its not just gibberish. Professional speculation suggests that it's written in some sort of code, but no one has any idea how to break it. When I say "no one," I mean, "the top codebreakers working for the war effort in both world wars tried and failed to figure it out."

Though in Britain's case they were busy destroying their greatest code breakers' lives at the time

The illustrations don't really seem to help all that much. The one thing they do is tell us that the manuscript is divided into six parts based on the thematic imagery: herbal, astronomical, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. Aside from that, the pictures are completely unhelpful in identifying the purpose of the book

Today, the Voynich Manuscript resides in the Yale University Library's rare books collection. In the interest of serving the public with healthy portions of cryptographic mystery, said library has made the whole thing available in a free, online, high-resolution digital copy. So have at it.

In case you were wondering, Voynich was far from the first collector to investigate his eponymous manuscript. Starting in the 1600s, there is a spotty record of several people who ended up with the book in their possession. They were as clueless about its contents as we are today, if their letters are to be believed.

Artist's rendition

What we have here is a genuine history mystery. A book with an unknown script and language, strange illustrations, and a certificate of authenticity from the ever skeptical scientific community. My favorite theory about its purpose came from xkcd, but we may never know what its contents really mean.

Holy shit.