Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Oh really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.

Erin Menke (0:34)

Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Aaron Manke (0:42)

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of curiosities.

Erin Menke (1:06)

In 1593, a strange figure entered Buckingham Palace. It was a woman from Ireland of around 60 years of age, appearing in London for an audience with the Queen. Elizabeth I greeted this woman, and although the pair of them were about the same age, the stranger seemed much older. She was weather beaten, her skin showing the evidence of many years spent at sea. The two women spoke in Latin, which is the only tongue that they shared. The visitor had a petition to bring before the Queen. Her son and her half brother were both captured by Sir Richard Bingham, and she had come to implore Elizabeth to spare their lives. If legends are to be believed, this visitor refused to bow before the Queen, and in open defiance to British authority, she had a dagger at her side. This defiant Irish woman was Grunja Nualia, but she's best known to us as Grace O'Malley. Her most famous name is her nickname in Irish folk, Granual, the Pirate Queen of Connaught. Her meeting with Queen Elizabeth I would become the stuff of legends, but it was only a small part of an already legendary career. Born to the chief of Clan O'Malley in County Mayo, she displayed a taste for adventure from an early age. According to legend, as a child, she wanted to accompany her father on a voyage to Spain. He refused, making the excuse that her long hair would get caught in the ship's rigging. So the young Grace promptly cut off her hair. Her name ever since. Granual translates to Grace of the chopped hair. Like many daughters of powerful men, she would be married off to another chief's son for political reasons. But Granual was never going to be content merely raising children and tending the homestead. She took the reins of her husband's clan and set sail, literally displaying a mastery of seafaring, she established trading routes with Spain and Portugal and would become famous for leading raids on enemy ships herself. Her power was diminished slightly upon her husband's death in the mid-1560s. By Irish law, a widow was entitled to only a third of her husband's property. She resettled on Clare island with 200 followers and a small fleet of three galleys, enough of a force to maintain influence on her nearby shipping lanes and charge a toll for anyone who dared pass through her territory. By 1566, most of Clew Bay, on the eastern coast of Ireland, was under her control. She became known as a pirate queen and would fiercely defend her territory against the British and rival Irish clans alike. A legend during this time tells of how she found a shipwrecked sailor who and fell in love when he was slain by the McMahons. She personally led an assault on the McMahon Castle of Duna, slaughtering those responsible. She married again in the late 1560s, but once again refused to settle down. In 1574, the British captain William Martin, laid siege to her castle with a fleet of ships. To his surprise, what he thought would be an easy victory turned into a resounding defeat as the Irish, led by Granouille, repelled his forces. The tide turned for Ireland in the 1570s, with clan leaders forced to submit to the British monarchy, and Granual followed suit. But this did not mean that she was retiring, nor that she would not come into conflict with the empire. When her second husband died in 1583, she took command of his remaining followers, claiming her rights as a widow. She would not be cheated again. Years of fighting on and off with various English governors appointed to Ireland led her to that fateful meeting in 1593. Granual, after decades of violence and heartbreak, sought the Queen's pardon for her own family and compensation for the losses that she had incurred against the English. To the court's surprise, she was granted everything she asked for. Her son and half brother would be spared. She would be left in peace, and in return, she would only attack England's enemies. From then on, the two queens parted in mutual respect, allowing Granouille to live out her days in the home she fought so hard to protect. Records of her life dwindle towards the beginning of the 17th century, and in the following centuries, she became a strange figure in history. Half legend, half truth. A real woman who commands mythic respect from her people. To this day, it's widely believed that she passed away in 1603, which, if true, would be a remarkable coincidence, because that was the very same year that saw the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the woman who ruled the world, the one who Granuel faced as an equal. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. What are some of your relationship green flags? We often hear about the red flags we should avoid. But what what if we focused more on looking for green flags in friends and partners? 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H E L P.comCuriosities Chester didn't know what to expect when he was recruited to the marine Corps in 1942, but it certainly wasn't this. He and 28 other Navajo men had made it through basic training. Together, they had crawled through trenches, zeroed in on targets, and trained with all kinds of weapons. But now, sitting in a conference room, Chester had just learned that they were about to face their toughest mission yet. Chester looked up as an unknown major stepped into the room. He glanced around the table, sizing up the Navajo recruits. And then he spoke. His orders were short and to the point. The group was to create a code in their native language. And then he left the room, locking them all in together. Chester and the others stared at each other. They were brand new recruits. They had barely had any cryptography training. How on earth were they supposed to develop a code? The Navajo Code Talkers were a group of nearly 400 native Navajo speakers who used their native language to encrypt messages for Marines during World War II. At the time, all radio broadcasts could be easily picked up by enemies listening in, so every important piece of information had to be sent via code. What? While probably the most famous, the Navajo were far from the first Native American soldiers to use their language for espionage. In World War I, American troops from the Comanche, Choctaw, Hopi, and Cherokee nations used their native languages to send messages that their Enemies couldn't translate. After the war ended, Germany and Japan sent students to the US to study these languages. And this may have looked like an innocent cultural exchange, but really, these nations were preparing in case they needed to decode those languages in future wars. And for this reason, when the United States was drawn Into World War II in 1941, the military was reluctant to use native code talkers again, at least until a Los Angeles engineer named Philip Johnston spoke up. Johnston was born and raised on the Navajo reservation, the son of Christian missionaries, and spoke the language fluently. In fact, he'd even acted as a translator when Navajo leaders negotiated a new treaty with President Theodore Roosevelt. He knew the language was incredibly complex. It was tonal, people spoke multiple dialects of it, and the language had no written Alphabet. It was practically impossible for anyone to learn apart from growing up with native speakers. If the military was looking for a code, Navajo was perfect. And the military agreed. By 1942, Chester Nez and 28 other native speakers were the first Navajo code talkers working for the military. Although initially surprised by their mission, these Navajo soldiers quickly got to work creating a complex system of codewords and descriptors, making it so even another native speaker wouldn't be able to understand their transmissions. Part of the code was giving Navajo names to military vehicles navigate, many of which did not have a word already in the Navajo language. So submarine became beshlo, which means iron fish, and dahitihi, meaning hummingbird, became the code term for a fighter plane. These Navajo code talkers were present at every major Marine operation in the Pacific, starting in 1942. They were widely credited with helping the Americans take Iwo Jima, a strategic island in the South Pacific. Over the course of the war, more than 400 Navajo code talkers served in the Pacific theater. Their encyclopedic knowledge of the Navajo language and their own developed code let them receive a message, decrypt it, encrypt a response, and send it over the radio in just over two minutes. For a non native speaker, that same task would have taken hours. While the code talkers were treated like heroes by their fellow servicemen, the wider public had had no idea what they had done for the war effort. The entire operation remained classified until 1968, 23 years after the war. Finally, in 1982, the Code Talkers were recognized nationally when President Ronald Reagan declared August 14th to be National Navajo Code Talker Day. And in 2001, President George W. Bush gave gold Congressional Medals of Honor to the original 29 code talkers. After the war, the Japanese Chief of Intelligence admitted that one of the only codes they were never able to break was the Navajo one. Not bad for a bunch of fresh Marines who had never made a code before.