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The Columbus Letter (What the Conspiracy!)
28 Plays3 years ago
Josh tells M about the Columbus Letter! Well, about the three forged copies of the Columbus Letter! That we know of...
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Building Anticipation with Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
So, I know precisely what conspiracy theory you're going to tell me this week. You do? Okay, so what is it? Oh, I'm not telling you. I want to surprise you. Ah, so you're going to reveal all when you answer the where, when, and what questions? Nope, I'm gonna make those answers up. Yeah, but then surprise me with a, with a, but really, you're actually going to talk about... About...?
00:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, uh, sly devil. No, no, no. You claim you already know. And I do. No, I'll review all at the end. When I've finished. After I've told you.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yep, once you've finally detailed the conspiracy theory you think I've never heard of, I'll lean back and go... Well, I already knew about that one, obviously. I might even roll my eyes so hard, it'll come across in a purely audio format. Well, I mean, that just sounds a bit dickish. It is. And a bit... post-hoc? I mean, you could just lie. I never lie. Well, obviously that's a lie. Of course it is.
00:01:06
Speaker
Well, but... certainly... Anyway, I don't believe you, but... But? But just in case, I'm swapping back to my emergency backup using a crisis extra whilst the conspiracy. No! Yes. Well, you win this round. I guess the world will never hear the true story of Louis XVI's jar of mystery. Okay. Wow.
00:01:31
Speaker
We really did work it out. How? Let's just say I have my methods and your children love candy. They do, but how are you getting it to them? Oh, I know a man with a van. And no, you don't know him. It's a lot to unpack there. And it's all immaterial. The important thing is our listeners will never find out what was inside that vessel.
00:01:52
Speaker
Mmm, probably for the best I suspect it might have been even more salacious than your sexist conspiracy theory from a few weeks ago. Let's just say the Sun King's essence was not easily contained. Ah, but we've said too much.
Introductions and Pandemic Reflections
00:02:14
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. N. Denteth in Zhuhai, China. Still the old lockdown blues here and the numbers are not going in the right direction, I have to say. So who knows how it's going to end? Badly. That's how it's going to end, badly. Well, yes. We've seen what happened with countries overseas that gave up on elimination.
00:02:50
Speaker
going to happen back home? Yeah, I mean, there's still the argument here about whether we are giving up on elimination and what giving up on elimination means, whether giving up on elimination means or whether elimination means having zero cases in the community, or whether it just means having a manageable cases that you're always on top of and tracing and contacting and so on. So yes, it's all
00:03:16
Speaker
I don't know. I think the government's biggest mistake at the moment has been not being as upfront as they usually have been about everything else. And so then there's been a lot of guessing and supposition filling the void, which is never a good thing. Never want your void filled with a bit of
Podcast Announcements and Humor
00:03:33
Speaker
supposition. No suppository. There is a cake for everyone. And for some people, it's filling their void with suppositions.
00:03:42
Speaker
That's probably true. No, sorry, actually, so filling their void with suppository. Sorry, not supposition, suppository. As I say, there is a kink for everyone. And some of it is filling their void with suppositories supplied by the Prime Minister. Anyway, in other news, we have a Twitter account. I mean, we have had for three weeks. But yeah, you set up one for the actual podcast, because that's what real podcasts have, their own Twitter account.
00:04:07
Speaker
I mean, we're only up to what episode 337 and we finally have our own Twitter account with four followers, you know, we're, we're doing well. If you also want to, I mean, I, I kind of feel that having me, should we tell them what I should, or should we make them fight? Okay.
00:04:22
Speaker
No, the account is called PodGuideCon, because it turns out that A, Twitter handles have to be below a certain length, and B, all the obvious ones are already gone. So we're PodGuideCon, that's P-O-D-G-U-I-D-E-C-O-N, and we have four followers, why not make that five, or even, even, and this is Slesias, six. Six followers, I mean. I mean, surely we'd get a blue tick if we get six followers.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yes, no, we have, I mean, we've, I'm sure have mentioned, in fact, is it still in the little bit at the end what our actual Twitter accounts are? No, because I had to try everything down to 20 seconds to fit the podcasting deck, which, of course, we're no longer reliant on because not recording in person and doing live broadcast. But yes, we do have our own Twitter account. I am Conspiracism. And you, Josh, are? I am monkey fluids.
00:05:19
Speaker
for reasons that those who have known me for a while will be familiar with. And for the rest of you, it'd probably take too long to explain. Well, precisely.
Setting the Stage for New Conspiracy
00:05:27
Speaker
I think that's all we have in the way of preamble. So it is once again what the conspiracy week and it is now my turn to dazzle the good doctor with a conspiracy that that I'm going to assume you haven't heard of. But who the hell knows? Quite frankly, we'll find out very shortly.
00:05:44
Speaker
Naturally, before we move on to that though, for people who are keen listeners of this podcast, I'm assuming if you've stuck with us this long, you are one of those. We've only mentioned this in the bonus episodes recently, but the last few weeks, we've been having some technical issues recording this podcast. We have at that, yes. Our usual system of recording the podcast for some reason as a service does not work.
00:06:07
Speaker
So the last two episodes we recorded via Zoom. Zoom introduces some really interesting compression into the audio which why if things have sounded different recently it's probably that. This week even Zoom was causing us issues so we're using Skype. Next week I suspect we'll be doing things by carrier pigeon or even just lighting bonfires.
00:06:30
Speaker
Who knows? But at the moment, we're having systemic technical issues. So if you're noticing a change in sound quality, then you are noticing something. If you're noticing a change in quality in the podcast, well, you know, that's just what happens when a podcast gets to almost 340 episodes in length.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yep, that is basically true. So, I think with that out of the way, play one of those little stings... Oh, does the sting... We haven't tested if the sting board works over Skype. Push a button quickly, quickly! Well, I can hear that, so I assume you the listener can as well. So in that case, play the What the Conspiracies Sting, and we'll get on with it.
00:07:16
Speaker
It's time to play Want the Conspiracy! Well, there you go. Quality sting. Quality sting. So, um...
00:07:32
Speaker
We'll do the traditional thing then, I suppose. I have a conspiracy theory of a sort to talk to you about. And so I'll ask you to guess what you think it might be about when it happened and where it happened, not necessarily in that order. I like how you said of a sort. So I feel as if you're going to lead me down a garden path to a certain extent. So my what is going to be, it turns out, not to be a conspiracy at all.
00:08:02
Speaker
My wear is going to be the Mid-Atlantic.
Unveiling the Columbus Letter Mystery
00:08:07
Speaker
And my when is going to be the late 17th century. You're closer than you've been recently, I have to say. Especially that middle of the Atlantic business. That's a little scary. The story I'm going to tell you today, which has elements of conspiracy to it, starts at the end of the 15th century, but resonates to this very day. It happens kind of in the Atlantic Ocean.
00:08:37
Speaker
well actually it has its origins in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and then spreads itself around the world and what it is about is the Columbus letter. The Columbus letter?
00:08:54
Speaker
Get that sting ready, you'll be using it a bit. I'm sure this has happened a few times to us now. One of us has come up with a topic, and then by the time we get around to talking, it just by coincidence turns out to be a timely topic, because of course this week was Columbus Day in the States, and here we go with a topic about Christopher Columbus that I just happened to see weeks ago. No, it should point out for...
00:09:17
Speaker
American listeners who may have well been miseducated in school, as they're likely to have been, Columbus did not discover the Earth is round. No, we'll get into that. I've got a bit of a Columbus primer here all ready to go. Yeah, it was weird. I learned about, I remember learning about Columbus in primary school a long time before I learned about, say, the Polynesian migration to the country that I actually live in.
00:09:47
Speaker
All I remember from learning about Columbus as a child was his ships with Anina the Pinta and the Santa Maria, and he died thinking America was a chain of islands. And I always did think it was a little bit odd that he's credited with discovering America when he kind of discovered the way to America, but never really
00:10:08
Speaker
didn't really discover it as a continent. As you say, people had known that the world was round for millennia. Eratosthenes did a fairly good job of measuring its circumference to a decent degree of accuracy back in 240 BC. I mean, to a point of accuracy that we really only surpassed it accuracy-wise last century.
00:10:30
Speaker
But people living in Europe, while they knew the world was round, they weren't aware of the existence of the American continent, apart from the Vikings, who I think by that stage had kind of forgotten about it. Why? Why? Why did that not really because they were there around sort of 1000 BC, 500 years later, I assume there were there were still sort of stories about it, but nobody really took it seriously. When we talked about the Vinland map the other week, what's the deal with with Vikings and and the lack of remembrance?
00:10:58
Speaker
I mentioned part because many of the sagas have large amounts of allegory in them. So you might end up going, oh, it's an allegorical story of someone going on a voyage to a faraway place. And then people go, actually, no, it turns out that's a bit of the story that isn't allegorical in this case. And there's also the fact that because the Viking community was not a centralized civilization, but a decentralized one,
00:11:24
Speaker
it was quite possible for this kind of information on the fringes of Viking society to never become kind of part of the orthodoxy of their kind of lexicon of knowledge claims. So that's kind of why they could do something quite spectacular, travelling all the way to the coast of North America, and then kind of not actually making it into the history books per se until well after the fact.
00:11:52
Speaker
Anyway, that's all by the by. By the end of the 15th century in Europe, as far as anybody knew, there was nothing but open ocean in between sort of Portugal and like China. And knowing how far that distance was, people sort of thought there was no way you could possibly sail from one to the other. There were though some people who did the maths a bit differently and came up with a considerably shorter distance
00:12:19
Speaker
across the ocean, and Columbus had been listening to those people. And so that was why he believed he could establish a trade route to the west from Europe across to Asia, across the ocean. And that's why people thought he'd never make it, not because they thought he'd fall off the edge of the world or something, it's just because they thought he had vastly underestimated the distance he was going to have to travel.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yes, I remember someone telling the story such as, if there was that infamous scene between the Inquisition and Columbus, which occurs in the book by the author of Sleepy Hollow, whose name has completely escaped me, which is kind of the fictionalized scene that people are taught in schools, which is the Inquisition saying, but you know the earth is flat, Columbus. Columbus says, no, no, the earth is round.
00:13:10
Speaker
And people are going, well, that never happened. Even the author admits he made up that chapter as a kind of narrative device. But if there was anything of an equivalent scene in Columbus's actual life, it would have been people saying, you realize the world is very, very big and you'll never make it back. And Columbus going, no, the world is very, very small or make it back with ease. And Columbus was wrong, but he was also quite lucky. Yes, quite fortunate.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yes, he was lucky that there happened to be a stinking great continent in the middle that gave him something to land on.
00:13:43
Speaker
He was also- And food and water. And food and water and all sorts of stuff. And slaves. That's what I was going to get to. He was also a bit of an imperialist asshole, even by the standards of the time. His first voyage was 1492. By 1500, he was the governor of the colony that he had set up on what is now the Dominican Republic, I think.
00:14:10
Speaker
1500, he was arrested and packed off back to Spain because of how tyrannical he'd been ruling. There was a document, which is not the document I'm going to talk about, but another document was rediscovered in 2005, 500 years after it was written, by the fantastically named Francisco de Bobadilla, a member of the Order of Calatrava, who was Columbus's replacement, who was commissioned by the King and Queen to do a report into exactly what he'd been up to.
00:14:37
Speaker
wrote this 48-page report detailing all the horrible things, all the horrible disproportionate punishments Columbus had been meeting out at his whims and what an awful, awful manager he'd been. But anyway, on his first voyage in 1492, he landed, basically, he hit the Caribbean. He didn't know it was the Caribbean, he thought it was India, or he thought it was the Indies, the East Indies or something.
00:15:07
Speaker
Hence why he started referring to the natives as Indians and why people continue to do that for hundreds of years afterwards. I believe he did actually set foot on the continent in South America and Central America in his later journeys, but never touched North America. But anyway,
00:15:27
Speaker
where the story really begins is that in February of 1493, on the way home from his first voyage, Columbus wrote what is now called the Columbus Letter, which was an eight page letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, basically describing, writing down everything he had seen and done on his first voyage. And so the letter, you can find the text of it online today translated into English.
00:15:53
Speaker
It starts near the start he says, on the 33rd day after leaving Cadiz, which was the port from Spain where he left, I came into the Indian Sea, or rather what he thought was the Indian Sea.
00:16:05
Speaker
where I discovered many islands inhabited by numerous people. I took possession of all of them for our most fortunate king, by making public proclamation and unfilling his standard, no one making any resistance." So basically that Ediezard routine. I assume you've seen the whole business about imperialism, showing up with a flag in some of our country and then- You don't have a flag. Oh, you mean- No flag in the country? That's the law. Without a flag, you don't really even exist. I quite like the idea.
00:16:34
Speaker
of someone from Portugal. Look, I've just said I own the place because I've used my sovereign citizenship. Here's my name, my real name, the standard law by which I do things. And you didn't say otherwise. So technically,
00:16:49
Speaker
I mean, you didn't understand what I was saying. And now you belong to me. Yes, the letter continues later on. I came to a certain harbour which I had remarked. From there I sent two of Almena into the country to learn whether there was any king or cities in that land.
00:17:06
Speaker
They journeyed for three days and found innumerable people and habitations, but small and having no fixed government, on which account they returned. Meanwhile, I had learned from some Indians whom I had seized at this place, get back to them, that this country was really an island. And so he talks about these islands that he's discovered and how lovely they were and how beautiful and how beautiful the trees and the birds and
00:17:29
Speaker
and just how generally nice they were to be on. He talks about the people who lived on those islands. He describes them as being sort of timid, mostly unarmed, afraid of these strange new people. But once they've got used to them, they're very open and trusting and very hospitable and generous.
00:17:47
Speaker
I said they were willing to trade things like gold for basically anything new that they hadn't seen before, and Columbus writes about how he had to put a stop to the practice of some of his men were just trading rubbish, basically. What does he say? Bits of plates, dishes or glass, also nails and straps, just handing over any old tat that was new to this island for gold and what have you.
00:18:12
Speaker
He was quite pleased to see they had no idols, but believed that all power came from the heavens, making them suitable for converting to Christianity.
00:18:22
Speaker
He says about those quote-unquote Indians that he quote-unquote seized, as soon as I had come into the sea I took by force some Indians from the first island and that they might learn from us and at the same time tell us what they knew about affairs in these regions. This succeeded admirably for a short time we understood them and they us both by gesture and signs and words and they were of great service to us. They are coming now with me and have always believed that I have come from heaven notwithstanding the long time they've been and still remain with us.
00:18:50
Speaker
Though the first two told this, wherever we went, one calling to another with a loud voice, Come, come, you will see men from heaven, whereupon both women and men, children and adults, young and old, laying aside the fear they had felt a little before, flocked eagerly to see us, a great crowd thronging about our steps, some bringing food and others drink, with greatest love and incredible goodwill.
00:19:11
Speaker
And basically, it's read through the whole thing. It pretty much just ends up being a sales pitch to the king and queen to say, hey, if you give me a bit more money, I can come back and make more voyages and sort of start bringing back some of this good, good stuff that I found for you. So right near the end, he says,
00:19:29
Speaker
Finally, to sum up in a few words, the chief results and advantages of our departure and speedy return, I make this promise to our most invincible sovereigns, that, if I am supported by some little assistance from them, I will give them as much gold as they have need of, and in addition spices, cotton and mastic, which is found only in Chios, and as much aloe wood, and as many heathen slaves as their majesties may choose to demand. Besides these, rhubarb, not just slaves, but rhubarb. Gotta have rhubarb with your slaves.
00:19:58
Speaker
Besides these rhubarb and other kinds of drugs, which I think the men I left in the fort before alluded to have already discovered, or will do so, as I've delayed nowhere longer than the winds compel me, except while I was providing for the construction of a fort in the city of Nativity and for making all things safe. So basically, this letter gave a big description of what he'd done, what he went through and did on his voyage,
00:20:19
Speaker
And then he ends with a, and hey, if you'd like some more of that good stuff I just described, then like and subscribe. Yep. Bit of that rhubarb. I mean, I do like rhubarb. Good rhubarb crumbles actually quite a delicious food stuff. And rhubarb just boiled up and then served on your breakfast. It's quite delicious. I'm suddenly going, maybe this Columbus chap, maybe he had the right idea. Maybe we should invade another country, take it over, destroy its religion and its culture just so we can get access to rhubarb.
00:20:49
Speaker
Well, you would have fit him great at the end of the 15th century. So, uh, Columbus sent his letter, or delivered his letter, probably. I can't imagine you can send something for a well-trained carrier pigeon. He would have just popped into a local post office in the Caribbean. Could he send this post haste back to Europe? Oh, you've already got a postal service and we can't have one of those.
00:21:17
Speaker
Oh, it doesn't have a flag. Yes, no, so he sent his letter to the king and queen, and then for the sake of posterity, they sent it to Rome, where it was translated from Spanish into Latin and then printed.
00:21:32
Speaker
and printed copies of the letter were distributed all over Europe. So this actually has quite some amount of historical significance. This letter of Columbus is being described as probably the first contemporary account of anything to be spread widely around Europe, the first printed document to go all over the place that was just, here's a thing that happens just now, not copies of the Bible or historical texts or something.
00:22:01
Speaker
In fact, one of the people I was reading this about described as one of history's first best sellers.
00:22:07
Speaker
Now, the original letter that Columbus wrote, the original handwritten letter, is long gone. It's lost to the mists of time. But numerous printed copies from the time, from the end of the 1400s to the 1500s, still exist today in various collections around the world.
Discovery of Forged Columbus Letters
00:22:30
Speaker
Or do they?
00:22:35
Speaker
Yes, get your finger ready on that button for a bit more. Because that's what I want to talk about today. Today, there are most of the articles I read set about 30 copies of the letter. One article set about 80, which I choose to believe is somebody misreading someone's handwriting and thinking a three was an eight. But whatever it is, less than 100, a few dozen copies of the letter still exists. And each one's worth around a million dollars, a bit more probably these days.
00:23:03
Speaker
Now, the real story begins in 2011, when a man called Jay Dillon, who was a rare book dealer from New Jersey, was looking at pictures, presumably online, of the copy of the Columbus letter that was owned by the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona.
00:23:22
Speaker
And looking at these images, he noticed something a bit strange. He noticed that this copy appeared to be identical to another copy he'd seen for sale. And obviously, they're printed documents from the same press. You'd expect them to be the same, but not identical. These were exactly the same right down to the little smudges in the margins.
00:23:42
Speaker
And then also there were some issues. So that's to say they didn't look quite like something which had been printed on the same press with the vagrates you'd get from one press to another. They looked more like a photocopier. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they had photocopiers back in those ancient days. I'm pretty sure the photocopier was invented after 1500, yes. So yeah, apparently there were some irregularities. I think the
00:24:10
Speaker
the stitching marks you could see on the paper didn't match the stitching on the binding, but basically he looked at this and said okay well that's at least one of these two documents has to be a forgery then either one is a copy of the other or both copies of something else and both of them are fake.
00:24:29
Speaker
And so at that point he sort of went from being a rare book dealer to being sort of an amateur detective. He took it upon himself to start examining, finding out about as many of these copies around the world as he could find and see if he could work out whether or not they were fake.
00:24:46
Speaker
So this is one of those things which is very much a product of the digital age, isn't it? In the old days, if you were someone who was interested in these things, you might take the occasional photograph of a precious item to make comparisons. But now we have the ability to go around the world a little bit to see a few. But now you can basically just look at copies in archives which have been digitized and then go,
00:25:12
Speaker
That's weird. The same smudge is on a page in a copy in Portugal and a page in a copy in New York.
00:25:22
Speaker
And that smudge shouldn't be on both copies. And here's a third one located in Sydney, Australia. And it's also got the same smudge. This, yeah, this seems like something which is very much a discovery of a potential series of hoax or forgeries. And I don't know where you're going with this, which is very much of the modern age. Yes. So
00:25:46
Speaker
Get your finger over that dun dun dun button here, because having done his investigations... He died? No. It turned out that the copy in the library in Barcelona was a fake. And then he died. No, and so was the one in the Riccardiana Library in Florence.
00:26:12
Speaker
And then he died? And so was the one in the Vatican. And that's at the point the Pope died? No, when did the Pope last die? No. Not around then. Complete coincidence. Nobody saw nothing.
00:26:29
Speaker
So this was the point when people really started to pay attention because it suggested that somebody had managed to steal a document from the Vatican's library and replace it with a forgery. And so of the various fake copies that were around, the Vatican was the one that by far got the most press.
00:26:47
Speaker
So, the actual document that the Vatican thought it owned was a copy that was printed in Rome by a fellow called Stefan Planak in 1493. The Vatican themselves had received it in 1921 as part of a bequest of rare books and manuscripts that belonged to another fabulously named gentleman, Mr Giovanni Francesco de Rossi.
00:27:11
Speaker
who was only listed as a 19th century bibliophile, and quite frankly, something we could all aspire to, I think. The document was listed in a catalogue of 15th century works that was put together in 1934, as apparently described in detail in this catalogue.
00:27:31
Speaker
And that's about all we know for certain. So back to the investigation and Mr. Dillon, the amateur detective, then decided it was time to go to the professionals. But he thought rather than going straight to these libraries that he was pretty certain had a forgery on their hands, he thought if he went straight to them, he might risk tipping off the thieves if it was a recent theft. Who knows what they might do, might destroy the original law.
00:27:57
Speaker
or run away and hide and they'd never get it back or what have you. So rather than going to the owners of these documents, he went to the Department of Justice in the States who turned it over to the Department of Homeland Security, because I guess the Department of Homeland Security just does whatever the hell they want. And they opened an investigation. They went and got themselves a second opinion from a man called Paul Needham, who was an expert in 15th century printing.
00:28:24
Speaker
And so he examined these letters and in each case he determined that the originals had indeed been removed and they'd been replaced with photographic facsimiles printed on centuries-old paper, which is something we've talked about before as well. It's a good forgery technique. You get genuine old paper and then put a forged image onto it.
00:28:44
Speaker
It must be quite difficult to load parchment into a standard photocopier though. I mean, that seems... Most photocopiers don't have a 15th century parchment mode. No, well, yeah, we'll get to the printing technique at the very end. It's not entirely relevant to the case, but it's still interesting.
00:29:02
Speaker
So yes, having established to their satisfaction that these were forgeries that they were looking at, the investigation then turned to finding out where the stolen originals had ended up. And the stuff I've read never didn't go into a lot of detail about how exactly you investigate this. I don't. I don't.
00:29:19
Speaker
quite understand how you're able to look at a document and say, haha, okay, this is genuine. And it's actually the one that we thought was in this library or what have you, I assume there must be records, there must be some way of verifying it against something or other. But at any rate, they found the originals and then
00:29:40
Speaker
The timeline I have, I assume they ended up sort of working backwards from finding it and then going through it, but they determined that the authentic Columbus letter, which should have been in the Vatican, had been sold by a man called Marino Massimo DiCaro, who Homeland Security called a notorious Italian book thief. Mr. DiCaro had sold it to a New York book dealer.
00:30:08
Speaker
Now, in 2018, when a lot of these stories were written
00:30:14
Speaker
He was serving a seven-year sentence for stealing hundreds of rare books, although one of the things I read was a story by CBS, which was from 2019, at which time his head had been released from jail and they were actually able to interview him. And he said that while he may be a book thief and indeed a forger, he was not the thief nor the forger behind these specific documents. He claimed
00:30:40
Speaker
He had sold two copies of the Columbus Theatre himself, didn't say whether or not they were forgeries, but did insist that he had nothing to do with the forging of them.
00:30:49
Speaker
Now, after he sold it to this book dealer in New York, it was then bought in 2004 by a man called David Parsons, who was an actuary and rare document collector in Atlanta, Georgia, paid $875,000 for it, which you probably thought was a good deal. So the timeline, 2011, Mr. Dillon first discovers that these documents are fake.
00:31:12
Speaker
2012, Homeland Security having done their own investigations informed these libraries, including the Vatican, that the documents they had in their collections were forgeries. But it wasn't until 2017
00:31:25
Speaker
that the copy owned by Mr. David Parsons was examined and identified as being the document that was supposed to have been in the Vatican's library. Now, by that time, Mr. Parsons had unfortunately died. He died in 2014, but his widow, after the investigations were complete, voluntarily agreed to return the letter to the Vatican Library, and that happened in 2018, which is when a lot of these
00:31:50
Speaker
articles I was reading were written. So 2018 the Vatican got their copy back. Around the same time the copy that was in the library in Barcelona was also identified and retrieved and returned back to them. I don't know where that one turned up because that was
00:32:09
Speaker
That's the one nobody cared about, because all anyone was interested in was this Vatican document. The one from the library in Florence had already been returned in 2016. Guess where they found that one? In the Vatican? No, that would have been good. No, they found it in the US Library of Congress. Had it just been filed by accident, or had it been hidden in most other documents?
00:32:34
Speaker
It had been donated to them by some rich benefactor who presumably had got it through a similar chain or something. But yeah, it turned up there and went back. So that's the timeline. That's how things worked out. We discovered there had been these thefts and forgeries. So when I say it sort of
00:32:58
Speaker
conspiratorially sort of related.
Speculation on Theft and Forgery Methods
00:33:00
Speaker
There's obviously a conspiracy at play here, we just don't really know the details of it. So we sort of, we know how things turned out, but when it comes to how did this all begin, we really just have no clue and probably never will. In terms of how they were stolen, they talked to a fellow called Timothy Yance,
00:33:23
Speaker
who was the Director of the Printed Books Department at the Vatican Library, who basically said it kind of could have happened in all sorts of different ways. It could have been an inside job, some unscrupulous staff member might have walked out with it and made a forgery and put the forgery back. It could have happened when it was sent out for binding or rebinding at some stage.
00:33:47
Speaker
He couldn't even rule out whether or not the forgery, the switch had even happened after the Vatican got their hands on it. It's possible that this collection of documents that was bequeathed to the Vatican already contained the forgery, which again makes me wonder how the hell would you have known what the original one had done.
00:34:10
Speaker
At any rate, the point is there are a bunch of ways it could have not helped by the fact that up until 2007, the security in the Vatican's library was pretty lax. It wasn't in a public library. It's not like anyone could walk in. It was only the staff and you needed to be some sort of an academic wanting these documents to study them for some reason or other.
00:34:32
Speaker
But there was not a lot of actual security around it until 2007 when they got a bit of a major upgrade with proper actual security and cameras and all that business. When you're working for God, you might think that God would actually look after your utter thanks for you. Thanks, God. Thanks.
00:34:52
Speaker
So we don't know, like you said, it was only because of the information age that we live in that these forgeries were able to be detected in the first place. So we really have no idea exactly how far back in the past they first happened. We can get a rough stab at the timeframe by the technique that was used for the forgery. So apparently the forgery had been created with a technique called stereotyping, which
00:35:20
Speaker
apparently, quote, reproduces the tactile effects of early printed books. So this is a method that
00:35:29
Speaker
it comes out sort of feeling like a document that had been printed back then, and since it was printed on paper from the right era. And apparently this technique of producing a document this way was popular during the 19th and 20th centuries. So we probably, we know probably didn't happen hundreds of years ago, but it could have happened 100 years ago, if a little bit more.
00:35:54
Speaker
Now, I'm not quite sure. They referred to it as stereotyping. And then earlier on, what did I say it was? It was a photographic facsimile. So it was some sort of a photocopy sort of a thing, which is not what I know as stereotyping.
00:36:13
Speaker
I don't know if you're aware, the word stereotype that we use today is sort of a metaphorical mutation of the original word stereotype, which is about movable type printing. And an actual stereotype was you get your movable type or your little letters and you put them together to make a type set form, and then you take a mold of that form using paper mache or plaster or something,
00:36:39
Speaker
and then cast a stereotype using that mould. You pour metal into the mould and so now you have this solid, solid bit of metal rather than being a thing made up of the little typesetting letters and you use that to print with and the advantage is you can then take all your typesetting, all your letters and put them back in their cases and reuse them. You don't need to
00:36:59
Speaker
keep them all stuck in that thing while you're doing your printing. And you can make multiple casts from the mould and print off lots, you know, it was basically just a more efficient way of doing things. And because a stereotype is sort of a thing that is sort of easily reproduced, I think that's how the metaphorical term stereotype as we use it today came around. And that's pretty much all I have to say except
00:37:26
Speaker
If there's one thing you take away from this, the one thing I really want you to know is that when I was trying to find out what stereotyping was, I read the description of the old type of stereotyping with movable type and found out that the paper mache mould that you make off the type, the technical term for that is a flong.
00:37:46
Speaker
Flong. So, if nothing, I would like you to add the word flong to your vocabularies, because I think it's the best word I've heard in quite a long time, quite frankly. And frankly, I think that flong deserves a...
00:38:05
Speaker
Out of curiosity, I'm assuming they've looked at every other single instance of the Columbus letter, whether it be 30 or 80, to detect whether many of these are also stereotypes. So the only ones people have talked about are the one in the library in Barcelona, the one in the library in Florence, and the one in the library in the Vatican. So I don't know if more of them turned out to be fake.
00:38:32
Speaker
But I gather that most of them are genuine, but a few of them had been the victims of some sort of, I'd like to imagine, heist in the Vatican, you know?
00:38:47
Speaker
could have been some dude walking it out with it under his arm, but I like to think of people sort of abseiling past statues of Jesus and plonking down and some dusty stacks and cutting a hole in a glass window with one of those hole-cutty things and all that sort of stuff.
00:39:05
Speaker
That being said, sometimes people in the art world or the literary world don't want to find out that their documents might be facts or hoaxes. Because an awful lot can rest upon the claim that a document is genuine. I mean, this goes back to our discussion of the Vinland map. Last bonus episode.
00:39:27
Speaker
There were people who didn't really want there to be any further investigation to the Vinland map, because reputations were on the line. There were books and articles attesting to the map's authenticity. Further investigation that calls that authenticity into doubt, then calls into doubt the work of the people who authenticated it. And if you're a creator, a curator in a museum,
00:39:54
Speaker
and you end up going well you know I've looked at this document several times I've never seen any fault with it and oh god it's got one of those features of a stereotype in Barcelona I may just put this back into a drawer and ignore the problem until such time it either goes away or I retire and then I die and I never find out anything more about it because
00:40:18
Speaker
suddenly I might start doubting I'm good at my job. And of course, these were things which people had paid significant sums of money for. But you know, as far as I know, those those three copies are the only ones that were talked about as being having been stolen and replaced with forgeries. And I think right to begin with right at the start, Mr. Dylan was just sort of on his own.
00:40:44
Speaker
investigating as many copies of the Columbus letter as he could find. So I assume that those three were the only fakes that we know of, but that's all we know. So, there you go. Christopher Columbus, bit of a dick. The Columbus letter, historically important and stolen from the Vatican.
00:41:08
Speaker
Let's say, Josh, I am disappointed because I was expecting there to be lots of Chris Columbus jokes and their Home Alone jokes, jokes about the Goonies, jokes about the Princess Bride, Harry Potter films. What's Chris Columbus got to do with the Princess Bride?
00:41:24
Speaker
I'm sorry, that's Chris Sarandon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, Frank, I mean, I mean, all that being said, if you had some Chris Sarandon jokes to bring in as well, that would also I would have allowed that. No, that was a interesting little story. It does fit into that wonderful niche we have on this podcast. We really do quite like our art hoax art forgeries. It's kind of a little thing we like to get into from time to time. Yes.
00:41:51
Speaker
maybe one day we'll pivot and just become the podcaster's guide to Art Hoag's stories. I mean, we can't betray him. Maybe we're on quite enough of them to fill out the playlist, yes. So that's the end of, that's my contribution to the episode. Tell these lovely people what they will hear if they tune into the bonus episode that we're going to be recording for our patrons as soon as we're done with this one.
00:42:14
Speaker
Well, in our bonus episode, we're going to be talking about the supposed unmasking of the Zodiac Killer, which as far as I know, no one thinks the Zodiac Killer wore a mask anyway. So why he's been unmasked, no one will find out. And then we're going to talk a little bit about something which is two weeks old, which is that Alex Jones has suffered some major defeats in legal cases in Texas. And it's kind of interesting as to what is going to happen next.
00:42:44
Speaker
So if you'd like to hear about those topics and you're a patron, then just stick around and listen to the bonus episode that will be released shortly after this one. If you'd like to hear about them and you're not a patron, you can become one by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. If you want to find out about us on Twitter, you can once again go to podguidecon.com
00:43:10
Speaker
as a Twitter username. And you'll find, oh, like three or four tweets, perhaps something like that. Yes, I mean, I'm sure it will be used as much as the other social media forms like Facebook with that we have and don't ever use to any particular purpose. We are very, very bad at promoting our own podcast. Well, yes, that's probably true.
00:43:36
Speaker
Anyway, so I think that's all there is to say. So there's nothing there for me to say except a combination of goodbye and flong. And I'm going to say Barcelona.
00:43:58
Speaker
You've been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Imdentive. If you'd like to help support us, please find details at our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.