A Pair of Queens

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 irishwoman was Grunia Nullia, but she's best known to us as Grace O'Malley. Her most famous name is her nickname in Irish folk history, Granule, the Pirate Queen of Connacht. Her meeting with Queen Elizabeth the First 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 Es promptly cut off her hair. Her name ever since, Grannual translates to Grace

of the chopped hair. Like many daughters of powerful men, she would be married off to another chief son for political reasons, but Grannual 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 fifteen sixties. By Irish law, a widow was entitled to only a third of her husband's property. She resettled on Claire Island with two hundred 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 fifteen sixty six, most of Klue 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 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 fifteen sixties, but once again refused

to settle down. In fifteen seventy four, 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 Granywall, repelled his forces. The tide turn for Ireland in the fifteen seventies, with clan leaders forced to submit to the British monarchy, and grannu All 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 fifteen eighty three, 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 fifteen ninety three. Granuall, after decades of violence, at 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 Grannuall to live out her days in the home she fought so hard to protect. Records of her life dwindled towards the beginning of the seventeenth 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 sixteen o three, which, if true, would be a remarkable coincidence, because that was the very same year that saw the death of Queen Elizabeth the First, the woman who ruled the world, the one who grann you All faced as an equal. Chester didn't know what to expect when he was recruited to the Marine Corps in nineteen forty two, but it certainly wasn't this. He and twenty eight 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 shorts 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 four hundred 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. While probably the most famous, the Navajo were far from the first Native American soldiers to use their language for espionage. In World War One, American troops from the Comanche, Choctaw, Hope, 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 nineteen forty one, 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 nineteen forty two, Chesternz and twenty eight other Natives 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, many of which did not have a word already in

the Navajo language. So submarine became beschloh, which means iron fish, and Dahi tihi, 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 nineteen forty two. They were widely credited with helping the Americans take Iwajima, a strategic island in the South Pacific. Over the course of the war, more than four hundred 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 in cryptosc sponts, 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 no idea

what they had done for the war effort. The entire operation remained classified until nineteen sixty eight, twenty three years after the war. Finally, in nineteen eighty two, the code talkers were recognized nationally when President Ronald Reagan declared August fourteenth to be National Navajo Code Talker Day, and in two thousand and one, President George W. Bush gave gold Congressional Medals of Honor to the original twenty nine 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. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership

with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore. Dot com and until next time, stay curious,