Resilient

on a Nazi ship. The Bismarck was launched just a few months before Germany invaded Poland, and by nineteen forty one was prawling the northern part of the Atlantic. Their job was to sabotage nabl envoys sailing between Canada and the UK. Sam was one of twenty two hundred crew members who wished that they weren't there on May twenty seventh of nineteen forty one, when the Bismarck engaged in a violent two day battle with the British Royal Navy

alongside her sister ship. Given that they were outnumbered and outgunned, no one was surprised that the Bismarck sink. Really it was a couple of biplanes that dealt the crushing blow. But I digress now. According to the story, one of the British ships, the HMS cossack lingered in the area attempting to rescue survivors. Out of the over twenty two hundred crewman, there were just one hundred and fourteen souls left alive after the sinking, including Sam, who was floating

on a plank in the sea of debris. They hauled him aboard and started calling him Oscar as a nod to his German origins. Oh, did I forget to mention that Sam was also a cat, A sweet little tuxedo cat with black fur and a white patch on his faced chest and pause. There's a long history of cats on board ships, hundreds of years of companionship and pest control in one adorable package. Cats were really the best animal to have on a ship, no matter how many

stories you hear about parrots. They'll eat anything and were very good at their job protecting any provisions in cargo from rats and other pests. It's a tradition that carries through even today. Some private ships will keep their own cats, although most every navy in the world has banned them at this point. Back in the nineteen forties, though sailors could still have a furry little friend on board, which

leads us back to Oscar. He served on the Cossack as it conducted escorts in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. They were protecting a convoy from Gibraltar to Britain on October twenty fourth of nineteen forty one when things started to get exciting, and honestly, no one wants things to be exciting in a war zone. Oscar wasn't on the Cossack for long. To be fair, no one was on

the Cossack for much longer. Within a few months, they were torpedoed and sank, leaving these survivors bobbing among the remains of their ship. Luckily, the HMS arc Royal and Aircraft Carrier was in the area and managed to scoop up the remaining sailors and of course Sam or Oscar whatever you want to call him now. In another stroke of bad luck, Sam's new home wasn't long for this world. Well, there was a war on and the HMS arc Royal had their own tangle with a torpedo on November fourteenth

of nineteen forty one. Luckily, the cat managed to survive once again, although at this point I bet that he was definitely down a few lives. When the HMS Legion arrived, they pulled Sam or Oscar and the other survivors out of the water. Apparently he was quite angry after his third ship sinking, but ultimately unharmed. As soon as they learned their new furry friend's history, they christened him Unsinkable Sam. Luckily,

for Sam, his third sinking was his last. Maybe they were superstitious, or maybe the sailors just felt bad about it, but either way, Sam was sent off the Legion to live with the Governor of Gibraltar, where he hunted mice to his heart's content. His final destination was the UK at a Belfast home for sailors. So far as I know, he never left dry land again, passed seen away in nineteen fifty five. We've certainly heard plenty of stories about

people who survived shipwrecks time and time again. Violet Jessup comes to mind the star of one of our very own earlier Cabinet episodes. It's been done, But the thing is, we're not entirely sure if the story about Sam is true. Really Sam's whole adventure might just be a tall tale. There's no record of a cat being brought on board the Bismarck, and none of the survivors mentioned him later, although to be fair, at that moment they had other things on their mind. There are only a couple of

images of Sam. One is a pastel drawing of him sitting on a floating piece of wood by an unknown artist. The other is a photograph of a tuxedo cats in a collar. The cat looks like every description of Sam, except there's one problem. The collar is inscribed HMS Amethyst, which Sam never served on. This is likely a photo

of another famous ship cat named Simon. Maybe Sam was a stowaway, or it's some kind of good luck charm for one of the sailors on the Bismarck, which would explain why he was never officially registered as the ship's cat. In all likelihood, we will never know if Sam was real or not, but I'm not sure that that matters. Stories can be important, whether they're real or fake. They show us what was important to the people during those

big moments. World War two was the war that was never supposed to happen, especially after the carnage and terror of the Great War, the idea that a little critter like Sam was rescued time and time again, that even during the worst moments of their lives, these sailors wanted to save what they could. While fact or fiction, I think that's a curious story worth remembering. Imagine you work

at an art museum. You've had a certain painting, one from a legendary artist, on display for decades, and one day you and your team take it off the wall so you can examine it for an upcoming exhibition. As you're analyzing the work, you realize that there's something hidden beneath the portrait, as in, behind the actual paint. It's something no one has ever seen before. You'd be stunned. Right, here's this mysterious thing that could potentially change the entire

art world, and you just found it. And if you've guessed that this hypothetical scenario isn't actually hypothetical at all, you'd be right. It really happened in July of twenty twenty two at the National Galleries in Scotland. But before we get there, let me back up just a bit. You see, art is often mysterious, right. Painters from DA Vinci and Picasso to Pollock and Moore have been the

subject of decades, even centuries, of scholarly debate. Staring at the mona Lisa's shy expression, or a canvas colored and seemingly random splashes of paint, we can't help but wonder what does it mean? But while critics mean use about symbols and metaphor, some experts look at canvas as much more literally. Art conservators analyze the actual matter of the painting.

This could mean examining the chemical makeup of the paint itself to figure out exactly where it came from, or using X rays and infrared light to see through the painting, usually to get a better idea of how the art is sketched or layered paint to create the final product. This the X ray examination, is what those experts at the National Galleries of Scotland were doing when they made their big discovery. They had had a van Go painting called Head of a Peasant Woman since nineteen sixty. When

a lawyer from Edinburgh donated it to the museum. They took it down so that they could move it for a July twenty twenty two exhibition on Impressionism, which is an artistic movement that van Go was a part of. Before they hung it back up, though, they decided to x ray the piece and see if they could glean any new information about it. Now, a few things to know.

Van Go painted Head of a Peasant Woman in eighteen eighty five, but between then and when it landed in the National Galleries of Scotland it changed hands quite a bit. At some point, maybe around nineteen oh five, someone decided to glue the canvas down on a piece of cardboard, which seems more like the way that you would treat a school project and a portrait from one of the

world's most famous artists, but hey, I'm no expert. Regardless, when they did this x ray, they realized there was actually a second van Go painting hidden between Head of a Peasant Woman and the cardboard. It had been painted on the back of the canvas. Head of a Peasant Woman was on one side and this second painting was on the other. But nobody ever recorded the second painting's existence, and when it was glued to the cardboard it was basically lost, until, of course, the x ray revealed it

was there. This painting was a never before seen self portrait of van Go. In it, he's wearing a straw hat and a neckerchief. He stares directly at the viewer, and his left ear that he eventually cut off is still clearly visible. It's remarkable not only because it's newly discovered, but also because Vang painted it around the time that he moved to Paris and was first exposed to Impressionist art.

Chances are that he painted both sides of the canvas, not because he was trying to hide something, but because he didn't have a lot of money. Canvases were expensive, and van Go wouldn't be the first artist to paint both sides or even paint over older works. As it stands, experts at the National Gallery of Scotland are doing research looking for a way to remove the canvas from the

cardboard without damaging either painting. Until then, Head of a Peasant Woman remains on display alongside the X ray image of the self portrait, and while this type of discovery is rare, it's not unheard of. Experts have also found hidden works by both Theicelli and Picasso using similar technology. So the next time you're at a museum staring up at a curious canvas and wondering what it all meant.

Consider asking yourself what might be hiding beneath it. 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.