Sounds Big

the verge of collapse. His financial ruin seemed inevitable. Now, before you extend too much sympathy toward the colonel, it's worth knowing that he was the manager of a plantation in Civil War era Tennessee. His financial woes were entirely tied to the resolution of the Civil War. The Confederacy had lost, and human trafficking, the enterprise that supported the

entire Southern economy, was no more. Colonel Anderson was so desperate for anyone to salvage his fortunes that he wrote a letter to a man named Jordan, entreating him to come back and work for him. Jordan, you see, was a former enslaved man of the Colonels. Jordan had also taken the last name Anderson, and had been freed by the Union Army in eighteen sixty four. The request to come back and work for his former enslaver was so absurd that Jordan, who was by this point living in Dayton, Ohio,

had to respond. Now. The man could not read or write, but what he could do was dictate to a neighbor, who sent the response on his behalf. The document was entitled Letter from a Freedman to his old master. In this letter, Jordan Anderson described his pleasant life in Ohio to the man who had once held him captive for decades. Jordan insisted that he and his wife, Millie, were in a good situation and didn't wish to go back south.

In a tone that at first sounds sincere but drips with sarcasm, he outlined his concern that he and his wife wouldn't get the proper treatment they deserved if they were to go back and work for their one time enslaver. And then he went on to make a request what the colonel would have to do in order to get his interest. Jordan requested thirty two years of back pay for both himself and his wife, amounting to some eleven thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars including interest, that's equal to

about a quarter of a million dollars today. To compliment that dry sense of humor, he said that the figure included deductions for clothing that his master purchased for them, and for the services of a dentist to pull a couple of teeth. Underlying every sly jab in the letter is the brutal reality that life for a black man in the South was still extremely difficult even after emancipation.

Dan Anderson mentioned in the letter that he wished to get his children a good education, implying that this would not be possible in the South, and that any request from him to go there would be an absurd decision on his part and if his intent wasn't abundantly clear at that point. Jordan also added a PostScript, say howdy to George Carter, he wrote, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me. The reference to attempted murder makes for a perfect punchline.

Jordan Anderson obviously had no intention of going back to work for the Colonel. It is an eight hundred and eight word clapback against a man who never saw Jordan as worthy of human dignity. What makes the letter an incredible historical document is the use of humor to critique the brutal reality of slavery. Jordan's tone is blistering to read even today, and we can only imagine how his

former enslaver received it. One month later, in September of eighteen sixty five, Colonel Anderson sold his plantation, all one thousand acres of it, for a fraction of its value. He was dead two years later at the age of forty four. According to a journalist who tracked down his surviving family, they remained bitter at Jordan for generations afterward, saying that he should have been loyal and respectful to the colonel, whatever that means, thus proving that generations later

they still missed the entire point of the letter. Jordan. Anderson, on the other hand, outlived his former master by almost forty years. His letter, published in local papers, became a viral sensation in its day, encouraging comparisons to Mark Twain, the legendary literary satirist, and it was printed and reprinted among oral accounts of surviving enslaved peoples, helping give insight and perspective on the sort of person who survived enslavement

in the nineteenth century. Even though he was illiterate, Jordan Andersen displayed an incredible literary wit, and without the ability to read or write, he backed his way into becoming an acclaimed offe, a more important voice of the American experience than people like Colonel Anderson ever would be. It was August twenty sixth, eighteen eighty three in the Dutch colony of Katimbang, on the southern end of the island of Sumatra. Johanna Baar inc Was the wife of the

local colonial overseer. She stood on the porch of her family's home, looking out across the Sunda Strait at the smoking volcano Krakatoa. The volcano was known to occasionally spew ash and lava into the air, it had for as long as they'd live there, and it was doing that now. But Johanna was less concerned with what she could see and more concerned with what she could hear. For months now, the volcano had been producing a series of loud bangs similar to thunder but over the last day or so,

those bangs had been growing in volume and frequency. When she closed her eyes and listened to the jungle around her, the birds chirped with a chaotic energy that wasn't typical. She walked inside, picked up her newborn infant son from his crib, and held him close. She looked at her two other young children playing in the sitting room with their nanny, and she had a bad feeling. Johanna's heart leapt at the arrival of a new sound, two loud bangs,

but not from the volcano. They were heard coming from the roof. Outside. She could see large smoldering stones raining down onto the colony. It was pumice stone. The volcano was erupting. The family ran with their servants from their cottage into the hills. Johanna tried to ignore the putrid, burning air as it coated her throat, and the sharp panes of the pumice stones when they landed on her, but once again what she could hear was infinitely more

terrifying than what she could see or feel. This time, she heard a roaring sound coming from behind them, and it was getting louder, and then suddenly, a massive wave crashed through the jungle behind them, sending their hiking party flying in all directions. It was all Johanna could do to hold onto her baby. Her husband and their servants grabbed the other children, and they all held onto whatever they could, dragging themselves forward through the jungle against the

crashing current. Miraculously, the family managed to pull themselves through the jungle, out of the water and up into the hills, where the safety of their village awaited them. The family and the villagers alike huddled inside. Johanna hoped that the worst of it was behind them, that she wouldn't hear any further harbingers of doom. Unfortunately, her hope couldn't have been more in vain. At five point thirty in the morning,

an ear piercing boom shook the whole island. The baby cried and the children screamed, And then at six forty four am, another ash began to fall outside the windows, and then at eight twenty eight a third boom, and finally, at ten o two am, the sound to end all sounds. The whole world seemed to shake. Johanna felt two sharp pains on both sides of her head, and all went silent. Her entire body seemed to swell. Her lungs inflated to their maximum capacity, and she couldn't expel the air. She

felt beyond dizzy, completely disoriented. Luckily, the disorientation quickly passed and she could breathe again, but she couldn't hear a thing. Even worse, looking down, she saw white smoke curling its way up into the room from the floorboards. The heat was unbearable. When she looked down at the baby in her arms, she realized that he wasn't moving. Some combination of the heat, the smoke, and the sound had taken her child from her. Devastated, she laid the baby down

and wandered outside into the smoke. She couldn't see her hands in front of herself. She couldn't hear anything. When she felt her face, she realized that her skin was hanging loose off of her body. She was literally melting. She fell to the jungle floor and waited for Krakatoa to claim her as its next victim. When Krakatoa erupted that August in eighteen eighty three, it killed over thirty six thousand people. Most died from the resulting tsunamis, but

some died from the sound of the eruption itself. You see, that final ten oh two am explosion is believed to have registered at three hundred and ten decibels, the loudest sound ever documented in history. At that level, the shockwave from Krakatoa ceased to be a mere sound wave and instead became a wave of air pressure, rupturing the ear drums and even the internal organs of anyone within one hundred miles. People three thousand miles away in Australia even

heard the sound. Miraculously, Johanna and the rest of her family actually survived. They were found at the brink of death and nursed back to health. Their hearing ofally returned. But it's possible that her baby and hundreds of others were killed by the sound of Krakatoa alone. It's incredibly curious that's in a legendary disaster where massive waves, falling pumice stones and burning clouds could kill you, it was an invisible force in the air that was the most

deadly of all. 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 Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.