Episode 65 - San Felipe
Tanner: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Breakers, a podcast about shipwrecks, loss, and lessons learned from maritime disasters. I’m Tanner, and here, as usual also, is Taylor. Taylor, what’s up?
Taylor: Not a whole lot, how ya doin’?
Tanner: Doin’ very well.
Taylor: It’s a good weekend, Father’s Day, it was very busy. A lot of back and forth all over the place. But it was good. Did you do anything this weekend?
Tanner: Not really. Father’s Day is one of those interesting holidays that’s like, a conditional holiday depending on your situation of whether or not you have to do anything for it.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: So, for me, it was just a long weekend, you know, with the Juneteenth holiday today. But yeah, for you, you know, Happy Father’s Day, and Happy Father’s Day to all of our listeners out there to whom that applies. So it was a pretty boring week for me. What have you been up to media-wise? If you had any time for that.
Taylor: [laughs] Well, I finished, like I said in an earlier episode, I mentioned KL about the history of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Um, finished that, so I decided I needed something a little lighter to read, so I went with Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek. It's like a broad overview of the Fertile Crescent and the origins of city-states as an organizational unit. It’s kind of mind-blowing a little bit, talking about stuff from like 5,000 B.C. Like just to kind of comprehend how old civilization is and writing and all that.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: It’s different. It’s just weird to see people complaining about some of the same things we complain about now, but like 5,000 B.C. It’s interesting.
Tanner: It’s always interesting to learn about that stuff and just to look at the unfathomably old dates associated with some of this stuff.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s hard to even wrap your head around how old that actually is, like, how long ago that was, and how we view 5,000 B.C. to 4,000 B.C. is basically the same thing, but it’s a thousand years in between.
Tanner: Right. And thinking about like, you know, when we think of the ancient world, you can think about someone like a Julius Caesar, and then if you put that in the grand context of the history of civilization, you know, Sumeria and Babylon and the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, these things are so incredibly ancient.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Even to someone who is ancient to us, it’s crazy to put it in that context.
Taylor: Yeah, so it’s an interesting read, I’m like halfway through it right now. It’s also interesting how little we actually know. So much of it, even with the experts it’s just them kinda guessing sometimes, and using inference to kinda see what things mean or what something was used for.
Tanner: I’m sure a lot of that also, like most things in history, a lot of the good documentation we have on things is written by other people writing about them, potentially from an antagonistic perspective, so it’s kinda hard to suss out what’s what.
Taylor: Yeah, so it’s really interesting. What about you? What have you been up to?
Tanner: A lot of the media I consumed was directly related to this episode. I don’t think that counts for our media check-in, but I did have a really interesting podcast-related dream. So I’m just gonna put this on record, just in case this ever happens…
Taylor: …[laughs]
Tanner: …so people know that we’ve predicted it. I dreamed that you and I went to Michigan - the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We were gonna do a live on-site recording like how podcasts do that sometimes, in front of an audience. There was this specific wreck we were gonna do, I don’t know what it was. We were gonna go to the site of it and talk about this wreck for a live recording, and while we were there in the exact same spot, a team had discovered another much, much older wreck, so we helped them out with it? I don’t know why they needed our help. Cause they were like, marine archaeologists.
Taylor: Like people that should be doing that, not us.
Tanner: Right. So we were helping them out and it ended up being a Viking, like a longboat, and evidence of a Viking settlement in the U.P. of Michigan, and we got really excited, so we just ditched the original episode we were planning to do, and we totally shifted to basically a ripped-from-the-headlines “what’s going on with this archaeological dig”, and we had all of our stuff, we were ready to present all the stuff, and we received a letter, it was an injunction from the Norwegian government…
Taylor: …[laughs]
Tanner: …telling us to stop production of our episode and that we weren’t allowed to talk about it. And so we went back and forth with like lawyers and stuff and the reason they didn’t want the episode made is ‘cause they didn’t want to admit that Vikings had ever been to Michigan.
Taylor: [laughs] …interesting.
Tanner: There was this shame of having been…
Taylor: …the shame of Michigan.
Tanner: …they didn’t want the world to know about that, so we were prevented from making our episode.
Taylor: By the Norwegian government.
Tanner: But, I just told everyone about it, so you can’t stop the truth from coming out.
Taylor: This would be when I become a flag-waving American and say “it’s my right to talk about this.” [laughs]
Tanner: Yeah. If that ever ends up being true, if we ever discover a Viking settlement in Michigan, we called it first. We get dibs on the first podcast episode about it.
Taylor: Nice, that’s an interesting dream.
Tanner: There’s my media, it was self-made media. Self-published.
Taylor: [laughs] the worst kind.
Tanner: Alright, so let’s get into our episode, I guess.
Taylor: Yeah.
Tanner: This episode is a bit different from some of our episodes. It has a bit more of a historical flair to it. There is a shipwreck involved.
Taylor: We gave you the Myron last week, now you get history this week. So strap in.
Tanner: Yeah, last week it was just, you know, an upper 80s fastball right down the middle of the plate, and we’re pulling out the fork ball this week.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: The eephus pitch. Probably not quite that weird. So to get into the episode today, we have to do a good bit of background discussion. This episode takes us to a new part of the map for the show, I think?
Taylor: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve done this.
Tanner: Which is Japan.
Taylor: Which is surprising, because they have a huge maritime culture, so we’ll be back.
Tanner: Right, and it kinda goes back to what I mentioned in our Joola episode where there is a lot of great documentation and stuff on Japanese naval history, but a lot of it is in Japanese, you know, go figure.
Taylor: Mm-hmm, a language you don’t read.
Tanner: Right, and that’s not one that I see myself picking up quickly. So yeah, it just takes a little bit more effort to access some of that stuff. But I definitely wanna do more with Japan in the future. We’ve been close to Japan, we’ve been in the Sea of Okhotsk for the Dalniy Vostok, but never quite there. It also takes us considerably further in time than most of our episodes, with the exception of Mary Rose and the White Ship disaster. We’re going back to the late 16th century. The closing years of the Japanese Sengoku period, the Warring States period, you could call it.
Taylor: Is this like samurai time?
Tanner: This is like samurai time.
Taylor: Okay.
Tanner: This is kind of coming to the end of when the samurai are a military force that’s fielded on the battlefield.
Taylor: So if my only reference point to this is Ghost of Tsushima, where is that fitting in? ‘
Tanner: Ghost of Tsushima, just talking roughly here, is gonna be like 400 years before this. Give or take a few decades. So I’ll get a little bit into the era that we’re talking about here. So this Sengoku period, this is about 150 years that’s characterized by heavy fighting among local rulers, or daimyo, in the absence of any real strong central authority. You know, the emperor is obviously still there, is still on the throne, but the emperor had been just a ceremonial figurehead for a long time and the shogunate that was in power, the Ashikaga shogunate, had really declined in its ability to maintain any sort of grip on a wide span of territory.
Taylor: Is this the same, like, line of emperors that would eventually go into World War II and everything, where it seemed like it wasn’t just ceremonial, he actually had some power.
Tanner: I don’t know that much, but I think they’re all the same line of descent? I have no idea, though. I don’t know if there’s any, like, different lines for the emperor.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So in this period, this kind of late Sengoku period, there are three main figures that stand out in Japanese history as the ones who brought this period to an end, kinda the three big unifiers of Japan. The first one is a name that people may know if you’ve done a little bit of reading on Japanese history, and that’s Oda Nobunaga. So he, kind of just one of these daimyo, dissolved the Ashikaga shogunate in 1573, and conquered large parts of Honshu, Japan’s main island. He was very successful in his conquests. He ends up being assassinated in 1582. Technically forced into suicide, kinda just given the cultural ramifications there, it’s essentially an assassination.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Nobunaga was succeeded by one of his most powerful followers, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and he’s a really fascinating character in history, because he was actually born a peasant, which is not something you hear about a lot.
Taylor: Right, yeah that upward mobility.
Tanner: You know, in a society like this that’s so heavily influenced by feudalistic ideas and rank and social standing and everything, having a peasant become the most powerful person in Japan is a really crazy story.
Taylor: Yeah, it is.
Tanner: The third important figure that we will be talking about, and this name might be the most recognizable, is Tokugawa Ieyasu. We’ll discuss him more at the end of the episode in the aftermath portion, but this obviously leads to what we’ve come to know as Tokugawa Japan.
Taylor: That is the only name I recognize.
Tanner: Yeah, that’s definitely the one that is remembered probably the most outside of Japan. Those three figures in particular, their story is told really, really well in the Netflix mini-series Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan. I think it’s 6 parts. It was really good, it’s kind of one of those mixed history and dramatization things. I thought it was really cool, it seems like other people feel the same way about it. It was really great.
Taylor: Where does the Tom Cruise documentary The Last Samurai fit into all of this?
Tanner: I’ve never seen that, but I know the real story that it depicts and that happens later, that happens in the 1800s.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: That’s more tied up with like, Meiji Restoration-type stuff where you have sort of the reassertion of the emperor as the authority and you also sort of dispense with some of the traditional Japanese things like samurai having this influence and having this special status.
Taylor: I feel like currently the period we’re talking about is sort of like a Holy Roman Empire situation, there’s all these little states and, it’s like pre-German Unification almost.
Tanner: That’s a good way to think about it, you essentially control whatever territory you’re able to take. If you can govern it and the people listen to you, it’s yours. So our story today takes place during the final years of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s power, so that’s the second guy that I just talked about. So to get more of a feel for the situation here in our story, we should look at the nations and organizations involved in the political and commercial picture of East Asia in the late 16th century. A big player for our episode today: Spain.
The ship we’ll be discussing today is a Spanish ship, so we’ll start with them. Spain at this point in history has this massive empire, they’ve got colonies in Mexico, Central America, South America, they’ve just established themselves in the Philippines. They’re all over the place now. As they expand further west, as I mentioned, they’re in the Philippines, they founded the city of Manila on the island of Luzon in 1571. This is kind of the foundation of what’s the current city of Manila. There was an Indigenous settlement there that dates back to the 13th century.
Taylor: It’s weird talking about Spain in the Pacific like that. Like obviously I know the influence they have over the Philippines and everything, but it’s weird to think of them outside of North and South America, doing colonialism.
Tanner: Yeah, the Japanese thought so, too.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: The story we’re telling today takes place during the time of the Iberian Union. So this is the point in history where the king of Spain is also the king of Portugal.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: This applied to three kings of Spain: Philip the Second of Spanish Armada fame, I think for most English speakers at least, Philip the Third, and Philip the Fourth. All of them would reign as kings of both countries, covering a period from 1580 to 1640.
Taylor: Was Portugal less than enthused about this, I’m assuming?
Tanner: Not super jazzed about it. It’s actually a really crazy story, the whole thing kicks off from, I think it’s called Ksar el-Kebir, a battle that happened in Morocco where the king of Portugal was killed and there wasn’t really a solid line of succession, so the king of Spain kinda stepped in and said “hey, I’ll do this.”
Taylor: [laughs] that’s funny. That’s just funny that he’s like “yeah, this is mine now, I’ll do this.”
Tanner: “I’ll take it.” So anyway, again, this is a personal union, very similar to James the First being king of England and king of Scotland but they’re still separate countries. Each nation kept its own government, its own laws, administrative bodies, nothing effectively changed in the terms of how these countries and these empires were run, they just happened to have the same monarch. So they’re, you know, probably not working against each other’s interests quite as much.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: But that rivalry, that doesn’t go away just because on paper it says that you have the same king, and this even affects the religious orders. We’ll talk more about that definitely by the end of the episode.
Taylor: It’s like 50 Shades of Catholic, right?
Tanner: Yeah, yeah, just as much torture involved.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: Let’s talk about…well, we should probably talk about Japan some more here. So as we talked about before, Japan at this point in history is becoming a unified nation for the first time in quite a while. They’re developing this central authority that’s being won at the point of a sword, but they’re kinda being hammered together into this one cohesive unit. But that task isn’t accomplished yet, and at the time of our story, the local daimyo still have quite a bit of leeway in how they run their territory, even in aspects of things like foreign relations. Enter: Francis Xavier and his Jesuits.
Taylor: [laughs] all I know about Jesuits is that they like to found universities in America.
Tanner: They do.
Taylor: Like, every Catholic university I can think of, like Xavier or Notre Dame…I think they’re the Jesuits? I don’t know, someone will probably yell at me now for saying that.
Tanner: I don’t think Notre Dame’s a Jesuit university?
Taylor: Looking this up…
Tanner: …I know Xavier is, obviously.
Taylor: …before someone corrects us.
Tanner: The Loyolas are definitely Jesuit.
Taylor: Are they?
Tanner: I think Gonzaga is, too. I don’t think Notre Dame is a Jesuit university.
Taylor: It doesn’t really say on their Wikipedia page. I’ve put forth enough effort, I’m willing to retract Notre Dame as being a Jesuit university.
Tanner: Fair enough. Anyone, feel free to correct us. Good at founding universities, and you know, pretty good at basketball.
So Francis Xavier, he’d arrived in Japan actually in 1549 and he was pretty well-received, even being permitted to build the first Catholic church in Japan. So this wasn’t a situation where there’s instant antagonism between the two sides, and obviously there was this appeal to the local daimyo about the possibility of benefiting from trade with Europeans. Europeans have cool stuff that we want, we have stuff that they want, let’s be friends.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: Some of these daimyo even converted to Christianity themselves…
Taylor: …interesting.
Tanner: …with around 20 doing so, a little bit over 20, I think, was the estimate. Three of these daimyo even sent their own delegations all the way to Rome to visit the Pope. Again, something that we’ll circle back to later in the episode as a legitimate strategy for getting your ideas out in the world, not just your religious ones but also your political ones. But it wasn’t just the smaller, local rulers that saw the positives here in this relationship with European Christians. Oda Nobunaga was going about his work of trying to unify Japan, and one of the big thorns in his side here was actually the Buddhist religious establishment. They were quite a bit of an obstacle.
I think in the West we kind of think about Buddhism in general as being kind of a passive, peaceful religion, and like any religion, it’s like, sure that might be one aspect of it, but there’s also quite a bit of political power being exerted here. And that’s kind of a problem, so he kind of sees [that] anything he can do to shake up the situation is gonna help him out. Anything to undercut that influence was helpful on a very pragmatic level and Oda Nobunaga was nothing if not pragmatic. So yeah, he had no issue with Christian missionaries going about their work if it took away power from the Buddhist establishment.
Taylor: That’s really interesting that…I feel like a lot of places would be resistant to that, but he sees it as something that lets him wield more power.
Tanner: It’s a good, I guess snap-shot, into his way of thinking. It really is all about the task at hand and he doesn’t seem too hung up on tradition and doing things the way that they’re quote unquote “supposed to be done.” Another big thing for Oda Nobunaga was that these Europeans brought new weapons with them.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: Nobunaga would become pretty famous for his deployment of the arquebus on the battlefield. They came with just a few of these things in these ships, and almost immediately he orders these things to be copied and reproduced, and pretty soon he’s got the best trained arquebus corps in Japan. So as powerful as he was already, now it’s almost irresistible, especially somewhere where cavalry is such a dominant force on the battlefield.
Taylor: It’s interesting, he seems to have a little bit of a vision, like he seems to be able to see beyond just like “oh, these Spanish people bad. Don’t wanna interact.” He can kinda see how he can use them for his benefit. It’s interesting.
Tanner: Right. After Oda Nobunaga’s death, Toyotomi Hideyoshi kept up pretty similar policies towards Christians and Europeans in general, but, in 1587, Hideyoshi put a ban on the preaching and practice of Christianity in Japan. The reason for that isn’t 100 percent understood, like what was the trigger for this? But it’s well known that a lot of his advisors were obviously not in favor of this foreign influence, this foreign religion coming into Japan. As much as you did have the pragmatists who wanted the benefits, you have the people who saw the risks of doing this.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: But despite that new policy it doesn’t seem like there was any intention of enforcing it, so this is something maybe put on the books to appease certain people, but nothing’s really being done about this. No one’s being tortured, no one’s being executed, no one’s being arrested for this.
Taylor: Yet.
Tanner: Yet. Priests continued to arrive in Japan, including now the Spanish Franciscans, in addition to the Jesuits who had come in the wake of Francis Xavier. You see some interesting rivalries play out among these religious orders, each of them competing with the others to get their foot in the door and, you know, win some converts but, more importantly, prestige. It’s all about that within the church. Who is the best, who is getting the most converts, who has the most missionaries out in certain places.
Taylor: It’s really interesting how with Catholicism you kind of think of it as a monolith but with these different orders and stuff you kinda see how a lot of the Protestant religions will later form. They’re all kind of different flavors of the same thing, like there’s these very minor differences that play out as being completely different groups.
Tanner: Yeah, and that’s the interesting thing to see here, you see the manifestation of Christianity in the Pacific and this is right at the time in Europe where Europe is on fire with religious diversity. Earlier in the century you’ve got Martin Luther and the birth of the Protestant Reformation and stuff and this is a few decades before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, so you’re right in that cauldron of religious thought and obviously the Catholics, if they’re suffering setbacks in Europe, maybe they’re gonna try to expand somewhere else. Let’s try and make up for this.
Taylor: One final closing note on Notre Dame. They are part of the Congregation of Holy Cross, not Jesuit.
Tanner: Oh okay.
Taylor: That might mean something to someone. They also have an endowment of 18 billion dollars, so they’re doing just fine.
Tanner: They’re doing okay.
Taylor: Yeah, they’re fine.
Tanner: If you’re an alum…an alumnus? If you’re an alumnus from Notre Dame and you get that letter in the mail asking for money, I feel like it’s probably pretty easy to say no?
[both laugh]
Tanner: I know when I get mine from Wisconsin, I throw it right in the garbage. [laughs]
Taylor: Oh yeah, yep. [laughs]
Tanner: Your Linguistics degree does nothing for me. Uh, so, where was I here? So this brings us to The Incident. This whole time I don’t think I’ve said the name of the ship we’re talking about here, but it’s in the episode title. So the main sequence of our story starts on July 12th, 1596. The Spanish galleon San Felipe left Manila destined for Acapulco in Mexico. This, at least to me, I am very new to knowing anything about sailing, I thought this would just be like a straight shot east across the Pacific, and that’s not at all how that works. There’s things like wind and ocean currents that you actually need to worry about.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So yeah, to sail eastward from the Philippines to New Spain, ships first had to sail north…
Taylor: …interesting.
Tanner: …and get into what we would now call the North Pacific Gyre. If you look at a map of these Pacific currents, you basically see a lot of smaller ones, but there’s two big gyres that kind of spin together like two gears in a machine, and you need to get into that North Pacific Gyre. I’ll share a map of that to go along with the episode. Once you’re in that big northern circular current, ships would sail east, so talking roughly at the latitude of like Washington or Oregon in the modern US, sailing east across the Pacific then down the California coast to Acapulco. The western leg of this gyre is referred to as the Kuroshio Current. That’s gonna play a role here. So back to the San Felipe herself. We’ve talked a fair amount on the show about crossing the Atlantic, but much less about crossing the Pacific.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: We’ve talked about the dangers facing sailing ships when they start their journey too late in what is the accepted sailing season. We saw that particularly with the Edmond, our Irish coffin ship. Space was at a premium, [they were] trying to get as many people on these things as possible to take them to North America and trying this westward trans-Atlantic crossing in November. Obviously that didn’t end well, they barely made it off the coast of Ireland. Even on the Great Lakes we’ve seen instances of ships trying to squeeze in one last trip, that’s kind of what happened with the Carl D. Bradley. Very late in the season, supposed to be finished and just [trying to] go for that one last trip.
Taylor: Just when they were about to get out, it pulled ‘em right back in.
Tanner: Right. Exactly. So here we’re talking about July, but despite the fact that this, compared to what we’ve seen, this seems right in the middle of the sailing season, this is actually pretty late in regard to typhoon season in the Pacific.
Taylor: I guess also just how long it takes at the time, like, you’re just talking about such a longer time span of travel.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. Actually, in 1620, about 2 decades after this story, Phillip the Third, King of Spain, would issue an order that ships were to leave Manila no later than the last day of June.
Taylor: It’s really interesting thinking of a world where you just can’t travel. Nowadays, within reason, you might be delayed a day or two because of a storm, but literally the sailing season ends with the end of June, like that’s kind of crazy.
Tanner: Yeah, the idea that if you leave a week late, you could be stuck somewhere for an extra four months or something like that. It’s interesting to see here that this is a known thing, you don’t try to cross the Pacific at this time ‘cause you’re gonna get caught in a typhoon. So unfortunately for the San Felipe, she wouldn’t escape the wrath of the Pacific storm season. She reportedly encountered not one but two typhoons, causing her captain to decide on Japan as a stopover point before continuing, just to get themselves ready for the rest of the crossing. By this point, it’s already October 5th.
Taylor: That’s crazy that that much time has passed.
Tanner: Yeah and you look at a map, like, the Philippines and Japan are not very far away in the grand scheme of things. It’s already October, and they left in July. The expected travel time crossing the Pacific west to east was about four to six months and they’ve already spent about three of this not even getting into the eastward leg of this journey. So on the approach to Japan, a third typhoon struck San Felipe and disabled her completely, leaving her adrift but being…scare quotes…”fortunately” carried towards Japan.
Taylor: I’m really interested in knowing if it was actually three different typhoons or is it bad storms. Obviously they had no way of actually knowing at the time, but like what happened meteorologically for this event?
Tanner: I was curious about that too. Are these elements of the same storm hitting them a few different times? I believe typhoons form roughly similarly to how Atlantic hurricanes form, and the idea of getting hit by three different hurricanes on one voyage seems a bit odd, like you’d think it’d just be parts of the same storm.
Taylor: Yeah, and like when we see those weird tracks where they loop back on each other and stuff, like who knows? But it would just be very interesting to see that.
Tanner: Yeah, I don’t know enough about the meteorological side of that. But they’re in bad shape. They’ve got no sails, they can’t steer, they’re just along for the ride at this point.
Taylor: Sounds like they’re having a bad time.
Tanner: Ultimately they came to shore in Tosa Bay.
Taylor: That’s in Wisconsin, ‘tosa. Wauwatosa.
Tanner: Yes. Wauwatosa Bay.
[both laugh]
Tanner: They came ashore in Tosa Bay on the island of Shikoku on October 19th, 1596. However, this was not without assistance. They had no control of their ship, slamming into the coast of Japan was a real possibility and this was one reason that ships would use this current that would take them up north past Japan. They would try to stay as far away from Japan as possible, even before there were political reasons to do that. It was known that this was not a good place to potentially ground your ship. Very rocky, not a good place to be.
The San Felipe was… scare quotes… “aided” to shore by Japanese boats who took San Felipe in tow and beached her in a shallow area. Here, an important character enters the tale. The daimyo of Tosa Province, Chosokabe Motochika. He’s the ruler of the province, this is his territory. As we said, daimyo can pretty much do what they want in their territory, as long as it doesn’t come in conflict with, at this point, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Note that the rule of this whole province wasn’t something that Motochika had inherited. He had fought his way to control of the territory by defeating other daimyo and he had a reputation as a skilled warrior.
Taylor: So he’s not a man that’s afraid of violence.
Tanner: No, not at all, and interesting enough, I saw this…I was just on his Wikipedia page…apparently, as a child, his father was worried that he was too sensitive and not manly enough…
Taylor: …oh no.
Tanner: …so he developed the nickname of The Little Princess, and basically, the first time he got on the battlefield, he never got called that again it seems like. ‘Cause yeah, turns out he was pretty badass it sounds like, in terms of what he was capable of. In the early 1580s, Motochika had actually been in control of the entire island of Shikoku after conquering his neighbors, one of the four big islands of Japan. However, that ran up against Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s expanding power on Honshu, the main island of Japan. So when Hideyoshi invaded and conquered Shikoku, Chosokabe Motochika was allowed to retain rule of Tosa province. Just like you see in these European feudal encounters, just ‘cause you fight against someone on the battlefield doesn’t mean that you’re mortal enemies, it might end up in both of your favor to leave this person in power where they are.
Taylor: Right, like I feel like it makes it easier on you, it’s like “oh, you got this? That’s fine, you’ll do what I say, but you can manage the day-to-day.”
Tanner: Yeah, “I taught you your lesson, you’re fine, you’re better than some random person I could replace you with.” So Motochika supported Hideyoshi in his other campaigns, including Hideyoshi’s…ill-fated is probably a good way to describe this…invasion of Korea in 1592. One of those historical screw-ups, truly on a majestic scale, the Japanese invasions of Korea. So by the time of the San Felipe incident, Chosokabe Motochika was in his late 50s. He’s had a full life, and he’s getting a little bit up there in age now. With this Spanish vessel coming aground in his territory, the daimyo felt that he was well within his rights to seize the cargo onboard.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: If you don’t want that to happen, you shouldn’t have wrecked on my territory.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So the remaining cargo was estimated at 600,000 pesos. They had left Manila with closer to a million, but some of that had been lost during the voyage. I wasn’t exactly sure what type of cargo this was, you know presumably trade goods that they’ve acquired, but that’s kind of the estimated value we’re talking about here.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: Most of the foreign trade with Japan happened in Kyoto, so any opportunity for Tosa province to sort of get a piece of that would have been amazing. Gonna jump all over this if it falls in your lap.
Taylor: But like, by trade he means like “give it to me, it is mine now.”
Tanner: Yes. In this case. ‘Cause there’s not much else they can do.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So yeah, getting a little bit of that…a little trickle of that sweet, sweet Nanban trade action. The stranded Spanish screw understandably protested the seizure of their cargo. Saying “hey, that’s still ours.” [laughs]
Taylor: I feel like in this situation I would be like, “no, no, please don’t. Oh, you have more people and weap-…it’s yours now. This belongs to you.”
Tanner: Yeah, it’s like when you’re the cashier at the gas station, like “I don’t care. Take it.”
Taylor: Yeah, like “it’s not my money, here ya go.”
[both laugh]
Tanner: “Just let me go home.” Motochika agreed to sort of send it up the ladder to Kyoto to get a ruling on this. He sent it up to the booth. He sent it to New York.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So Captain Landecho of the San Felipe, he sent two of his officers to Kyoto with instructions to work with the Franciscan missionaries there to negotiate a way out of the situation.
Taylor: And those Franciscan missionaries, are they Japanese? Or are they Spanish?
Tanner: No, these are Spanish missionaries.
Taylor: They are Spanish.
Tanner: Or, at least, European. I’m assuming they’re Spanish since they’re Franciscans in this story, but they’re not Japanese.
Taylor: Okay. But they live there, like they’re doing their work in Japan.
Tanner: Yes. That’s the interesting thing here, even though there is that ban on Christianity, you have these Franciscans practicing openly enough that they can be contacted and, you know, brought to court to plead someone’s case…
Taylor: …and they’re just more aware of the social conventions and everything that’s going on in Japan.
Tanner: …yeah, presumably.
Taylor: If they cared. [laughs]
Tanner: Right. So these two officers were specifically instructed to avoid interacting with the Jesuits in Kyoto.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: There’s a little insight into that antagonism between these religious orders, you know, you can trust these guys, but don’t trust the sneaky Jesuits. Here we can see there’s two well-known missionary groups more or less openly right in the capital, so this enforcement of the ban is non-existent. So Mashita Nagamori was sent to Tosa province as a government representative to bring the matter to a close. On arrival, he had some questions for the crew of the San Felipe. While talking with the pilot, Francisco de Olandia, which I couldn’t get verification on this, but just based on his name, I’m assuming this just means Francisco the Dutchman?
Taylor: Yeah, I kind of forget that a lot of these crews, like…just because they’re sailing under a Spanish flag, they’re not all Spanish.
Tanner: It seems like an odd name for a Spaniard to have, but, I don’t know, I could be wrong.
Taylor: Maybe his father was Dutch or something.
Tanner: Maybe. He had Dutch vibes about him.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So while talking with this pilot, Nagamori asked about where they’d come from, what their intentions were, and the extent to what was considered Spanish territory. So note that while all this is going on, the ship’s cargo is being loaded onto Japanese boats to be taken away…
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: …so like, that part is kind of decided already.
Taylor: I’m just picturing it being like a comedy movie, where they’re talking and like, right behind them you see the people unloading the ship.
Tanner: Yakety Sax is playing as he’s trying to hold on to crates and [inaudible]
Taylor: [laughs] right.
Tanner: So at some point in the conversation, the San Felipe’s pilot discussed the role of missionaries in the growth of Spain’s empire.
Taylor: Hmm. Uh-oh. [laughs]
Tanner: Allegedly he explained how first converting local populations made the full conquest of new lands easier. This is basically what had happened in the Philippines, you know, trying to start with the religious aspect and then kind of move in for the government side of things. Why he would have said this is not totally clear, it seems like a strange thing to bring up when you’re in this kind of precarious situation.
Taylor: It’s kind of like where you almost say too much, and you don’t even mean it in a bad way, like “oh no, no, we’re not doing that to you…”
Tanner: …right!
Taylor: “...but that’s what we do to the other people.”
Tanner: “We’ve done it to other people.”
[both laugh]
Tanner: Some sources explain that this was done kind of as a boast or a threat against the Japanese, ‘cause the crew weren’t being treated respectfully. Just trying to say “hey, well this is what we’re gonna do to you…”
Taylor: It sorta gives me a little bit of “but I’m an American” vibes. Like when you’re overseas.
Tanner: Yeah, I mean, you could say “but I’m a Spaniard” is kind of the equivalent of the day. Like, “you can’t do this to me, don’t you know who I am?”
Taylor: Yeah, “…he said to ISIS”. Like, you know what I mean? [laughs]
Tanner: This obviously set off some alarm bells for Mashita Nagamori since Christian missionaries were operating in the open and weren’t seen as a threat to the stability of Japan. At least by the people with the most power. Sure, there were people at court who really, really didn’t trust these people, maybe for good reason, and now he’s starting to see that.
Taylor: Yeah, I feel like it’s almost like fulfilling what the skeptical people said, you know what I mean? It’s like, “oh no, they were right to be suspicious.”
Tanner: Mm-hmm. Yep. So Nagamori’s last big question was about the relationship between Spain and Portugal. The Jesuits operating in Japan had always explained that Spain and Portugal were separate entities, separate governments, separate administrators, separate languages, everything is separate, everything’s different. That’s not technically a lie. As we talked about with the Iberian Union they all kept their stuff, especially in the earlier days of Christian presence in Japan when that Union wasn’t even in effect. However, the situation had changed. The pilot of the San Felipe probably didn’t think he was spilling any beans when he said that Spain and Portugal had the same king.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: Prompting the Japanese officials to go “…what?”
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So when this was reported up the ladder to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, this was kind of the last straw for him in what had been a growing suspicion of Christian operations in the country. “I don’t know who to trust, they’re telling me different things, they can’t even explain who is who and what’s going on here, why they’re here…probably best to just shut this whole thing down.”
Taylor: Yeah, this just seems like the classic series of unfortunate events, like misunderstandings and half-truths and half-understanding of things…
Tanner: …right.
Taylor: …and unfortunately, at the end of the day, the leader of Japan is like, “well I gotta do what I know, and this is bad.”
Tanner: Yeah, it’s like, “there’s just a lot of static going on here, I’m just gonna turn this off.”
Taylor: The vibes are really off on the San Felipe. [laughs]
Tanner: That kind of, more or less, brings to a close the ship aspect of this. The captain of the ship, he ended up going to Kyoto also to basically protest in person, saying “I want my ship back, and my stuff.” And they basically told him “we could just execute you as a pirate.”
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: “And who would know?” Basically. He picked up on what they were putting down, and they said “you can leave with your crew and your ship, whatever, we don’t care. We’ve got the stuff we want, get out of here.”
Taylor: Yeah, I feel like in the very beginning if they had been like “okay, take our stuff, let us fix our ship” would it have all just gone away? Like they really just wanted the stuff.
Tanner: Right, anything to cut down the amount of time the pilot was able to talk would have been a good thing.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So in the aftermath of the San Felipe incident, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of Christian missionaries in Japan. The Franciscans in particular would’ve been easy to find, as they preached a lot more openly, whereas the Jesuits were known for showing more discretion. And even among the Japanese, this distinction was noted, like, the Jesuits are kind of seen as a little bit more acceptable because they’re not making a big deal out of it, whereas the Franciscans, they show up later, they make a big deal out of it, they’re preaching in the open, they’re a little bit more intrusive, they’re the Ugly Americans of the day.
Taylor: [laughs] I think that’s interesting, because how hard would it have been to find these people in 1597? I just feel like any Spanish person in Japan, you’re like “yeah, you’re probably a missionary, right?”
Tanner: Mm-mm, yeah. You could definitely see how the border between secular and religious would be extremely hard to parse here. On February 5th, 1597, so this is about four months after the San Felipe was stranded on the Japanese coast, twenty-six Catholics were executed in Nagasaki…
Taylor: …interesting.
Tanner: …after a considerable amount of torture. Of these, eight were foreign Franciscans, so some of them were from Spain, one was from Portugal, one was from Mexico, seventeen of them were Japanese Christians who had converted, and three of them were Japanese Jesuits. So you can see the Jesuits have been in Japan long enough that there are native Japanese members of the order.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: Of those executed, one had been a passenger aboard the San Felipe. This was a Franciscan from Mexico who’s now venerated as Felipe de Jesús. Philip of Jesus.
Taylor: So he was on the vessel and they like, left him? When they left?
Tanner: Well, he was on the vessel and presumably before they allowed the ship to leave, [they made] sure that they had rounded up all of the missionaries. So the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan were all beatified in 1627 and ultimately canonized in 1862. They’re all considered full saints of the Catholic church.
Taylor: It’s just really crazy like, the interactions here. Like Spain and Japan in this time period. It’s almost like playing Civilization, you don’t even think these countries should be interacting, much less executing people and stuff.
Tanner: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: But also I feel like Japan must be in a pretty strong situation if the full might of the Spanish empire doesn’t come down upon them for this. ‘Cause like, Spain wasn’t shy about you know, this kind of stuff.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. And, we’ll talk a little more about it in the Wrap-Up section, but yeah, it’s interesting to see Spain having to deal with a nation that has a cohesive identity and foreign policy in place and takes decisive action to keep them out.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s interesting with Japan. Like there’s constantly these examples of them besting European powers, I mean, ask the Russians how that worked out for them. It’s just very interesting seeing that there’s not a lot of like non-Western nations if you will? And like Japan is one of them that’s collectively organized to be like a nation when it needs to be.
Tanner: And I think at this point in world history, you kinda have to put it in the context of well… what normally happens when European Christians show up somewhere? And kind of think, well, it’s probably not ideal, but… maybe just killing every Spanish person who shows up here is a good thing? If the Aztecs had done that, would that have worked out better for them?
Taylor: Right, yeah. It’s sort of like maintaining your own identity without being colonized, literally, right?
Tanner: Yeah, you kinda see this is the flip-side of that. What happens when those actions are taken? Coming out as softly pro-crucifixion here?
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: Depends on the situation. And yes, I don’t think I mentioned this, but those Twenty-Six Martyrs were executed via crucifixion.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s interesting that that’s what they chose. I can’t imagine that was a typical way of doing business in the Japanese empire, but…
Tanner: Yeah, you see a lot of shrewdness in what the Japanese choose to do to the Christians that they capture here and later on.
Taylor: Yeah, I feel like they clearly have an understanding of that, you know what I mean? You have to know a little bit about the religion to think up like, “oh yeah, let’s crucify ‘em.”
Tanner: Yeah, because there’s this incubation period of Christianity. It’s not a secret what the belief system is, it’s more or less understood, but uh, yeah. There we are.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s successor Tokugawa Ieyasu, he’s not initially antagonistic towards Christians, but he would ultimately ban them for good in 1614. This is interesting because it brings more European politics into this. This decision was helped along by the arrival of English and Dutch traders in Japan, who were very, very happy to tell horror stories about the atrocities that the Spanish empire had committed around the world…
Taylor: …mm-hmm.
Tanner: …you know, just to pull one over on their imperial rivals and their religious rivals, since those are both Protestant powers. Happy to share their negative views of the Spanish empire. So this ban on Christians would evolve into a ban on all foreigners in 1639, with very few exceptions. The Dutch were permitted access to the small trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki. A very cool novel dealing with that is called The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, it’s by David Mitchell. Phenomenal novel.
Taylor: That sounds interesting. It’s just not a time period I know much about.
Tanner: Yeah, it’s a great read; I highly recommend it. Christian missionaries continued to be smuggled into Japan, and they were continually captured, tortured, and martyred. If they didn’t choose to apostatize, which was always an option. However, it shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a religious persecution. We’ve kind of already discussed this. This isn’t for any doctrinal reasons that Christians are being targeted. Back in Europe, yeah, that was totally happening. We were still burning people ‘cause they didn’t believe that Christ literally turned into bread during communion back in Europe. Totally happening for doctrinal reasons. But here, this is a bit trickier, you know, at this time religion and government in many places, and especially in Spain, are pretty tightly bound together.
Taylor: Yeah, I feel like the religion is more incidental to it all, as far as the opposition from Japan. It’s just part of it.
Tanner: Yeah, and especially for the Japanese here, it would have been very difficult to parse out this influx of religious ideas from the infiltration of foreign political agents.
Taylor: Particularly if you’re just a practicer of Catholicism and you’re there to do trade, but you’re still religious. To them, how do they separate that out? It’s hard to parse those things.
Tanner: Yeah, and you can see that with some of the Japanese reaction to it…learning about Christianity and talking about “okay, so who’s the king of Spain? Okay, now who’s the Pope? What does the Pope do? Why does he matter?” Now that you’ve got all these foreign influences on your people, and you start to wonder “well, are they still loyal to me at all?”
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: So yeah, from their perspective, it probably appeared that this was one and the same. A Franciscan missionary could just as easily be an agent of the Spanish crown, and probably is.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So the incident highlights the rivalry between the religious orders who ostensibly share the same goal. Quoting here from Liam Brockey writing in the Catholic Historical Review: “The Jesuits had not only pioneered the mission to Japan, but had also sent the largest contingent of priests and brothers there, and by being the first to shed their blood on Japanese soil, the Franciscans gained a major publicity victory in Europe.” It’s interesting to talk about “publicity” when we’re talking about these things. The question was quite quickly raised over whether the Franciscans had any right to be in Japan at all, even implying that they had deliberately provoked the ire of the Japanese lords, putting the whole mission church at risk.
So this goes back to what I said about the Franciscan preaching style. Much more open, much more confrontational, especially in a country that has an official ban on it. So walking a very thin knife edge, assuming that you won’t be called on it. There’s one painting of this mass crucifixion by Jacques Callot from 1627, and this painting - I think the painting’s just called The Martyrs of Japan, but there’s a caption on this painting, and it says: “the portrait of the first twenty-three martyrs put upon crosses for their preaching of the holy faith.” Do you remember how many people were crucified?
Taylor: Uhh…more than twenty-three?
Tanner: Twenty-six. Do you remember how many of them were Jesuits?
Taylor: [laughs] … was it three?
Tanner: Three of them. So this painting, and the associated commentary, intentionally leaves out three of these people because they’re Jesuits. For the idea of wanting to promote “hey look what the Franciscans did in Japan.”
Taylor: It’s interesting that…honestly, I just would’ve assumed that they wouldn’t have included the Japanese people. If I was guessing, you know what I mean?...
Tanner: …oh right, right.
Taylor: …like, “oh, they were Christians but they were Japanese so we’re not gonna count them.” Like I’m a little surprised that he didn’t do that.
Tanner: And that’s the thing to remember here, is that while all of them are canonized, the names that are remembered are mostly the ones who were members of these orders. Even some of the Japanese who were crucified are Jesuits. The bulk of the people crucified were laymen, and they were native Japanese. That gets overlooked a lot in a lot of these religious persecutions. Kind of as intended by these religious orders, their people get the glory, get the notoriety for these things when by and large the bulk of the people suffering are lay people. So later the Dominicans and the Augustinians would get involved too, leading to almost quite literally a competition of who could get most martyred.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: I’m quoting from that same article here: “The Papacy was savvy about the competition between orders and keen to remind them of their subordinate place within the church hierarchy. Rome therefore deliberately turned its bureaucratic wheels very slowly, thus it was not until 1627, thirty years after their deaths, that the Franciscans and Jesuits who’d been crucified at Nagasaki, were beatified.” Basically the Pope doesn’t want people doing this just so that they can get martyred.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: So he’s saying if we canonize someone the year after that, more people are gonna do it, because they know it’s a guaranteed way to become a saint.
Taylor: It’s like the waiting period to get inducted into the Football Hall of Fame…
Tanner: …sort of!
Taylor: ..you can’t just do it right away.
Tanner: Yeah, or it’s [laughs] I thought of the South Park [episode] where Chef tells the boys that they shouldn’t be going around crucifying themselves.
Taylor: [laughs]
Tanner: That’s basically what the Pope is telling people. “You can’t do this, you have to actually do your job.”
So continuing here, this is from that same article: “It is one thing to exhort others to piety or even to send them on journeys around the globe, and another to encourage them to sacrifice their lives. But the cult of the Martyrs of Japan served precisely this end during the 1630s. All priests, brothers, or friars who made their way to Japan understood that their journey was one-way. There’s something deeply disturbing about the later martyrs of Japan. Their stories incited emulation, even when going to Nagasaki it would be not only futile, but suicidal. The cult of martyrs in early modern Catholicism evoked zeal potent enough to drive men around the world to certain death.”
Tanner: Reading that, again that was from the Catholic Historical Review, it really puts in perspective, you know, under this pressure of this persecution and having pretty much a guaranteed route to martyrdom, what it did to people’s minds.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: You had missionaries quite literally going to Japan basically with the expressed intention of getting martyred. And again, the church sees that and says “this is not the game we’re playing. Like, that’s not the goal. You have a job to do.” So yeah, it’s fascinating reading. It’s also interesting to see how it’s referred to. You see phrases like being “given martyrdom”, “receiving martyrdom”, being “gifted martyrdom”, you don’t hear about people “suffering martyrdom”.
Taylor: What it made me think of, actually, is the movie Paradise Now. I think there’s some of those same themes running through that almost. It’s a very different situation but that idea of like, being given martyrdom, you’re doing something so good that you should be happy to have this opportunity to be a martyr. Like in actuality, you’re probably being manipulated into doing something you shouldn’t do.
Tanner: And that’s the thing, I think. That’s why I think it’s important to read about some of these historical religious events because reading about some of the ways it’s talked about by the people participating, it’s what I think a modern American would associate with radical Islam. And I think seeing that in other contexts is important to see that anything can be manipulative. A young, impressionable person anywhere can be forced into doing something that they think they wanna do and think is helping, it’s not really unique to any particular group.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So the ban on Christianity would last officially until 1873 and the Meiji Constitution of 1889 guaranteed religious liberty in Japan. However, you know, that’s starting to get into where you start to see the rise of these hyper-nationalist groups in Japan, and that puts a lot of pressure on anything foreign, particularly religion. If you were a practitioner of Christianity in the late 1880s, early 1900s, sure you were technically free to do so, but there’s a lot of societal pressure against it if you’re not participating in the state religion of Shinto. The new Constitution, post-World War Two, removed any special status for Shinto beliefs and it separated the Japanese state from religion.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: In modern Japan, about one percent of the population, or 1-2 million people identifies as Christian in some form or denomination.
Taylor: I was doing a little reading about that earlier, and something that’s super interesting is that most weddings, like 60-70 percent of weddings in Japan, are actually Christian weddings because of…I’m kind of guessing, but I’m assuming it’s because it’s what you see in movies. Like, what do we export in America? We export culture, right? You wanna have the wedding like you see on TV, especially in Japan where you have a dominant middle class, upper-middle class, that has money to spend on those kinds of things. It’s just interesting that the idea of a Christian wedding is so appealing to such a large chunk of the population that isn’t Christian.
Tanner: Yeah, it’s interesting to look at it that way of how something kind of has a religious flavor to it even though that might not be the goal. You know, you don’t necessarily want a Christian wedding, but I want a wedding like in this movie, or whatever.
Taylor: Right, which it happens to be based on.
Tanner: Yeah, it’s very interesting to see that. So as a media tie-in, if this is a topic of interest to you, I cannot recommend enough the book and film Silence. The book is by Shūsaku Endō and it was published in 1966. The movie is by Martin Scorsese, that was released in 2016, and it’s got Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson. It’s a very good movie. It’s a very heavy piece of fiction, the book. It’s a quick read, it’s only about 200 pages. The movie is like a little under 3 hours, I think.
Taylor: Wow, they really…
Tanner: …depending on the reader, you could probably read the book faster than you could watch the movie.
[both laugh]
Tanner: A central question in the book…it deals a lot with personal convictions and suffering…one of the big questions that it raises is who suffers because of your actions? And at what point do those personal convictions that you have become irrational in the face of real world suffering happening in front of you, that you have some hand in. Something that you could potentially stop from happening.
Taylor: Interesting.
Tanner: It’s a very big piece of art, I would say, in terms of what it makes you think about. Yeah. So I mean, that’s our story. The shipwreck took up a little less of the episode, but it’s kind of the spark here in what we talked about.
Taylor: I think that’s what’s so interesting with shipwrecks as a whole, right? Like we talk about it, it’s kinda been part of human culture since we started sailing. You have these shipwrecks where the shipwreck is such a small thing but it sparks this massive shift in the way that religion and politics are handled in Japan all because this vessel shipwrecks there and because there’s a pilot that can’t stay quiet.
Tanner: A pilot who’s much better at piloting the ship than he is at shutting up.
Taylor: It is just really interesting what a prominent role that shipwrecks always seem to play in human history. That movement of people and goods enables these interactions that are so weird, and strange, and meaningful. So it is, it’s really cool to see how not every shipwreck is this detailed blow-by-blow account, but some of them have these broad-ranging blowback from these shipwrecks that’s super interesting.
Tanner: It takes me back to when we talked about the White Ship disaster and saying how, sure, in terms of shipwrecks it was a pretty deadly one, a lot of people died in it, but far more important is all of the people who died as a result of it in that ensuing Anarchy in England. So yeah, this is kinda the same thing, you know, the shipwreck itself, from what I saw, no casualties, I didn’t even see that anyone was even injured in any of the ship elements of this, but obviously it leads almost directly to the deaths of these twenty-six and then ultimately the deaths of hundreds more.
Taylor: I guess we can say for the Lessons Learned portion here is just don’t be a martyr. That’s bad. Don’t do it.
Tanner: Yeah, there’s probably a better way out. Or rather, if you are gonna be a martyr, make sure you’re doing it because you want to, not because you think that it’s gonna make you popular.
[both laugh]
Tanner: There’s a lot of related reading on this topic that I was able to find but not able to include, it was kind of a bloated episode as is, but I’ll share what I have in a public Patreon post if you wanna check that out. There’s a lot of cool reading there.
Taylor: Nice.
Tanner: Uh, so I guess as a wrap-up, just a little preview for what’s coming up. We have an exciting episode next week as Josie Spicer from A Hill to Die On and Australian Gothic podcasts is going to join us to talk about a maritime incident from Australia.
Taylor: Yeah, I’m excited for that. That’ll be fun.
Tanner: That should be a fun one.
Taylor: I will say if you haven’t listened to Australian Gothic, start with the Bluey episode if you have children. It’s really good, I listened to it last week, and yeah, it’s just really good. They talk about a lot of Australian culture and things like that, it’s just really interesting, it’s a well done podcast. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Tanner: Same for A Hill to Die On, I would say it’s kind of the way you wish conversations could be where you have an opinion on something and then you kinda take some time, think about what you’ve said, and then come back and reassess. It’s a very cool concept, both of those podcasts. The week after that episode, we’re actually going to be off for a week as we prepare for the largest endeavor that we’ve attempted on the show. Not to give away too much, but there’s a certain legend that has lived on starting from probably the Chippewa… and has come on down... So we’re gonna be doing some stuff that week to prep for our next episode that will definitely be a multi-part episode.
Taylor: Yes.
Tanner: We will be putting out bonus episodes at some point before the end of the month, probably another movie episode in addition to our new Dead Reckoning series.
Taylor: Yeah, that’ll be good.
Tanner: I think that’s everything we’ve got for today. Take care everyone, and we’ll talk to you next week.
[background audio of waves on shore]
Tanner: Thanks for listening to another episode of Beyond the Breakers. We love hearing from listeners, and if you’d like to get in touch with us, there’s a couple of ways you can do that:
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