Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's other Josh who's basically fast becoming. He's gunning at Jerry's heels. I would say, Chuck. When't you agree? Well, I think at the very least he's the new Frank the chair. For sure. He may soon be the new bird, the bobbing bird. Oh that's right. Yeah. At any rate, we're glad Josh is here, and we just almost two inanimate objects. Exactly. We just ate up about a third of our time. So let's we're gonna have to remove
the ending from this one. Okay, Yeah, this one is interesting because I read the original New York Times piece from nineteen o five or whatever, la la very different than the story we get here in a lot of ways. So I can't wait to who knows, Let's just I'll just point out what the New York Times article said compared to what we have in front of us. Do it like a cranky I T guy when I say something,
just be like wrong? Well, who knows? It is New York Times, But I don't know what There's andreds were like in nineteen five. I don't know either, right, Um, So there's this this article from How Stuff Works that we found um does a really good job of of of placing this in context in the world and saying that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vershka, which means tree which gives all that is necessary for living, which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot
about what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying, you don't need anything else but this one tree. That's how great this tree is. Yeah, and that's also just a slightly fancier way than saying Webster's defines a little blank a little bit. It's it's definitely fancier, for sure. It's it's got like cursive everywhere. But the whole point is it, coconuts m m are pretty fun and good to eat
and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It is it turns out that the sans Christs were saying is quite wrong, like it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist
on coconuts. And there was actually a guy who was born in eighteen seventy five named August Engelhardt who who basically proved that inadvertently it wasn't his intention to prove that the Sanskrit term was wrong, but um, he actually took it to heart, um and and tried to live exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed was coconuts and sunlight. And uh ended up living on I don't want to say deserted island, but certainly a
sparsely populated island. Um living and dying there to to spoil the ending. Yeah, yeah, this is uh interesting mostly to me because it was when it happened. He was born in eighteen seventy Like, if this happened in the nineteen seventies would be like, sure, of course this happens
all the time. But this guy was born in eighteen seventy five in Germany, and then after college sort of became uh well there's a lot of debate and whether or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that, he became very much into the Laban's Reform, which is life reform movement. Basically what you would think of these days is like a very sixties hippie American thing they were doing, I guess in Germany in the you know,
early twentieth century. Yeah, I took it to be kind of like a prototype for Goop, for who for Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's site. Oh good lord, Yeah, that's that's kind of I mean, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and what you could find on like some of the sites that Coop endorses and coop itself, especially if you take into account this book that he wrote, Um, it sounds a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days.
You got sand Coop Coop so in he wrote a book, uh called a care Free Future colon the New Gospel Semicolon. That's rare glimpse into the depth and distance for the selection of mankind, comma comma for the reflection of all comma for consideration and stimulation. And he should have just put an exclamation point at the end, just over all spaces. He missed that Oxford comma after consideration though. But it
was a kind of a cookie book. He talked about life, his lifestyle and what you know he believed his version of the Laban's reform was. And then he also wrote poems about coconuts. Yeah, like mother Coconut, The Coconut Spirit, How to Become a Coconut. Those were titles of some of the poems and tracks that he included in this book. And like, it's really hard to overstate just how much faith this guy placed in the coconut as the source of not just life but health. And um it was based.
It was based on some somewhat unfounded ideas. So it tied in very much with an idea that he had that the sun was the source of all life in the universe, and that coconuts grew on coconut palms um toward the top, just like the brain in the human head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun, coconuts are closest to the sun. Ergo the coconut can care for the brain and everything else you need in life.
And um, that was it. Yeah, that probably would have been the end of his story had he not had a substantial amount of money. Uh. I was about to say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative, so he had some cash. All of a sudden, he bought a hundred and eighty five acres of land on a tiny little island called kabakan Um off of Papa what is now known as Papua New Guinea, and he took a long books, got rid of most of his clothes and went out there and lived um by himself.
Well not by himself because there uh, there are indigenous peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only white German there right. And his whole jam was that he he had either heard or figured out that that humans had evolved in the subtropics, between Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. And that's what we were basically evolved too, That's where we were evolved to be. So the idea of living in like a house and driving a car eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet,
but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. Um. The idea of just basically living in a boxing, cubicalized, stuffy life. It was and athetical of how we were designed by evolution or natural selection or even God if that's your bag, right, And so he moved to this island so that he could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts, living how This guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live.
And from what I can tell, he fully expected to basically be free of all disease and any kind of terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way that it ended up at all. No, because, first of all, coconuts, you cannot live on coconut alone. Um. They do have a lot of good stuff in there. They have good carbs and fat and stuff like that, but they lack a lot of vitamins, notably B twelve, B six A K,
calcium um and protein. There's a little bit of protein, about three to three grams or so, uh, but that's that's not very much protein. So if you're gonna eat enough coconuts to supply your body, and he was about five ft eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly less as time went on, Obviously he would have had to been eating, you know, between fourteen and eighteen coconuts
a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean, if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked on an island, reading some books, you got time to eat fourteen to eighteen coconuts a day. So he could have, but it's not clear that he knew he needed to eat that amount. And it's also not clear that he
would have responded to that information. So he didn't and he started to wither away, which, as you said, um, probably would have been the end of the story had this guy actually not managed to convince other people through his book and then through correspondence with them to come join them. And so people started to show up on this island. And we'll talk about what happened after that after this. Alright, So this this is where the New
York Times story has diverged already. Okay, they wrote an article and everyone, if you don't know that The New York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written, uh scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's uh. So there was an article failure of a womanless Eden in the Pacific Dash, a strange story from the South seas. As the New York Times tells it, only two people joined the Sona Norton cult the Order of the Sun
cult um. This article that we have says, and I'm inclined to go with ours, because you know, investigative journalism has gotten better since nineteen UM. But the New York Times set a boat showed up in the end that he was thought was going to be full of like twenty people and there was only two guys. Uh. The rest of the people got worried that the island was
full of cannibals and decided not to show up. Which if that's wrong, it sounds like it was completely made up by the by the writer, because our thing says that about fifteen people showed up, uh and took their clothes off, and we're basically like, let's do this. Um. They did agree on the two two dudes though one one guy's name was Einrich Yukin's. He was four years old, he was a vegetarian, and he was away down with this, uh. And the other was very famous person actually um or
at least medium famous in Germany at the time. Um, that's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzow and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of the Lutzeu Orchestra in Berlin. Right. So, so Yukin's and lets ou basically showed up, from what I understand, and said, we're here, Um, we're very enthusiastic for this. Let's see some coconuts. They took their clothes off, they started to
live this way. Um. But there were two big problems for for um Yukon's It was that he his body did not take to this diet despite from what I understand, being a vegetarian, if not a vegan ahead of time. Right, Still, the coconuts got him. Maybe had an allergy, maybe he got too much sign who knows, but he died. This article from how Stuff Works puts that he dropped dead within weeks of showing up and starting this this coconut subsistence. New York Times confirms that, okay, good, all right, so
we've got a fact. We've we've unearthed the fact here too. It's double double sourced, um unless our house stuff Works article used that New York Times as a source. That's how facts get generated. And then the other guy loots out the conductor. He was doing fine and apparently he got along with um August angel Heart, the leader of this cult. But um he also they had they had varying tastes in music, and that actually created a bit of tension between the two. Yeah, apparently, let's out. I'm
sorry Inglehart hated but Set. I think let's love but Set. And it says that lets brought his music collection. The only thing I can figure is that he brought over he was a violinist as well. That he brought a violin, I don't know. He could have probably one of those cranky gramophones maybe, you know, or maybe a bird with a beak like Flintstone style, or maybe a person dressed like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah, maybe he did bring records. Uh, I mean, Augus Inglehart
brought books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player. So maybe that's what happened. But they they got the way The New York Times described it as they started getting into arguments about music. Uh. And because it was just the two of them, according to that article, it you know, it's gonna get a little crazy after a while. And looks I was like, I don't want to spend the night hit next to you tonight. Um And he applied for permission, supposedly with Inglehart, to go spend the
night on a missionary boat that was nearby. Um at one of the other it was a bunch of islands around, and I guess Inglehart granted him this. He went on board this boat, he spent the night. He would refuse to eat any of the food that they had and apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting back to his coconut paradise, and he died. Yes, he died.
And if there were so, if two people showed up of the visitors died, but even if there were more in this house stuff works articles, right, because this guy carried this guy, August Engelhardt, he carried on even after these two deaths, um for more than a decade beyond that that New York Times articles. So maybe more people
showed up afterward, and that accounts for the discrepancy. But as this how stuff Works article tells it, um, more people showed up, More people died from things like the hydration, heat stroke. Um. And then this one, this is tough to swallow. If it is true, then there is a creator God who does take pleasure in and and messing with us. But somebody died from being hit by a coconut. Somebody in the coconut worshiping cult died from being killed
or died from a coconut injury. Which happens, Sure it does, it does, But I mean imagine traveling from Germany in the nineteenth century early twentieth century, showing up to eat nothing but coconuts and then dying because of coconut hit you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic. So um August Engelhardt himself died too, but he hung on for a really long time, considering he had the true grit of somebody who really would have just eating
eaten coconuts. From what I can tell, yeah, I mean, there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time from people who, uh, I guess we're nearby, and he he looked awful. He looked like he would expect someone to look. They describe him as a bearded bag of bones. There were lesions on his body. It was clear that
he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York Times tells it, he eventually was one of these missionary boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto a boat, where he fought them physically as best he could while they tried to care for him. It's probably not not much now, until he jumped off the boat to swim back to the island where he died. According to our article and perhaps further you know, more accurate research,
he he did go on that boat. He was kind of nurse back to semi health and then left again, went back to the island. Um survived until nineteen fourteen, and then because of World War One, he was captured as a prisoner of war. Released from camp when they realized he was mentally ill, They're like, wait, what is this about coconuts? You're saying uh? And he carried on apparently until nineteen nineteen, when he died at the age
of forty four, weighing less than seventy pounds. So this guy did this for like maybe years ish, Yeah, I mean eighteen years. That's impressive. Man. Hats off to this guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story of August angle Heart. You can learn more about him
on How Stuff Works. They wrote this article. I also want to just throw my two cents in and say I would put pretty decent money on the idea that angle Heart spent at least a significant amount of time married to a coconut on the island probably, so uh. Well with that, everyone, we bid you adieu from short Stuff. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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