Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, The Silence of the Sea, we found the ghost ship Mary Celeste adrift on the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years, many theories have been put forward to explain what happened to
the ship's ten crew and passengers. Today, despite the many other worldly explanations, the most popular theories tend to revolve around the nature of the cargo on board the vessel. It's been speculated that leaking vapors from the dnatured alcohol in the ship's hold might have scared Captain Briggs into thinking the vessel was about to explode. Terrified by the prospect of imminent catastrophe, the passengers may have taken to the lifeboat in a panic, only to later sink under
difficult conditions. Others have suggested that the vapors may even have caught fire at some point, but since only the gas would have been burned off, no evidence remained of anything untoward having taken place. However, it is unlikely we will ever have a definitive explanation for what occurred, and so the marriage Celeste is destined to remain forever adrift
on those inscrutable and unforgiving waves of maritime history. There is something uniquely evocative and even romantic about the notion of being lost at sea. I think this is due in part to the inevitable sense of isolation that such an event conjures up, but also the strange confluence of something as singular and dynamic as an animal being consumed and ultimately dissolved into something so impassive and amorphous as the sea, at least from the perspective of an animal
that lives above the water. That is, in writing the last episode, I was reminded of a story I heard many years ago about the artist bass Jarn Arda, who in nineteen seventy five attempted a solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from the US to the United Kingdom. Like many artists, Arda was determined for his work to get as close to eliminating artifice as possible, to leave only
the unadulterated truths of existence. Arda's earlier work played on the conflict between free will and determinism, the notion that all acts are the result of pre existing causes. One series of films in particular, based around the notion of falling, explored this idea explicitly recorded in the early seventies. The films depict Arda falling in different ways. Fall one Los Angeles has the artist sat in a chair on the roof of his house before tumbling uncontrollably to the ground.
Fall two Amsterdam shows Arda cycling along a canal in the Dutch city before turning the bike toward the water and cycling straight into it. As one critic, Alexander Damadzi noted in his book Bassian arda Death is Elsewhere, these were moments presented as ordinary occurrences that then become highly unusual, but also that they were intended to represent events that could not have unfolded differently. Nothing he could have done, notice or indecision on his part would have altered the
course of events. As also noted by the critic, Arda's friends often worried about the possible consequences of his determination to use art as a way to explore his philosophical ideas. For Arda, it seemed merely depicting them wasn't enough. What he ultimately wanted was to actualize them. It was an approach that may well have cost him his life. Bastian Johann Christian Arda was born on April nineteenth, nineteen forty two, to mother Johanna Arda Appel's and his father also called Bastian,
in Windscotton in the Netherlands. Arda was born during the height of the Second World War, with the Netherlands under German occupation. Both his parents were morally opposed to Adolf Hitler's government and were active members of the Dutch Resistance. Using Arda's father's position as a Calvinist minister, Arda's parents are thought to have helped somewhere between two to three hundred Jewish compatriots escaped the Holocaust, often using their home
to help hide them. In nineteen forty four, while away in central Netherlands, Bastian Arda was arrested by the German army on one late November night. He was taken into the woods along with six other prisoners to face a firing squad. Arda demanded that he be killed last, so he might comfort his fellow prisoners before their death. After watching each of them being shot in the head right
in front of him. He is said to have then met his own fate with the strength of conviction that haunted his eldest son for the rest of his life. It is not hard to see where perhaps Arda's fascination with fate, determinism, and free will might have sprung up from considering these brutal early experiences. After the war, Bassian's mother moved him and his baby brother Eric to drybalk
where they grew up. Arda struggled with the discipline of school and rebelled against his mother's wishes for him to follow in his father's footsteps and become a minister. Instead, he renounced his faith and turned his attentions to art. At eighteen, he traveled to America and spent a gear studying in Washington, d c. Before eventually finding his way to Los Angeles, where in nineteen sixty five he met his wife, Mary Sue, a frequent collaborator in his work.
Though Arda had exhibited his work throughout the sixties, it wasn't until his first series of Fall films, shown in nineteen seventy one that he began to make his mark in the emerging Los Angeles art scene at the time. In nineteen seventy three, Arda began work on a piece which was intended to be a triptych called in Search
of the Miraculus. The initial part, consisting of fourteen to eighteen photographs, was titled In Search of the Miraculus One Night in Los Angeles and was first exhibited in November nineteen seventy four. Together, the black and white stills depict the nocturnal meander through the city in each which can be found either upfront and obvious, or hidden somewhere in
the shadows, a darkly clad ardor shining a flashlight. The final photo reveals a haunting image of Arda standing in fuzzy isolation on a beach, seemingly cut off from the bright lights and life of the city just visible in the distance behind him. Shortly after making the photos, Arda seemed to lose interest in his work and took up
a teaching post in the University of California. Some concerned by his diminishing output, speculated that Arda had reached an impass in his work and that he thought it had become too routine and formulaic. It was around this time that Arda began planning for the second part of In Search of the Miraculous. This part would take the form of an ambitious journey in which he would sail on his own from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cornwall in England.
Though some have suggested otherwise, Arda was in fact a very accomplished sailor, having learned to sail from a very early age growing up in the Netherlands. At nineteen, after hitchhiking to Morocco, Arda befriended a man named Neil Birkhead, who was looking for a crewmate to help him sail to California. Arda jumped at the opportunity, and together they successfully completed the eleven thousand mile journey, arriving months later after a series of life threatening disasters, all of which
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get started. That's teladoc dot com Slash Unexplained podcast. In nineteen seventy four, Bassian Arda accepted an offer to put on an exhibition at the Groninger Museum in Groningen in the Netherlands. The show, which was seen by Arda as the perfect opportunity to conclude his in Search of the Miraculous project, was scheduled for the autumn of the following year.
By now, the artist was deep in preparation for his trip, studying flows of currents, possible weather patterns and reacquainting himself with all the necessary nautical charts. Although his efforts to find sponsorship failed and the costs quickly escalated, Arda plowed on regardless, asking the few friends that knew about his journey to keep it a secret until he had successfully completed the trip. In June, he purchased a twelve and
a half foot long Guppy thirteen sailing boat. Despite its small size, it was well designed for overnight sailing and open water, made from molded fiberglass, which was able to right itself in case of capsize. Arda named the boat ocean Wave, after the old sea shanty a life on the Ocean Wave. Over the next few weeks, Arda had the boat modified, strengthening the rigging and washboards, as well as securing the life line that would keep him attached to it if he should fall out at any point.
Next he stockpiled all the necessary food and water that he would need to complete his journey, and by the end of the month his preparations were complete. Having told family and friends that he hoped to arrive in the Ukue at some point in September, he and his wife Mary Sue, along with Ocean Wave, made their way to
Chatham in Massachusetts. After writing a couple of letters and postcards to a couple of European galleries announcing his departure and imminent arrival, At two p m. On July ninth, nineteen seventy five, Arda waved good bye to his wife. Moments later, he and Ocean Wave were towed out of the harbor and disappeared into the horizon. After seeing her husband off in Cape cod, mary Sue traveled to the Netherlands,
hoping to be there for his arrival. By early September, however, Arda had yet to appear, and mary Sue was forced to return home due to a work commitment. Arda's failure to appear at this point was not a huge concern, since it wasn't unusual for such journeys to take up to one hundred and fifty days to complete. Such facts were little comfort for his friends and family, however, eagerly
awaiting any sign that he was okay. The fact that he had deliberately resisted taking a communications device and was using only a sextant and maps to navigate with only served to exacerbate their anxiety, and as the weeks went by, still with no trace, of Arda anywhere. It was beginning to dawn on those closest to him that something terrible had gone wrong with the artists planned show in Groningen, having long ago been postponed. By December, he had still
yet to appear. In response, Mary Sue alerted all appropriate authorities to let them know that her husband was missing at sea. Despite the British Coast Guard carrying out two sweeping searches, they found nothing of Arda or his boat. In April the following year, a Spanish fishing vessel traveling just south of Ireland and to the west of the southern coast of England came across an eerie and incongruous site.
It was a small sailing ship partially submerged, with its hull standing up vertically in the water after hauling a boat onto the trawler. A quick search of it revealed some spoiled tins of food among other paraphernalia, as well as a damaged Dutch passport belonging to Baste Johann Christian Arda.
There was no sign of the man himself anywhere. It wasn't long after Arda's disappearance and likely death that the story of his ill fated trip hit the news, with his boat having been taken back to Spain, where it was later stolen. Spanish naval authorities speculated that an explosion on board might have forced Arda to evacuate it. His brother Eric, however, suspected he might just have been knocked overboard in a heavy storm, with his lifeline having then
been ripped away from the boat. Some believed that the artist, who is thought to have been struggling with a number of personal issues at the time, might have either faked his own death or indeed committed suicide. However, both his wife and his other friends were adamant this was not his intention or frame of mind before he set off.
In the end, we are left with the uncomfortable question was Bassian Arda's final peace in search of the Miraculous, as some suggest, unfinished, or had it in fact been completed. Having accepted that Arda was dead. Later in nineteen seventy six, his mother, Yohanna, held a memorial service in his honor while her son was away at sea in the midst of his journey. Johanna has said that she received a premonition of his death coming to her as if telepathically
in the form of a poem. On the night of October twelfth, nineteen seventy five, from the deep waters of sleep, I wake up to consciousness. In the distance. I hear a train rumbling in the early morning. It is going east and passes the border. Then it will stop. I feel my heart beating too. It will go on beating for some time, then it will stop. I wonder if the little heart that has beaten with mine has stopped when he passed the border of birth. I laid him
at my breast, rocked him in my arms. He was very small. Then, a white body of a man rocked in the arms of the waves is very small too. What are we in the infinity of ocean and sky, a small baby at the breast of eternity? Have you heard of happiness springing from a deep well of sorrow, of love springing from hayne and despondency, agony and death? Such is mine. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now go
to Unexplained podcast dot com forward slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements have Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
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