The Semmelweis Museum in Budapest, Hungary is one of the city’s most rewarding little hidden treasures. Located on a small side street on the Buda side of the Danube (the bustling city side, Pest, lies on the other), the museum can be difficult to find, but is well worth the effort. The small medical museum is housed in the former home of the doctor Ignác Semmelweiss, who discovered the importance of washing one’s hands after surgery. He was deemed the “Mothers’ Savior” because he realized that doctors were delivering babies after preforming surgery. Parts of the corpses from other surgeries got into the blood stream of the mothers, causing blood poisoning. Sometimes more than 30% of delivering mothers would die in a month when delivered by doctors, as opposed to 3% by midwives. At his insistence, doctors were made to wash their hands after every procedure at Semmelweis’ hospital, saving hundreds of lives.

Here are a few mummified objects, just a small example of the wondrous plethora to be found at this often overlooked museum.

Mummified Woman’s Crippled Foot

Mummified Falcon

Well-Preserved Mummified Head

Semmelweis Flickr Set

There is something inherently creepy about automata. Moving, yet un-living little people, their vacant eyes staring into nothing as they perform their set of actions over and over. They occupy that uncomfortable space known as the uncanny valley, a space between life and non-life, inciting a flurry of crossed signals in our brains. Cuteness and creepiness share a border. This ill-ease with automata, robots, and moving dolls is evidenced in the many horror movies staring living dolls or toys as killers: Chucky, Dolly Dearest, Demonic Toys, Puppet Master. This is no new concept either; the Golem, Frankenstein, the sculpture brought to life in Pygmalion, all are part of our fascination and repulsion with things brought to life by human hands. There is a place, not far from New York, where you can see rooms full of these moving, life-like yet lifeless dolls: New Jersey.

When you think of New Jersey, a world-class collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind. Yet that is exactly what we found in Morristown, NJ at the Morris Museum.

Most of the museum, a catchall establishment for art, science, theatre and history, is somewhat spare, but the permanent exhibition Musical Machines & Living Dolls is worth the visit alone. The strange setting for this incredible collection is due one passionate collector’s lifetime of acquisition which he donated to the Morris Museum. With over 700 antique mechanical figures and machines, the collection is one of the largest in the world on public display.

The museum does a nice job displaying these fragile, if eerie, machines. Short films show the more delicate automatons in action and a daily demonstration displays some of the less delicate pieces. Beautiful and strange automatons line the walls behind glass cases, in sumptuous dress, with bright faces. Those that do not fit in the gallery are on display in the basement, a storeroom of lonely un-wound figures behind two panes of glass for curious visitors to peer at.

From dancers to clowns, elephants to crocodiles, the automatons range widely in shape, size and function. Among the automata there were a few strange looking automata that very much stood out: the monkeys.

Though largely lost on passing schoolchildren and tourists at the Morris Museum, these monkeys were once a scathing critique on French aristocracy. There is a monkey on a early sort of bicycle called a velocipede, a monkey harpist, a monkey violinist, two small monkey musicians, and an incredible monkey dandy under a large glass dome. All are dressed in fine silks with hair done up in the style of French Royalty. These automata were a post-French-revolution joke on the former rulers and current dandies of France. So popular was the theme of foolish aristocratic monkeys that it was common in French homes, and whole rooms were decorated around the theme.

One such room is the Chateau de Chantilly’s Monkey Room in Paris, France. From the article, “In the mid-1730s the artist Christophe Huet (1700-1759) was commissioned by Louis-Henri, the duke of Bourbon, to paint scenes with monkey vignettes on the walls of an elegant white Rococo salon with gilded stucco ornaments. By 1737, Huet had decorated nearly every surface (paneled walls, doors and ceiling) with a complex allegorical design in which monkeys, fashionably dressed, are depicted in aristocratic pursuits: boar hunting, drinking chocolate, doing their hair, dancing and singing. While the monkeys are charming, they also gently mocked the nobles they represented.”

The use of monkeys to poke fun at the rich wasn’t always restricted to art, and often the rich joined in on the fun. “In the early 1700s it was fashionable for aristocrats to keep monkeys as pets. They dressed the monkeys in fancy outfits for comic effect and taught them human tricks, like pickpocketing, that they would display on leisurely walks around Versailles.” Little dressed up versions of humans, stealing treats from the lavish banquet spreads.

In the case of both monkeys in fancy outfits kept by the rich, and monkey automata made to mock the rich (no doubt there is an automata of a aristocratic monkey holding his pet monkey out there) humans seem to have an innate need to create iterations of ourselves. No matter the ill-ease it can create, we like to see versions of ourselves doing the things we do in real life. As primates ourselves, we still delight in repeating and mirroring actions we see others do, and having others repeat our own actions back to us, even if only in toy monkey form. As they say “monkey see, monkey do.”

Morris Museum Automata Flickr Set

We are very excited and humbled that our Brooklyn apartment was recently featured on Apartment Therapy!

The Sibiu Pharmacy Museum in Sibiu, Romania, is housed in a 1569 Gothic townhouse where the oldest pharmacy in Romania operated for over 150 years. The pharmacy was known as La Ursul Negru (The Black Bear), and likely looked nothing like this. While the museum has a vast collection of chemistry instruments ranging from the 15th century to the 19th, this beautiful pharmacy reconstruction dates from the 18th century.

The wooden Viennese counters, rows of ceramic and wooden jars, and walls of carefully labeled drawers for herbs may not be entirely Romanian, but a back room dedicated to Homeopathy is. The room is in honor of Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy. Hahnemann is believed to have come up with many of his early ideas that lead to homeopathy in Sibiu, Romania.

Bright Prussian blues, pasty greens, muted periwinkles, rich aquas and pale violets; yet they are all one color, united by a name and an ancient tradition.

Haint Blue originated in the deep American South. Today, in cities and towns throughout the south, one will find these blues and greens tints on shutters, doors, porch ceilings and windowsills, gracing many historic homes. The pretty blues and greens compliment any grand old Victorian mansion, but the first painted strokes of Haint Blue adorned not the homes of the rich, but the simple shacks of African slaves.

Known as the Gullah or Geechee people, the original Haint Blue creators were descendants of African slaves who worked on rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Many of their ancestors came from Angola, which may be where the name “Gullah” originated. They are well-known for preserving their African heritage more than any other African American community. They kept alive the traditions, stories, and beliefs of their ancestors, including a fear of haints.

Haints, or haunts, are spirits trapped between the world of the living and the world of the dead. These are not your quiet, floaty, sorrowful ghosts, they are the kind you don’t want to mess with, and the kind you certainly don’t want invading into your humble abode looking for revenge. Luckily, the Gullah people remembered an important footnote to the haint legend. These angry spirits have a kryptonite; they cannot cross water. The safest place would be in an underwater bubble, or perhaps to surround your house with a moat. But the Gullah people had a much more elegant solution. They would dig a pit in the ground, fill it with lime, milk, and whatever pigments they could find, stir it all together, and paint the mixture around every opening into their homes. The haints, confused by these watery pigments, are tricked into thinking they can’t enter.

D and I recently spent a wonderfully southern weekend in Savannah, Georgia, one of the spookiest cities in the United States. Haunted pub crawls and candlelit cemetery tours are popular and fun, but the subtle blues and greens framing doors and windows are a much creepier incantation of the spirit world. Through the thick drapes of Spanish moss, hints of color peek through, always reminding you that the inhabitants of these homes are protecting themselves from the unrested dead all around. And no wonder Savannah should be a popular place to retire as an unhappy spirit. One of the few cities that was spared during the Civil War (Savannah was given to President Lincoln as a Christmas present from General Sherman, and thus spared being razed to the ground as so many other southern towns), Savannah is of another time. Huge old trees lean and reach toward the ground along the sidewalks, and imposing old mansions with the family name engraved over the door are still dotted with gas street lamps casting a flickering light on the house’s haint blue trim.

The milky blue color is said to have another advantage besides making a home ghost-proof; insects seem to be repelled by this protective hue. While some speculate that insects perceive the blue color as a never-ending sky, and so don’t understand that they can settle there, the more likely reason is the lime content in the paint. Insects generally tend to avoid lime. Today, in places far-flung from its southern roots, the tradition of Haint Blue lives on as a popular color choice for porch ceilings. The reason is based on the idea of an extending sky and a calming effect, but to us, the safeguarding defense of the Gullah’s Haint Blue against evil makes the southern version a far more fascinating color.

If you are in the New York area on July 10, please join us at Observatory for our first Curious Expeditions event!

Date: Friday, July 10
Time: 7:30
Admission: $3.00

Curious Expeditions Presents: Antique Science

An evening of unexpected and obscure nature films. Each short film will be introduced by Jessica Oreck, director of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a beautiful documentary on insect collecting in Japan.

The evening will feature the trailer for Oreck’s fascinating film, as well as short films by Jean Painleve, the great french nature documentarian of early avant-garde documentaries on everything from crystals to seahorses to vampire bats.

Then we’ll have a look at The Cameraman’s Revenge, a silent stop-motion film from 1912 by the Polish animator, Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965). The leading players of this short animation are real insects.

Antique Science will also introduce you to a behind-the-scenes film documenting the techniques of Disney’s vintage nature films. The films of insect-life and plant time lapses are beautiful, the early filming techniques awe-inspiring, and the 1950s naturalist couples who made them adorable.

We’ll round the evening off with a outtake reel from one of our favorite nature hosts, plus a few other surprises, time warranting.

A fantastic array of skulls, each a different shape and size, adorn the facade of the Belgrade Cathedral in Szentendre, Hungary. The otherwise relatively cheerful Baroque-Rococo red cathedral was completed in 1764 and was the seat of the Serbian Orthodox bishop in Hungary. Szentendre was home to many Serbians at the end of the 17th century who had fled the Turks.

Belgrade Cathedral Flickr Set

For all of our artistic readers, D and I are on the judging panel for a poster contest! The contest is for the wonderful documentary, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, directed by friend of Curious Expeditions, Jessica Oreck. Oreck’s film “delves into the ineffable mystery of Japan’s age-old love affair with insects. A labyrinthine mediation on nature, beauty, philosophy and Japanese culture might just make you question if your ‘instinctive’ repulsion to bugs is merely a trick of western conditioning.”

The contest is to design a poster for this beautiful and fascinating film about insects and Japanese culture. The winner will receive $350, a bunch of prizes, and a chance to design further ephemera for the film. Entering the contest also entitles you to an exclusive look at the film, you lucky duck, you.

More information on entering can be found at Designer Daily, where the contest is being hosted.

A few weeks ago Curious Expeditions made a trip out to the Newark Museum in New Jersey, specifically to see the installation, Insecta Fantasia, by artist Jennifer Angus. What we found was far beyond our expectations. After walking through very typical museum halls - high ceilings, bright and airy, you suddenly find yourself stepping into a dark 19th century mansion. The Newark Museum was built right up against the Ballentine House, and the Museum restored the elegant abode to its original dark wood and horror vaccui (fear of empty space) style. This fear of empty space is often seen in Victorian homes - pictures covering every inch of wall, furniture and carpets covering all available floor space, murals and moulding on the ceilings, objects crowding every surface, elaborate window coverings and stained glass in the windows. There is no place for the weary eye to rest; just how we here at Curious Expeditions like it.

It is fitting location for artist Jennifer Angus to show her work. Nestled within the Ballentine House, Angus has taken two rooms, the former rooms of the two Ballentine children, and covered them in insects. From a distance it looks like wallpaper, but upon closer inspection, the walls have been covered in thousands of precisely pinned bugs. Giant pink grasshoppers, perfect replicas of leaves and iridescent jewel beetles all swarm the walls in orderly geometric patterns.

Around the room beautiful octagonal shadow boxes hold scenes of insects, while cabinets display carefully pinned and labeled specimens and display cases hold wax dioramas in which insects play out fairytale scenes. In these two rooms, Angus imagines that young Percy and Alice Ballentine were perhaps amatuer entomologists, and their collections have completely taken over their rooms. The Victorian obsession with amassing, collecting, and displaying is evident, and the art both melds with, and is dissonent from the surroundings.

The soothing beauty of geometric patterns draws you in, instilling a sense of comfort in the ordered, but upon closer inspection, the very fabric of the wallpaper is breathtakingly beautiful. Angus creates a frame in which we can take a moment to appreciate the artistry of Mother Nature. The installation is up only until June 14th, and it’s well worth any effort it takes to get there to see Insecta Fantasia.

Curious Expeditions had to know more about the person responsible for such wondrous rooms. So we asked her, and Jennifer Angus generously agreed to answer some of our questions. So without further ado, Jennifer Angus!

What are some of your inspirations?
In particular I draw inspiration from the Victorian era. It was a time of travel, collecting and very dubious taste. In my mind the elephant’s foot umbrella stand is the quintessential item that defines the period because it is exotic yet grotesque. I also feel inspired by taxidermist Walter Potter who lived during this period. He created over the top scenes in which animals were anthropomorphized to enact scenes such as the kitten wedding and the rabbit school room. They are absolutely amazing but rather horrible too. I suppose that more than anything I try to channel an aesthetic in which there is no such thing as too much!

What artists do you draw inspiration from?
I tend to look at historical periods and other cultures for inspiration rather than other artists. That said I do have a list of artists I identify with. Petah Coyne’s waxworks are amazing in their detail. I love the way the work evokes a feeling of the grotesque and the macabre.

I am a big fan of the collaborative team of Nicholas Khan and Richard Selenick. I enjoy the nostalgia of another era and really engaging narrative that emerges in their work. I saw their show World’s Discovered at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. In one work modern day astronauts chance upon an Edwardian era space crew. It’s absurd but almost believable. The same is true with the story they created around an iceberg hitting land and how a town adapts to this mountain of ice suddenly thrust upon them. They created supposed artifacts from the era as well as photo documentation. I love stories so this work is very appealing to me. I also enjoy the other worldly quality in the work. It’s something I am trying to create in my work too.

For the same reason I enjoy the work of Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz. Their snow globe worlds are disturbing, surreal and absolutely compelling.

Read more »

Every now and again on the site we have alluded to working on a large upcoming project…well here it is! We are extremely proud to present to our readers “The Atlas Obscura,” started by myself and Josh Foer (founder of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and all-around polymath) it aims to be  “A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica.” or in simpler terms “A Guide to World’s Most Unusual Places.”

It has a while coming but it is finally ready (well, mostly, we are still in Beta and plan to continue changing and improving the site throughout the year) to show the world. One of the most important things about the Atlas and one way in which it differs from Curious Expeditions as well as other curiosities and travel blogs is that it is (a la wikipedia) a user generated site. One of the first things we realized about the site was that to make an Atlas of wonderous places and have it be really great, the kind we would want to use,  we could never do it alone! This is where you, the readers of Curious Expeditions come in!

The Atlas Obscura depends on a community of far-flung explorers, including you, to find and write about the world’s wonders and curiosities. If you have been to, know of, or have heard about a place that belongs in the Atlas Obscura, (and I know you have because sometimes you write me about them!) we want you to tell us about it. We are looking for those out-of-the-way places that are singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange, the kind of places that Curious Expeditions has so much fun going to. Examples include an Icelandic phallological museum, an enormous castle built by one man, and a 300 meter hole in the middle of the desert that has been burning for 35 years. Of course, it need not be this exotic, many of the best places in the Atlas are little local museums and oddities, a wonder may very well be in your own backyard.

Anyone and everyone is welcome and encouraged to nominate places for inclusion, and to edit content already in the Atlas. We would love for you to come by, take a look around, give us any comments about what you like/dislike and if you like what you see, and sign up a user profile! We are exceedingly proud of the Atlas and hope you enjoy it as well. Yours in Curious Expeditions, D and M

Hand and Books (Handbooks?)

The Paris Market shop in Savannah Georgia is one of the most aesthetically pleasing shops we’ve ever come across. The shop owners take their cues from the English countryside, London wharfs, the famous Portobello Road, and the flea market high style of Hungary, Holland, and Belgium…with a dash of 15-19th century natural history thrown in for good measure.

Natural History Curios

19th century Belgian Carnival Mask Noses

Insects, Antlers, and a Goat

Whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian, religious relics- the human remnants of those worshiped by the faithful- have been venerated objects for millennia. Be they Buddhist mummies, Muslim objects like Moses’ staff and hair from Mohammed’s beard, or the bones and mummified remains of Christian saints, these objects of revere are an inexorable part of religious worship.

Still today, monasteries, cathedrals, treasuries and holy places all over the world hold vast collections of cherished relics. These fragments of bone, hair, tooth and miscellanea were never simply religious decoration. They provided a physical comfort to those surrounded by the intangibility of god and the devil, and also were believed to hold miraculous power. In the bible, objects touched by Jesus and his disciples had healing powers, so why shouldn’t the same be true of the very remains of their bodies, and those most saintly of saints?

Relics of Jesus and Mary themselves are spread all over the world, from Jesus’ baby teeth to containers Mary’s milk (long since turned to a white dust), splinters from the true cross to scraps of Mary’s veil. These Jesus and Mary relics are often the most holy and venerated of relics. Far more common are the relics of the apostles and saints. There has always been a scramble among monasteries and cathedrals to have the holiest relics, sometimes regardless of how they obtained them. Relics were often stolen from churches during times of war, taken to the victor’s home country and displayed to be venerated by their own people. “Often the idea for the theft came in the form of a dream or vision, which was widely considered to be the way God and saints communicated. Often the saint itself decided. If the saint allowed itself to be taken without punishing the thieves and if the saint continued to produce miracles, then clearly he or she was happy in their new home.” (Source)

The relics, be they bone, hair, or assorted other, are the most valuable part of the display; nonetheless the vessels in which they are held do their best to match them in preciousness. Opulent reliquaries of gold and silver, bejeweled and gem-encrusted, inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, these dazzling containers can hold the tiniest fragment of bone. Some of the most interesting reliquaries are those shaped like the object they contain; arm reliquaries for arm bones, head reliquaries for skulls, and entire body-sized reliquaries for the whole darn thing. Reliquaries are fantastically ornate objects, painstakingly crafted to morbidly hold a sliver of bone.

But there’s a lesser-known type of reliquary that interests us more than all that lavish splendor; the homemade reliquaries.

Trade the gold for wood, the jewels for beads, ivory for wax, and you’ve got some of the most charming and unique reliquaries in the world. We saw some beautiful examples of these homespun objects of veneration at the Museum of Folk Art and Life in Salzburg, Austria. For centuries, the catholic church made a point of releasing tiny relic bone fragments to the public for just these types of homemade reliquaries. The public then put their heart and soul into creating reliquaries grand enough to house the precious relic. The results were little packages of art, talismans of faith. Reliquaries gave common people a creative outlet, a reason to devote time to being artistic. One of the wonderful things about folk art is that unlike most creators of traditional reliquaries, these pieces were made by people who were unschooled, untrained, driven only by an innate aesthetic and an inspired passion, and there is definitely something divine about that.

Museum of Folk Art and Life Flickr Set
On Reliquaries and Relics: Source 1 and Source 2.

The Zwerglgarten, or “Dwarf Garden” in Salzburg, Austria was created in 1715 by Prince Archbishop Franz Anton Harrach. Many of the statues were modeled after dwarves who lived in the court (they served as entertainers to the archbishop), the rest inspired by peasants and foreigners. The Dwarf Garden resides within the beautiful Mirabell Gardens, but for a time, the gardens were dwarf-less.

“In concern for his wife and their unborn child, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria had the disfigured creatures with their goitres and hunchbacks removed from the Dwarf Garden (they were to be destroyed). Fortunately, they were only auctioned off and the dwarves were forgotten for over one hundred years. Not until 1921 did the Salzburg Society for the Preservation of Local Amenities recall this part of Salzburg’s cultural heritage to mind and convince the city councilors to place the nine dwarves then in the city’s possession in their historical positions. Today the carefully restored dwarves are set up in the Bastion Garden and the hope remains that all of the dwarves still preserved will be retrieved and reunited in their historically innate location.” (Salzburg.com)

For more of the Mirabell Dwarf Garden, please visit our Flickr Set.

If it wasn’t for the sign, it would look like any other house from the street; a small, one story red house with white trim…perhaps charmingly reminiscent of a log cabin or summer cottage, but a regular home nonetheless. Driving along an obscure residential street in Rockport, Massachusetts, you might pass right by it. But it would be a shame if you missed that sign, the one that says it all; “Paper House”.

In 1922, a mechanical engineer, Elis Stenman, began building a small summer home. It started out like any other home, with a timber frame, roof and floors, but Stenman had other plans for the walls; newspaper.  215 sheets of newspaper (about an inch thick) varnished together into walls, to be exact. Paper walls were an economically brilliant idea, not that Stenman needed the money, having designed the machines that make paper clips. Newspapers may be cheap, but they also make great insulators. While no one is quite sure what Stenman’s motivation was, be it thrifty, logical, or merely curious, it is clear that he was utterly devoted to the idea. Layer after layer after layer of newspaper, varnish, and a homemade glue of flour, water and apple peels were pasted together until more than 100,000 newspapers walled the home. Stenman had originally intended to put up clapboards on the outside, but decided to leave the newspaper, just to see what happened. The result is still standing, still insulating, and “pretty waterproof”, according to the Paper House Website.

Word got around in the 20s when Stenman was building his house of paper, so the strange home has had curious visitors since its beginning. The house wasn’t turned into a museum until 1942, after Stenman’s death,  after he had filled the interior with paper furniture. Everything inside the paper house is also made of paper, from the curtains to the chairs to the clock, save for two objects; a fireplace and a piano. Those are real, thoughtfully covered in paper. The fireplace is functional, though it is hard to imagine a fire on a cold night not ending in certain disaster in a house made of paper and varnish.

Perhaps the most wonderful part of the paper house is the paper itself. After nearly 100 years of exposure to the elements, the topmost layers of the walls are slowly peeling back, revealing bits of newspaper articles from the 20s. Wanted ads, recipes, news from Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign, and headlines like “LINDBERGH HOPS OFF FOR OCEAN FLIGHT TO PARIS.” can be discovered by inquisitive visitors. The walls are a timecapsule, one that can only be viewed and enjoyed in tiny, random bits. As time goes on, more of of the walls will peel away, offering an ever-changing glimpse into the past.

This article appeared in the lovely Antler Magazine, an art, fashion, design, literature and culture magazine where Curious Expeditions will be contributing each month!

The police officer just intended to just get a drink. Perhaps he was going to ask a few questions about the mysterious disappearances that had been reported for the last few years. He certainly didn’t intend to leave Savannah; much less, the continent. Too bad for him. When he woke up he couldn’t remember leaving the bar, yet nonetheless found himself on a ship traveling to China. The officer had been shanghaied.

Experimental botany, murderous pirates, secret tunnels and an all you can eat buffet; there are very few places where these things can all be found together. Savannah’s “Pirates’ House,” is one place where they can, with each time period written in ghostly layers throughout the house. Despite having an animatronic pirate and a kind of theme-park atmosphere, the Pirates’ House is indeed filled with a long history, and in a strange way the Pirates’ House traces the path of Georgia’s founding to today. Curious Expeditions recently had the opportunity to visit Savannah and the Pirates’ House, and found that the American South is every bit as surprising as anything we’ve seen overseas.

When British General James Oglethorpe landed on the banks of the Savannah river in 1733 he intended to build a perfect community. Armed with a Royal Charter to found the colony, Georgia was the last of thirteen British colonies settled in the new world. For the British it represented an important buffer between the Spanish in Florida, but to Oglethorpe, a prison reformer as well as general, it represented a chance to build a utopian colony and Oglethorpe intended to do it right.

Aided by Mary Musgrove (Indian name: Coosaponakeesa), a local trader who spoke English, Oglethorpe was able to establish a peaceful and economically beneficial relationship with the local Tomochici and Yamacraw Indians. Oglethorpe was a tolerant man in need of skilled labor and his Georgia colony charter accepted settlers of all religions except Catholics, a means of keeping out Spanish sympathizers to the south. The only other group barred entry into the town were lawyers, which is, well, understandable. Other things Oglethorpe’s charter did not allow within Georgia was hard liquor and slavery, as Ogilthorpe felt both would ruin the industrious nature of Savannah’s colonists.

Along with laying out the town in its beautiful format of park squares, one of the first priorities was to plant an experimental botanical garden on the banks of the Savannah. Based on the Chealsea Botanical Garden in London it was established to help find the best way to grow potash, wine grapes and most importantly, cultivate mulberry silkworms in the mulberry trees that grew in Georgia, producing valuable silk. In 1734 they built a little “herb house” (seen to your left) at the top of the gardens where the gardener stayed. Savannah was poised to be Oglethorpe’s southern Eden; tolerant, friendly with the Indians, free of booze and slavery, and rich in silk. Things did not work out.

By 1743 Oglethorpe, the founder of the Savannah experiment, was called back to England to answer to allegations of mismanaging the colony, and he never returned. The botanical garden failed as it was the wrong type of mulberry tree to support silkworms and by 1751 liquor, slavery and lawyers had all found their way into the colony. Savannah settlers were expelled from the safety of their botanical experiment and into the harsh realities of  being a newly minted port town. Eden had failed, and a much rougher element was ready to take its place. There was even a building ready to take them in.

The “herb house” built at the top of the garden was now expanded into a fully swinging tavern that catered to just that rough element. The inn welcomed salty sailors, merchant ships and soldiers that came to port and provided them with drink, food, lodging as well as other services provided by the staff of young ladies at the tavern. There was another type of seafarer who was known to frequent the tavern and inn. They were the roughest yet. They were pirates.

Pirates get a bad rap. They were cut-throat, drunken maniacs, sure, but what they did have was great benefits. Compared to other sailing outfits, pirates often had better food, better pay, better sleeping arrangements (all still horrible of course) than other soldier or merchant vessels. Pirates at least had a democratic decision-making system. Comparatively luxurious, the pirate ships often had plenty of people willing to join them. Not so for your standard military or merchant ships. Sailors regularly jumped ship, and after a few days stay in a port, a ship could be shorthanded by half a dozen men. This is where the “Pirates’ House” came in. Besides beer, food and wenches, the “Pirate House” did a brisk trade in something else; they found new sailors for the ships. Rather than going to all the trouble of convincing people of what a nice life it was at sea (people knew better) they simply kidnapped them.

Known as being “shanghaied” it usually went something like this. People would come to the bar, sometimes sailors from another vessel, sometimes travelers. It was always easier if they didn’t have relatives or friends in the town. The bar would then treat the stranger to a couple of “free” drinks. Either they got them pass out drunk, or to hasten the process would lace the drinks with Laudanum. Failing that, they would simply bash the poor guy over the head. The unconsciousness men would then be dumped into a tunnel in the corner of the Pirates’ House that supposedly ran from the bar under the ground (seen right) and let out straight onto the docks.

The men would find themselves waking up on a boat miles from the shore headed towards China, and hence had been “Shanghaied.” They could either serve their new found duties or jump into the water and swim the 20 miles back. Most chose to stay. A particularly famous story is that of the police officer who came to the Pirates’ House and was Shanghaied. It supposedly took him more then two years to get back to Savannah. Another particularly gruesome tale involves the bartender knocking a man unconscious and placing him in a secret compartment until a ship came looking for a readied sailor. The man stayed unconscious, the ship never came looking, and so the man simply rotted away in the secret compartment. The stench apparently had little effect on business.

The Pirates’ House saw a number of other pirate related activities, including the torturing of pirates in the basement (stairs to the basement seen on the right) by Savannah officials. The inn also supposedly played host to Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, and according to the Pirates’ House placemat (that counts as a primary source, right?) Stevenson met the real Captain Flint at the Pirates’ House, and based his fictional Captain Flint on him. Though it remains unclear as to whether Flint was a real person or not, he is said to have died in the Pirates’ House and haunt the premises to this day along with a myriad of other restless souls.

The Pirates’ House has gone through one more transformation, one mirrored by the rest of Savannah. Having avoided being burned in the civil war, Savannah has some of the best antebellum architecture in the country. Savannah fell into hard times around the turn of the century, and Savannah was in bad shape in the 1930’s. Luckily, it was around this time that Savannah became acutely aware of its own history and its status as a Southern icon. The founding of the Historic Savannah Foundation saved much of old Savannah from being paved over.

Today Savannah is a gorgeous city with a robust tourist industry. The Pirates’ House, built on the site of the failed botanical Eden and housing the Herb Garret (the oldest building in Georgia), is quite aware of its own unique history has also become a family friendly restaurant, complete with both automatic and flesh-and-blood pirates. (Pirate re-enactors, anyway.)  While the line of people waiting for the buffet, combined with the history of Shanghaiing and murder cause a kind of cognitive dissonance, don’t look on the Pirate House’s current cheesy incarnation too harshly. It, like the rough and tumble brawling tavern before it, and the botanical garden and Herb House before that, are appropriate for their moment in time. Savannah having started as a Utopian vision has circled around to be much closer what Oglethorpe had in mind, then it was in 1753. As long as Savannah continues to regard its history with such reverence, it will always be a Southern jewel, regardless if it comes with a hot buffet and costumed pirate or not.