In the past, we have examined some of the mysterious questions that keep historians up at night. And today, we are ready to take a look at 10 more…
10. Who Fired the Shot Heard ‘Round the World?
April 19, 1775, is a date that forever changed the world. It was the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military engagements between the British and the Americans that triggered the Revolutionary War. That opening salvo of bullets that marked the beginning of the battle has become known as the “shot heard round the world,” thanks to a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but the question is…who fired it?
Unfortunately, the initial skirmish was a mass of chaos and confusion, and nobody is even really sure which side fired the shot, let alone which person. An army of 800 British regulars led by General Thomas Gage entered Lexington at around 5 am that morning, with orders to seize all the weapons and gunpowder stored at Concord. They encountered a militia company of 70 men or so who scattered as the British forces entered the town square. Then, someone somewhere fired that fateful shot. Thinking they were being attacked, the regulars opened fire on the colonists and killed eight militiamen before moving on towards Concord. And thus… the war began.
9. What Happened to the Bermagui Five?
On the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, there is a small town with nice, lovely beaches, with the intriguing name of Mystery Bay. So what mystery does it refer to, exactly? Well, it’s the 1880 disappearance of the Bermagui Five, a group of men who vanished without a trace in that area while conducting a geological survey.
The group was led by a geologist with the New South Wales Mines Department named Lamont Young, who was working out of the nearby town of Bermagui. This was at the time of the Australian Gold Rush. There was lots of money to be made, so geologists like Young surveyed every bit of Australia in the hopes of finding a new goldfield. On October 10, 1880, Young took his assistant and a boat crew of three and traveled northward to explore a new area of the coast.
Later that evening, a laborer riding along the coast saw the empty boat, which had drifted into a rocky part of the bay. The sail was tied down. Some of their clothes, books, and equipment were still aboard, and there was a lot of vomit on the floor of the ship. The five men, however, were nowhere to be found, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.
8. Was Nauscopie Real or a Scam?
Around 250 years ago, there was a French engineer named Etienne Bottineau who claimed to have invented a new science, which he called nauscopie, that could be used to “discover ships and land at a great distance.” Nowadays, both the man and his strange claim have almost completely faded from memory, found mostly as minor references in other people’s works. But even in his own time, nauscopie was never seriously studied, both because Bottineau never bothered to write down or explain in detail how it worked, and because he lived on the remote island of Mauritius, back then called Isle de France.
It seems that, for the most part, Bottineau used nauscopie as his secret weapon to winning bar bets, being able to predict the arrival of ships into port up to four days in advance. But in 1782, he alerted the governor that a fleet of 11 ships was approaching the island. Bottineau then advised him that the fleet had changed course. Fearing that the British might be attacking, the governor dispatched a warship to find out what was going on. When it returned, it confirmed everything Bottineau said – a fleet of vessels was heading towards Mauritius, but then it changed course and headed towards India. So the question remains: was Bottineau simply lucky, a conman, or did nauscopie actually work?
7. Where Is Attila the Hun?
Fewer people have had a more sudden, shocking, and violent impact on the world than Attila, leader of the Huns. The origins of these nomadic people are still uncertain, but they appeared in Europe sometime during the late 4th century AD. In just a few decades, they had established a vast empire and became the biggest threat to the hegemony of the Roman Empire. They could have become the leading force in Europe, if not for the unexpected death of Attila, which surprisingly happened during peacetime, while the Hunnic leader was celebrating his latest marriage.
Many cultures have different customs when it comes to dealing with the dead. Some like to build lavish tombs, mausoleums, even pyramids for their leaders. The Huns were exactly the opposite – they believed Attila’s tomb should be a secret. The Hunnic chieftain was placed in three nesting coffins – one made of iron, one made of silver, and the last one made of solid gold. These were filled with jewels and other priceless treasures that signified Attila’s strength and subjugation of other nations. But they didn’t mark the burial site with any kind of monument and they also killed the gravediggers so that the knowledge of the location would die with them. And that location remains a mystery to this day.
6. What Caused the Puebloan Migration?
The Ancestral Puebloans are one of the oldest Native American cultures, having appeared sometime during the 8th century AD. For hundreds of years, they lived and thrived in the Four Corners region of the United States, comprised of parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. But then, during the late 13th – early 14th century, they seemingly disappeared under circumstances that still remain a mystery.
For a while, we thought that the Ancestral Puebloans were wiped off the face of the Earth – maybe by a natural disaster, maybe by enemy tribes. Nowadays, however, scholars are pretty convinced that these ancient people didn’t die out suddenly, they migrated. But there is still the question of what event could determine an entire civilization to pack up and abandon the place they called home for centuries?
It’s still possible that enemy attacks could have been the reason, or a loss of fertile land due to deforestation and soil erosion. Some scientists believe that the culprit was a “megadrought” that made it impossible to grow food in the region. While all explanations are plausible, none have been proven definitively.
5. What Happened to the Joyita?
When it comes to creepy stories about ghost ships, the Joyita has to be right up there. On October 3, 1955, this American merchant vessel left Samoa with 25 people aboard, heading towards the Tokelau Islands. It was supposed to arrive there two days later, but even on October 6, there was still no word from the Joyita. A search and rescue team was dispatched but they were unable to find it.
It was over a month later that another merchant ship stumbled upon the Joyita adrift hundreds of miles off-course. It was partially submerged and listing badly on one side, although it wasn’t in danger of sinking. The people were gone, the cargo was gone, and the interior had sustained a lot of damage. Had the vessel been attacked by pirates, or Japanese fishing boats, or a Soviet submarine? Was there a mutiny or was it all some kind of insurance fraud? No signs of the 25 people aboard the Joyita have ever been found, leaving this puzzle unsolved for the time being.
4. What Happened to Thomas Paine’s Remains?
There once was a time when Thomas Paine was regarded as one of the biggest heroes of the American Revolution. His influential pamphlets inspired many people into action, and when he was finished in America, he traveled to Paris and became involved with the French Revolution, as well. And yet, when he died in 1809, he was broke, childless, and so hated by his peers that only six people attended his funeral. And according to legend, some of his bones were recycled into buttons while the rest were tossed in the garbage. Paine’s ideas and his character have been mostly rehabilitated in modern times, but one question still lingers – what happened to his remains?
Thomas Paine became a pariah in his time mainly due to two reasons. One, his work titled The Age of Reason was seen as an attack on Christianity, and two, following his arrest and detention in France, Paine criticized many of his former revolutionary allies, feeling that they had abandoned him.
When he died, Paine was buried in a modest grave on his farm, but a decade later, a fan of his named William Cobbett arranged for him to be exhumed and shipped to his native England. He hoped to arrange for a grand resting place for Paine but found no takers. Ultimately, Cobbett ended up keeping Paine’s bones in his attic until he died, at which point their fate becomes uncertain. Cobbett’s son sold all his effects at auction, so it is possible that some bones were sold off piece by piece, while others were thrown in the trash. Several people have claimed to possess parts of Thomas Paine, but none have been proven.
3. Where Did the Tamil Bell Come From?
There is a certain category of historical puzzles called out-of-place artifacts and, as its name suggests, it refers to items that have been found in places where they don’t belong. This puts pressure on scholars and scientists to try and explain how they got there, and one of the most prominent examples is the Tamil Bell.
Around 1836, British missionary William Colenso stumbled upon the Tamil Bell in the Northland Region of New Zealand, being used by M?ori women to boil potatoes. After questioning the locals, he found out that they had possessed the bell for many generations, after finding it buried under a tree. Later examinations of the unusual artifact revealed that it was a ship’s bell made of bronze and that it had Tamil writing on it. And it wasn’t modern Tamil, either, but rather an old-fashioned script that had not been used for centuries.
It’s pretty obvious that the bell came from a Tamil ship, but this raises more questions than it answers? Europeans first made contact with New Zealanders in the mid-17th-century, but this was at least a hundred years older than that. Did this mean that the Tamil people and other South Asian cultures knew about New Zealand much earlier than this? Did they have contact with each other or did the bell simply wash ashore following the sinking of a Tamil ship?
2. What Happened to America’s First Black Doctor?
James Durham, sometimes spelled Derham, made history when he became the first Black man in the United States to become a doctor. Unfortunately, most of his life is clouded by mystery and uncertainty, and so is his death, as Durham disappeared one day, never to be seen again.
The future physician was born into slavery circa 1762 in Philadelphia, and for the first two decades of his life, he was owned by several doctors. One of them, John Kearsley, taught James to read and write not just in English, but also in French and Spanish. Durham’s last master was a Scottish physician who lived in New Orleans named Robert Dow. He encouraged Durham to study medicine and also allowed him to practice it on some of his patients.
In 1783, James Durham became a free man. We’re not entirely sure if he paid for his liberation or if Dow granted it, but he was able to open his own practice in the city. It flourished for years, thanks mainly to Durham’s fluency in multiple languages and his willingness to treat patients from all racial backgrounds.
Things were going well for Durham. He even became a correspondent with Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and, arguably, the most famous doctor in the country at the time. In 1801, Durham returned to his native Philadelphia. Just a year later, he disappeared and was never heard from again. Some think he moved to practice medicine elsewhere, but others fear that he may have been killed by people who resented his success.
1. Who Were the Sea Peoples?
Ancient history is filled with mysterious civilizations about whom we know almost nothing, but few of them have had a bigger impact on history than the Sea Peoples. A confederacy of seafaring nations, the Sea Peoples appeared suddenly in the Mediterranean during the 12th century BC and waged war on anyone who got in their way – the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, they all suffered at the hands of this wrathful civilization.
The Egyptians were the ones who have provided us with the most detailed accounts of the Sea Peoples, as the two sides fought often during the reigns of Ramses II and Ramses III. They also named some of the groups that made up this warring confederation, such as the Tjeker and the Sherden, but this has not helped us pinpoint their origins.
Today, the incursions of the Sea Peoples are considered one of the main factors behind the Late Bronze Age collapse, but their identities, their purpose, and their final fate remain unknown.