Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 220 - The Battle of Lake Tanganyika Part 1: The Worst Officer in the British Navy

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

During WWI the british navy thought of one of the most pointless battle plans of the entire war. They had to find someone equally worthless to command it. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Giles Foden. Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Edward Paice. Tip and Run. The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa

Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I have almost forgotten what this podcast is called because I woke up at 530 a.m. this morning. I'm Joe and with me is liam hi liam hi joe hi joe yeah uh i'm recording this uh uh at uh 10 p.m eastern standard uh which is so funny so i i got done playing warzone with my friends at at nine and i was like oh uh i have no idea what to do with myself for the next hour because it wasn't like i was gonna text you and be like yo get your ass up like at 505 a.m your time like i'm trying to record bitch don't worry i have my phone silenced while i'm asleep it is pure bliss that's yeah i do the same thing except i have i have um a couple people who are like

exceptions to the rule like uh my parents this is my dad i figure if my dad's calling me at 1 30 am someone's probably dead yeah i mean at this point i don't know like enough people uh if my mom was calling me at 1 a.m and it was an emergency there's really not a whole lot i could do about it i'm on the other side of the world. Paddle real fast. I am in a landlocked country, Liam. Where am I paddling to? Down to Shut Up Spill. Oh, I'm going to get my clothes from the toilet store while I'm there.

Anyway, Liam, it has been... Also, I have to say the joke uh to be an insufferable dick i'm coming to you from the future because it's wednesday here in case you're wondering the future still sucks um it's not good but the weather's nice i mean i'm i'm happy for you given that i have been what's uh the temperature like in fahrenheit where you are right now like i know it's early morning so it's probably cooler, but mid 60s. The nice fog is coming off the mountains. It's been 95 in Philly every

fucking day. We have central air and I feel, dude, I'm just sitting in like not even what can be described as ball soup. That sucks. I dude, I've been just sweating it out for like a week and a half. Isn't a I mean, you know, thankfully guy uh i can't

fucking can't even use this joke anymore because there's no guys to pick up trucks here i was gonna say a guy that pickup truck told me that it snowed uh this winter so climate change is a liberal lie uh so i don't know what your guys's problem is climate change is a liberal lie but also i'd like my balls to remain attached to my body speaking of which how's your ball hernia going i don't have a ball hernia i told you yes he does yes fucking dick uh related to the ball hernia yes go ahead chef liam it's been a long time um since we've talked about a solidly dudes rock kind of guy yeah i gotta i gotta tell you uh the the guy who kidnapped his own this episode is not out yet but the one we did a couple weeks ago where the guy basically kidnapped his own this episode is not out yet but the one we did a couple weeks ago

where the guy basically forced his crew into a misadventure to say the least the wilks of expedition it'll be a lot of time this episode comes out well okay yeah the wilks expedition is not dudes rock it's just guys i sort of feel bad for you know i i i propose a dude's rock spectrum and that is like you can be a good dude's rock like a chaotic good a chaotic bad a neutral etc you know like dnd yeah a little live in chart yeah and we like we did a two-part series on a baron von sternberg who is obscenely evil but you cannot deny he is solidly dude's rock oh yeah he He's chaotic evil. He's just like a super villain. Yeah.

I would argue that he's like orderly evil. That's the worst. I don't know, man. Can we have a mix of the two? Cause like he was feeding them into wolves, but also he believed in like a strong central government. What are you going to do?

Yeah. Nice, nice, crisp Brown apartment buildings. Also also there are wolves yeah you remember the uh all ghillied up mission from uh call of duty modern warfare it kind of looks like that is that the one where you you shoot no matter what you do you blow his arm off okay trip yacht yeah now the guy that i'm proposing today is someone i believe is dudes rock for sure. So the guy we're talking about today, I propose to join our dudes rock club. However, I'm not sure where he lands

on the spectrum of dudes rock. And I think that's something we'll have to discuss in part two. Isn't this guy just a total wackadoodle fuck from what you told me? He's nuts. Don't get me wrong. He's he's he's british and this is world war one so people would definitely describe him as you know eccentric eccentric yeah or i don't know touched or any other weird british term for crazy person um because he's an officer so you can't just like use pleb words on him like crazy right but you know on at the end of part two we'll have to discuss where on the spectrum of dudes rocky lands um because i mean belgian congo is involved here so like it's not a it's not a good thing right um though i will say with confidence that uh he

never owned slaves so he's got welcome to the lives head by donkeys where we have the lowest bar in human history yeah it's it's subterranean now to do this uh around this guy uh we're going to talk about the weirdest and probably most pointless battle of world war one um and it was led by a good old fashion brain damaged british military officer officer of your lieutenant commander and eventual commander, though he at one point self-proclaimed a rear admiral, Jeffrey Spicer Simpson. Oh, we got to stop with the self-proclaiming guys. Two in a row, baby. Navy guys love some flags. Actually, weird sidebar here.

But at the current moment, I believe this episode is going to come out in August. We are in July recording this. And I'm watching the Alex Jones defamation trial, which is streaming on YouTube. Not that this will help anybody when this episode comes out. Because I'm a huge fan of Knowledge Fight. Obviously, I've had Jordan on the show before. Right, right. But I didn't know that's actually what the term false flag came from is a naval warfare.

Yes. Yeah. Learn something new while laughing at Alex Jones's misfortune. And the defense attorney who just is so goddamn ill prepared. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's gone through so many of them yeah that's true now uh i have to we're going to describe uh spicer uh simpson variously uh now in the books that i use which i'll talk about in a second he's variously called a braggart a liar a madman

a terrible officer but of all the things he was called and were undisputably true is that he was the oldest man with his rank in the british navy because they refused to promote him oh free my boy dude um now to get to this point we have to discuss the background of the great war and africa and uh now this is the the asterix. This is not an exhaustive history of German East Africa or the World War I campaign that tore through Africa. That'll come at some other time. absolute monsters uh so it will eventually be talked about but this is about a very specific battle uh mostly because i really want to talk about spicer the battle is unimportant as hell uh and to be fair the british government thought the exact same thing this is that this is not me just disregarding something i don't care about sure uh now for the sources, we use Giles Foden's Mimi and Toto's Big Adventure and Edward Pace's Tip and Run, The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa, which, good God, read both of them in

a row like I did for the greatest whiplash and tone that you've ever heard of in your life. Giles Foden wrote The Last King of Scotland. So he's great great prose very readable um not to mention um you know spicer's story in general is kind of light-hearted because barely anybody even dies um like it's hardly even a war story and more the story of like uh kind of a brain dead adventurer uh where like you know pace is a tip and run is about you about horrible colonial war and genocide. So read them all like I did and just have your brain be spun around inside your skull. It's great. We've told before how Imperial Germany founded its colonies in Africa.

Not this one, but German East Africa was slowly taken over by Karl Peters and the Society for German Colonization in the mid-1800s. It's the same kind of thing that happened in Namibia back in our Namibian genocide series. Peters eventually formed the ominously named the German East Africa Company. Oh, no. Don't want to see a company. Never want to see a nationality and then a company after that.

Hey, you can bet who he modeled that off of this is part and parcel of how the germans kind of colonized africa they these would all be private holdings then bismarck would piss and moan pretending that he didn't want german colonies and then he would end up uh like absorbing them anyway nationalizing them basically right yeah um and then you know turning them to official colonies it was just it was all politics by bismarck to absorb a bunch of deutschland freebooters but yeah i mean it allowed him to do shit at arm's length like i you see i simply had no choice our colony our german citizens were under attack by the British or whatever. Now, what would become East German East Africa encompassed a massive swath of land that would include most of the African Great Lakes region, which I assume means culturally they're just like Michigan.

I'm kidding. That's a joke. Yeah. Rwanda. Huge about hockey. You know, but today that would be burundi rwanda tanzania or tanzania if you're british amongst other places um like the the landmass was three times the size of germany itself and this is germany dude this this is like the reich at its biggest

before they became nazis because obviously that would eventually encompass a lot of things that didn't right now. So when Europe imploded over inbred monarchs beefing over turf, it should be no surprise that they eventually ended up dragging in all of their colonies into this mess, despite the fact none of the people who lived there did not give a single fuck or even know what was going on in Europe. Sure. Outstanding work.

Now, without going into the blindingly evil concept of colonial war uh because i feel like anybody listening knows how we feel about the subject uh it's not good yeah spoiler alert bad um someone recently left a bad review that said like these guys uh critical theory of history boils down to more racism and i'm like yeah because it does yeah yeah we're not sorry for it uh i really feel like the same the same guy is curious about states rights to be completely honest yeah states rights for what states rights for what motherfucker um now uh for the the reason why that these colonies were important obviously is wealth wealth. But in the case of World War I, manpower. The population of German East Africans runs 7 million people.

Good. Bodies for the wood chipper. Exactly. And the white population, 10,000. God damn, dude. I hate this shit so much. You could accurately call them overseers they did mostly the colonial administration ran the uh the mineral extraction process etc etc etc um but you know

it was right next to germany's africa the genocidal playground previously owned by belgian king Belgian King Leopold II. Oh, God. And now, because even the story of the Congo Free State and then Belgian Congo is one of the most depraved stories in human history. But at one point, it was literally King Leopold's private thing. Personal colony, yes. Yes, it was not owned by Belgium. King Leopold's ghost. Yeah, it's real good um and eventually what he did there was so horrifically evil that like it was taken away from him kind of like he was pressured to

give it to the belgian government uh and that then it became belgian conga which is what it was now granted i need to i need to be very clear here that did not make things better um no i i wouldn't expect that i figured this was a like hey you can't be that horribly depraved to black people only we can be that horribly depraved to black people it kind of was this weird thing of like okay but it's like weird white man's burden shit kind of and it was like this weird like legal gray area of like can he personally own this fucking gigantic piece of africa like um because he wasn't you know totally in charge of of belgium so like you know anyway it's belgian congo now it's still terribly

monstrous and and unspeakably evil um but you know because of that they were you know colonial bullshit they these two people would be forced into war against one another despite the fact that they didn't care uh about what the reason was why uh they had other problems like you know getting food um because they were being ruled by belgium and germany genocide it's a problem yeah uh spoiler racism yeah my genocide um god that feels like once you get a phd in genocide studies and you wear uh like a trilby and you tip it like my genocide i hate it uh i did that to myself now No. Yeah, you deserve that. Yeah, I deserve every bad thing that's ever happened to me. You do not, you fucking baby. In between the two colonies is Lake Tanganyika, which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing.

I have a pronunciation. I've heard it's Tanganyika. I think you're pretty close. Yeah. Like, I've even watched tourism videos and stuff from the area. I'm just bad at words. Now, it's a pretty large lake it's the longest freshwater lake in the world and i need to be clear here really no military importance

whatsoever because again it's a lake um you know uh the reason that there it became important simply is that the germans put a navy there so that meant the british wanted to get rid of interfere with it right like now of course like you know there's more a little more to and we'll talk about later like it's quite literally a red versus blue situation um if you've ever watched that the old uh the old i think rooster teeth made it yeah shorts about halo we're like why do we have a base in this pointless valley oh because they have a base in this pointless valley oh because they have a base in this pointless valley it like honestly if germany never plopped a navy down in it i don't think this battle ever happens i don't think brit never tries to uh that scene from

where he's talking about his neighbor it's just this but a battle you see i have navy my neighbor has to have navy he's playing in my assholes. Yeah, military history is fucking dumb, isn't it, folks? Now, before anybody gets mad at me, I will lay out the very dumb perceived military importance of this lake and the entire East African campaign. For starters, of course, the Allies wanted to seize German colonies for themselves. It was a power play, which, of course, happens after the war anyway when Germany's defeated. Secondarily, the British knew that if the Germans managed to have uncontested control of the African front, they could do the same thing that they were doing, for example, in India or other parts of their colonies, which is ship all of these people into the meat grinder of Western Europe.

Manpower-wise, that's bad. bad however even with that everybody was very very aware of how largely unimportant this whole east africa campaign thing was in the grand scheme of things which also meant this mission was not exactly rating very high on the priorities list. Sure. So much so that First Sea Lord, which obviously I'm not a big fan of the British Empire. First Sea Lord is actually okay. Yeah. First Sea Lord sounds like if I was to write a book where Poseidon was a villain, but for some reason I would get sued by, I don't know, Mount Olympus if I used the word Poseidon was um like a villain but for some reason i would get sued by i don't know mount olympus if i used the word poseidon uh you know like i would name him the first sea lord first lord yeah so first sea lord lord henry jackson really wanted to bring bring the war

to the german colonies and stop this from happening however kind of like in our bonus episode about the show show but you can like he wanted to do this but he also didn't want to take away anything that might impact the western front or anything else so this whole mission would have to be you know this whole mission has to be slapped together with bike parts right that's good dude it says wait dude that's right uh he couldn't That's right. He couldn't send the A team. He couldn't send the B team. At this point, even the C team was in the trenches. We're talking like end of the alphabet, maybe S. That's right, baby. Enter Jeffrey Basil Spicer Stimpson, the man who was...

Yeah, S team. There you go. Yeah, S team. Yeah. He was born in 1876 to a large family and a fatherhood and naval tradition. He had been a merchant marine who had been an India-based gold dealer. That doesn't sound very ethical. This is the 1800s at this point, so you can assume he was a real bastard. You could assume he was a real bastard. Old Spicer Simpson or Simpson or Spicy, as his friends called him.

His friends call him Spicy. We're calling him that. Old Spicy. Old Spicy sides. Most people don't know this. This is where Old Spice gets its name. This is what he smelled like. It's not true. No, he smelled like piss, dude.

We can all be honest. He smelled like piss. He joined the Royal Navy when he was 14, which we've talked about a bit before how normal that was back in the day. And it quickly became obvious to everyone around him that spicy was an old timey word for crazy eccentric. I looked up another British word for it. Barmy. He was a bit barmy. He was barmy, isn't it it barmy he was a bit barmy he was barmy in it uh yeah he was nuts

uh i believe the phrase you want in the effort to be uh non-judgmental here is uh cuckoo bananas that's right uh crazier than a shithouse rat uh was the medical definition yeah um i've heard that one that's a good stay i'm taking that. He wasn't like, I will say since we've already talked about Baron von Ungern Sternberg, he was truly insane. He did shit that made sense to nobody where it seemed like Simpson

thought everything that he did made people like him. And I need to be clear here. Everybody who met him hated him. I just feel sad now not not much is known about his like mid uh mid-tier life in the in the royal navy though he was covered in tattoos which was very uncommon super rare right yeah i mean there was there's a tat there's a naval tattoo tradition but that's mostly enlisted men not officers which

he was uh now they're mostly snakes and butterflies and skulls and shit across his upper chest and arms and he'd love to show these off at all times uh to include like the middle of dinner parties like he would tear his shirt off at random i feel like i'd like this dude and like he would do it seemingly of nowhere and you know like this was not normal um not to mention you know ripping his shirt off in public he was a less ripped armstrong from full metal alchemist but covered in tattoos another reason why it's hard to pin down the facts of his life is that spicer lies about everything uh everything everybody and especially himself he's like if l. Ron Hubbard had actually served in combat. It's really like he did do some rotations into China during the Boxer Rebellion,

but there's no real evidence that he saw any combat. He has service ribbons from the Boxer Rebellion. He didn't really talk about it. He talks about adventures in China which like we'll talk a little bit more about that because there was just like a series of of dumb shit that he does that gets him in continuously more trouble he did mostly like river patrol duty and surveying um but you know he spent a lot of time in china where his brain melted further. Doing God knows what with some opium. Oh, probably that.

That would actually explain a lot. Oh, cool. Good. I happen to help. Nobody during the adventure in Africa notes that he did drugs. So, I don't know. He did drink, but he was an officer in the Navy. So did everybody. Now, while he was tearing his shirt off, he would tell

wild stories about each tattoo uh where and where he got them though he couldn't keep track of his stories so they would change from time to time and he would tell people who were there with him in china a completely different story that they everybody knew it's completely made up and he was full of shit he would get in arguments like this is mostly in mimi and toto's big adventure but like he would get in arguments with everybody to include experts in a subject like at one point uh on a boat he gets in an argument with like the head astronomer astronomer of uh of like south africa of about where like the stars are in the sky. I appreciate the enthusiasm, I guess.

At no point does this man ever admit that he's wrong for any reason. He just insists that he's wrong. He also always told incredibly unfunny jokes. Same mood. Yeah, and he would laugh at them, you know he'd be fine on this podcast um but he would also randomly break out into song oh we don't do that no um and i need to point out as well uh all this happened in what was described as a high-pitched nasally voice it's like my dad singing he sounds like pete wentz from fallout boy while singing but like

he's british what if pete went wentz was somehow more annoying wow i don't like that at all that like i said before anybody who spent any length of time around him fucking hated him so okay we've talked about officers before who were just bad at their like just annoying bad people but they were good at their jobs right so like obviously spicer is too right also no he's not good at his job either good good why are we good at your job you could just suck at it dude somehow he destroyed at least three ships um yes yes so during his lower rank a time in the lower ranks of officer dumb he nearly killed his entire crew on a survey mission of the yangtze river how do you kill your entire crew on a

surveying i think he got like beached or like he uh he hit a sandbar and nearly flipped over uh and the like the raging river which would have killed everybody yeah jesus man um and then he's almost sank two different destroyers while in training uh with by by smacking him into another i love him i know he's a piece of shit i love him i don't even know he's a piece of shit he's just kind of bad at his job uh in another training exercise at the at the at the portsmouth harbor uh he ramped his ship onto the beach and got it stuck. Oh, hell yeah, dude. He also crashed his ship into a supply ship

and it sank. Dude's fucking rock. So, of course, he failed upwards because World War I happened, right? As we've talked about before, if it wasn't for things like World War I or the Civil War, a lot of these guys wouldn't be officers. Right. So, when World War I starts in 1914, he left his

first command. He was still in command of a ship, but he left the HMS Niger anchored off the coast and dipped out because he had a dinner party scheduled with his wife and some friends at an upscale restaurant that was right off the coast. Oh, yes.

Yes, you told me this. Now, while he was there having, I don't know, whatever upper class naval officer dinner, it looks like, getting drunk. It's on me, too. Yeah, doing weird things with each other. A German U-boat surfaced and then sank his boat. And he watched it go down from a nearby window. Unfortunate. Just like swirling his whiskey in his glass,

watching his ship sink in the harbor. Oh, that's still good. Wonder whose problem that is. Oops. Did it again, boys. By 1915, he had been court-martialed twice. And he almost certainly would have been thrown out of the military if it wasn't for World War I and they needed naval officers. However, still in 1915, the campaign in Germany East Africa was not going great for the British.

German leader and noted psychopath who we'll talk about at length on his own series, Paul von Lietau-Vorbeck, which... It sounds like a sociopath. He's German German all German names sound like that yeah I know he's one of those people that he's often championed

as like this crazed like eccentric but insanely successful guerrilla leader but like he was a genocidal

insane like genocidal monster caused horrible famines by design, slaughtered villages, that kind of thing. Dude, I'm so surprised that a German would do that. I mean, this is before the Nazis. So when you hear the Imperial Germans do that, normally you're like, oh, wow, okay. This is normally reserved for the 40s.

Now, he had been running circles around the British. His reputation as being military successful is earned. I'll give him that much. However, come on now. Now, the first sea lord held a meeting with a guy named John Lee. Now, John Lee was a hunter in Africa, and he had experience in the Great Lakes region. He was not in the military. And he had good relationships with local tribes.

One of them was the most important one in the story is called like the Holoholo tribe in British held areas. Well, they're kind of in both because they're tribes. They don't really give a shit about borders. But yeah, through this process, Lee said that the Germans had plopped two steamers, which are boats, I understand, by saying plopped and steamers. Sounds like they took a shit on the lake.

I did not do that on purpose. I was hoping for a poop joke. Sometimes you write things down and only realize how ridiculous they sound when you say them out loud. But yeah, they plopped two steamers down under military command in Lake Tanganyika. Now, these were mostly repurposed, like civilian steamers, transportation ships, that used to have some plate armor and cannons on there in a lake where you can then use them for fire support from the shore.

It's bad. This gave the Germans full control of the lake using the formidable, at least for a lake, steamboat, the Hedwig von Witzmann, which was quite large. A ghastly name. Yeah. Well, again, German name. They all sound that way. steamboat the hedwig von wiesman uh which was you know quite largely named yeah well again german name they all sound that way and you know the british had nothing to contend with it lee told the sea lord that you know it might be pretty easy to take these ships out it's not like they're you

know fucking dreadnoughts or whatever right they control the entire lake. Lake boats. Yeah. If they could get some ships over there, just like the Germans did, and bring combat to them. And the British currently had none. Of course, this brings up a small problem. How in the hell do the British get a navy in the middle of a lake in Africa? You cannot sail it over there. Kind of. I mean, so Lee told them that was easy if you had manpower, which of course

they did, because the Germans had already done that. The SMS Graf von Götzen had been built in Germany, disassembled, packed into over 5,000 crates, and shipped across Africa to the lake where it was transported over rail to a shipyard and then reassembled with the help of thousands of local laborers. And since this is not Belgian Congo, I feel comfortable calling them that not slaves. His plan was simply to do the same exact thing. However, their whole plan rested on Belgian Congo and their limitless supply of slave labor. Oh, no, not my limitless supply of slave labor oh no not my limitless supply of slave labor lee said if they if they if they shipped two small motorboats

and armed them to south africa which of course is then owned by britain uh loaded them onto trains brought them up through africa into belgian con. They then could bring them overland via tractor through the goddamn mountains. This feels overcomplicated. They could then drop them into the lake and go to war. And since these motorboats are so small, they wouldn't have to

pause and assemble them like with thousands of people like the Germans did. You simply drop them into the lake. The Germans don't realize it because they're very small boats and then go to war. Now, are the motorboats related to the steamer show? Depends how much money you got.

Oh, okay. Yeah, fair enough. Now, this plan, despite being charitable... Cuckoo bananas? Cuckoo bananas. Was agreed to. Yeah yeah of course it was immediately like the the sea the first sea lord was like was like yeah sure why not he said quote it is both the duty and the tradition of the royal navy to engage the enemy wherever there

is water to float a ship which this is fucking pointless like that's not how war works you're supposed to fight over things that are tactically important not just no shut up wait i'm sorry are you for sea lord joe that's crazy remember how you got demoted yeah i i only made it to fifth sea lord i i was only lord of like the the the weird kind of gross lake that was behind my my my neighborhood the weird like thingies the coast guard and system not like 50 cows on hell yeah no that's too good for me like you know how everybody grows at least in the midwest there's lakes everywhere yeah and like everybody knows there's one like you don't

swim in that one yeah that's that's the one i'm in charge of your lake yeah that's my lake i'm like the 16th sea lord once removed Freshwater Bureau. That's tough, man. I hope you get a promotion soon. It won't happen. It's fine, though. I'm fine sitting here and getting Lynchman ISS. However, the Sea Lord realized that this mission is a bit of a gamble, and he wasn't sure who to put in charge of it.

So he punted it down the hallway to his subordinate, Sir David Gamble. Now, Gamble, much like the Sea Lord, who I will insist on calling the Sea Lord, understood that in the grand scope of World War I, the Great War in Africa was a sideshow. It was lacking any real tactical importance because everybody knew the war would be won in Western Europe. And he didn't think that seizing this large colony of Germany was really all that important. However, winning any military victory morale-wise is a good choice. So he wanted to do it. However, he would have to pick someone with a comparable lack of importance to lead it.

So Gamble wanted to pick Lee, the hunter. The whole thing is your idea. You showed up here with it. You already came from Africa. So going back is no loss to us. Right. Why not? Get in there, champ.

He was a civilian. And the rules are like, you can't just put him in charge of a naval mission. Though they did make him second command. So they sure were trying. Yeah. Now they're trying to find a marine officer to take the command because it seemed suitable. There'd probably be

landings on the other side of the lake. There'd be infantry scrimmage, whatever. But none of them wanted to do... None of them wanted to do when none of them wanted anything to do with this mission whatsoever also understandable no sir i'd rather just go get minced meat in the fucking uh you know i was going to the psalm i'd rather go like huff uh mustard gas for fun with my lads um just a nice huff with the lads yeah that's actually where the tradition of whippets come from

in in the uk is sure not many people know that yeah i think they're great grandfather's love for for huffing spicy air with the lads gotta say with the lads with with the with the lads uh now in a nearby office sat old spicy functionally unemployed within the royal navy sitting behind a desk in the intelligence branch where he had been relegated since losing his ship at a at a dinner party it just makes me giggle every time his job was like had something to do with uh liaisoning uh uh liaising uh with the merchant marine though he didn't really have yeah uh like i guess he was a bit of a secretary or whatever uh now he overheard gamble talking about the mission so of course he rushed outside and volunteered for it gamble's like that fuck it

why not and spicy got the job now charge, Spicy had to find a crew. And much like finding him, he couldn't get active duty people. He had to mostly get dudes from the reserve. People were exempt from active service. People that he could pull. Yeah. He had to go fill a dinghy with lads.

Unimportant lads who were not previously being used. Now, however, he swore all of these men to secrecy uh because there was you know a lot of german spies uh right in in england at the time so he's like don't fucking say anything uh there's german spies everywhere so of course he then went home and told his wife about the mission and then she shared with everybody else yeah so secretly the secrecy not the best for the mission um now what about the men and then she shared it with everybody else. Yeah. So secretly there's secrecy, not the best for the mission.

Um, now what about the men here? It could have clearly, these were, you know, our lads, right? Uh,

yeah. The men were hard. Yeah. Uh, because you know, the, you can't, if you look at the realities of the mission,

you do need some dudes who are quite resilient. You're going to be marching over land through the jungle, dying in droves from malaria or whatever. Well, for starters, no, that's not who he recruited. There's a doctor because the crew needed a doctor

who was a washout like him and kind of like... I couldn't find any information as to why he got fired from previous jobs. However... Killing patients. Maybe uh it's like 1950 and he was cancer patients yeah but that wasn't frowned upon back then he's like oh my bad patients here's a rivet his name is dr hanschel um and i think when the reasons why he had found himself in an office uh like riding a desk rather than out on the front or whatever, is that he was suffering from a seemingly

incurable case of dysentery. It had been going on for years, which isn't completely uncommon. I think it's like amoebic dysentery that happens. However, it did make him occasionally shit his own pants. It's it. Got a doctor.

Now, the other men recruited were previously retired, exempted from military service or regular Navy service and were relegated to say it. Got a doctor. Now, the other men recruited were previously retired, exempted from military service or regular Navy service, and had been relegated to the reserves. All of them were at least some form of Naval Reserve, and it included a travel agent, a race car driver, a lieutenant at the age of 50 who had never been promoted and insisted on wearing a monocle. Oh, my God.

He did fight because these were motorboats he's wearing to be steamships right so he had to find people who actually knew how to work on motors one was the race car driver uh and the other was noted for being a quote prickly glasswegian which i just assume is everybody from glasgow it's just alice yeah it's just alice alice's more war one. There was another person who probably faked his death for $100 in insurance money once. Dude, this is a fucking...

Remember the scene from Miss Glorious Bastards? I'm suddenly a special team and it's just guys. There were two Scotsmen. One who had his finger blown off at the Battle of Ypres, who volunteered. Yeah, he's more dynamic without it. They heard someone talking about the mission at a bar.

Again, secrecy. Who needs it? They insisted on only wearing kilts, which that's the least weirdest thing of anybody in the crew does. I do kind of respect that, though. I mean, it allows air to get all up in your in your grundle parts you know not related to the steamer or the motorboat somehow now there's another guy who's honestly the weirdest to me he was noted for being young so i don't know why he got away with just being in the naval reserve but he also insisted on calling his wife mother stop it i hate that it's like my pens man it's fucking

gross uh i don't know what like it's oh i hate it um now when the important thing now one of the most important things is to get his two motorboats they were 40 feet long and made of mahogany uh he named them officially the hms cat and dog um to which the royal navy said you can't name them something that stupid renamed pathetic why yeah that's the it's the royal navy i don't know they didn't want to like that's lame as shit no feel the feel the cat and dog uh so he he actually named it something even funnier um he named it the mimi and the toto uh now spicer picked those names to spite the royal navy after shooting down his first one and he claims he spoke French and he claims that Mimi meant

meow and Toto means bow wow so he still named them cat and dog then the Royal Navy is like sure fine that sounds great and they were both armed with like three pounder hotchkiss guns machine guns and stuff like that

it was decided that they should probably test these weird overarmed uh motorboats uh before they left and found out you know in the in the throes of lake tanganyika that they don't work right so we should probably test them uh they go over to the river thames uh and they fired the three pounders It snapped off the boat and cartwheeled into the river. They had to be replaced. Hell yeah, dude. They had to reinforce the gun mounts. And like, all right, that should be considered good.

Let's go. The boats are loaded down with personal weapons. A bicycle for some reason. As well as tons of tinned beef. And Spicer made sure to have special dress uniforms made for all the men by his own design, which for some reason included bell bottoms.

Perfect. I kind of got nothing for that one. I'm going to be honest with you. Except the Scotsman who still refused to wear anything but their kilts. Which again, I respect. I'd rather wear a kilt than bell bottoms. Yeah, me too. I've worn a kilt before. wear a kilt than bell bottoms yeah me too i've worn a kilt before yeah kilt to my eighth grade dance were you were you michael flatley uh no i was

trying to impress a pretty girl you know this is gonna shock you didn't work uh we've all been there i mean whomst among us has not worn a dress to impress a woman you know it wasn't a dress it's a kilt yeah that's why i said thousands of years show some god damn respect armenia no okay yeah fair enough that's all i can ask it's not even that ancient all right now the small boats were were loaded up onto a transport like they were put in like this weird uh block and tackle thing loaded up onto a transport ship They were put in this weird block and tackle thing, loaded up onto a transport ship, and then sent off in June of 1915.

But they left all their medical supplies and food behind. Whoops. That's so good. Also, nobody had packed a map. They solved this problem later on with something that's honestly kind of funny. Instead of planning

for this upcoming mission, because Spicer had not planned yet. He didn't plan for shit. His job was putting... I am so goddamn surprised this man wasn't very good at planning or anything else. Shocking, you know? At this point, Spicer's career arc in the context of this mission is effectively

that part of a heist movie where he's like, I'm putting together a team. Yeah. Such that it is. All of the planning was being done by Lee, who was already in Africa. However, he spent the entire

voyage on this ship getting blackout drunk and telling everybody made up stories about his time in China and his fighting that he'd been doing in World War One up to the point which of course as we know he hadn't been. Yeah. And all this is happening

while he's shirtless and swinging his sword around. He had an officer's sword. It wasn't his deck. This sounds like it was probably his deck. It wasn't his deck. Also claimed that he invented the entire mission plan and had got it greenlit personally from Churchill in a mano-a-mano meeting because Churchill respected him so much. Churchill was first Lord of the Admiralty at the time. And of course, he had to approve of this plan before he was forced to resign from the whole Gallipoli thing.

Right. But of course, it didn't happen with like a personal meeting with him at all Lee was the one doing all the planning and everybody knew it like everybody had met Lee and so in order to counter this

Spicer demote like threatened to demote anybody who said it was Lee's plan oh come on you fucking baby there's also a time he almost blew up the ship on accident. He began smoking. I love smoking ships. He's a huge fan of accidentally killing naval vessels. At this point, he's like the anti-naval officer.

A ship that killed his dad when he was a kid, and he's been trying to get revenge the whole time. So he was smoking near the ships uh near the the motorboats engines uh like so that they were loaded on the ship they're doing that they were testing the motorboats engines which required them to be started and because this is like 1915 these engines kind of suck they give off really bad gas vapors which of course are flammable everybody knows this. However, he insisted,

because like the captain of the ship that they are riding on starts yelling at him, like, put the, put your fucking cigarette out. You're going to kill us. To which he does not put a cigarette out, but insists that gas vapors cannot form on a ship.

That's wrong. Yeah. It's doesn't make any fucking sense. So the captain of the transport ship had to threaten to like detain him to get him to go away um yeah oh uh about those cigarettes this is probably my favorite part i don't know this is like one of those small details that honestly makes it just underlines perfectly the kind of guy he is his cigarettes he smoked at the end of a long stem like the penguin or a french woman in the 20s yeah uh and each one is personalized with his name he had monogrammed cigarettes okay that's

actually pretty fucking cool i want monogrammed cigarettes like from somehow he managed to bring so many monogrammed cigarettes it's noted that by the time they finally get all the way to the lake he's still smoking them somehow like i don't have no idea how many fucking cigarettes he brought it's a lot yeah gotta be prepared joe so they finally get to cape town south africa in uh 19 july 2nd 1915 every single person in the mission uh fucking hated him it's by this point i assume yeah most of them also hate one another which happens to all military people when they're in small enclosed spaces that for a long period of time however that didn't change anything it didn't make him like maybe i should do this differently

and because the people in his crew were talking about lee so much like oh i wonder how lee's doing in africa like this has he got... Because at this point, Lee is organizing everything. He's organizing the entire overland trip that they're about to make. Like what trains they're going to take, where their switch offs are going to be, where they're going to sleep. When they get to Belgian Congo, he arranged with feudal slave owners, feudal slave owning belgians to build roads for them because there was no roads he was doing all of that while these guys were like getting tanked on this ship what's personalized cigarettes monograms with monogram cigarettes yeah uh yeah like like the like the girl from fully coolly um now don't worry about it i'm not gonna explain that one

that joke is for again about three people uh and so he gets to south africa and he's getting furious at this point uh spicer is almost like you know the guy they get so mad like their face just turned red and they shake like he's doing whenever he hears his name like Whenever he hears Lee's name, that's his reaction. Because he's so mad that Lee is getting all of the credit. And rightfully so. He's doing everything. But they do manage to find a map finally.

They stole one from the local museum. So they have a map. Yeah. Now the ships are loaded onto the train, brought through what is today's Zimbabwe, formerly known as something else that won't be named. Rest in piss, motherfuckers. However, do check out the latest

W2IP about it. Oh, yeah. Well, it won't be the latest by the time this episode comes out. Yeah, it fucking might be, bud. Going on a month-long hiatus. Now, you're a train guy uh as your podcast famously says you know trains good cars bad which i'm not arguing with uh but you know tell me what happens when you when you when you load flammable wooden boats onto the back of a train, like the cargo. Things inevitably blow up.

And it's a coal-powered train that throws sparks. Just the tastiest scenario imaginable, really. Yeah. Honestly, if almost a topic for your other show. And to his credit, Spicer kind of understood this was a problem.

So he fixed it in what is the most British way way possible and that is by almost getting his men killed again well this guy just loves doing it he stationed has been standing on top of the boats armed with brooms and then like batting away sparks sweeping the sparks yeah okay and by the end of july they're in elizabethville um which is inside Belgian Congo. And it was there he finally ran into Lee, where Lee gave him a full debriefing and a full rundown of what exactly they were going to do to get to the overland part of the journey. Because they're not going on trains the whole time. They're about to get to the part where they're going to Fitzcarraldo this motherfucker up a mountain.

And Lee has been planning for that four months at this point. So, of course, Spicer orders Lee to go to south africa because he's facing criminal charges oh the criminal charges are completely made up uh yeah spicer accuses him of violating operational security and letting information out and uh telling the germans um and weirdly the charge and telling the Germans. And weirdly, the charge of insulting the Belgian flag, which I need to be clear here. I feel like that should be mandatory rather than criminal charge. Yeah, the Belgians are the worst. We all know this. Actually, the reason why I'm joining you, normally I'm like, God, you just hate every

country and you do. But recently I went to a trivia night here in Yerevan. I'm joining you. Normally, I'm like, God, you just hate every country, and you do. I do. Recently, I went to a trivia night here in Yerevan, and we lost by one point, and the answer to the question that we got incorrect that cost us the game was Belgium, so now I also have a feud with Belgium. There you go. See? Doesn't it feel good?

It's not my team's fault for not knowing that. It's Belgium's fault for existing. Doesn't it feel so good? Feels so good, doesn't it? So he was given two charges, both of which made no sense. Insulting the Belgian flag was quite funny. It is funny. Maybe he did insult it.

I don't know. I mean, he's British. He probably insults every flag he sees reflexively. And Lee correctly points out that if the Germans know anything, it's because of you or because when we landed

in South Africa with large motorboats, the German spies in the area saw it and watched you loaded up on a train and knew where that fucking train went because it's not like you're going to get lost on a railroad. Yeah, you can't really

redirect. That train goes to fucking Belgian Tongo. Kind of the point, actually. Yeah. Now, of course, none of that matters. And not to mention Lee's like, what about your wife, bro? We all know that she told everybody. So he ends up

leaving lee kind of disappears uh after this uh he returns to south africa um i doubt he's actually charged with anything for reasons that like the british government's also not exactly right he just kind of vanishes from history uh i can't like me and toto's big adventure like the author jow's phone's like yeah i really can't i can't even find a death certificate or anything wow i mean there's a good chance he he dies during the war of course oh yeah good point uh but none of this matters uh lee's gone even though he remember he was second command of the mission uh which leads spicer to command everything like a dictator uh and by august they're even deeper into the congolese jungle still by rail um and a weird uh

historical side note here this is the railhead uh where cecil roads once attempted the cairo project um and failed miserably yeah it's dead now this is where the boats were to be offloaded and they'd go into, you know, Fitzcarraldo mode. There had been no roads at first. That's where Lee came in. He worked at the Belgian Congo administration to scratch out roads because the Belgian Congo only built roads for the purpose of resource extraction

outside of the, like the various municipalities of this massive colony. Because the Belgian Congo only built roads for the purpose of resource extraction. Outside of the various municipalities of this massive colony, they built very little to zero infrastructure. Unless it was directly linked to... Resource extraction, presumably. Yeah. Dragging diamonds out, whatever, bringing them to the coast, getting them out of the country. Or rubber or whatever. If it was like, the local villagers would really like a road here. Nah, that's not how we do things. That's why when Congo got independence, they were famously fucked, on top of various other reasons.

So all of these auxiliary roads that wouldn't otherwise exist, they had to just be scratched into existence. So it's like single tractor roads because they had only a couple months to do all this. There was also the entire Mutumba mountain range that they would have to cross, which is a problem. Easy peasy. Yeah. All of this for the grand total of 150 miles. Jesus.

Now, all of this seems quite insurmountable. And for any sane person it may have been, but Lee had been really good. Well, that's not what we're talking about. Right. We got to pay rent, Joe. Some credit needs to go to Lee for doing a lot of the

organization and bribes and whatever he had to do with the Belgian Congo feudal lord system to get them to work to work of course a lot of this involves massive amounts of congolese slaves um which you know so you do not in fact have to hand it to lee not in second thought um at one point he's working with a man who's only noted as being named as uh mr davidson uh. I don't like that. Yeah, he ruled over an area, like a fiefdom, which is also super common.

It goes into the licensed purchasing practice that the Belgian Congo had, where if you ran a company or you were a rich guy, you could lease out this huge chunk of land and the Belgians would just give it to you and let you do with it whatever you wanted. And they wouldn't ask questions. Seems ethical. Yeah.

There's certainly nothing evil happening here, fellas. He owned thousands of slaves. At one point, at least 1,400 slaves were working on this project to level areas, cut down thousands of trees, which, course, and they can then use for the steam tractors that they plan on using, which virtually trains themselves, building hundreds of bridges, stuff like that. This never happens without Lee. Not saying it's a good thing, but in the context of the military mission, it's a good thing for so you know in the context of the military mission it's a good

thing for so it could be complete i guess so that's where spicer shows up where all of this has already happened so of course he takes credit for all of it um and seeing he is seeing these slaves busting their ass uh and getting ready to to help pull all these boats through he decides that these are a perfect willing audience um to have his men dress in their dress uniforms he had purposely made for them and parade through the labor camps of slaves and like that in berlin ceremony but okay think of it this way have you ever seen a better portrait of a british military officer than the asshole forcing a group of people that absolutely hate his guts to march around in front of slaves? No, I mean, that's perfect.

That's pretty much on the nose, right? Yeah. Now, the crux of the plan required steam tractors and draft animals, as well as human bodies, to pull the ships down the roads. And, you know, in a perfect world this goes smoothly um but you know this goes this is lines like my donkey so yeah actually it all goes smoothly the end uh thank you everybody for tuning in um yeah but uh the steam tractors didn't show up on time uh now the easy answer to this is simply wait for them to show up right um but you know that doesn't happen hundreds of slaves and draft animals get lashed to these

boats via ropes and they begin to just drag them down the road um now as you can imagine this goes very very slowly with the added benefit of damaging the boats they were supposed to you know use to fight this whole thing right this went on for a week until the tractors finally showed up um at this point like the you know the how they're in like a a carriage like the like a box type thing most of that's broken by now because they've been handling these boats terribly along the way uh the slaves had also built hundreds and hundreds of small bridges, like we talked about. However, because there's tons of rivers and valleys. Right.

However, there's a small flaw in the plan. Nobody involved in this is an engineer, exactly. I don't like him. I fuck the bridge. And mr davidson uh in his assistance mr i fucked the bridge to you yeah mr i fucked the bridge uh ordered the slaves to build the bridge uh built the bridges and you know the the overseers over like coming up with the plans only built these bridges and design these bridges to account for the weights of boats and the men not the tractors oh that's outstanding work

that's terrific they busted straight through that motherfucker um so chocolate up one setback so then they had to wait to rebuild that bridge Other teams got sent ahead to reinforce the other bridges. So yeah, they made it about six miles down that again. And then the edge of the road collapsed. And when the tractors flew off the road into a bush, bringing one of the boats with it. Standing work. Yeah. Great stuff all around, no doubts. No doubts.

Honestly, one of my favorite parts is they found themselves in the middle of swamps occasionally. These are like super fast moving swamps. I don't know how to explain it. Like sand, maybe? Well, it would rain a lot. And then swamps, like you'd get suddenly swamps. And they would be so deep, it would take over the road that had previously been built for them. So they'd have to stop because they couldn't bring the tractors across the soft, muddy road.

They'd just get stuck. So they'd have to stop. The slaves would have to build a big circle-y road that goes around the current swamp to get around it, only in time for another swamp to come in. And of course, we're talking swamps in the jungle, so malaria. Now, I should note here that nowhere in Jal's phone's book does it note that any member of the crew dies. What is unknown is if any slaves died,

because if they did, nobody would have noted it. It seems exceedingly likely. Though I couldn't find any accounts, even in the stuff that Spicer wrote of any slaves dying. He probably would have written about it. He wasn't that, he wasn't, he's an idiot, but he wasn't like, he didn't think of these people as subhuman, at least not in his own writing.

Right. So who knows? I'm going to say the, if I was the eight ball of doom here, I would say it seems likely you know yeah yeah i'll go it seems likely spice had also forgotten the small detail of getting food from the camps uh so they were forced to go hunting which uh i need to be clear here he was not very good at uh most people in his crew also were not good at it because it's almost like they could have kept Lee around who was noted for being a hunter. And maybe that worked the plan, Joe.

Yeah. The African laborers and slaves took mercy on them and showed them how to harvest cassava and stuff and shared their food with them. cassava and stuff um and shared their food with them however this had a small downside as these most of these guys had never been out of england let alone been to africa their guts were not prepared for anything other than boiled meat and beans and this shit just ran through them causing you know like dehydration and stuff like that and there's also the problems of the steam tractors themselves um they would require burning wood to move, of course, steam. And they'd get out of the swamps, right? So they're out of the swamps.

And after this, they're in tall, dry grass country. The steam engines would occasionally throw off sparks, just like the train we talked about, and cause massive bushfires out of nowhere. Terrific. and cause massive bushfires out of nowhere. One of the men on the crew named McGee noted that on a couple occasions, they were almost all killed by a random wave of fire. What a hell of a way to die. There's so many cartoonish ways to die in this mission.

Well, if you don't drown in the swamp or get murdered by falling equipment, you might get killed by a wild appearing fire that we caused. I don't know. Wildfire? Within 10 days, they'd gone only 30 miles. Remember, they have

150 miles to go. Not ideal. It's not good. Though at some point, a man in the crew nicknamed Tubby I don't know why. You know why, Joe. I'm not going to make any assumptions. Had managed to acquire a pent chimpanzee named Josephine, who followed him around, which is kind of fun.

Josephine seems nice. I feel like that's the only fun we're going to get in the rest of the story. Honestly, Josephine stays pure throughout the entire thing uh like it's always comic relief which that's another thing is like if you didn't know this was a true story you would think it's like an over-the-top adventure novel because now they even have a chimp sidekick you know there's a small side episode where uh Spicer attempting to prove his hunting expertise nearly got murdered by a buffalo because he tried to shoot at it and he missed.

Now mind you, he spent a lot of this time telling people all of the great hunting he had done in China and then grabbed a rifle to go hunt a buffalo. While he was also doing the Boxer Rebellion. Fighting the Boxer Rebellion. Yes, of course. While he was also doing the Boxer Rebellion, fighting the Boxer Rebellion. Yes, yes, of course.

So while he attempted to bag a buffalo, he missed entirely. And to be fair, buffalos, and like Cape buffalos particularly, super dangerous. Like if you try to hunt them, like they kill a ton of people, which like good.

Stop trying to shoot them. If you're like if you're like a tour a big game tourism hunter fuck you i hope the animal wins me too and uh yeah he had to run uh he ran away from this buffalo who wanted who wanted to like clap him uh and he hid behind a hill um and that hill ended up being a gigantic red uh red ant hill which then uh attacked him and he got attacked by a cloud of ants. Tasty. And then going along with the concept, this might be a stupid adventure novel.

They were followed by a gang of baboons who would come out and occasionally just punch the shit out of someone in the group. It's noted in the book that they, quote, him uh or assaulted people in the crew so like it's not like they threw stuff at them like if they had shit thrown at them like they would probably like the monkeys threw poop at me but like when you say assault it tells me that they like came screaming out of the bush and just started beating that's a specific use of a specific word right i mean i know which one i want to believe even the jungle hates the british military by by september yeah i mean it's like the jungle is neutral like but you can call it many things it doesn't care for anybody um like when one of the things that's

interesting uh to me is um when i was researching way back when i was doing my undergrad i was doing research for like the battle of Dien Bien Phu and like comparing and contrasting like the Viet Minh to the NVA later on in the US war in Vietnam and like the memoirs and notes left behind by the Viet Minh and the

NVA and like VC and all that like all of them note how much they hate the fucking jungle like this shit sucks I am so sick VC and all that, all of them note how much they hate the fucking jungle. This shit sucks. I am so sick. I'm so tired. I've had malaria for 16 years. So yeah,

the jungle is at best neutral. By September, they were finally at the foot of the Mutumba Mountains, which they immediately found a problem with their plan uh despite the fact that you know things have been cleared out to make room for their convoy of misery here the slope of the mountains was simply too steep for the tractors to make it up uh like

yeah so it's like okay we're gonna do this uh the old-fashioned way and By that, I mean, of course... Slaves. Attaching slaves and oxen to it. And admittedly, there's only 28 people in the whole crew, but the crew also joins in. Not Conor Spicer, of course, because he's an officer. So, 30 oxen and hundreds of people

were still not enough. But they struggled inch by inch over 6,400 feet of mountain before they finally got off the top. The way down was somehow worse because at least on the way up, you're pulling it, right? Assuming the ropes don't break. Right.

This time you have the control. You have to push and pull. Yeah. And this time on the downslopeope they don't have the strength to slow them down um they broke like when the tractors broke off the chains of goof went flying down the mountain uh they lost the boat on one more than one okay just like tumbling end over end somehow this didn't kill anybody that i can find evidence of incredible yeah uh though it does seem like the entire expedition at this point

had been a continuous series of close calls like so many things that could have happened so far like catastrophically bad but somehow they managed to keep the bad to a dull roar because like I said I had no evidence of anybody dying

so far and I need to be clear here nobody in this crew dies amazing I had no evidence of anybody dying so far. And I need to be clear here. Nobody in this crew dies. Amazing. Yeah, I do not. So like, yeah, Germans die, though. But that's next episode.

Who cares? Sorry. Thankfully, for everybody involved, the other side of the mountain was one of those areas where uh there was resources so there had there was a railroad through diamond country uh so they just had to load the heavily damaged ships or boats uh onto the train here boss just like six planks fall off the boats are bucked at this point uh so they finally get to the uh alu alaba River, where part of the plan was to actually float the motorboats down the river and actually use them. And of course, they're completely unfamiliar with the territory. So they have to hire someone, sure, have a comic book to be their guide. He's a Danish guy who worked for the Belgians.

Danish guy who worked for the Belgians. Despite the fact he was standing in a sweltering jungle, he made sure to wear a bright white suit no matter what he did. Oh, boy. That guy's a fucking supervillain. I don't trust anybody who's wearing like a... I don't trust anybody in a white suit. And I certainly don't trust anybody in a white suit in the middle of a jungle, in the middle of a slave fiefdom.

Or I don't trust Danish people. I'm kidding. I don't know anything about you guys i'm sure you're fine nope um this episode has just been a running list of european countries we're trying to offend good good every episode that's every episode yeah we're kidding guys we love you um yeah we we doing a lot of work there but liam liam hates everybody don't take it personally. Now, at this point, they were finally able to use the boats as they are meant to, as boats, like jump in them and see them float.

Right, going into water. At this point, they did discover how badly damaged the boats had been. There was countless holes smashed in all of them, all two of them them but like tons of holes because they've been handling them with all the grace of a ups delivery guy um so yeah i was recently spurned by ups and they fucking broke my goddamn box fuckers i'm sorry i know it's fine it's fine it's fine so another setback they had to drag them out of the water and repair them uh however the heat and the humidity of africa had also caused the wood to warp and now the boats are melted they had to effectively take the boats apart plank by plank and reseal them and like put it all back together this took them another week uh and they are finally able to be off again though spicer was a little worried about using the boat's engines um i mean again it's you know the early

1900s a boat engine isn't the the most technically sophisticated thing yeah it's not the most reliable thing on earth you know and you know going so far as like i really don't want to break these motherfuckers before we even get to the lake that's me giving him the most charitable thing uh it could have been that he didn't want to use them because uh spicer reasons i don't know he's weird um so they were attached to uh barges uh which had congolese paddling teams and you know he his boat was towed by those boats so of course then they got stuck on a sandbar uh they got stuck so bad they were stuck there for a week um they came up with a um admittedly the boats were uh quite heavy uh because remember they were loaded down with like

cannons and shit um so they had to devise a way to make it float higher up on the water so they attached a whole bunch of empty barrels around the side. To give it more flotation. That worked. I can see the Magic School Bus episode by that logic. Yeah. I remember when Miss Frizzle took the kids to Belgian Congo. It got pretty dark.

But you know what you're going to do, right? And if that wasn't enough. They nearly were murdered by a hippo. And they got to the other side. The boats were hauled out of the water. Loaded back onto trains. know if that wasn't enough they nearly were murdered by a hippo uh and uh yeah they finally they got to the other side the boats were hauled out of the water loaded back onto trains and and they went on their final stretch of their very stupid journey now while at the edge of the river old spicy sewed together the flag of a vice admiral which was a rank i should point out that he did not have i love doing it joe yeah uh he just kind

of gave it to himself uh and he was a lieutenant commander uh and he had been temporarily promoted to full commander for the length of the mission so he skipped over the ranks of commander captain commodore and rear admiral on his way to promotion good for him man previous this he he also insisted someone called him rearar Admiral too. I guess when you're faking it, aim high, right? Right. Totally makes sense. As if this isn't weird enough, he had his African

valet sew him his new rank because he had, of course, he's a Vice Admiral. He has to have the rank to go along with this. He tells his valet to sew this rank onto his shoulder board so he can show it

thusly. And of course, this is a problem. This African valet has no fucking idea of the ranks of the Royal Navy. So he's sewn one shoulder rank of a lieutenant and one of a major, one in the Navy and one Marine rank, both of which

were wrong and did not match, which honestly I would like to believe he did that on purpose to just embarrass him. Yeah, good. Now, there are already two men wearing kilts. However, he changed into a skirt. This was not a kilt. This was a skirt that his wife had

made for him. Alright, yeah. Way to eschew gender roles, bud. Yeah. The Belgian officers of the force public, which is like the Belgian Congo's military called him, uh, like the roughly translated as like, uh,

the skirt commander or the dress commander. Well, I don't know. It was kind of funny. Uh, there were things to be called, I suppose. Yeah.

Uh, so when the force public met with uh met met with the british navy here well if you want to call this the british navy uh they met with the spicy what resembles the british navy the wish.com version of the british navy oh yeah we are on alibaba express where's it go they met spicy and they saw him drinking tea with josephine the chimp and his personal officer's hut while wearing a dress it had to be a fucking scene amazing and then uh on the distance on lake tanganyika they saw the german war steamer the kingani and finally they had found the war. And that is where we will pick up next time.

So how are you feeling about spicy so far? Dudes Rock, both in good, you know, the Dudes Rock spectrum is complex. We can't pretend to understand it, but it's pretty fucking funny. I'll tell you that. Yeah. And honestly, I think his Dudes Rock Spectrum test will be complete next episode. I'm not only saying that because it's a two-parter, but I'm saying that because, I don't know, he shows himself to not be a complete piece of shit. It's kind of hard to tell.

He's a complicated man. Most people are. Most of us also don't have chimp ballets or whatever's going on. I believe Josephine's just a friend. That's tough, man. It's tough out there for a chimp. Can't even get a job in the Navy.

So, Liam, thank you for joining me as always. Plug your shows. I had a choice. Yeah. Well, there's your problem, which is a leftist engineering disastrous podcast with slides and 10,000 losses, which is a leftist Philly sports podcast for labor, all that good stuff. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you like what we do here, consider donating to the show.

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until next time... Get yourself a monkey butler. Get yourself a monkey butler.