Show Notes
Content note: this episode contains graphic descriptions of disease, death and human remains. One victim drowns in their own blood. Another is buried alongside four of his siblings, all from the same family. Yet more are burned rather than being sent back home for a proper burial, doomed to wander the earth as lonely ghosts. And in one of the most gruesome accounts of all – some victims are turned into human ammunition, flung over the walls of a Genoese fortress to spread terror among those within. And yet this stealthy killer was able to travel across the globe, undetected, for more than 500 years. That’s because history’s deadliest traveller wasn’t a person, but the plague – and it was only when an awkward Swiss man named Alexandre Yersin decided to take matters into his own hands in Hong Kong in 1894 that the culprit was finally identified. In the centuries that preceded him, people around the world could only guess at the cause of their misery – and when you don’t understand what’s killing you or why, you’re powerless to stop it. Just 16 years after Yersin’s breakthrough, the killer returned, but this time in a different guise, picking people off one by one in Harbin, northern China. Another out-of-town scientist, Wu Liande, suddenly found himself in a race against time to understand exactly how this deadlier form of the disease was spreading along the country’s new railway lines – and, against the advice of others, made a discovery that still protects us today. Join Sarah and Jeremiah for this special Halloween episode of By Their Own Compass, as we tell the story of history’s deadliest traveller, and the two men who put their own lives on the line to stop its reign of terror. In this episode, Sarah and Jeremiah discuss: * The siege of Caffa, where a Mongol army is said to have catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the city walls, and whether this really unleashed the Black Death * The Black Death and its effect on the medieval population of Europe, including the first-hand account of Italian shoemaker Agnolo the Fat * Alexandre Yersin’s race to identify the plague bacterium in Hong Kong in 1894, despite being shut out by a better-equipped Japanese team led by Kitasato Shibasaburō * How Wu Liande uncovered the airborne spread of pneumonic plague in Harbin, and the French rival who ignored his advice to wear a mask * Whether the marmots of the Manchurian steppe could be the plague’s hidden reservoir, and why rats and fleas may not be the whole story * Dark-tourism spots for plague history, from Hong Kong’s Tai Ping Shan to Edinburgh’s Mary King’s Close, Venice’s Festa della Salute and the Sedlec Ossuary
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.bytheirowncompass.com/subscribe
More from By Their Own Compass
In this encore episode of By Their Own Compass, we explore the extraordinary journey of Sacagawea, a nursing teenager who traveled across North America with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Corps of Discovery from 1805–1806. Looking beyond the legend, we examine her role as a traveler, cultural mediator, and Native American woman navigating survival, motherhood, and agency in a rapidly changing America. Join us as we gently dismantle the stereotypes attached to Sacagawea to tell her story as a voyager and cultural pioneer learning to move between two radically different worlds. Was she the faithful guide so often portrayed in American history books? A collaborator in a process that brought devastation to Indigenous peoples across the United States? Or was Sacagawea acting for her own reasons – making the best of a situation she did not choose while doing what she believed was right for herself and her newborn child? Born into a world shaped by seasonal migrations and annual rhythms, she was a member of the Shoshone tribe, part of a complex network of exchange, cooperation, and conflict with neighboring peoples, including the Hidatsa, Mandan, Sioux, and Crow – each with its own languages, customs, and political realities. Sacagawea understood this world instinctively, one the expedition did not. Along the way, she repeatedly saved Lewis and Clark from disaster, asserted herself when it mattered – insisting on being allowed to see a beached whale – and experienced deep emotion, including a brief reunion with her long-lost brother, only to be forced to leave him again. This is the story of a Native American woman negotiating colonial expansion, motherhood on the move, and the power of finding your voice in a world being reshaped around you.
Where do our world maps actually come from? When was the first one made? Are our maps racist? And why did the UN just pass a resolution encouraging governments and organisations to move away from the map we’ve all been using since the 16th Century? In this episode of By Their Own Compass, we look at the one thing every traveller we’ve featured on this podcast has needed – and some have even shaped: a map of the world. Our story starts in Roman Alexandria, where Claudius Ptolemy’s grid of latitude and longitude laid the foundations of modern geography, and continues with Gerardus Mercator, whose 1569 world map transformed navigation at sea – then shaped how the world saw itself for the next 450 years. The catch? Maps have always meant power, and many things we take for granted – that north is up, that Europe sits at the centre, that Africa is roughly the size of Greenland – are choices and distortions, not facts. And it's no surprise that African nations led the recent push at the United Nations to move away from Mercator: few places have paid a higher price for the way Europe drew the world. We ask how the blank spaces on European maps of Africa came to be seen as an open invitation to colonialism, and how the Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference turned lines on paper into borders that still divide communities today. We also delve into Renaissance heresy trials, horoscope-obsessed Greeks, and the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. You’ll also hear about David Livingstone’s hunt for the source of the Nile, the Gall-Peters map controversy (yes, including that West Wing scene), and why the only map that doesn’t lie, is a globe.
Christian missionaries have regularly been at the forefront of travel adventurism over the last 500 years, sent by their churches to parts of the world few back home knew much about, and often at great personal risk. And while they were regularly showing up in regions that hadn’t invited them and weren’t always receptive to what they were selling, their stories remain some of the most fascinating that history has to offer – particularly those of the missionaries who were more ambitious than most .In this episode, we take a closer look at the efforts of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest who set out to convert China from the emperor on down; Mary Slessor, who tried to personally save as many Nigerian-born twins from infanticide as she possibly could; and Samson Occom, a Mohegan convert whose fundraising tour of England aimed to fund a school for training other Native Americans – a school better known today as Dartmouth College. Yes, that one. (But also this one. And this one, too.) And yet their accounts of the places they visited didn’t just shift opinions back home or capture something significant about a moment in time – sometimes their efforts genuinely changed the lives of the people they encountered, and, just as often, ended up changing the missionaries themselves. Sarah and Jeremiah discuss the complicated legacy of missionaries like Slessor, who found herself simultaneously opposing and embedded within colonial British rule in Africa; the advantage of being a novelty in a foreign land; and whether any of the three actually converted the people they set out to bring into the house of God.
In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, two Swiss women decided to drive a Ford from Geneva to Kabul. One of them was running out of time, and they both knew it. The driver was Annemarie Schwarzenbach – a Swiss industrialist’s daughter, archaeologist and journalist who’d been gifted the car by her father. The other was Ella Maillart – Olympic sailor, elite skier and an intrepid traveller who’d already crossed from Beijing to India by camel, lorry and foot with Bond author Ian Fleming’s older brother. Schwarzenbach had a secret, but Maillart was eager to go, so off they went – through the Balkans, across Turkey and Iran, over the Hindu Kush, and into Kabul, arriving in Afghanistan just as war broke out in Europe behind them. When they arrived, they found a country with its own problems: a king exiled a decade earlier for unveiling Kabul, girls’ schools operating unofficially against the objections of the clergy, and women whose identities were completely erased. The women recorded the journey in two separate books: The Cruel Way (Maillart) and All the Roads Are Open (Schwarzenbach) – but readers may wonder if they’re even on the same road, never mind sitting next to each other in the same car. In this episode, Sarah and Jeremiah discuss the differing versions: Schwarzenbach’s desperate need to escape and Maillart’s doomed conviction that distance could cure any problem; travelling as women who were often read as men; and the Afghanistan they drove into.
Jeremiah and Sarah are both traveling this week, but as a special treat, we’re reposting one of our favorite episodes from earlier this year. We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be back in two weeks with a fresh episode. If you’ve ever Googled “how to avoid scams in [destination],” you already know the genre: YouTube videos breathlessly (and ominously) exposing the 15 tricks that will ruin your trip to Florence, Bangkok, or Marrakech. Full disclosure: We watch them too. But the historically minded traveler will be quick to note that almost none of these scams are new. Structurally, the “hey, did you lose your wallet” scam is identical to cons recorded in Chinese travel literature over 400 years ago. The “helpful stranger” who leads you to his friend’s shop? A porter scam from 1617. Fake antiquities? Egyptian villagers were running that play on European collectors since the days of Napoleon. In this episode, we trace the world’s most common travel scams back to their historical origins across three centuries and three continents, and then embarrass ourselves by sharing the ones we’ve fallen for personally or that have happened to people on our trips we’re supposed to be protecting. You can trust us! For a small monthly donation, join the By Their Own Compass Club for bonus content, transcripts, reading lists, and special member-exclusive offers.