I am somewhat of an expert on various gasses. I had no carbon monoxide detector in my house, because I don't have any gas appliances or an attached garage. One day a company *accidently* sent me two very expensive CO detectors for free, so I installed them. A few weeks later the power went out, and I was using a very small propane heater in the house. Knowing a lot about propane, I considered this safe, the heater was inspected, the gas was not leaking, burning correctly, etc. It's rated for indoor use. Then I got a bad headache and started to feel tired so I was going to go take a nap. And leave the heater running. The second I laid down the CO alarm went off, and jesus christ, that's why I had a headache and was tired! If they had not accidentally shipped those detectors to my house, I would have absolutely gone to sleep and never woken up. Do as Simon says, install one. Doesn't matter if you don't really "need" it.
@@momcat2223 I think it was like Jeff or Bob or something. LOL! They came with a packing slip from somebody else in the box, with a different address. Even more strangely it was a company I regularly do business with - and checked the price of these detectors and said...nah. Like 3 weeks later they were here, and they even fit into the same wiring as my old ones. (smoke only) There is no way they could have known I was looking at them on their website. They do have cheaper models available, at least buy a cheap one - I just wanted the combo CO/smoke in one. :) And yeah, looking back on what I was doing...I would have yelled at anybody else!
“Huge fiery spheres rising from the sea” like the sun? I absolutely want to start using that now. Imagine starting every diary entry with “Today a huge fiery sphere rose from the horizon and currently burns above me.”
"Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys." That's a real piece of a famous morse code, sent just before the Halifax explosion.
If it happened in the straits of Malakka in the late 1930s or in the early/mid 1940s it's quite possible that official records were lost during WW2 or during the following Indonesian separatist rebellion. Both conflicts caused massive destruction in the East Indies.
In cases of risus sardonicus or rictus grin it’s normally been caused by tetanus or strychnine poisoning, the face being pulled back in a locked grimace. Most mouths just gape when death occurs due to the relaxation of muscles after death. I think the writer of this piece was using it to add drama to the scene.
If you ever seen a body that's laid on a hot deck in the sun for a few hours in a tropical climate they all tend to have that look. The heat causes the skin around the mouth and eyes to recede. This is nothing but a ghost story. If it had really happened someone who was on the "Rescue ship" would have spoken about it to somebody. The dead peoples relatives would have been asking what happened to their loved one when they never returned from sea. There would be shipping records the "Rescue Ship" would have the encounter written down in the Masters diary . Nobody on the "Rescue Ship" Ever spoke of this huge mystery that they came across to their family or let it slip out while they were drinking with their buddies. Why would the Rescuers flee the mystery ship just because they saw smoke thats not how it works there could of been many other people on board that needed help and just because there is smoke doesn't mean the ship is likely to blow up. The boarding party would have tried to find the source of the smoke and what the ship was carrying first. Nothing makes sense to anyone who has worked on the ocean. Plus, no one is just going to run away when there is a chance of salvaging the ships cargo that quickly.
W/ regard to the ship carrying all the dangerous stuff. UPS used to try to store up everything with hazard stickers on it and put it onto one truck. I think the logic was that only one driver would be at risk, rather than everyone having a little bit of risk.
Depending on the type and levels of hazards, there are certain certifications and even special additions to the operator's driver's license that are required for the operator to legally transport said hazardous materials. I'm sure these vary with different states and countries. I highly doubt every driver for USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. has these requirements. Some can be pretty pricey and require a decent bit of effort.
People believe in lizard shadow government child trafficking pizza parlor basements, invisible sky men who made everything in under a week, a water walking snack multiplier god child, nuclear wars fought thousands of years ago, flat Earth, that 550k people came together in a conspiracy to fake the entirety of the space race, Donald Trump was a good president, and that Joe Biden isn't a doddering old fool. There is no limit to what an ignorant savage can hold as true.
Medan is a city in Indonesia, pronounced May-dan. "Orang" in Indonesian means "person" (orang-orang >people) but the Dutch era many spellings include the extra letters presumably to mate up the phonetic pronunciation with the Dutch language, for example the letters oe to make the u sound which is like the word too or pew, (English bamboo>Dutch era bamboe>modern Indonesian bambu)
Regarding telegraphy: It really can become part of how you communicate to a degree where it's no different to talking. I've met a few people who had a distinct habit of tapping while talking. The one that really got me was an elderly gentleman with severely slurred speech after a stroke making him hard to understand, yet the taps were perfectly clean and easy to copy Morse code with the exact same content - and crazy fast if he stopped trying to get the words out of his mouth as well (I'm not very good at copying Morse code, so I used my phone to help me out).
With how quickly I clicked on this video just minutes after it being posted, I accept my fate as a Simon Whistler fangirl. Tell me all the spooky stuff fact boy!
I definitely recommend playing Man of Medan. It’s short, sweet, and deeply interesting. It’s kind of a choose your own adventure novel in the form of an exceptionally well-rendered and well-acted video game.
"Sweet" really? O.o not quite how I would describe it but I definitely would love to see Simon play it on stream! Or just a recorded video, doesn't matter
I'm hoping Katy gets to do a whole series of maritime mysteries, because this was fun. Although it'd probably be a rather short series, since all the stories get rather repetitive. Different note: government offices get the weirdest shi*t. I used to do office work low-level state government, and one of my supervisors had a collection of "interesting" letters. My favorite was the very polite one requesting to view the UFOs we were keeping from the public. I worked in the state taxes office.
Well, it's called THE Government so you're OBVIOUSLY all in on all the big secrets. The whole thing with different branches and departments is to befuddle the common sheeple.
i know it's been a literal few minutes since this was posted, but i just want to say thank you straight away, Simon & Crew. i have regular seizures and just had a particularly bad one. Came to and started stressing about what to put on the telly while i wait for my meds to kick in. And then the very moment i start to panic, this gets uploaded... i can't begin to describe the instantaneous relief haha. Yous really came to me in my time of need :'-) thank you so much for your content, Simon, Katie, and especially Jen (the real star of the show)! much love from Glasgow ❤
Incredible how Simon puts out hours of content every single day - even though he has writers and editors, the organization, recording, pre-reading scripts for shows that are not cold reads etc. must take forever - and still manages to have videos prerecorded for several months. That's insanely productive.
This is why his jokes about cocaine use and keeping script writers locked in the basement are amusing despite the fact nobody would be surprised if the jokes were even partially true.
@@bobfg3130 That is my point. I wouldn't be surprised if Simons work would amount to more than 40h per week, assuming that he also takes vacation time every now and then and has to have videos prerecorded for those times. I mean sure it might be fun most of the times, but some of these Casual Criminalist episodes seem to really effect him negatively and I assume Into the Shadows can't be much better.
@@MissRiny Actually I'm saying he's working 40 hours per week and not more. In 8 hours he can make 5 or 6 videos quite easily if they're shorter than 30 minutes.
I think the main reason this story has endured so long is the operator's last words. "I die." This is a terrifying line to read if you're receiving that Morse message yourself, so it's not surprising that it strikes the imagination of people who know of this story now.
@@michaelmurdock4607 Unless you were, for instance, wanting to say "I'm dying", but since you're doing Morse, you'll want to say that in fewer letters. And so, "I die"
@@resileaf9501 agreed or it translates to "I die" but was in another language originally. Or the operator is dying and not hung up on grammar. Or the grammar of a second language. As a nurse, I can say that language gets odd when people are very ill or going under/recovering from anesthesia or gas.
@@theConquerersMama German here, I die and I'm dying would both be ich sterbe in German. Im sure there are many other languages that don't have that kind of grammatical thingy.
It's actually pretty common for ships to have their names changed to confuse authorities from pirates and smugglers even today (The Atlantic had an article about it about 10 years ago). There are thousands of ships and oceans are huge. Ships don't need to have transponders like aircraft so hiding even big ships isn't hard.
A note on bodies with "fearful expressions" in general: that isn't the norm, as in the moment of death all muscles relax (or lose all tension, more specifically). So it has no relation to actual fear in the moment of death: dead faces are slack. There are a few exceptions: If the cause of death is something that causes uncontrolled muscle contractions (rictus -> uncontrolled spasming of the facial muscles in a "terrified grin"), these may persist after death. This can happen with things like tetanus, or strychnine poisoning (but strychnine is a powder, not a gas, though it can be breathed in). I'm no expert on gases or toxins but I wouldn't be surprised if some gases can do this. (Cyanide doesn't do this as far as I know, though. It causes a chemical asphyxiation, not primary muscle contraction. "Mustard gas", which can be sulphur based, also doesn't cause contractions as far as I know, and does gives strong skin reactions with horrific blistering, so wouldn't leave "unmarked bodies"). Alternatively, depending on when death took place, if it's been a while and the environment is very dry, dehydration might cause the skin to shrink, which might pull open the eyes and mouth. This isn't a quick process, though could be within days depending on the environment. (In terms of this story, if there's no distress call and a ship is just encountered adrift, the finders may not know how long ago deaths have occurred)
It was written in logs. The logs are not necessarily turned over if it doesn’t contain information deemed pertinent or necessary to warn other organizations. My grandfather was a WWII navy veteran and some logs were not turned in until a ship gets decommissioned.
honestly the best evidence that it's fake... is that there's multiple versions of the account in several sources. It's almost like a pre-internet creepy pasta. The real kicker, is that these accounts in no way form a coherent story, they have drastic variations that make them impossible to even be the same account. And yet... they have enough similarities, that it obvious they're not actually separate from each other. Always a ship named Orang Medan(or a slight variant spelling). Always found after a cryptic morse code broadcast. Always mysteriously sinks soon after being found. But... virtually every other aspect varies. Who found it? What was the morse code message? What caused it to sink? Etc.... But the big tells are that the locations don't match.... or the dates. Part of why only one version is famous is because the older versions were told during WW2. they had less fantastical elements and well probably got ignored because of how many things happened at sea in WW2. The most detailed version of the story... was not published until much later, and in a publication mostly known for publishing fiction. And well... there's no actual evidence of it being non-fiction. I know someone is gonna scream about how it was talked about in things definitely non-fiction. But that's the key.... TALKED ABOUT. IE they mentioned that they'd heard about the case, nothing more. Sooo, in the end? I must conclude the incident was probably fiction.
I am 95% sure the version of this story I heard when I was in late elementary school/early middle school involved the Navy arriving and the crew had been dead so long they were mummifying, including the corpse of the guy who was dead next to the telegraph that was transmitting the morse code message, meaning that something supernatural had to have happened for the Navy to have gotten the telegraph. That addition definitely made it more interesting.
I remember it that way too, although I don't believe it. I think they were poisoned,and just diedi. It happens. If it happened at all. The Coast Guard is a very credible source, and if they say it happened I tend to believe their report.
@@aceofspadess4945 I definitely never believed it, I always thought of it as one of those ghost stories that ended up in those Unexplained books aimed at kids that age that also talk about Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. Adding in that they had to have been dead a while makes it a better ghost tale in my opinion.
@@KMKOST1701 Probably where I read about it too! I loved that stuff as a kid, although I'm pretty much a skeptic about most of it. Still love to watch the spooky stuff for entertainment! But, I think a lot of skeptics do.
@@aceofspadess4945 I definitely believed in it a lot more as a kid, as an adult I now look for the logical answers, but since I live in the Bigfoot capital of the world, I have my fingers crossed he's real.
@@KMKOST1701 That's one that I can say honestly i hope he's out there too. I hate to say this, but until someone kills one we may not know, and I hope that never happens. Talk about hate mail and death threats for a lifetime!
A guy who says"Yeah, ships blow up" like it was the most ordinary thing in the world is probably a guy that now is put on every cruise line's list of people they not going to let near their ships.
Ships do have fires and explosions with modern safety protocols and there's enough of them out there that it's a regular occurrence, it just doesn't always make the news. There is that car transporter that recently went on fire, a gas carrier blew up in Korea a couple of years ago, and a container ship blew up a couple of years before that, I even fought a fire at sea just last year on my vessel.
Also, this supposedly happened in 1940. It was particularly common at that time for cargo ships to be happily steaming along and then suddenly explode and sink. That's what unrestricted submarine warfare does.
I wish we all sounded like Sean Connery! The name of this ship is not in the Dutch language, it sounds Indonesian? edit: yeah, we, the Dutch, colonized what is now known as Indonesia. Sorry about that.
The Dutch Indies or Indonesia was a Dutch colony that didn't end until WW2 with Dutch involvement going on after WW2. Could make an interesting history video itself. The fall of the Dutch colony to the Japanese might explain the lack of official records.
@@Kadeo-ms6qw I posted before he mentioned it. It happens, I was only slightly "Showing off", all instances need to be "Called out" I wasn't raised in a Japanese family, but recognized that as a kid, "The nail that sticks up must be hammered down". The "Grownups" themselves were only entering adulthood, and the "G.I. generation" were still in charge, Nationally.
Jen..when Simon starts to rant about the bad things that happen at sea in the past; I would have added the "Life of Brian" clip where Eric Idol mentions that worse things happen at sea as they are all crucified. That is just me though. Love your work as always. The dog was pretty funny. I am surprised Simon didn't comment about how it got what it deserved. Lol
If that was a false ship name it could be used by multiple ships fulfilling the same clandestine missions. But even if there were multiple “problem” voyages, you wouldn’t get the exact same story details (Morse code message, presence of dog, one row boat missing, etc.).
Every time that I hear about this story, I’m always struck by how much of it parallels the ‘ghost ship’ story in chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel.
@@Bluesit32 No, but it is a ship found with its crew entirely dead. I mean, it's not a direct one to one comparison, but I can understand why it would bring that scene to mind.
Am i wrong or even just the only one thinking that hearing Simon doing Morse code is hilarious??? He should definently be giving us some more shows involving lots of beeps 🤣
This channel is becoming my favorite to listen to, Katy's writing is always on point and the subjects are always interesting. Brain blaze is my favorite to watch, Sam's editing is otherworldly, especially on Simon's tangents.
Ourang Medan is Malaysian for Man of Medan. Ourang meaning “man” or where we get the term Ourangutan meaning “forest man”. There’s a video game based on it called Man of Medan.
I've heard in modern times the straits of Malaca are notorious for piracy. Not sure if this was the case around WW2, but piracy could explain the dead crew.
You are right on Ourang Medan sounding like Orangatan. They're related Malay words. Ourang Medan means "Man from Medan" and Orangatan means "Man of the Forest" Edit: oh, they get to that eventually
I literally only know about this case because of a video game called, Man of Medan. I never heard of the death ship until I played that game Oh look, Katie mentioned the game 😅
I always figured that this story was like the Eilean Mor Lighthouse and the Mary Celeste - a real event that has been buried so deep under 'folklore' it is hard to find the truth.
Cyanide gas causes painful seizures when it kills, so horrible looks on faces is quite real. Still air could have killed the hypothetical crew. A slight breeze could have dissipated the cyanide gas. Also, acids react with sodium or potassium cyanide to produce cyanide gas (and a potassium or sodium salt of the acid). Other than that, who knows what really happened? I first head this as a "Strange deaths on a ship [was it paranormal events or arcane evil?]" tale.
Here's another possibility, it could be that Ourang Medan wasn't the name of a ship but was the description of the survivor who told the story, a man from Medan told the story about the ship to the missionary who didn't remember his name or the name of the ship and so the "man from Medan" became the name of the ship in error. (The missionary on the uninhabited island). I was hoping his name was pronounced Shirley or surely because it would have set up the old, "Don't call me Scherli!" gag which was huge in Amsterdam in the 40s. Scherli you jest!
Sulfuric acid has to be SUPER concentrated to turn into a gas, but it is probably the reason the ship blew up. It has a habit of reacting violently with things, including water.
Yeah, but sulfuric acid would react with potassium cyanide to form hydrogen cyanide, which would be a very toxic gas (literally the active compound in Zyklon B, which was used in gas Chambers)
5:57 rictus is a fixed grimace..like a frozen look of horror.. or the joker smile... I googled it cause I didn't know what rictus meant either so I also learned a new word lol thanks simon!!!❤❤
I feel like the better question regarding the CIA letter is why on earth was it classified for 50ish years? Seems kinda strange (note, not cover up strange, but more like a bureaucratic backlog sort of strange)
Considering the number of smugglers transporting dangerous cargo during various wartimes, it is entirely possible that the Orang Medan was not one ship, but several true stories that got mixed together over time. Especially since the earliest tellings came through a game of Whispers before actually being written down. An actual ship named OM may not have existed, but enough similar stories put together made a Tulpa ship. Even in modern times events can be conflated if only part of the facts are known. If someone hears about a ship exploding and is telling someone else about it who has heard about a different ship exploding, it is easy for the details to get mixed together. To the average person, a ship exploding is a rare thing, so it is easy to think separate incidents were not actually separate. Also, dangerous goods ships tended to all be stuffed onto single ships during wartime, because it just made it easier if only properly trained crews were dealing with such cargo instead of having it all over the place in the hands of whoever-wherever. Not that this makes things any safer when things go wrong. There is a port city in Canada that was almost completely leveled because a ship carrying munitions and combustibles collided with another ship. Another case is of a munitions ship somewhere in the Pacific during WWII that was parked too close to the rest of the fleet when something caught on fire wrecked a considerable chunk of the fleet it was supplying. The crew of that ship had to be officially listed as MIA, because there was nothing left of them to identify.
Didn’t he walk on a lake? Not that I care because they do a pretty good job of doing that now and somebody worked it out in the past, good on them. What are they called ? oh yeah, magicians.
If they had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, those viewing the bodies would have seen distinctive cherry red faces. This is caused by the high levels of carboxyhemoglobin in the blood.
I'm watching this two days from Christmas. I didn't check the date it was posted. The sweater was totally normal to me, until it wasn't. An interesting moment for me. Thanks for messing with my head Simon. Good job.
This sounds like the beginning of two different Clive Cussler novels-one in which it was nerve toxin and one in which it was radiation from a smuggled nuclear device.
Where is the Podcast episode. I remember it being uploaded on spotify but having the Sydney Quarantine attached to it and then it was gone and now it is not on Spotify oO. Confusing
Can't remember what exactly Simon said about sulfur being toxic or not, but as a sailor, H2S is a very real, and extremely dangerous thing that sailors may have to deal with. It was made very clear to us in the engineering sphere, exactly how dangerous it was. If you were in a space long enough to detect and realize it's presence, those could very well be your last thoughts.
I spent way too long deciding if that tiny clip of the book opening at the start was Disney's Sleeping Beauty or Robin Hood. It's Sleeping Beauty if anyone else was wondering.
I have heard this story before but Simon and Katy really did a great job with this. As usual I was on the same page as Simon throughout. Looking forward to more stories of sea mysteries.
I'd like you to make a video about the Polybius arcade game. It's an incredibly interesting story about a game which caused deaths to some of it's players. It was allegedly a CIA mind control experiement. A youtuber called AHOY has made a brilliant video on it
In the past many people used quotation marks as an emphasis rather than in a sarcastic way. He was likely using the quotations in a way that now we would use all caps or underlining.
Problems with records: finding the record (so much scope for human error even with computers) and unintended destruction (natural disaster, war, etc.).
DANG IT JEN!!! I’m driving around listening to this on you tube and the background sounds keep sounding like car horns!! It took me the full times of pulling over to figure it out!!!
Hello here the Netherlands, I did a 2 year research about the ss ourang medan, I can tell you the story is a fact I found out there are a lot of mistakes in the story, and I can tell you I found the real doccuments and everything that associated with it, documentaire will come!
Love letter from a Tuber, Jen the Editor Is my second most favorite part of these shows. Horrible crimes against sweaters worn by Simon being the first. First class memes by Jen. Next. Again Simon and his slander of language. Love this show.
just to explain the chemistry behind it: potassium cyanide is made when hydrogen cyanide, which is a weak acid, reacts with potassium. when potassium cyanide reacts with sulfouric acid, the much stronger sulfouric acid binds to the potassium ions, driving out deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, which anyone used to handling cyanide would instantly recognize by the characteristic smell of bitter almonds, which would explain the paniced expressions on the crews faces, the moment they smelled it, they knew what was going on and that it was too late to stop it. EDIT: what i do find highly unlikely is the ship carrying nitro glycerine. if this was world war two, there would have been no reason to use nitro-glycerine, nitro glycerine is highly explosive and dangerous to transport even in small quantities, much less at sea where strong waves could cause unfortunate events such as a barrel falling over. additionally by world war two dynamite had been invented for a LONG time, which is much safer to transport than pure nitro glycerine, it is also chemically stable enough to not spontaneously detonate, you can throw dynamite on a fire and it will just burn out slowly. third reason why i don't buy it is that, by WW-II TNT had been invented which is a much superior explosive to be used in weapons due to its specific properties.
I am somewhat of an expert on various gasses. I had no carbon monoxide detector in my house, because I don't have any gas appliances or an attached garage. One day a company *accidently* sent me two very expensive CO detectors for free, so I installed them.
A few weeks later the power went out, and I was using a very small propane heater in the house. Knowing a lot about propane, I considered this safe, the heater was inspected, the gas was not leaking, burning correctly, etc. It's rated for indoor use. Then I got a bad headache and started to feel tired so I was going to go take a nap. And leave the heater running. The second I laid down the CO alarm went off, and jesus christ, that's why I had a headache and was tired!
If they had not accidentally shipped those detectors to my house, I would have absolutely gone to sleep and never woken up. Do as Simon says, install one. Doesn't matter if you don't really "need" it.
Wow. That's freaky. Have you nicknamed that guardian angel of yours?
Sometimes the stuff you deal with at work, you never think about it being at home. I second you on the CO detector.
*sarcastic comment alert* - this is a conspiracy brought to you by the c02 detector companies i know it.
@@momcat2223 maybe Simon?
@@momcat2223 I think it was like Jeff or Bob or something. LOL! They came with a packing slip from somebody else in the box, with a different address. Even more strangely it was a company I regularly do business with - and checked the price of these detectors and said...nah. Like 3 weeks later they were here, and they even fit into the same wiring as my old ones. (smoke only)
There is no way they could have known I was looking at them on their website. They do have cheaper models available, at least buy a cheap one - I just wanted the combo CO/smoke in one. :)
And yeah, looking back on what I was doing...I would have yelled at anybody else!
“Huge fiery spheres rising from the sea” like the sun? I absolutely want to start using that now. Imagine starting every diary entry with “Today a huge fiery sphere rose from the horizon and currently burns above me.”
"Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys." That's a real piece of a famous morse code, sent just before the Halifax explosion.
Oh wow… idk what I imagined exactly, but I didn’t know it was Morse code?? That must have been chilling to decipher
If it happened in the straits of Malakka in the late 1930s or in the early/mid 1940s it's quite possible that official records were lost during WW2 or during the following Indonesian separatist rebellion.
Both conflicts caused massive destruction in the East Indies.
Death rictuses in this case means "death grimace" or I'm guessing a painful look on their face at the moment of death
Wrong. The face is caused by the person shitting themselves.
In cases of risus sardonicus or rictus grin it’s normally been caused by tetanus or strychnine poisoning, the face being pulled back in a locked grimace. Most mouths just gape when death occurs due to the relaxation of muscles after death. I think the writer of this piece was using it to add drama to the scene.
Desiccation of the body in tropical heat will cause the lips to be drawn back exposing the teeth.
If you ever seen a body that's laid on a hot deck in the sun for a few hours in a tropical climate they all tend to have that look. The heat causes the skin around the mouth and eyes to recede. This is nothing but a ghost story. If it had really happened someone who was on the "Rescue ship" would have spoken about it to somebody. The dead peoples relatives would have been asking what happened to their loved one when they never returned from sea. There would be shipping records the "Rescue Ship" would have the encounter written down in the Masters diary . Nobody on the "Rescue Ship" Ever spoke of this huge mystery that they came across to their family or let it slip out while they were drinking with their buddies. Why would the Rescuers flee the mystery ship just because they saw smoke thats not how it works there could of been many other people on board that needed help and just because there is smoke doesn't mean the ship is likely to blow up. The boarding party would have tried to find the source of the smoke and what the ship was carrying first. Nothing makes sense to anyone who has worked on the ocean. Plus, no one is just going to run away when there is a chance of salvaging the ships cargo that quickly.
i came to the comments for this 🙏
W/ regard to the ship carrying all the dangerous stuff. UPS used to try to store up everything with hazard stickers on it and put it onto one truck. I think the logic was that only one driver would be at risk, rather than everyone having a little bit of risk.
Depending on the type and levels of hazards, there are certain certifications and even special additions to the operator's driver's license that are required for the operator to legally transport said hazardous materials. I'm sure these vary with different states and countries.
I highly doubt every driver for USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. has these requirements. Some can be pretty pricey and require a decent bit of effort.
“Are there any sea deniers out there?”
There’s a woman on TikTok claiming that the Roman Empire never existed, so any level of stupidity is possible.
There's people that think reality isn't real, so yes.
Well, I suddenly feel the need to drink at 3:12 pm on a Tuesday
@@scizorlord5126 It's ironically more believable to think that reality isn't real than it is to think the Roman Empire didn't exist.
People believe in lizard shadow government child trafficking pizza parlor basements, invisible sky men who made everything in under a week, a water walking snack multiplier god child, nuclear wars fought thousands of years ago, flat Earth, that 550k people came together in a conspiracy to fake the entirety of the space race, Donald Trump was a good president, and that Joe Biden isn't a doddering old fool.
There is no limit to what an ignorant savage can hold as true.
@@scizorlord5126 that’s far more believable than the theory that the Roman Empire never existed. The simulation theory is quite logical.
Medan is a city in Indonesia, pronounced May-dan. "Orang" in Indonesian means "person" (orang-orang >people) but the Dutch era many spellings include the extra letters presumably to mate up the phonetic pronunciation with the Dutch language, for example the letters oe to make the u sound which is like the word too or pew, (English bamboo>Dutch era bamboe>modern Indonesian bambu)
“Ourang” also means “Man” hence the name of the ship is actually “Man Of Medan”
@@OshaneC92 like the video game
"It's obviously not sharks." It could have been *flying* sharks. Sharknado!
Regarding telegraphy: It really can become part of how you communicate to a degree where it's no different to talking. I've met a few people who had a distinct habit of tapping while talking. The one that really got me was an elderly gentleman with severely slurred speech after a stroke making him hard to understand, yet the taps were perfectly clean and easy to copy Morse code with the exact same content - and crazy fast if he stopped trying to get the words out of his mouth as well (I'm not very good at copying Morse code, so I used my phone to help me out).
Why did I read “telepathy” and not telegraphy…😂😂😂
Pilots during and before ww2 had to be able to Morse 20 words per minute while flying a single pilot plane.
I just realize the Man of Medan horror game is based off this boat. Thank you Simon and Katy for that little fact.
With how quickly I clicked on this video just minutes after it being posted, I accept my fate as a Simon Whistler fangirl. Tell me all the spooky stuff fact boy!
girl me too he's just so....... so..............
.......bald 😩❤💘
(nah but for real he's delightful)
Me too lol
Fact boi fan girl
You do know he has no legs and he is an identical triplet
Remove Ned Flanders
Add Simon Whistler
Remake The Outer Limits
Job ✔ 👍 done.
I definitely recommend playing Man of Medan. It’s short, sweet, and deeply interesting. It’s kind of a choose your own adventure novel in the form of an exceptionally well-rendered and well-acted video game.
"Sweet" really? O.o not quite how I would describe it but I definitely would love to see Simon play it on stream! Or just a recorded video, doesn't matter
COME AT ME, SHARK
It's a pretty good game. A decent continuation in the anthology after Until Dawn.
@@bluesghostieos8016 Until Dawn isn't a part of the Dark Pictures Anthology, even though I think it's the same makers.
I downloaded the game right after watching this
I'm hoping Katy gets to do a whole series of maritime mysteries, because this was fun. Although it'd probably be a rather short series, since all the stories get rather repetitive.
Different note: government offices get the weirdest shi*t. I used to do office work low-level state government, and one of my supervisors had a collection of "interesting" letters. My favorite was the very polite one requesting to view the UFOs we were keeping from the public. I worked in the state taxes office.
Well, it's called THE Government so you're OBVIOUSLY all in on all the big secrets. The whole thing with different branches and departments is to befuddle the common sheeple.
@@Adjuni OBVIOUSly! Don't people know how this works by now? ;)
if someone has ufo´s ..certainly its the taxes office.
😄
As someone who works in the government- I can also confirm the absolute bananas that fall out of letters.
i know it's been a literal few minutes since this was posted, but i just want to say thank you straight away, Simon & Crew.
i have regular seizures and just had a particularly bad one. Came to and started stressing about what to put on the telly while i wait for my meds to kick in. And then the very moment i start to panic, this gets uploaded... i can't begin to describe the instantaneous relief haha. Yous really came to me in my time of need :'-)
thank you so much for your content, Simon, Katie, and especially Jen (the real star of the show)!
much love from Glasgow ❤
No one cares
@CRAM MARC thank you so much, you too!
As a fellow epileptic, I know the feels!
@@Algrenion Being epileptic myself I hope ur ok safe and sound the panic is real take care
@@mine0146 you as well.
Incredible how Simon puts out hours of content every single day - even though he has writers and editors, the organization, recording, pre-reading scripts for shows that are not cold reads etc. must take forever - and still manages to have videos prerecorded for several months. That's insanely productive.
People work 40 hours per week. For him this might not be even work.
This is why his jokes about cocaine use and keeping script writers locked in the basement are amusing despite the fact nobody would be surprised if the jokes were even partially true.
He just reads the scripts.
@@bobfg3130 That is my point. I wouldn't be surprised if Simons work would amount to more than 40h per week, assuming that he also takes vacation time every now and then and has to have videos prerecorded for those times. I mean sure it might be fun most of the times, but some of these Casual Criminalist episodes seem to really effect him negatively and I assume Into the Shadows can't be much better.
@@MissRiny
Actually I'm saying he's working 40 hours per week and not more. In 8 hours he can make 5 or 6 videos quite easily if they're shorter than 30 minutes.
I think the main reason this story has endured so long is the operator's last words.
"I die."
This is a terrifying line to read if you're receiving that Morse message yourself, so it's not surprising that it strikes the imagination of people who know of this story now.
Their is an another case where the last words of operator of orang medan were " a doctor needed " then after sometime time " a warship needed ".
@@michaelmurdock4607 Unless you were, for instance, wanting to say "I'm dying", but since you're doing Morse, you'll want to say that in fewer letters.
And so, "I die"
@@resileaf9501 agreed or it translates to "I die" but was in another language originally. Or the operator is dying and not hung up on grammar. Or the grammar of a second language.
As a nurse, I can say that language gets odd when people are very ill or going under/recovering from anesthesia or gas.
@@theConquerersMama German here, I die and I'm dying would both be ich sterbe in German. Im sure there are many other languages that don't have that kind of grammatical thingy.
@@adenkyramud5005 interesting.
It's actually pretty common for ships to have their names changed to confuse authorities from pirates and smugglers even today (The Atlantic had an article about it about 10 years ago). There are thousands of ships and oceans are huge. Ships don't need to have transponders like aircraft so hiding even big ships isn't hard.
I love your long form channels. The 10 minute ones leave me hangin'.
A note on bodies with "fearful expressions" in general: that isn't the norm, as in the moment of death all muscles relax (or lose all tension, more specifically). So it has no relation to actual fear in the moment of death: dead faces are slack.
There are a few exceptions:
If the cause of death is something that causes uncontrolled muscle contractions (rictus -> uncontrolled spasming of the facial muscles in a "terrified grin"), these may persist after death. This can happen with things like tetanus, or strychnine poisoning (but strychnine is a powder, not a gas, though it can be breathed in). I'm no expert on gases or toxins but I wouldn't be surprised if some gases can do this. (Cyanide doesn't do this as far as I know, though. It causes a chemical asphyxiation, not primary muscle contraction. "Mustard gas", which can be sulphur based, also doesn't cause contractions as far as I know, and does gives strong skin reactions with horrific blistering, so wouldn't leave "unmarked bodies").
Alternatively, depending on when death took place, if it's been a while and the environment is very dry, dehydration might cause the skin to shrink, which might pull open the eyes and mouth. This isn't a quick process, though could be within days depending on the environment. (In terms of this story, if there's no distress call and a ship is just encountered adrift, the finders may not know how long ago deaths have occurred)
It was written in logs. The logs are not necessarily turned over if it doesn’t contain information deemed pertinent or necessary to warn other organizations. My grandfather was a WWII navy veteran and some logs were not turned in until a ship gets decommissioned.
honestly the best evidence that it's fake... is that there's multiple versions of the account in several sources. It's almost like a pre-internet creepy pasta. The real kicker, is that these accounts in no way form a coherent story, they have drastic variations that make them impossible to even be the same account. And yet... they have enough similarities, that it obvious they're not actually separate from each other. Always a ship named Orang Medan(or a slight variant spelling). Always found after a cryptic morse code broadcast. Always mysteriously sinks soon after being found. But... virtually every other aspect varies. Who found it? What was the morse code message? What caused it to sink? Etc.... But the big tells are that the locations don't match.... or the dates. Part of why only one version is famous is because the older versions were told during WW2. they had less fantastical elements and well probably got ignored because of how many things happened at sea in WW2. The most detailed version of the story... was not published until much later, and in a publication mostly known for publishing fiction. And well... there's no actual evidence of it being non-fiction.
I know someone is gonna scream about how it was talked about in things definitely non-fiction. But that's the key.... TALKED ABOUT. IE they mentioned that they'd heard about the case, nothing more.
Sooo, in the end? I must conclude the incident was probably fiction.
Lloyds of London has ZERO record of the alleged ship. That alone tells me it never existed.
@@jenniferbrewer5370 oh ya? well Lloyds of London is an insurance company. So please tell me more about all the stuff you're so sure of...
@@jenniferbrewer5370Could they not have been insured through a different company?
That’s a perfect impression of Sean Connery playing a Dutch character.
I am 95% sure the version of this story I heard when I was in late elementary school/early middle school involved the Navy arriving and the crew had been dead so long they were mummifying, including the corpse of the guy who was dead next to the telegraph that was transmitting the morse code message, meaning that something supernatural had to have happened for the Navy to have gotten the telegraph. That addition definitely made it more interesting.
I remember it that way too, although I don't believe it. I think they were poisoned,and just diedi. It happens.
If it happened at all. The Coast Guard is a
very credible source, and if they say it happened I tend to believe their report.
@@aceofspadess4945 I definitely never believed it, I always thought of it as one of those ghost stories that ended up in those Unexplained books aimed at kids that age that also talk about Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle. Adding in that they had to have been dead a while makes it a better ghost tale in my opinion.
@@KMKOST1701 Probably where I read about it too! I loved that stuff as a kid, although I'm pretty much a skeptic about most of it. Still love to watch the spooky stuff
for entertainment! But, I think a lot of skeptics do.
@@aceofspadess4945 I definitely believed in it a lot more as a kid, as an adult I now look for the logical answers, but since I live in the Bigfoot capital of the world, I have my fingers crossed he's real.
@@KMKOST1701 That's one that I can say honestly i hope he's out there too. I hate to say this, but until someone kills one we may not know, and I hope that never happens. Talk about hate mail and death threats for a lifetime!
A guy who says"Yeah, ships blow up" like it was the most ordinary thing in the world is probably a guy that now is put on every cruise line's list of people they not going to let near their ships.
Ships do have fires and explosions with modern safety protocols and there's enough of them out there that it's a regular occurrence, it just doesn't always make the news. There is that car transporter that recently went on fire, a gas carrier blew up in Korea a couple of years ago, and a container ship blew up a couple of years before that, I even fought a fire at sea just last year on my vessel.
Sometimes the front falls off.
Also, this supposedly happened in 1940. It was particularly common at that time for cargo ships to be happily steaming along and then suddenly explode and sink.
That's what unrestricted submarine warfare does.
The Sean Connery Dutch accent was killer 😂😭
I wish we all sounded like Sean Connery! The name of this ship is not in the Dutch language, it sounds Indonesian?
edit: yeah, we, the Dutch, colonized what is now known as Indonesia. Sorry about that.
2:25 - Chapter 1 - The mystery
8:25 - Chapter 2 - The case for the death ship
25:00 - Chapter 3 - The case against the death ship
The Dutch Indies or Indonesia was a Dutch colony that didn't end until WW2 with Dutch involvement going on after WW2. Could make an interesting history video itself. The fall of the Dutch colony to the Japanese might explain the lack of official records.
The man from Medan was a incredible game with a somewhat plausible background story to real life events
I thought it was the weaker entry in the anthology.
Was just thinking if this was the inspiration for that game. So much fun.
Ourang means "Man" in Indonesian. An Orangutan is a. "Orange man".
@@tomfrazier1103 yes, we also watched the video.
@@Kadeo-ms6qw I posted before he mentioned it. It happens, I was only slightly "Showing off", all instances need to be "Called out" I wasn't raised in a Japanese family, but recognized that as a kid, "The nail that sticks up must be hammered down". The "Grownups" themselves were only entering adulthood, and the "G.I. generation" were still in charge, Nationally.
Jen..when Simon starts to rant about the bad things that happen at sea in the past; I would have added the "Life of Brian" clip where Eric Idol mentions that worse things happen at sea as they are all crucified. That is just me though. Love your work as always. The dog was pretty funny. I am surprised Simon didn't comment about how it got what it deserved. Lol
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that one. 🤭
it need be said that jen is a true youtube hero. legend really
I must confess this has become my favourite of Simon's channels.
P much my fav podcast rn. Right up there with casual crim. Keep it up factboy!!
I think it would be entertaining to watch Simon play The Man of Medan
If that was a false ship name it could be used by multiple ships fulfilling the same clandestine missions. But even if there were multiple “problem” voyages, you wouldn’t get the exact same story details (Morse code message, presence of dog, one row boat missing, etc.).
Every time that I hear about this story, I’m always struck by how much of it parallels the ‘ghost ship’ story in chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel.
I don't see it. I mean, there isn't even someone tied to the wheel here.
@@Bluesit32 No, but it is a ship found with its crew entirely dead. I mean, it's not a direct one to one comparison, but I can understand why it would bring that scene to mind.
Try the Death Ship movie.... It's on TH-cam....
Am i wrong or even just the only one thinking that hearing Simon doing Morse code is hilarious??? He should definently be giving us some more shows involving lots of beeps 🤣
This channel is becoming my favorite to listen to, Katy's writing is always on point and the subjects are always interesting. Brain blaze is my favorite to watch, Sam's editing is otherworldly, especially on Simon's tangents.
Ourang Medan is Malaysian for Man of Medan. Ourang meaning “man” or where we get the term Ourangutan meaning “forest man”. There’s a video game based on it called Man of Medan.
I've heard in modern times the straits of Malaca are notorious for piracy. Not sure if this was the case around WW2, but piracy could explain the dead crew.
You are right on Ourang Medan sounding like Orangatan. They're related Malay words. Ourang Medan means "Man from Medan" and Orangatan means "Man of the Forest"
Edit: oh, they get to that eventually
As he says in the video. XD
@@resileaf9501 yeah I just got to that part. The comment was from the beginning lol
Big ups Simon and Team, always bringing in the good stuff!
I literally only know about this case because of a video game called, Man of Medan. I never heard of the death ship until I played that game
Oh look, Katie mentioned the game 😅
Likewise. Kinda pissed it didn't have actual ghosts. Sure, the original deaths would have been from the gas, but c'mon.
And then there's the movie Death Ship.... It's here on TH-cam.... Probably based on the same story....
I have just seen Simon Whistler's impression of Sean Connery. My life is complete.
I always figured that this story was like the Eilean Mor Lighthouse and the Mary Celeste - a real event that has been buried so deep under 'folklore' it is hard to find the truth.
I vote Simon does a playthrough of Man of Medan! That game has some seriously tense moments lol Simon's reactions would be amazing 🤣
Cyanide gas causes painful seizures when it kills, so horrible looks on faces is quite real. Still air could have killed the hypothetical crew. A slight breeze could have dissipated the cyanide gas. Also, acids react with sodium or potassium cyanide to produce cyanide gas (and a potassium or sodium salt of the acid). Other than that, who knows what really happened? I first head this as a "Strange deaths on a ship [was it paranormal events or arcane evil?]" tale.
Simon,you have fucked up my day with one little line."We'll all be forgotten one day." Thank you once again.
Here's another possibility, it could be that Ourang Medan wasn't the name of a ship but was the description of the survivor who told the story, a man from Medan told the story about the ship to the missionary who didn't remember his name or the name of the ship and so the "man from Medan" became the name of the ship in error. (The missionary on the uninhabited island).
I was hoping his name was pronounced Shirley or surely because it would have set up the old, "Don't call me Scherli!" gag which was huge in Amsterdam in the 40s. Scherli you jest!
Totally possible, just look at all the people who called the Ever Given that was stuck in suez by the company name, Evergreen.
I do love Simon's teams. The editing is always as entertaining as Simon's tangents, and the scripts are always well-written. Good job FactBoi!
Suggestion: The Lusitania
There are undoubtedly plenty of conspiracies floating around it.
Fun Fact: This ship is a main inspiration for the game "Men of Medan".
Sulfuric acid has to be SUPER concentrated to turn into a gas, but it is probably the reason the ship blew up. It has a habit of reacting violently with things, including water.
Yeah, but sulfuric acid would react with potassium cyanide to form hydrogen cyanide, which would be a very toxic gas (literally the active compound in Zyklon B, which was used in gas Chambers)
I'm so glad you are covering this. I first became aware of this story because of the Dark pictures anthology game The man of Medan. 🌸💗🌸
Do we really think Morse code is the common denominator for said tangents though? 🤣
Much love, as always!🧡
The past was the worst
Look at this Christmas jumper! It came out in March and it's great. Come for the content and stay for Simon
Nitro glycerin is not TNT. But I believe you need it to make trinitrotoluene. But don't worry you're still my favorite youtuber
5:57 rictus is a fixed grimace..like a frozen look of horror.. or the joker smile... I googled it cause I didn't know what rictus meant either so I also learned a new word lol thanks simon!!!❤❤
I feel like the better question regarding the CIA letter is why on earth was it classified for 50ish years? Seems kinda strange (note, not cover up strange, but more like a bureaucratic backlog sort of strange)
Simon's "I'm so confused!" voice gets higher and higher 🤣
Considering the number of smugglers transporting dangerous cargo during various wartimes, it is entirely possible that the Orang Medan was not one ship, but several true stories that got mixed together over time. Especially since the earliest tellings came through a game of Whispers before actually being written down. An actual ship named OM may not have existed, but enough similar stories put together made a Tulpa ship. Even in modern times events can be conflated if only part of the facts are known. If someone hears about a ship exploding and is telling someone else about it who has heard about a different ship exploding, it is easy for the details to get mixed together. To the average person, a ship exploding is a rare thing, so it is easy to think separate incidents were not actually separate.
Also, dangerous goods ships tended to all be stuffed onto single ships during wartime, because it just made it easier if only properly trained crews were dealing with such cargo instead of having it all over the place in the hands of whoever-wherever. Not that this makes things any safer when things go wrong. There is a port city in Canada that was almost completely leveled because a ship carrying munitions and combustibles collided with another ship. Another case is of a munitions ship somewhere in the Pacific during WWII that was parked too close to the rest of the fleet when something caught on fire wrecked a considerable chunk of the fleet it was supplying. The crew of that ship had to be officially listed as MIA, because there was nothing left of them to identify.
Simon, I swear you've covered everything. I found out about this ghost ship ten minutes ago, and you've already shot a vid for it.
Sea deniers got me good. "If it's real, how did Jesus walk on it?" Spot on 😄😄😄
I mean, I've never seen it myself and it sounds pretty unbelievable, if you ask me...
Didn’t he walk on a lake? Not that I care because they do a pretty good job of doing that now and somebody worked it out in the past, good on them. What are they called ? oh yeah, magicians.
Seriously, one of TH-cam’s true brilliant creators. Top notch.
If they had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, those viewing the bodies would have seen distinctive cherry red faces. This is caused by the high levels of carboxyhemoglobin in the blood.
Cyanide and Sulfuric Acid mixed would probably create a death cloud of some degree.
@@ShadowReignhart It would make carbon monoxide
I'm watching this two days from Christmas. I didn't check the date it was posted. The sweater was totally normal to me, until it wasn't. An interesting moment for me. Thanks for messing with my head Simon. Good job.
Oh wow, I didn't know the video game Man of Medan was based on anything.
They're all based off of spooky folklore
This sounds like the beginning of two different Clive Cussler novels-one in which it was nerve toxin and one in which it was radiation from a smuggled nuclear device.
Bedtime Stories did a video on this ship a while ago. It's a creepy pasta. Still excited to watch this after class!
That was a good one.
You mean, it's a "ghost story".
Where is the Podcast episode. I remember it being uploaded on spotify but having the Sydney Quarantine attached to it and then it was gone and now it is not on Spotify oO. Confusing
Simon goes on and on about carbon monoxide so often that I actually got myself a carbon monoxide detector a few months ago.
I am grateful to Simon for teaching me the meaning of Plethora, it means a lot.
As we've all seen, Hollywood never allowed facts to get in the way of a story someone wanted to tell, so stories like this shouldn't surprise anyone.
Can't remember what exactly Simon said about sulfur being toxic or not, but as a sailor, H2S is a very real, and extremely dangerous thing that sailors may have to deal with. It was made very clear to us in the engineering sphere, exactly how dangerous it was. If you were in a space long enough to detect and realize it's presence, those could very well be your last thoughts.
I spent way too long deciding if that tiny clip of the book opening at the start was Disney's Sleeping Beauty or Robin Hood. It's Sleeping Beauty if anyone else was wondering.
I’m now watching this for the first time so the Christmas jumper is perfect 🎄great video. Happy Christmas 🎅
Simon, sulfur dioxide is also called mustard gas... there is definitely something to the gas poisoning theory.
Mustard gas is a thioether, C4H8Cl2S, sulfur dioxide is SO2
I have heard this story before but Simon and Katy really did a great job with this. As usual I was on the same page as Simon throughout. Looking forward to more stories of sea mysteries.
Maritime Horrors does an excellent take on this subject. He did it for his October spooky series. Very enjoyable.
There's a decent game based around these events, called - you guessed it - "Man of Medan". It's worth the money and gives a cool take on the story.
4:50
Yeah, let's go with that...the Morse Code is what always starts those tangents...
Seconds later...
The edible kicked in right as Simon started doing his Dutch accent/Sean Connery impression and I am LOSING it
Nothing wrong with Christmas jumpers. Wear them year round, I say!
Especially the warm and comfy ones.
PSA: Rictus (5:35) means an intense or permanent facial expression, so “death rictuses” means the last faces people made as they died
Well this may not be a real ship the story definitely provided a great video game.
Simon's CV:
Qualifications:
Pronounciation
Skills:
Accents
Experience:
Popular culture
😁❤
I'd like you to make a video about the Polybius arcade game. It's an incredibly interesting story about a game which caused deaths to some of it's players. It was allegedly a CIA mind control experiement. A youtuber called AHOY has made a brilliant video on it
Stephanie Harlowe has one about it, spoiler, she debunks it as would Simin presumably :)
@@andreakoroknai1071 yeah. AHOY debunks it in his video as well. It's just an urban legend
In the past many people used quotation marks as an emphasis rather than in a sarcastic way. He was likely using the quotations in a way that now we would use all caps or underlining.
Totally unrelated, but the killing of Ken McElroy was MADE for Simon to cover on The Casual Criminalist!
Ryan and Shane covered it and so did Infographics. I’d like to see Simon do it too.
Problems with records: finding the record (so much scope for human error even with computers) and unintended destruction (natural disaster, war, etc.).
DANG IT JEN!!! I’m driving around listening to this on you tube and the background sounds keep sounding like car horns!! It took me the full times of pulling over to figure it out!!!
Watching in June and am amused at Christmas sweater, thanks Simon!
Simon’s Best channel yet in my opinion. Just Simon keeping it 1000% real while admitting we’re all pretty ignorant in the best way.
No more accents (as posted on one of your channels previously) and definitely NO MORE MORSE CODE! Great video, thanks team!
🤣🤣🤣
Hello here the Netherlands, I did a 2 year research about the ss ourang medan, I can tell you the story is a fact I found out there are a lot of mistakes in the story, and I can tell you I found the real doccuments and everything that associated with it, documentaire will come!
"Ships can blow up, that's fine"
-Whistleboi
Love letter from a Tuber, Jen the Editor
Is my second most favorite part of these shows.
Horrible crimes against sweaters worn by Simon being the first.
First class memes by Jen. Next.
Again Simon and his slander of language.
Love this show.
just to explain the chemistry behind it:
potassium cyanide is made when hydrogen cyanide, which is a weak acid, reacts with potassium.
when potassium cyanide reacts with sulfouric acid, the much stronger sulfouric acid binds to the potassium ions, driving out deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, which anyone used to handling cyanide would instantly recognize by the characteristic smell of bitter almonds, which would explain the paniced expressions on the crews faces, the moment they smelled it, they knew what was going on and that it was too late to stop it.
EDIT:
what i do find highly unlikely is the ship carrying nitro glycerine.
if this was world war two, there would have been no reason to use nitro-glycerine, nitro glycerine is highly explosive and dangerous to transport even in small quantities, much less at sea where strong waves could cause unfortunate events such as a barrel falling over.
additionally by world war two dynamite had been invented for a LONG time, which is much safer to transport than pure nitro glycerine, it is also chemically stable enough to not spontaneously detonate, you can throw dynamite on a fire and it will just burn out slowly.
third reason why i don't buy it is that, by WW-II TNT had been invented which is a much superior explosive to be used in weapons due to its specific properties.
This feels like an analog horror plot.
I love watching the host of a show read for the first time read a summary of something he had no idea existed and then makeup his mind on the spot