EARLY EPISODE: The Siege of Petropavlovsk
In this episode, Joe, Nate, and Tom discuss a lesser-known battle in the Crimean War in which the British attempt to capture a city on the Kamchatka Peninsula after getting massively lost at sea (in an era where this wasn't supposed to happen) and getting waylaid when the King of Hawai'i invited them to the barbecue. We are not making any of this up.
Sources:
JR Stone. RJ Crampton. 'A Disastrous Affair': The Franco-British Attack on Petropavlovsk. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/polar-record/article/abs/disastrous-affair-the-francobritish-attack-on-petropavlovsk-1854/D765F9B46DA8B5A0C6D55460466220A6Mark N Lardas. Petropavlosk: The Crimean War's Forgotten Battle. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/petropavlovsk-the-crimean-wars-forgotten-battle/
John Stephens. The Crimean War in the Far East. Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 3. No. 3 (1969)
Comments (23)
I just finished Lydia Black’s Russians in Alaska and am relistening to this as a NYE treat, a bunch of this stuff comes up. It’s dry as hell except for when Rezanov comes up.
Listened to this episode for the first time yesterday morning and then an earthquake hits Kamchatka. Sorry everyone, my b.
Is this where the earth quake just hit?
Between the podcast sotadic zone joke and the multiple nautical fiction references, I’m starting to think me and Tom might spiritually be the same person
Whats up with the cover art? It’s really cool compositionally. Credit?
(this is Nate) I made the image based on a watercolor painting called "Counterattack of the Defenders of Petropavlovsk" by an artist named Igor Pavlovich Pshenichny. The image itself is visible here (https://hiddensiberia.ru/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/photo_2022-11-10-14.03.03.jpeg) and there's a Russian-language site with more details about the art here (https://hiddensiberia.ru/read/articles/arhive/grad-obrechennyh/) Obviously i changed up the color saturation and hue to a large extent, and added in a high-contrast overlay to give the impression of a black-ink outline. i chose that crop based on the need for a square image. I was trying to make it look like some of those absolutely bonkers (in a good way) ukiyo-e prints where the composition is very asymmetrical. glad that you liked it, but yeah it was a combination of finding a suitable image via various search engine image searches and then just going bananas in photoshop.
Crazy that David Price survived his suicide attempt and lived long enough to steal $200 million from the Boston Red Sox in the mid 2010s
New mission: go to The Hague, find Joe on public transportation, engage him in conversation to make him break his monk-like vow of silence and reveal his true colors (and volume)
Sit across from Joe. Make eye contact. Smile, feigned politeness. Maintain the stare. Remove the tin of shoe polish from your pocket and begin to Dutch yourself
In other news, would like to congratulate Joe for the new Superman movie making him half Armenian lol
Kamchatka sounds like literally the worst place in the world
So the British bullied the French into the plan by saying, "If you don't drink from the blood puddle, you're gay". And it worked.
Back then, GPS was the Gunfire Positioning System
Beyond the Breakers has an amazing couple of episodes on the difficulties of colonizing Russian America on their patreon. They discuss what I can only describe as 'the T-34 of 18th-century cargo ships'.
This was amazing; The Russia Empire is usually the butt of jokes.
What’s the name of the series on the American intervention in Siberia?
Polar Bear Expedition
This the plot of an Aubrey Maturin novel where everyone is stoned.
As a stoned individual, I can tell you I had to read that description more than twice.
Joe I will always enjoy your content, despite being German, and being made fun of constantly.
Pretty sure the DBZ thing actually is named after the Hawaiian king
?!
Home bunker.