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Expedition Files
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00:00On this episode of Expedition Files...
00:04In 1968, the USS Scorpion disappears without a trace.
00:09Accident?
00:10Or act of war?
00:13Did a Soviet spy inside the U.S. Navy help destroy it?
00:18For six decades, the truth has been submerged.
00:22Until now.
00:24And Paul Revere famously saved America on his midnight ride during the Revolutionary War.
00:31But does he deserve all the credit?
00:34Remarkable research changes everything we think we know about the birth of our nation.
00:41Then, a shocking claim.
00:44John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, wasn't captured and killed at all.
00:49But instead, lived on to meet a far stranger end.
00:55We dig into this mind-blowing theory.
01:01In the corridors of time...
01:05...are mysteries that defy explanation.
01:09Now, I'm traveling through history itself.
01:16On a search for the truth.
01:20New evidence.
01:24Shocking answers.
01:26I'm Josh Gates.
01:28And these...
01:31...are my Expedition Files.
01:37There are many things we know about America.
01:40Truths held self-evident.
01:42We have 50 states.
01:44We love freedom.
01:45We sing the national anthem off-key before every baseball game.
01:48And our idea of a small soda is still larger than any other nation on Earth.
01:53But tonight isn't about what we know about America.
01:56It's about what we don't.
01:57So, prepare to look beneath the stars and stripes to uncover three American mysteries.
02:03We begin in Spain, of all places.
02:06It's May of 1968.
02:08And the Cold War is running red-hot.
02:10As we dive into the enigmatic fate of one of America's most valuable military assets.
02:16We're on base at Naval Station Rhoda.
02:20And behind me is the USS Scorpion.
02:22A Skipjack-class nuclear-powered submarine about to depart for its home in Norfolk, Virginia.
02:28Due to arrive in two weeks' time.
02:30But this sub and all 99 men aboard will disappear.
02:34No distress call.
02:36No survivors.
02:37And what the Navy knows, well, that's classified.
02:40But then, more than 50 years later, a whistleblower claiming to have inside information will come forward to disclose something
02:48that, if true, would be one of the most well-kept secrets of the Cold War.
02:53Is the fate of the Scorpion an accident or an attack?
03:05Commissioned in 1960, the USS Scorpion is one of the Navy's most advanced nuclear attack subs, designed to be virtually
03:13undetectable by the enemy.
03:16Powered by a nuclear reactor, it's built to run silently and stay submerged for months.
03:23At 252 feet long, about the length of a city block, it can reach 33 knots underwater, nearly 40 miles
03:30an hour.
03:31Armed with classified weapons, including two nuclear warheads, it's one of the deadliest and most stealthy assets in the U
03:39.S. Navy.
03:39Here at the Submarine Force Atlantic headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, radio men like Mike Hannon monitor the Scorpion and every
03:48other U.S. submarine operating in the Atlantic.
03:52While here, beneath the waves, the Scorpion spends most of her time training to hunt Soviet subs.
04:00But there's a problem. The Scorpion isn't exactly ship shape. The Sub has been racking up maintenance headaches.
04:07There's a hydraulic leak they can't fix and a persistently faulty trash disposal unit. The crew starts calling it Scrap
04:15Iron.
04:15Despite this, in February of 1968, the submarine gets cleared for duty and begins patrols of the Mediterranean.
04:25For three months, the Scorpion travels throughout the Med. It doesn't find any threats.
04:30And on May 17th, its mission is scheduled to come to an end.
04:34Its last stop is the port of Rota, Spain, before it turns west into the Atlantic and heads home.
04:41On May 21st, the crew radios in from roughly 250 miles southwest of the Azores Islands of Portugal.
04:50They estimate they'll be back in Norfolk in six days' time.
04:58May 27th, 1968. The USS Scorpion is finally due home.
05:03Families gather at the pier, eager to welcome their loved ones.
05:07But something is terribly wrong.
05:09And radioman second class Mike Hannon suspects it.
05:13It's Hannon's job to track messages from the subs at sea.
05:16The Scorpion hasn't sent one in six days.
05:19He's praying there's some logical explanation.
05:22But there's no sign of the Scorpion.
05:27By 6pm, the evening news is painting an unsettling picture.
05:31The nuclear submarine USS Scorpion was scheduled to arrive in Norfolk this morning.
05:37But Navy officials say the vessel has yet to make contact.
05:40That's right. Families worry as the status of the crew of naval submarine Scorpion remains unknown.
05:47It's been almost a week since the Navy has received communication from the vessel.
05:52The next day, word spreads across the country.
05:55A nuclear-powered submarine is missing.
05:58And with Soviet tensions at an all-time high, the Navy is looking to avoid a panic.
06:03The government tries to keep a lid on things, quietly sending search vessels out framed as routine operations.
06:11But behind the scenes, there's much more urgency as the Atlantic fleet surges into action.
06:18Dozens of ships and aircraft search for the missing submarine.
06:22They scour the Scorpion's projected path from the Azores all the way to Norfolk.
06:27Weeks pass, and the Navy offers no explanation to the families, who are desperate for answers.
06:35But the operation presses on.
06:37And then, five months in, using cutting-edge sonar and underwater camera systems,
06:43the Navy pulls off the seemingly impossible.
06:46They find the Scorpion.
06:49The wreck of the submarine sits 9,800 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.
06:55Approximately 400 miles southwest of the Azores.
06:59The submarine is badly damaged, its hull shattered.
07:04What could have caused this catastrophe?
07:06And was the Scorpion's nickname of Scrap Iron an omen of her destruction?
07:12The Navy's official inquiry is contentious, with various theories hotly debated.
07:18Some experts blame structural failure or a hydrogen explosion during a battery charge.
07:24Others believe one of the sub's own torpedoes accidentally detonated, imploding the ship.
07:30The investigation suspected some form of explosion, but lacked the evidence to prove its cause.
07:36Ultimately determining that the reason the USS Scorpion sunk, quote,
07:40cannot be definitely ascertained.
07:47For the next 50 years, the loss of the Scorpion will remain one of the Cold War's biggest mysteries.
07:53But now, former Navy radio operator Mike Hannon has come forward with a stunning claim,
07:59that the Navy knew far more than it ever told the public.
08:02He believes the destruction of the Scorpion and the deaths of her crew was no accident.
08:07At the time the Scorpion was sunk, I was a service clerk, responsible for all incoming and outgoing messages.
08:18One of those messages was what's known in the Navy as a check report.
08:23Check report is a very simple message sent, encrypted, by a submarine when it is on patrol.
08:36The Scorpion was on a 24-hour check report.
08:39So we want to hear from them every 24 hours.
08:43The message simply would say, check 2-4, submarine Scorpion.
08:50So when no check report arrived, Hannon knew something was wrong.
08:54Very wrong.
08:56Any news on Scorpion?
09:03When the daily check report stopped, Navy Command pulled data from the U.S. Sound Surveillance System,
09:09a vast network of underwater hydrophones designed to detect and track submarines across the world's oceans.
09:16Mike Hannon viewed a visualization of that data and believes he saw something that changes everything.
09:23They showed me the tape.
09:25And you could clearly see a squiggly up and down line.
09:30And you could see, boom, here.
09:33A couple seconds later, boom, there.
09:36Two distinct torpedo hits.
09:42And Scorpion was sunk.
09:46After the two explosions, they could determine that a Russian submarine in that immediate area sped up, surfaced, and left.
10:01Hannon believes the hydrophone recording is a smoking gun, proving the Scorpion was sunk in a Soviet submarine attack.
10:08But there is one big problem.
10:09The tape Mike claims he saw of the hydrophone recording?
10:13In the 60 years since, no one else has ever reported seeing it.
10:17And even if we do take Mike at his word, there's another question.
10:21How were the Soviets able to locate a stealth submarine?
10:24Mike believes he has the answer.
10:26His co-worker was a Russian spy.
10:34A bombshell claim from former Navy radio man Mike Hannon suggests the USS Scorpion submarine wasn't lost to an accident,
10:43but instead was destroyed in a calculated Soviet torpedo strike.
10:47But if the Scorpion was a virtually undetectable stealth sub, how could the Soviets have found it?
10:54The answer wouldn't surface until nearly two decades later, with revelations about John Walker Jr., a chief warrant officer in
11:03the Norfolk communications office alongside radio man Mike Hannon when the Scorpion vanished.
11:09In the 1980s, he was officially outed as a spy and sentenced to life in prison in one of the
11:15most damaging security breaches in naval history.
11:18Walker had been passing the U.S. Navy's most closely guarded secrets to the Soviets, including top secret submarine patrol
11:26schedules.
11:27If the Soviets had access to the Scorpion's navigation plan, they would have known exactly where she was headed and
11:35could have been waiting to strike.
11:37We had a row of teletype machines where messages were coming in. And I had noticed that Walker would go
11:45back there and just go down the line looking at the messages on each of the machines.
11:51I said, why all of a sudden is Walker interested in all of these damn messages?
11:58I think there's a good possibility that Walker could have been involved. And there's no doubt in my mind that
12:06a Soviet submarine fired two torpedoes and sank the Scorpion.
12:11No doubt whatsoever. And I will take those feelings to my grave with me.
12:19Soviet spy John Walker Jr. died in prison in 2014 without ever being directly linked to the fate of the
12:26Scorpion.
12:27Many experts are also skeptical of Mike's theory, noting that the wreck shows no clear sign of an external torpedo
12:33attack,
12:34and that the sub likely imploded due to an unknown catastrophic event, which means that for Mike and the families
12:41of those aboard,
12:42there's no emotional closure to the case.
12:46It was painful then and for all the years since, I knew 10 of those guys closely.
12:57The scar that that's left on me, seldom does a night go by that I don't have that whole situation
13:07go through my head and wake me up.
13:10If you had seen those families on that pier, their anticipation and their dads are coming home or significant others
13:19are coming home, it broke my heart.
13:22I know that I've said information that's still top secret, but I'm not going to die with the people of
13:33America not knowing what happened with that submarine and its 99 dedicated sailors.
13:47Over a decade ago, a submarine veterans group petitioned the government to reopen the case to determine the true cause
13:54of the Scorpion sinking.
13:55So far, the Navy has declined.
13:58Today, the USS Scorpion still lies at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet on the floor of the Atlantic
14:04Ocean, as does her nuclear reactor.
14:06The Navy monitors the area for signs of radioactivity, but the sub itself remains off limits, a silent steel tomb
14:14for 99 sailors who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
14:23From a submarine lost at sea to the loss of an American president.
14:28It's April 26th, 1865.
14:31The Civil War is at an end, and Abraham Lincoln has just been murdered.
14:35And inside this blazing barn is the man who shot him.
14:40History records that in a few minutes, gunfire will ring out, and John Wilkes Booth will die.
14:46But soon, a conspiracy theory will emerge.
14:50One of the strangest theories you could possibly imagine.
14:53That John Wilkes Booth doesn't perish tonight.
14:55That he escapes, slips into a new identity, only to end up as...
15:00Well, I don't want to spoil it for you.
15:02Just get ready for a wild ride, as we use high-tech analysis to unravel the mind-blowing mystery
15:08surrounding America's most infamous assassin.
15:21Our strange story really begins 12 days before the barn.
15:27After four long years of bloodshed, the Civil War is finally over.
15:32President Abraham Lincoln is taking a rare night out to celebrate,
15:36enjoying the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.
15:42But just as the performance reaches its climax, a single gunshot rings out.
15:49Lincoln has been murdered in cold blood.
15:53The killer leaps from Lincoln's box onto the stage.
15:57He lands on both feet, hard. His leg is now broken.
16:09Many in the audience wonder if this is all part of the play.
16:14That's because the man who just jumped on stage is one of the most famous actors in America.
16:19John Wilkes Booth.
16:22Before anyone can react, he flees the stage.
16:27You shot the president!
16:29Stop that man!
16:33Booth rides off into the darkness and vanishes, sparking one of the most frantic manhunts in American history.
16:41According to some reports, he alters his appearance, shaving off his trademark mustache to avoid being recognized.
16:48As word of Lincoln's assassination spreads, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton locks down Washington,
16:55sealing bridges and dispatching teams of soldiers, detectives and bounty hunters to track Booth's escape.
17:04A staggering $50,000 bounty, over a million dollars today, is placed on Booth's head.
17:14After 12 days of desperate searching, finally, there's a break.
17:18A tip leads Union soldiers to a farm two miles from Port Royal, Virginia.
17:24Two men are said to be hiding there, one matching the description of John Wilkes Booth.
17:30The soldiers are under clear orders to take Booth alive, so he can expose any possible Confederate conspiracy.
17:40So the soldiers set the barn ablaze, hoping to force Booth out.
17:46Which brings us back here to the besieged barn.
17:49According to the account of the Union soldiers, they first demand the two men inside surrender.
17:54Eventually, one man emerges.
17:57It's David Harreld, one of Booth's accomplices.
18:00But the other man refuses to come outside.
18:06Sergeant Boston Corbett then confronts Booth through the doors of the barn.
18:11Come out, Booth! You're surrounded!
18:13Fearing the suspect is about to fire, he has no choice but to bring him down.
18:22The soldiers say they drag him, barely alive, onto the farmhouse porch.
18:29In his pockets, the soldiers find Booth's diary.
18:35Paralyzed from the gunshot, he apparently can't lift his arms.
18:38With his final breath, he stares down at his hands and whispers two words.
18:45Useless. Useless.
18:48Dawn is breaking, and John Wilkes Booth is dead.
18:53After 12 days on the run, the man who killed Abraham Lincoln has met his end.
18:59In the aftermath of Booth's death, the body is brought aboard the Union ironclad ship, the USS Montauk, where a
19:06surgeon performs an autopsy.
19:11Fearing his remains might be stolen or desecrated, Booth's body is then placed at a D.C. penitentiary, before ultimately
19:19being interred in a family plot at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore.
19:26Meanwhile, four people, including David Herold from the barn fire, are found guilty of conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, and are
19:34hanged on July 7, 1865.
19:38It would seem this tragic case has come to a close, but there are those that believe there's much more
19:44to the story.
19:46Enter Texas attorney Finnis Bates, who publishes a book in 1907 called The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth.
19:55In its pages, Bates recounts the purportedly true, jaw-dropping story of a man he befriended named John St. Helen.
20:04In 1878, St. Helen falls gravely ill, and believing he's about to die makes an outrageous confession.
20:13Our name is not John St. Helen.
20:17Our real name is John Wilkes Booth.
20:20He says he is the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
20:27According to Bates' tell-all book, John Wilkes Booth didn't die in that barn at all.
20:32He escaped justice and spent the rest of his life hiding behind a false identity.
20:37Now, that might sound like a crazy claim, but I promise, we're just getting warmed up.
20:42Because John Wilkes Booth then allegedly becomes an actual mummy in a traveling sideshow.
20:48Seriously.
20:55In 1878, a man on his deathbed named John St. Helen confesses an astonishing secret.
21:02He claims to be Abraham Lincoln's killer, John Wilkes Booth, and says he faked his death, escaping capture.
21:10The man explains that after assassinating Lincoln, he escaped through southern Maryland, hidden in the back of a wagon, and
21:18slipped back into Virginia.
21:19However, at one point, in order to avoid capture, St. Helen abandoned the wagon and fled into the woods, but
21:27in doing so, he lost his diary.
21:29St. Helen says he sent a messenger, a Confederate soldier known only as Ruddy, back for the diary.
21:36Ruddy collected it, but then panicked upon seeing the Union troops and fled to a nearby barn, where he apparently
21:42ended up alongside fellow Confederate conspirator David Harold.
21:46St. Helen says it was his messenger who was shot and killed in the barn that night.
21:52But because the man resembled him and carried his diary, it led Union troops to mistakenly identify the messenger as
22:00Booth.
22:01St. Helen said in the years that followed, he assumed various aliases, constantly on the move to avoid capture.
22:10I need to show you something.
22:11After telling this extraordinary tale to Finnis Bates, St. Helen presents an original photograph of John Wilkes Booth as proof,
22:20implying that only the real Booth would possess such a picture.
22:25But that's far from the end of this twisted tale.
22:29Following his dramatic deathbed confession that he is John Wilkes Booth, St. Helen recovers and promptly disappears.
22:38Bates keeps the photograph, but it would be another 25 years, in 1903, before he sees St. Helen again.
22:46Only this time, the man is definitely dead.
22:53Bates says he came across a newspaper article from Enid, Oklahoma, describing how a local mortuary had the preserved body
23:01of a drifter.
23:03The newspaper also reported the deceased man had been living under the name David E. George, but before he died,
23:10claimed to be John Wilkes Booth.
23:14One look at the photo of David E. George and Bates was certain.
23:18It was the same man he'd met years earlier in Texas, John St. Helen.
23:23A few years later, Bates actually buys the corpse, just as he's preparing to publish a book detailing the wild
23:31tale of Booth's escape and secret life.
23:33With the mummified body in tow and a sensational story to promote, Bates is ready to take his show on
23:41the road.
23:41For the next 70 years, the so-called Booth Mummy takes to the stage, touring America with multiple circus productions,
23:49often with the less than subtle billing, see the man who murdered Lincoln.
23:53The attraction even makes it to the world's fair.
23:57The mummy is a hit, but is there any shred of truth to its origin?
24:01Author Jane Singer has studied the legend closely.
24:05What's remarkable to me is how many people genuinely believe that John Wilkes Booth did not die in that barn.
24:15Was there a government conspiracy to suppress the fact that Booth really didn't die on April 26th, 1865?
24:23A lot of people believed there was.
24:26Enough people probably believed and were suspicious of the government because toward the end of the Civil War, before Abraham
24:32Lincoln was killed, it was a very hard-handed regime.
24:35In order to win this war, Abraham Lincoln first had to suspend the right of habeas corpus, can't have a
24:44trial, if you're a traitor, you get hauled off to jail.
24:46And then we have General William Tecumseh Sherman marching from Memphis to the sea and literally destroying much of the
24:56Confederacy.
24:57And so, to believe that that government was not trustworthy, I don't think was such a far reach for a
25:06lot of people.
25:08And let's be real, it would have been a terrible look for the Union if Lincoln's killer had just slipped
25:13away.
25:14But Singer isn't buying the conspiracy.
25:17Why?
25:17Because the soldiers at Garrett Farms swore up and down they knew exactly who they had.
25:22And other experts also corroborated it was John Wilkes Booth.
25:28When we are looking at Finnis Bates' theory that John Wilkes Booth escaped not just the burning barn but death,
25:37it doesn't add up.
25:39Because there were credible witnesses called to come to the Montauk and identify the body.
25:47Dr. John Frederick May was a renowned Washington DC physician who had removed a fibroid tumor from Booth's neck about
25:57three months before the assassination.
25:59And it left quite a vivid scar.
26:02And May allegedly said, that's the scar.
26:06That's the person I operated on.
26:09Unmistakable, in his opinion.
26:11Charles Dawson, who was a clerk at the National Hotel where Booth stayed.
26:16When he first saw the body of John Wilkes Booth, he said,
26:20Oh my goodness.
26:21On the right hand between the thumb and finger was a tattoo with the initials JWB tattooed in India ink.
26:29And young Dawson said, that's the tattoo I've seen repeatedly when Booth signed the guest register.
26:37These were ordinary folks.
26:39It would be highly unlikely that the official autopsy of record would be part of some overreaching conspiracy.
26:49And what of John St. Helen, the mummified man who insisted he was the real Booth?
26:55A forensic team recently used facial recognition technology to render a definitive answer to his conspiratorial claim.
27:02In 2020, the Smithsonian Institution created a civil war sleuth facial recognition software.
27:12They compared the face of John Wilkes Booth to the face of John St. Helen.
27:18During the testing of the photographs, there were data points that weren't matching.
27:23It was clear that John Wilkes Booth in photograph, John St. Helen in photograph couldn't possibly be the same person.
27:35So after 147 years, we can finally scientifically declare that John St. Helen is not John Wilkes Booth.
27:43More than likely, Finnis Bates spun the fanciful tale for pure profit using the story and the mummy to promote
27:50book sales.
27:51But conspiracies don't die quietly.
27:53As recently as 2010, Booth's descendants lobbied to have his remains exhumed and his DNA tested.
28:00The request was denied.
28:02Regardless, I think it's safe to say if you happen to pass by a carnival with a sign hawking a
28:07John Wilkes Booth mummy,
28:09that's one sideshow you can happily avoid.
28:15I'm at a pub in Boston, Massachusetts on April 18th, 1775.
28:21And even though the beer is flowing, the mood is anything but celebratory.
28:25These colonists, still technically British citizens, have been under the thumb of the crown for years.
28:31And they've reached their breaking point.
28:33A revolution is brewing.
28:35And Militia Commander Joseph Warren here has received word that the British are planning to strike back tomorrow morning.
28:41They need to take action now.
28:44And what happens next will become the stuff of legend.
28:46Because the commander dispatches this man, Paul Revere, to set out on a dangerous mission.
28:55The story goes that after leaving the tavern, Revere spots two lanterns hanging in a church,
29:01signaling the British are attacking by sea.
29:06And so he begins his famous midnight ride.
29:12His words echoing through history.
29:14The British are coming!
29:16The British are coming!
29:18The British are coming!
29:20Revere's heroic ride will be remembered as saving America.
29:25One man alone protecting the birth of a new nation.
29:28But 250 years later, evidence will reveal that almost everything we think we know about Paul Revere's fateful night is
29:37in need of a rewrite.
29:50In 1775, the year of his famed ride, Paul Revere is a silversmith living in Boston, struggling to make ends
29:58meet.
29:59Britain has imposed taxes on the colonies, causing a recession and spawning the taxation without representation movement.
30:07The most onerous tax is known as the Stamp Act, requiring the colonies to purchase special paper for all printed
30:15materials.
30:16The tax's true purpose is to raise money for the occupying British troops, essentially picking the colonists' pockets to pay
30:24for their very own oppressors.
30:25In response, some colonists, including Revere, form a clandestine militia known as the Sons of Liberty to battle the British.
30:36One of their most successful protests is the Boston Tea Party, where they sneak onto British ships and dump all
30:43their highly profitable tea leaves into the harbor.
30:46No better way to rile up a Brit than to mess with their tea.
30:50But the Boston Tea Party is only the beginning.
30:52What follows will ignite a revolution and bring Paul Revere and what he did, or notably didn't do, into the
30:59spotlight.
31:06It's 1775, a year and a half since the Boston Tea Party, and the American resistance to British rule is
31:13gaining momentum.
31:15Intelligence gathered by the colonial rebel group known as the Sons of Liberty reveals that the British have 700 soldiers
31:22at the ready for a raid on the colonists.
31:25In anticipation, the militia has been assembling stockpiles of weapons, gunpowder and supplies.
31:31One of the largest is in Concord, a small town on the outskirts of Boston.
31:36The colonists know it's only a matter of time before the Redcoats make their attack, so they activate an early
31:43warning system.
31:44If the colonists spot any aggressive movement of British troops, a man will light a signal in the North Church's
31:51bell tower.
31:52If the British are marching out of Boston over land, he'll light a single lantern.
31:56If, instead, the British cross the Charles River by boat, he will light two.
32:02Or, as you might remember it from your childhood, one if by land, two if by sea.
32:07On April 18th, the colonists' fears are realized.
32:11A spy spots British troops crossing the Charles River.
32:14Two lanterns it is.
32:16Now, unless you took honors American history in high school, here's the version of Revere's story you likely remember.
32:23Revere sees the lanterns, and so begins his ride to spread the alarm.
32:31Alone, galloping from town to town, Revere reportedly shouts that famous phrase.
32:36The British are coming! The British are coming! The British are coming! The British are coming!
32:43After an hour, it's said that he makes it to Lexington.
32:46And after another, he supposedly makes it to his destination, Concord, around 2 a.m.
32:52Revere has reportedly arrived just in time, single-handedly giving the rebel militia time to arm themselves and muster into
33:00formations.
33:06Just three hours later, those 700 British soldiers will march into Lexington, confronting the colonial militia.
33:14Gunshots ring out, and with that, the American Revolution officially begins.
33:20If it wasn't for Revere's warning, it all could have gone very differently.
33:28We all remember this story, but it may surprise you to learn that, for most of us, what we know
33:33comes from a single source.
33:35The 1861 poem titled, Paul Revere's Ride, written an astonishing 86 years after the event by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
33:46In the hour of darkness and peril and need, the people will waken and listen to hear the hurrying hoofbeats
33:54of that steed and the midnight message of Paul Revere.
33:58It's 14 stirring stanzas, really selling Revere's solo glory.
34:04Oh, but there is one small problem with the poem.
34:07It's wrong.
34:08It was written to be rousing, not historical.
34:11Historian Sammy Jerush explains.
34:13Longfellow's poem is a lovely poem.
34:18It tells a heroic story of someone who rose above the odds and proclaimed resistance out loud.
34:26But we have had to uncover numerous primary sources to truly piece together what took place during the actual midnight
34:34ride.
34:35That includes Paul Revere's diaries, Paul Revere's letters that he had sent with his own description of the midnight ride.
34:46In 1942, historian Esther Forbes dives into those primary sources and publishes a new biography of Revere.
34:54And some serious cracks emerge in Longfellow's version of Revere's story.
34:59The first issue is here at the very beginning of our story.
35:04Esther Forbes discovers a paper trail confirming Commander Warren dispatches not just Paul Revere, but fellow militia man, William Dawes.
35:13Warren wants two men on separate routes so that if one is captured, the other can still complete the mission.
35:20Because as leaders of the Sons of Liberty, the fear was that they would be forced to give up all
35:26this information
35:27and it would be a lot harder to take on the British Army because all of the secrets would have
35:33been given up.
35:34Forbes' biography wins the Pulitzer Prize, but to the general public, the story of Revere's ride continues to be shrouded
35:41in myth.
35:42And it turns out the full true story isn't just that Revere didn't ride alone.
35:48Buckle up, because what comes next will upend the most famous parts of Revere's legendary story.
35:59Paul Revere isn't the only Revolutionary War hero to take a legendary ride.
36:04In 1777, as British soldiers burned Danbury, Connecticut, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, the daughter of a local militia commander,
36:14reportedly rode alone through 40 miles of stormy woods.
36:18It's said that she warned neighbors, evaded British patrols, and by dawn had mobilized 400 men.
36:24But her ride, twice the distance of Paul Revere's, went unrecognized at the time.
36:30The first written account of it surfaced in 1880, with a statue then erected in her honor and markers placed
36:37along her reported route.
36:38Today, some scholars question whether the ride really was as epic as recorded.
36:43But her inspiring story persists, a teenage girl braving the night to help save a fledgling nation.
36:50Ride on, Sybil.
36:54Paul Revere's renowned solo ride is not as we remember it.
36:59In Longfellow's immortal poem, a pair of lanterns was hung in the Old North Church and lit to indicate where
37:05the British were coming from,
37:07one if by land and two if by sea.
37:10Once Revere sees the signal, he begins his ride.
37:13Well, it turns out Revere didn't start his ride because he saw the lanterns.
37:18He started because he'd been ordered to by Joseph Warren back in the tavern.
37:22The signal in the church wasn't for Revere.
37:25It was for the rest of the community.
37:28Revere didn't need a signal.
37:29He already had his mission from Warren.
37:31He already knew where he had to ride to, where he had to go.
37:33In reality, Revere came up with the signal idea.
37:37He went to the sexton of the church and he said, here's what you're going to do.
37:40If the British are coming by land, put one lantern in the belfry.
37:43If they're coming by water, put two.
37:44So the signal was more for other people to be aware of where the British would be coming from.
37:51And there's more myth-busting to come.
37:53Remember the most legendary moment of the ride?
37:56Revere's dramatic cry, the British are coming.
38:00Well, it turns out he probably never said it.
38:02At least not like that.
38:04The British are coming.
38:05The British are coming.
38:06The British are coming.
38:07The British are coming.
38:07It never happened.
38:09If you're riding past midnight and you're yelling out loud that the British are coming,
38:13you're waking everybody up.
38:14Not a good move if you're trying to stay as discreet as possible.
38:17What Revere actually ends up doing on his midnight ride is he rides to people's homes
38:24and he knocks on their doors and lets them know, hey, the regulars are coming out.
38:30The regulars are coming out.
38:33What the regulars refers to is the British regular army, a.k.a. British soldiers.
38:40So where did the famous phrase, the British are coming, originate?
38:45It's not from the Longfellow poem that's the source of other errors.
38:49It's actually from an 1879 school textbook that misattributes the phrase to Revere.
38:56When you read history and when you study history, we're only understanding history from a certain point of view.
39:02There's no all-encompassing source.
39:04You have to think about what's missing.
39:07To put the final nail in poor old Longfellow's poem, historians point out one more major flaw.
39:13Revere never actually made it to Concord.
39:17The poem gets that part wrong, too.
39:20It was another rider who reached the final destination.
39:23Digging into the historical record, it's clear Revere and Dawes actually met a third rider at John Hancock's house in
39:31Lexington.
39:31That's right, it wasn't one rider who saved America or two, but three.
39:39The third rider is a doctor named Samuel Prescott.
39:43Together, the three men set out from Lexington to Concord to warn of the oncoming British.
39:54But halfway there, the trio is spotted by a patrol of British soldiers.
39:59Prescott leaps to safety and rides on.
40:03Dawes escapes the Redcoats but is thrown from his horse and injured.
40:08And Revere, far from triumphantly making it to Concord, he's actually captured by the British.
40:15The British patrol that captures Revere press him for information.
40:20But Revere stands his ground, doesn't give them any information.
40:23What he tells them, though, is that you're about to be surrounded by a bunch of Americans who are ready
40:29to take up arms against you.
40:31The British don't initially believe Revere, so they keep him captured.
40:35But they run into other British soldiers who basically confirm what Revere has told them.
40:41And so they recognize that that's the bigger threat that they have to deal with and not on this one
40:46guy.
40:46So they end up letting Revere go. Revere ends up riding back to Lexington and helping John Hancock and his
40:52family escape.
40:56So ends the true saga of Paul Revere's midnight ride.
41:00It turns out he didn't ride alone. He was never warned by lamps.
41:05He never reached Concord and probably never shouted the British are coming.
41:09But whatever license Longfellow's poem may have taken, Paul Revere was every bit a hero.
41:15He was part of a trio of daring riders who, along with tens of thousands of brave militiamen,
41:20battled against oppression to forge these United States.
41:25I'm Josh Gates, and I'll see you on the next expedition.
41:28New York City is the American Museum
41:28New York City.
41:29New York City has been a departure for the来tman and has a cast of the
41:29New York City.
41:29New York City.
41:29New York City.
41:29New York City.
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