Scrolls and Leaves

27/01/2022

Looks familiar?

A play on our cover art by for the Sounds Profitable newsletter. So cool!

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21/01/2022

Various editions of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Treasure of the Great Reef" (1964). The book began and ended with a mystery. No one has yet identified the origins of the ship which wrecked on the Great Basses Reef and left its silver treasure on the ocean floor.

18/01/2022

Front cover of Arthur C. Clarke's "Indian Ocean Adventure" (1961) with American teens Mark Smith and Bobby Kriegel. Along with Mike Wilson, they made the first discovery of the shipwreck, silver coins, and other artifacts in Great Basses Reef, off the southeast coast of Sri Lanka.

14/01/2022

Camera in hand, marine biologist Rodney Jonklaas on one of the first visits to the Great Basses Reef, with Arthur C. Clarke and Mike Wilson, in 1959. Little did they know, they were diving within half a mile of treasure. It was only two years later that they discovered the shipwreck with silver coins.

Video Credit: "Beneath the Seas of Ceylon." British Sub-Aqua Club

12/01/2022

Arthur C. Clarke (right) and Mike Wilson in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka (date unknown). After meeting in a London saloon, Arthur was inspired by Mike's passion for the new-ish sport of scuba diving. 80-foot plunges into the icy English Channel followed. In 1956, both men emigrated to Sri Lanka, a diver's paradise.

Photo credit: Arthur C. Clarke Trust

11/01/2022

And thanks to the British Sub-Aqua Club, our podcast includes an excerpt from the very first underwater film produced in Sri Lanka!

A world history podcast featuring stories from the developing world, through the lens of the marginalized. Made in India in 3D sound.

10/01/2022

Loose coins littered the site of the shipwreck at Great Basses Reef. But most were fused tight by a coral encrustation into lumps with a canvas material, indicating how the coins were originally packed in bags. Each lump contained around a thousand coins and weighed 30 pounds. More than 350 pounds of silver was lifted from the reef.

08/01/2022

Cleaned and polished after 260 years under the sea, the silver coins found at the shipwreck date from 1702 during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. There are no signs of wear and tear, so they were likely freshly minted. One side of the silver rupiah is stamped with Surat, the location of the mint, and the other with the emperor's name.

06/01/2022

🎆 New episode alert! As famed author Arthur C. Clarke and his friends dive beneath the treacherous Great Basses Reef in Sri Lanka, they encounter a fairyland of caves, grottos and colorful sea life. And something else completely unexpected ... a shipwreck ... with treasure! 💰 Join us as we trace Clarke's attempts to identify the wreck and claim its hoard of silver coins.

04/01/2022

Beneath the turbulent waters of a Sri Lanka lighthouse, we dive with science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke to the mysteries of a shipwreck. Join us Thursday for the final episode of Season 1.

26/12/2021

Obituary: Brij Lal (1954-2021)

Renowned Indo-Fijian historian Brij Lal passed away on December 25 in exile in Australia. His loss feels unexpectedly gut-wrenching because my interactions with Brij were fleeting. We connected over phone calls from opposite corners of the world and spent hours talking about his life while making the episode, “My Hope is in My Heart” (episode 5). The episode is about indentured labour from India to Fiji at the turn of the 20th century, and more particularly, is Brij’s life-story.

Brij was born in Lebasa, Fiji, and was the grandson of an indentured labourer from Uttar Pradesh. He was a strong voice representing Indo-Fijians in his coup-prone homeland, and was exiled from his land of birth in 2009.

What struck me almost immediately about him was his humility. He was generous with his time despite being a world-renowned scholar who's been a mentor to entire generations of historians. He was tech-unsavvy, but put up with my requests to ensure good audio with patience. In his emails, he always inquired first about my safety during the pandemic first. This was a slow, open-hearted connection in a fast, cynical time. He told me that his greatest regret in his old age was not being able to go home to Fiji where his family and forefathers are buried.

Here are three quotes from our conversations that illustrate what he stood for.

25/12/2021

Thrilled that we got the award for best sound design from .

This is for our episode on indentured labour from India to Fiji and a search for home. But really, all our episodes sound beautiful (not biased at all). So wear your headphones and do listen to be transported to the past!

Link in bio. The sound (crafted by the wonderful .nagaraj) is *chef’s kiss*

23/12/2021

🥁 For our end-of-year bonus, we're re-releasing this lovely episode which was featured in the "100 Outstanding Podcasts From 2021" by Bello Collective, one of the most influential voices in podcasting.

21/12/2021

It's nearly the end of 2021, and we're taking a little break from our Season 1 rollout for a very special reason. Tune in Thursday to find out why!

20/12/2021

The origins of the pharmaceutical industry. From the 1700 onwards, Europeans project themselves as having a superior knowledge system. So the Brits bring their hospitals and their forms of medicine to their colonies, paving the way for sales of their drugs.

Medical historian Pratik Chakrabarti says, “If they had intermittent fevers earlier, they use at least 10 varieties of herbs or parts of plants that local experts suggested. Once they had quinine as a biochemical extract from the cinchona bark, they prescribed quinine as the only form of medicine.”

He says large-scale importation of Western drugs started in the 19th century, and Western medical companies made huge profits, selling and sending these products to the colonies.

Image: Bottle of 100 anti-malarial pills, London, England, 1891-94. Credit: Science Museum, London. via Wellcome Collection

17/12/2021

The O***m Poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the main source of o***m, the oldest medicine in continuous use, since around 5000 BCE. O***m oozes as a latex from slight incisions on the green seed pods. Morphine is a naturally occurring substance extracted from o***m. The plant is also the source of poppy seeds which contain morphine as well. One poppy seed bagel will make a urine test positive for morphine for a week, but someone would need to eat about 40 of these bagels to feel the effects of morphine.

Image 1: Morphine crystals. Annie Cavanagh. via Wellcome Collection

Image 2: O***m poppy. Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London. Dr Henry Oakeley. via Wellcome Collection

12/12/2021

Tropical plants have powerful healing properties. In 1958, when the leaves of the Madagascar Periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) were found to contain the chemical vincristine, investigators required 2kg of leaves to produce a single course of treatment. Mortality from childhood leukemia fell from 100% to 30% once it was introduced. Today, vincristine is artificially synthesized.

Image: Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London. Dr Henry Oakeley via Wellcome Collection.

11/12/2021

When Buddhist monk Yashomitra wrote plant-based recipes on birch bark leaves and threaded them together sometime in the 4th to 6th centuries, he could never guess his makeshift book would one day be found under desolate ruins outside Kucha, China. The book of medicine is one of the earliest texts based on Ayurveda and shows how far Indian medical knowledge traveled.

Image: Centre Culturel de Chine, Luxembourg, from the exhibition “The Ancient Silk Road Kingdom of Kucha."