Jamestown governor John Ratcliffe, the villain in Disney’s Pocahontas, died horrifically in real life.
Most people know John Ratcliffe as the scheming villain from Pocahontas, obsessed with gold and conquest. But the real man behind the animated character met a far more disturbing end—one that speaks volumes about the brutal dynamics between the English colonists and the Powhatan Confederacy.
In 1609, with Jamestown on the brink of collapse, Governor Ratcliffe led a delegation into Powhatan territory in a desperate attempt to trade for corn. Supplies were low. Colonists were dying. And Ratcliffe, hoping to stabilize the situation or perhaps restore his damaged political reputation, agreed to meet under what he thought were peaceful terms.
But the meeting was a setup.
Colonial accounts, particularly those of George Percy, describe how the Powhatan captured Ratcliffe and subjected him to a slow, deliberate execution. He was tied to a tree, stripped naked, and then—piece by piece—his flesh was carved from his body using mussel shells. Not steel. Not bone. Shells. Blunt-edged, serrated fragments used not for killing, but for maximum pain and slowness.
The flaying began with his limbs and torso. As strips of skin were removed, the flesh was tossed into the fire before him. It wasn’t just torture—it was spectacle. There’s even an account that suggests women performed the act, which in Powhatan culture could imply a form of ritualized vengeance. Ratcliffe wasn’t simply executed. He was unmade, slowly, while being forced to watch.
His face, according to some accounts, was flayed last. A final, symbolic gesture—stripping away his identity after his body had already been destroyed. Once the flaying was complete, they burned what remained of him.
This wasn’t senseless cruelty. From the Powhatan perspective, this was justice. Ratcliffe, like many of the English leaders, had come to represent betrayal, violence, and encroachment. To them, this was not just the death of a man—it was a statement. A warning.
There are no clean hands in this part of history. The English had massacred and burned native villages. They kidnapped leaders. They violated truces. The death of Ratcliffe isn’t an outlier—it’s part of a vicious cycle of conflict where mercy was rare, and vengeance often came with ceremony.
His story doesn’t end with a musket ball or a quiet death in bed. It ends at the hands of those who had learned that diplomacy with the English often led to dispossession and death. And in that moment, Ratcliffe became more than a colonial governor. He became a symbol—reduced to flesh and fire.
The victorian solution for the homeless: the 4 penny coffin. For 4 d a person could geat a blanket, pillow and single coffin to sleep in the warm of a building for the night.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, if you were poor in London—or any number of big industrial cities—your options were brutally simple: work until your body gave out, beg until someone noticed, or pay a few pennies to almost survive the night.
This was the world of the “penny sit-up” and the “four penny coffin.” These weren’t nicknames for some Dickensian horror novel. These were real, functioning shelters. Run-down warehouses. Charitable hostels. Flea-ridden, damp, overcrowded holding zones for the destitute. Think of them as a brutal early form of the pay-as-you-go safety net.
Here’s how it worked:
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One Penny bought you the right to sit on a wooden bench. Just sit. That’s it. No bed. No backrest. And—this is the key part—you weren’t allowed to fall asleep. If you started to doze off, someone would come by and jolt you awake. You were paying to not be outside. But comfort? Forget it.
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Two Pennies got you the same bench, but this time, you were allowed to lean forward onto a rope stretched across the room. That rope ran from one end of the hall to the other, like a human laundry line. You’d drape your arms over it, maybe your chest, and sort of nod off while folded over like a broken umbrella. In the morning, the rope would be cut or lowered to wake everyone up. This was called a “two penny hangover.” Yes, that’s where the phrase came from.
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Four Pennies? That got you a box. Literally. A narrow wooden coffin—no lid, no frills. Just a sheltered space big enough to lie down. You might get a tarp or blanket if the place was charitable. The “Four Penny Coffin” was both slang and reality. It was the best deal in the worst system: the only way you could stretch out and actually sleep like a human being… if you had four pennies.
These shelters were often run by religious groups like the Salvation Army, whose aim was both to provide basic protection and to preach repentance. So along with your coffin came a healthy dose of scripture. But beggars can’t be choosers. Not when the alternative is freezing to death in an alley.
It’s easy to look back and think this sounds medieval. But this was modernity. This was industrial society’s attempt to cope with a flood of poverty, homelessness, and urban despair. These weren’t dungeons hidden from view. They were part of everyday city life—just another fact of existence for people society had discarded.
The Four Penny Coffin wasn’t the worst part of history. It was the best the poor could hope for in a system designed to break them. It was a mercy you had to pay for. A temporary pause in the daily grind of suffering.
And somehow, that might be the most horrifying part of all.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Czar Nicholas II of Russia were all first cousins. They were all grandchildren of Queen Victoria. Kaiser Wilhelm famously said about World War 1 “If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.”
World War I wasn’t just a geopolitical disaster. It was also a family feud of royal proportions.
Incredibly, three of the major powers that plunged the world into war in 1914 were led by men who were not just acquaintances or rivals—they were first cousins. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia all shared one famous grandmother: Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.
If this sounds like a bizarre historical twist, that’s because it is. You could practically fit the war’s opening salvos into a single family reunion.
Let’s break it down:
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Kaiser Wilhelm II was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. His mother, Victoria, Princess Royal, was Queen Victoria’s firstborn daughter. Wilhelm grew up idolizing his British relatives—even as he grew more militaristic and nationalistic.
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King George V was the son of Edward VII, Victoria’s second son. George and Wilhelm were first cousins—and bore a striking resemblance to each other, down to their beards. In fact, George and Nicholas II of Russia looked so similar they were often mistaken for twins.
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Tsar Nicholas II wasn’t technically a blood grandson of Queen Victoria, but his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, was. Alexandra was Victoria’s favorite granddaughter. That made Nicholas a grandson-in-law—and even closer in reality, since he and George V were also cousins through other royal lines (they shared a grandfather, Christian IX of Denmark).
Three monarchs. Three empires. All bound by blood—and still utterly incapable of stopping the slide into global war.
Kaiser Wilhelm himself reportedly said, “If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.” And maybe he was right. Queen Victoria was known as the “Grandmother of Europe” not just because of her sprawling family tree, but because she commanded an extraordinary level of respect among European royalty. She had the presence and political savvy to mediate between rivals—at least within her own clan.
But by 1914, she was long dead. The continent she had once symbolically united through diplomacy and dynastic marriage was now coming apart at the seams. Nationalism had replaced royal blood as the dominant force in European politics. Treaties, alliances, and military mobilizations moved faster than telegrams could keep up. And when the war came, it didn’t matter that the men writing the declarations of war had once played together as children.
Kaiser Wilhelm and King George exchanged letters in the lead-up to the war, each trying to sound diplomatic while the machinery of death wound up around them. Nicholas II tried to slow things down too, but the world had already crossed a line that royal blood couldn’t pull back.
In the end, the war destroyed all three of them. Nicholas was overthrown and executed with his family. Wilhelm abdicated and fled to exile in the Netherlands. George survived, but the British monarchy was never the same again—forced to rebrand itself and distance itself from its German roots by changing the family name to Windsor.
The “War to End All Wars” was, in a very real way, a war between cousins. A reminder that blood may be thicker than water, but it’s no match for tanks, propaganda, and blind nationalism.
The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (where Mexico City now stands) was larger and more sophisticated than many European cities when the Spanish arrived in 1519.
When Hernán Cortés and his men first laid eyes on Tenochtitlan in 1519, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Stretching across the shimmering waters of Lake Texcoco was a city unlike anything they had encountered before—not just in the Americas, but anywhere.
This was Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Built on a series of islands connected by causeways, bustling with canals, temples, markets, and thousands of neatly laid out homes, it was a metropolis that could hold its own—if not surpass—many of the major European cities of the time.
Size and Population
At its height, Tenochtitlan housed between 200,000 and 400,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the world. For comparison, London in 1519 had fewer than 100,000 residents. Paris and Constantinople were among the few cities that could rival its size.
Urban Planning and Clean Water
While many European cities struggled with overcrowding and waste in the streets, Tenochtitlan had a sophisticated system of sanitation. The city was divided into districts, each with its own marketplace and temples. Workers collected garbage daily. Public latrines existed. Water was brought in via two massive aqueducts—built centuries before—and was used for drinking, washing, and cleaning the city.
Transportation and Canals
Instead of roads clogged with refuse and animals, Tenochtitlan had canals. Think Venice, but bigger. Canoes glided through these waterways, delivering goods to homes and markets. Causeways with removable bridges connected the city to the mainland, allowing for both transport and defense.
Markets and Trade
The central market at Tlatelolco, a neighboring city absorbed into Tenochtitlan, was a hub of commerce that stunned the Spanish. Thousands of vendors sold everything from gold and jade to textiles, food, tobacco, and even insects used for dyes. Cortés described it as larger and better organized than any market in Europe.
Architecture and Culture
The city was crowned by the Templo Mayor, a massive twin-temple complex dedicated to the gods Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. Around it rose palaces, government buildings, and ceremonial centers. Public art and sculpture were everywhere. Education was mandatory for all Aztec children—boys and girls alike. This was a civilization with its own written language, astronomical knowledge, and an advanced understanding of agriculture, medicine, and engineering.
So yes—when the Spanish arrived in 1519, they didn’t just find warriors and rituals. They found a capital city that challenged their assumptions about the so-called “New World.” Tenochtitlan wasn’t primitive. It was modern, organized, and breathtakingly advanced.
And within just two years, it was almost completely destroyed.
In 1518, a “dancing plague” in Strasbourg caused people to dance uncontrollably for days.
In the summer of 1518, the city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire, now in modern-day France) experienced one of the most bizarre and haunting public health crises in recorded history.
People started dancing. And they couldn’t stop.
It began with a woman named Frau Troffea. One day in July, she stepped into the street and began to dance. There was no music. No celebration. Just compulsive, uncontrollable movement. She danced for hours. Then through the night. Then into the next day.
By the end of the week, dozens of people had joined her. Within a month, the number had risen to 400.
They weren’t enjoying it. Their feet bled. Their muscles tore. They collapsed from exhaustion, only to rise again and keep dancing. Some reportedly danced to their deaths, from heart attacks, strokes, or sheer fatigue.
The city officials panicked. They consulted physicians, who declared it to be a natural illness caused by “hot blood.” The solution? More dancing. They built stages and hired musicians, thinking people just needed to dance it out.
That… did not help.
What caused it? Historians still debate the answer.
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Some believe it was mass hysteria—a form of psychogenic illness triggered by stress, starvation, and superstition. The early 1500s were a rough time in Strasbourg. Famine, disease, and the aftershocks of religious upheaval created an atmosphere of fear and anxiety.
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Others have suggested ergot poisoning—a hallucinogenic mold that grows on damp rye and contains chemicals similar to LSD. That theory is controversial, though, because ergot usually causes convulsions and hallucinations, not coordinated dancing.
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There’s also a theory involving religious mania. Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dancing and epilepsy, was widely venerated in the region. Some believed that angering the saint could cause a curse of uncontrollable dancing, and the idea may have spread through a mix of fear and suggestion.
Eventually, the authorities reversed course. They banned music and dancing and sent the afflicted to a shrine to pray for healing. The epidemic slowly died out.
But to this day, no one is entirely sure why it happened. The Dancing Plague of 1518 remains one of history’s most chilling examples of how the mind and body can unravel under pressure—and how entire communities can get swept up in a collective trance.
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