 This Columbus Day I want to celebrate the unique weapon, the nearly drove Columbus and his men from the New World. Columbus famously accidentally discovered the so-called New World during a hunt for new trade routes for spices. But on his second voyage, the New World struck back with their own weaponized spice and nearly drove them off. In this video I'm exploring and recreating this earliest recorded use of tear gas, which used a unique New World spice. I want to see how well this weapon worked and if I'm able to recreate it. The inspiration for this video comes from Charles Mann's book 1493, that explores the worldwide impact Columbus's voyage had on the entire world and how it transformed us into the age of the homogenosing, effectively destroying the world as it once was and creating the modern world we live in today. In a passage, he references an event during the second voyage of Christopher Columbus, where the Tainau people united against the particularly cruel oppression from Columbus's men and began to fight back with a unique New World spice, weaponized capsaicin. Capsaicin is the active chemical in the New World chili peppers, originally forming as a defense mechanism to protect itself. It provides a unique burning sensation to any mammal that attempts to eat their fruit. Humans, however, decided they liked that suffering and it became widespread in the Americas. Once it got introduced to the Europeans, it was one of the fastest spreading New World crops to reach nearly every cuisine around the world. But besides its culinary use, capsaicin is also the active compound in modern pepper spray and some tear gases, where it is used as a debilitating non-lethal weapon. But this tradition started a lot earlier than you might have originally thought. The Tainau people were a big disadvantage without steel weapons against the Spaniards, but they fought a difficult scorched earth war against them. Filling gourds with ground chilies and ash, they threw them at the Spaniards, creating a blinding and choking smoke screen. Then, protected with a bandana over their face, they would charge and attack these disorientated Spaniards. What I find particularly interesting about this story is that at least for some of these men in the attack, this is probably their first encounter with the effects of capsaicin. Their first taste of this unique New World spice was a blast of it to their eyes. Sadly, while this unique weapon may have helped them win some battles, the incredible bloody war was ultimately lost in the Tainau people faced enslavement and eventual annihilation. But I wanted to revisit this interesting point in history and see if I could recreate this weapon and just how effective it was. So let's hit up the HDMI garden and get the ingredients we need. Planted a few varieties of some of the hottest peppers, Carolina Reapers and Ghost Peppers. Unfortunately, this year they did not do very well and have maybe just one pepper that's going to be ready in time. For as luck would have it, this is the year of the so-called Peppergate, and a couple of the bell pepper plants that I bought turned out to not be bell peppers. They have been very fruitful and while I don't really know what kind of pepper they actually are, they are definitely spicy on their own. After chopping up all the peppers, let's leave them all to dry. Let's go and collect some gourds. Bottle gourds have also struggled a bit this year and their yield is a bit poultry as well. Fortunately, I've grown them a few times over the years and have a few spares from previous years, plus some extra ones that they'll purchase as backup. I was able to supplement it with a few other ones and have a few options here. They never really specify what type of gourd it is. Assumption is it's a bottle gourd. Bottle gourd kind of famously spread around the world by humans because it's so useful for storing things. But I have a few options we can try them out. My biggest concern is how to make it actually shatter and spread the ashes inside of it. They are surprisingly solid. If you throw it with all your force directly down onto pavement, you might be able to shatter it. I'm a little unsure how well it's going to work. And then another option is to use egg shells to make something a little bit smaller like it was done in Japan. Similar blinding powders were not unique to the Americas. In Japan, a very similar technique was used called Mitsubishi. Not too confused with Mitsubishi, that's something else. However, instead of a new world spice, chilies, this one used old world spice that chilies were misidentified as pepper. As a delivery device, this powder was sometimes placed in hollowed out eggs and included other powders like flour. So we can take a little bit of inspiration from this to try out some other options as well. First, thank you to BetterHelp for sponsoring this video. If you feel like you're needing to speak to someone or you just need a mental health check-in, BetterHelp is an amazing online resource that allows you to do just that. It's an online therapeutic resource that sets your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist, all from the comfort of your home. People often forget that mental health is just as important as physical health. I know I do. To get started, head to betterhelp.com slash htme. Answer a few questions about your state of mind and before you know it, you'll be matched with a licensed therapist who will work with you. It takes about as much effort as watching a YouTube video to start your connection to BetterHelp. BetterHelp is about facilitating great therapeutic matches, so they make it easy and free to change therapists as needed. Head to betterhelp.com slash htme to answer a few questions and get paired up with a therapist. Oh yeah, and you'll also get 10% off your first month when you click that link below. Now let's return to our now dried out peppers and pulverize them into a powder. I took some of the pulverized chili powder to try and extract just the spicy copasanoids. Apparently this is actually a pretty straightforward process to do and this requires a solvent like ethanol, something I've been able to previously distill. After soaking and boiling the solution for some time, those solids can be strained out, leaving mostly just the capsaicinoids behind. Then the ethanol and remaining water just needs to be left to evaporate. That's spicy. I don't know what I expected. It's spicy. Oh, it's spicy. After letting this dry for a while, it's a little bit more to go, but we have this very thick liquid wax-like surface on the top and that's going to be a final result. So this could have dried a little bit more, but I'm like a real genius. I decided to just taste a little, just the tiniest little dab, just put it in the tip of my tongue and see. Did it actually succeed? Did it actually get something spicy? And holy cow, yeah, that is some spicy stuff. Ah, I literally spent like the next hour drinking half a gallon of milk constantly swishing it in my mouth just to relieve the burning. This is some potent stuff. This is a pretty quick and simple extraction. I didn't expect it to be that effective. I think if you got this in your eye, you could easily blind yourself. I don't think I'm actually going to use this in an experiment because I'm not really looking to blind myself or anybody else when we actually test this to your gas. Surprisingly easy to make something really potent out of just a few peppers. Surprisingly dangerous stuff. There's some research into like what kind of concentration they usually have and things like mace, pepper spray, and they only use like 2%. So this is way over that probably. I don't know how concentrated this is. I can already tell it's very potent and I don't think you want to put this into anybody's eyes. I think I'm going to avoid actually using this and just stick to the powder. That stuff I can tell on its own just straight from the pepper is very spicy, very irritant to the eyes. So I don't think this is going to be necessary. For reference, most chilies are around 1% capsaicin, with ghost peppers reaching up to 2-4%. Even modern pepper spray can have some serious and life-threatening risk with this use so I think concentrating the capsaicin is probably not going to be necessary for our needs. Man's Book references the gourds being filled with ground chili powder and ash. For our mix, I ended up doing a mixture of a few fine powders. I ended up testing them individually to see if I had any advantage and got kind of similar results. We ended up using a mix of fine sawdust, flour, sifted ash, and fine charcoal mixed with roughly 50% ground chili powder. I feel like this should be done outside. It's like mixing cob. HTME assistants Theo and Elliot bravely volunteered to help with the testing of this potent chemical weapon. I can taste it now. It's a little daunting knowing that we're already sneezing and coughing and we haven't even put them inside anything yet. No, we just started. First up, the smaller egg bombs. Tasting it through the mask is not what I was hoping for. So we're just going to hit the tree and then kind of walk into it. Is that the plan? Trying to get this on myself. Ooh, yeah, it's coming right at us. Volunteered us tributes to take it not directly to the face, but we're going to hit the tree and I'm going to be in vicinity. I'm going to keep my glasses on so I don't get any direct splatter into my eyes. But I'm going to hopefully get a little sense of what it feels like. Stuff is kind of dispersed pretty well, but it's definitely causing burning in the nostrils just being in this area now. It's going to see what a decent face full of it feels like. Oh, yeah. That looks unpleasant. Whoa. I think it's too much in the eyes. I think the glasses helped. Most probably definitely got some. So that was just an egg. I think that's a little bit smaller than what they're using. I think a full gourd. You're going to get that smoke screen burning tear gas effect. Let's see how well you can get these gourds to break open. As a backup, I have some ceramic ones that possibly weren't also an option. Oh, I'm going to sneeze. But first Theo volunteered to take a shot to the chest. Brake goes right up your nose. I got a little wet in my eyes. Two for one. We scored the edges of some of the gourds to hopefully make them break apart a little bit easier. A little low, but that's definitely a cloud. Maybe I won't stand right in front of it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That got me. That got me. That is not pleasant. Not pleasant. Cool. Yeah. And I catched you by surprise. It wasn't a big puff. I don't know. I broke a lot better than I thought it would. That one did break. That one doesn't want to break. No, it doesn't. Got the ceramic one. You get that a shot. This one's packed pretty full. Wait around here. That's a good one. Lastly, we wanted to try a full bombardment attack to see if we could recreate the full smoke screen effect you'd likely face in actual battle with these weapons. That is a smoke screen. Oh. Did it get your eyes in all? So good stuff. For safety precautions, we kind of avoided getting directly into the eyes, but I think we got a pretty good proof of concept that is not pleasant. Just being downwind of it. We have definitely got it in our eyes. I think feeling the most in the nasal and throat. So that would definitely be pretty debilitating. I don't know what's worse. Like obviously the chili powder is awful, but just the ash itself, I think, is like when it hits your lungs, destroys you. Would not recommend. It really hit me hard. I see why it's called tear gas now. It's annoying, but the main thing is that I would not be able to fight with that in my eyes. So it's meant to debilitate someone so that you can come up and attack them. And I think it did that. I think the end result of our experiments have shown that this is a pretty effective weapon and one that I for sure would not want to have to face off against. This is an interesting topic to cover that I feel like is oftentimes kind of glossed over through history. I'm not sure if I'll be doing too many more chemical weapons. A lot of them get a little bit more lethal than this one, but definitely looking to do some more historical weapons in the near future. Thanks again for watching and thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon.