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Escapee: Dionysius
Place and time: Rome, 46 bc
Escape: When Dionysius, an enslaved librarian, fled the estate of his master, the statesman Cicero, he took with him a stash of valuable books. “It is a small matter in itself,” Cicero wrote to his friend Publius Sulpicius Rufus, governor of Dalmatia, “yet my vexation is serious.”
Aftermath: Although Cicero’s friends reported two sightings of Dionysius over the following years, first in Narona and later among the Illyrian Vardaei tribe, the librarian was never recaptured.
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Escapee: More than 150 rhesus monkeys
Place and time: Massapequa, NY, 1935
Escape: When Charles Selner, a zookeeper at Frank Buck’s Jungle Camp Park, forgot to remove a plank bridging a moat, scores of rhesus monkeys—purportedly led by a mischievous male named Capone—swarmed off their island enclosure and out of the zoo.
Aftermath: Before being recaptured, fifty of the monkeys ended up playing along the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, forcing a train to make an emergency stop.
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Escapee: Harry Houdini
Place and time: Boston, 1911
Escape: Accepting a challenge from a group of Boston businessmen, Houdini was shackled with handcuffs and leg irons and sewn into the embalmed carcass of a 1,500-pound sea turtle. He emerged fifteen minutes later.
Aftermath: According to the Boston Globe, Houdini boasted to his audience that he had done “Jonah one better, because Jonah’s whale was alive and possessed but a normal aroma.”
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Escapee: 109 Union Army prisoners of war
Place and time: Richmond, VA, 1864
Escape: Using makeshift picks and their fingernails, prisoners dug a sixty-foot tunnel through a fireplace and into a storeroom outside the Confederacy’s Libby Prison.
Aftermath: More than half of the soldiers made it back to Union territory alive; two drowned while fleeing, and the rest were recaptured.
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Escapee: Hugo Grotius
Place and time: Gelderland, 1621
Escape: Sentenced to life imprisonment for supporting the Remonstrants, a religiously tolerant reform group opposed by the Calvinist establishment, Grotius escaped by hiding in a large trunk said to contain dirty laundry and borrowed books.
Aftermath: After the trunk was delivered to a friend, Grotius fled to Antwerp before moving on to Paris, where his family later joined him.
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Escapee: Victor Folke Nelson
Place and time: Boston, 1921
Escape: While being led to his cell at Charlestown State Prison, where he was to be incarcerated for robbery, Nelson made a run for it, evading guards as he climbed up to a barred window and squeezed himself out, dropping more than twenty feet to the railroad tracks below.
Aftermath: Four months later, Thomas Mott Osborne, the progressive penologist who had been Nelson’s warden during a previous sentence, persuaded Nelson to return voluntarily to prison.
