231 avsnitt • Längd: 35 min • Veckovis: Måndag
The world’s No.1 podcast dedicated to all of maritime and naval history. With one foot in the present and one in the past we bring you the most exciting and interesting current maritime projects worldwide: including excavations of shipwrecks, the restoration of historic ships, sailing classic yachts and tall ships, unprecedented behind the scenes access to exhibitions, museums and archives worldwide, primary sources and accounts that bring the maritime past alive as never before. From the Society for Nautical Research, and the Lloyds Register Foundation. Presented by Dr Sam Willis.
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The podcast The Mariner’s Mirror Podcast is created by The Society for Nautical Research and the Lloyds Register Foundation. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
This episode is the first of a series on the history of the Cinque Ports in which we bring you a mixture of fascinating history alongside a glimpse into contemporary life in these vibrant and ancient maritime towns.
In the eleventh century during the reign of Edward the Confessor, five ports in the south-east of England joined together into a confederation for mutual protection and trade privileges. Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich were the original five ports; they were subsequently joined by Lydd, Faversham, Folkestone, Deal, Tenterden, Margate and Ramsgate which became known as ‘Limbs’ of the Cinque Ports; and then Rye and Winchelsea, designated as ‘Ancient Towns’.
Not only did they help each other but they also helped the Crown: in return for providing men for the King’s ships they received significant municipal benefits. The nominal head of the Cinque Ports was given the title of ‘Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports’ and became one of the most influential people in the Kingdom. Over time the position has retained is significance and honour and has often been held by members of the Royal Family and Prime Ministers.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis explores the deep history of the Cinque Ports with archaeologist and historian Dr Andrew Richardson and also speaks with Sue Jones, former Mayor of Dover and twice Speaker of the Cinque Ports. We also bring you along for a very special day at the Royal Military School in Dover to witness the installation of the new Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Admiral Sir George Zambellas.
In subsequent episodes we will explore some of the individual towns to get a sense of their intriguing past and dynamic present.
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A mini-series on the maritime history of Germany launches with a visit to the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, which has recently launched a stand-out new permanent exhibition 'Ship Realms - The Ocean and Us.' Through the clever presentation of artefacts amongst immersive displays, the exhibition powerfully makes the point that, the more we know about the connection between ships, shipping and the oceans, the better we can assess how they will influence the future.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis took a tour of the new exhibition with the museum's Managing Director, Professor Ruth Schilling. We hear about the size and changing nature of the global fleet; how the shipbuilding industry and those who work in it has had a profound influence on shaping society; we hear about the importance of scientific research vessels and the competition for resources in the sea; there are sections on shipbuilding and propulsion, maritime networks and health.
The new exhibition will set a benchmark for maritime history and heritage for years to come and places the German Maritime Museum as one of the world's leading hubs of maritime heritage.
'Ships awaken longing and generate knowledge. They harness the forces of nature and change the world. There is no ship without teamwork: this applies to shipbuilding as well as to the crew on board. Ships demonstrate inventiveness and the joy of discovery. But they are also a means of and witness to the merciless exploitation of the earth - with irreversible consequences.'
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This episode continues our work bringing you some of the finest original historical material, written by the people who were actually there.
Today we bring you the war diary of the U-boat commander Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, commander of U-20, from May 1915, when he sank the transatlantic liner Lusitania, full of civilian passengers. 1193 people died.
On Friday 7th May 1915, Kapitänleutnant Schwieger found himself in the middle of a conundrum. Heading towards him was a large, four funnel ship. He knew that the British often commissioned four funnel warships as auxiliary cruisers. In his mind, his duty was clear, without warning, he loosed a torpedo, which hit the ship. After the first hit there was a subsequent large explosion, which resulted in the ship listing seriously, and eventually going under.
Schwieger seems to have been appalled by the result of his attack and recorded "It looks as if the ship will stay afloat only for a very short time. [I gave order to] dive to 25 metres (82 ft) and leave the area seawards. I couldn't have fired another torpedo into this mass of humans desperately trying to save themselves." It appears that only then did he appreciate that he had torpedoed the Lusitania, which, in his favour, was known to be a potential Armed Merchant Cruiser.
Schwieger was born in 1885 and in 1903 joined the Imperial German Navy aged 18. He chose the submarine service early and by 1912, he was appointed to command U-14 and was appointed to U-20 shortly after the outbreak of war. Allegedly, he had the reputation of shooting first and asking questions after. He was killed in U-88 on the 5th of September 1917, which probably hit a mine. During his wartime career, Schwieger captained three different submarines, on a total of 34 missions. He sank 49 ships, measuring 183,883 gross register tons (GRT).
The fallout from the torpedoing of the Lusitania was very serious. The US President Woodrow Wilson (determined to keep out of the European War) was seriously displeased at the death of American lives and as a result of his representations, Kaiser Wilhelm gave immediate instructions to cease the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign. The resumption in 1917 after the Battle of Jutland directly caused the American declaration of War in 1917.
Over the years, there have been many takes on the sinking of the Lusitania from conspiracy theories about Winston Churchill to hidden arms shipments. As always, the presentation of contemporary documents help us to understand the elements of history.
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This is the extraordinary history of a single ship - a Baltimore clipper.
Once she was the Henriqueta, a slave ship; but subsequently she became the Black Joke, a hunter of slave ships.
In her former life she trafficked over 3000 captives across the Atlantic; in her new life she became the scourge of Spanish and Brazilian slavers.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the maritime historian Stephen Taylor who has captured and explored this story in his latest excellent book ‘Predator of the Seas’
In the research to illuminate this ship’s curious double life Stephen has explored the lives and experiences of both slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew. We hear about the business of slavery in Africa and Brazil run by the Portuguese; the Royal Navy’s preventative squadron that purchased the ship in 1827 and turned her against her former masters; and about the British seamen and Liberian Kru.
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This episode presents an astonishing and tragic story from the American Civil War with great relevance to the present day.
It’s the story of a black teenager called David Henry White who comes from Delaware and has done all in his power to create a life for himself – he has signed onto a merchant ship for work with the prospects of pay and promotion. Life has different plans for him however. When war breaks out he finds himself crossing paths with the USS Alabama, a confederate commerce raider of immense power blazing a path of success. White’s ship is taken and he also is taken and forced to work on the confederate warship, captained by Raphael Semmes.
White works on board until his fate is sealed in battle and the Alabama sunk. Semmes survives but White does not. He drowns. After the war Semmes writes his memoirs which paint the world in which White lived and died a very different way to how it appeared in reality.
It's a story of the life and tragic death of a disempowered black boy, of an entitled racist naval officer, and of the profound and lasting power of written propaganda. After listening to this podcast you will burn with the light of the true historian, and never believe anything you read again without checking who wrote it, and more importantly WHY.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Andrew Sillen, author of the new book that unpicks this remarkable tale in the finest detail: Kidnapped at Sea.
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During the Cold War years the Royal Navy faced some of its greatest challenges, both at sea confronting the increasingly capable and impressive Soviet Navy, and on shore when it faced policy crises that threatened the survival of much of the fleet. During this period the Navy had rarely been so focused on a single theatre of war - the Eastern Atlantic - but also rarely so politically vulnerable. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoked with Ed Hampshire, author of the fabulous new book – The Royal Navy in the Cold War Years, 1966-1990: Retreat and Revival. They discuss operations and confrontations at sea with Soviet ships and submarines; the Navy's role in the enormous NATO and Warsaw Pact naval exercises that acted out potential war scenarios; the development of advanced naval technologies to counter Soviet capabilities; policy-making controversies as the three British armed services fought for resources, including the controversial 1981 Nott Defense Review; and what life was like in the Cold War navy for ratings and officers.
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The ability to navigate in icy seas is one of the most important themes in the historical and contemporary story of human interaction with the sea. Over centuries of development ships are now able to operate safely in and amongst giant ice-islands or semi-submerged floes as deadly as any reef. Specialist vessels have been designed with strengthened hulls, unique bow designs and innovative propellers and rudders.
To find our more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Zach Schieferstein from Lloyd's Register Foundation's Heritage and Education Centre. Lloyd's Register has been classifying ships by originating and regulating rules regarding their design and construction since 1768. They have classed all types of vessels, from the largest bulk carriers to yachts and more specialist vessels such as high-speed ferries and - of course - icebreakers. Their vast archive is a goldmine for studying this type of craft. Sam and Zach discuss the historical development of icebreaker design and propulsion, the significance of the arctic and antarctic in geopolitics and the crucial role of Lloyd's Register in the evolution of icebreaker design and construction.
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Today we discover the remarkable story of how a handful of intrepid scientific navigators underpinned British naval dominance in the conflict with Napoleon.
During the Napoleonic Wars, more than twice as many British warships were lost to shipwreck than in battle. The Royal Navy’s fleets had to operate in unfamiliar seas and dangerous coastal waters, where navigational ignorance was as great a threat as enemy guns. If Britain was to win the war, improved intelligence was vital.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Michael Barritt about how they secured that intelligence. It is a story of how a cadre of specialist pathfinders led by Captain Thomas Hurd enabled Britain’s Hydrographic Office to meet this need. Sounding amongst hazards on the front line of conflict, alert for breaks in weather or onset of swell, these daring sailors gathered vital strategic data that would eventually secure the upper hand against Britain’s adversaries. And they did this around Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, honing a skill that revolutionised the British way of war at sea, ultimately securing a lasting naval dominance.
Michael Barritt is the former Hydrographer of the Navy, head of the Royal Navy’s hydrographic profession, and a successor to Captain Thomas Hurd.
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Throughout the eighteenth century the Royal Navy was the largest employer of free black labour in a period when Britain was - at the same time - the largest trader in human lives across the Atlantic. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Steve Martin, expert on black British history and literature, and who works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences. They discuss the origins of black mariners who ended up in the Royal Navy, their status, skillsets, and career trajectories, their settlement patterns and Black radical culture.
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We may think of globalism as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade and proft. And what did they seek? Exotic spices: cloves, pepper, cinnamon, ginger. These spices brought together the European ports of Lisbon, London, Amsterdam and Venice, with Goa, Bombay, Malacca and Jakarta - and through those ports the Arab world and China.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Nicholas Nugent. Nicholas spent his career as a journalist with the BBC World Service and his spare time collecting a valuable archive of original maps, developing a passion for how the growth of the spice ports helped spread the exchange of global culture between east and west. His magnificent book, The Spice Ports: Mapping the Origins of the Global Sea Trade published by the British Library is out now.
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This year we are launching a new strand of the podcast on eyewitness testimony, in which we bring you the most extraordinary primary sources – history as told and written by the people who were actually there.
Today we start with one of the most atmospheric of all maritime sources, one that transports you directly back to the creaky decks of the age of sail – you can smell the tar in the rigging – you can almost taste the rum.
This excerpt on Captain Avery comes from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which was published in 1724, exactly 300 years ago. It was a fascinating time in the publishing industry: a market in criminal biography already existed and the author of this book, Charles Johnson, hopped on board to bring to the world for the first time the adventures and crimes of pirates.
Fascinatingly, we don't have any idea who Johnson actually was. Many thousands of words have been written and suggestions made including that he was actually Daniel Defoe. What is certain is that whoever wrote the book knew his – or her – stuff. The account is brimming with detail and accuracy. The author undoubtedly spoke with people who had sailed with these pirates and knew their world intimately. And the year 1724, when this was published was the very peak of what became known as the 'Golden Age of Piracy'.
The book became hugely famous and public interest in pirates can be traced in a direct line right up to the twentieth century classics we know so well, such as Treasure Island, Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean.
This particular chapter introduces Captain Avery, one of the worst of the worst. Born in the summer of 1659 he mysteriously disappeared in 1696 after an extraordinary life for which he was known by his contemporaries as 'The King of the Pirates.'
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We find out about an exciting project run by the Imperial War Museum which explores how conflict has driven innovation in science and technology. Sponsored by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the project aims to discover how conflict has accelerated innovation, and how this has impacted on the world we live in today. Science and technology are the key factors in influencing the course of modern conflict. On land, at sea and in the air, innovation in technology has played a key role in the course of conflict during the twentieth Century. Warfare accelerates technological innovation as part of the wider war effort, and this in turn has a significant impact on civilian society. As the Imperial War Museum is a world-renowned authority on conflict history, the project gives audiences the opportunity to change their understanding about war. With over one million items in the IWM collection, this project will offer a range of a wide range of intellectual and emotional experiences.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Rob Rumble, lead curator of the project. They examine and discuss a number of artefacts in the collection, including the Cavity Magnetron, which became the preferred source of very high frequency radio waves in various radars and communication devices and led to a massive growth in microwave radar technology; public safety posters which educated and encouraged the public use of antiseptic to prevent infections, as well as for the use of safety harnesses whilst working from height; an example of the 'Davis' Submarine escape apparatus, an early type of oxygen rebreather invented in 1910; a lifejacket for a child; lifeboat navigation maps; a buoyant light; plastic armour; and a type of valve employed in early airborne interception and air to surface vessel radar equipment.
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Billy Waters was born into enslavement in 1770s New York, before becoming a sailor in the royal navy. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented Waters became London’s most famous street performer, celebrated on stage and in print. Towards the end of his life he was elected 'King of the Beggars' by his peers. Waters died destitute in 1823 but his legend lived on for decades. To find out more about life as a black man in the Royal Navy and on the streets of Regency London, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mary Shannon, author of the excellent new book Billy Waters Is Dancing.
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We hear about an exciting project to save and record accounts of shipwreck survivors. The project's goal is to raise awareness and understanding of the experiences of those who have been unfortunate enough to experience shipwreck. This is crucially important at a time when familiarity with life at sea is diminishing and there is a noticeable absence of empathy for seafarers in distress - and yet, as a maritime nation, seafaring remains a huge part of our history and shipping is a growing industry that brings us ever more of our worldly needs. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Daniel Jamieson who is running the research project at the University of Plymouth. They discuss the long and fascinating history of shipwreck survivors' accounts before discussing the many interviewees who have already contributed to the project, providing eyewitness insights into a variety of contemporary and well known maritime disasters as well as far more personal stories of maritime disaster. The stories include Helen Cawley, who survived the sinking of the liner Lakonia in 1963 as a 14-year old; Sheelagh Lowes, stranded on Suwarrow of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific 1996 for 6 months, her yacht Short Time having been thrown on a reef; a number of survivors of the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria in 1956; Sara Hedrenius, who survived the sinking of the ferry Estonia in 1994 in the Baltic; and Ben “Skippy” Cummings whose vessel capsized and
sank on a reef off Antigua, four miles from the finish of his trans-Atlantic race.
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In December 1941 HG-76 sailed from Gibraltar to Britain and was specially targeted by a wolfpack of U-boats whilst, in a rare example of German inter-service cooperation, the Luftwaffe pounced from French airfields. In Gibraltar and Spain, German intelligence agents had known every detail of HG-76 before it had even sailed.
Nonetheless, the convoy fought its way through. Improved radar and sonar gave the convoy's escorts an edge over their opponents, and the escort group was led by Commander Walker, an anti-submarine expert who had developed new, aggressive U-boat hunting tactics. The convoy was also accompanied by HMS Audacity, the Royal Navy's first escort carrier – a new type of warship purpose-built to defend convoys from enemy aircraft and U-boats.
Through seven days and nights of relentless attack, the convoy reached the safety of a British port for the loss of only two merchant ships. Its arrival was seen as the first real convoy victory of the war.
To find out more about this, one of the most dramatic maritime stories of the Second World War, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Angus Konstam, author of a new book 'The Convoy HG-76: Taking the Fight to Hitler's U-boats' that brings the story to life.
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This episode starts a new mini-series on maritime innovations, and we start with one of the most important: the stockless anchor. A Victorian innovation, the stockless anchor transformed seafaring, making it safer and simpler.
The stockless anchor was a simple but clever design which presented many advantages over traditional anchors. Previous anchors were fitted with a stock: a rod set at an angle to the flukes which dug into the seabed. That rod helped the flukes find the right orientation to bite.
This feature however, caused the anchor to be an awkward shape, requiring davits suspended over the bows to raise or lower them and prevent damage to the hull. The ship also needed an ‘anchor bed platform’ for storing the anchor when not in use.
The stockless anchor didn’t have that rod and the flukes simply pivoted against the main shank. This pivoting action helped the flukes bite and the lack of the stock meant that the anchor was easier to manoeuvre when raising or lowering and could be drawn up into the hawsehole for safe storage. Due to the simple geometrical design of the stockless anchor, it was also capable of free falling through water much faster when it was required.
As with all of the best technological inventions it was simple, manifestly a better design, and required someone with a touch of genius to think it up. That man was William Wastenys Smith. To find out more about this brilliant maritime innovation Dr Sam Willis spoke with William Wastenys Smith’s great-granddaughter, Trish Strachan. This episode includes a number of reports and thank-you letters from leading seamen in the 1880s, sent to Wastenys Smith commenting on the remarkable quality of his new invention.
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This episode looks at Llloyd’s Register Foundation’s new project Maritime Innovation in Miniature which is one of the most exciting maritime heritage projects of recent years and a leader in terms of innovation in the maritime heritage field. The aim of the project is to film the world’s best ship models. They are removed from their protective glass cases and filmed in studio conditions with the very latest camera equipment. In particular, the ships are filmed using a macro probe lens, which offers a unique perspective and extreme close up shots. It allows the viewer to get up close and personal with the subject, whilst maintaining a bug-eyed wide angle image. This makes the models appear enormous - simply put, it's a way of bringing the ships themselves back to life.
Ship models are a hugely under-appreciated, under-valued and under-exploited resource for engaging large numbers of people with maritime history. The majority of museum-quality ship models exist in storage; those that are on display have little interpretation; few have any significant online presence at all; none have been preserved on film using modern techniques. These are exquisitely made 3D recreations of the world’s most technologically significant vessels, each with significant messages about changing maritime technology and the safety of seafarers.
The ships may no longer survive…but models of them do. This project acknowledges and celebrates that fact by bringing them to life with modern technology, in a way that respects and honours the art of the original model makers and the millions of hours of labour expended to create this unparalleled historical resource.
This episode looks in particular at the extraordinary models that were filmed in 2022 at the Swedish National Maritime Museum in Stockholm.
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The 1660s were a time of great turmoil in England. In 1666 the great fire of London had destroyed much of the country’s capital and just a year earlier the great plague had killed a fifth of the city’s population. In amongst this chaos the new King, Charles II, recently restored to the throne after the English Civil War, began to build an extraordinary navy. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards the capabilities of seapower dramatically and exponentially increased. European powers began to take up permanent positions in foreign countries laying the foundations for the subsequent colonialism that shaped the modern world. Whilst they vied for control of the new global trade that linked east with west, that rivalry led to some of the largest-scale fleet battles ever fought.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Richard Endsor, a world-renowned historian who has has dedicated his life to studying the structures and building processes of seventeenth century ships. Richard has written several award winning books including The Master Shipwright’s Secrets for which he was awarded the prestigious Anderson Medal for the best maritime book published in 2020.
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This episode looks at the extraordinary maritime history of Scarborough, a port town on the UK's northeastern coast. Famed for its medieval herring fair that features in Simon and Garfunkel's 1960s version of the traditional English ballad 'Scarborough Fair' it has a lesser known but significant maritime history. Once one of the largest shipbuilding ports in the country, Scarborough had no fewer than twelve yards on its seafront, with supporting rope and sailmaking businesses in the town. Scarborough-built ships have travelled the world encountering pirates and transporting convicts. The fame of the town attracted huge numbers of people from a variety of backgrounds: Scottish 'Herring Lasses' travelled down from the north to work in the booming North Sea herring industry, whilst rich gentleman travelled up from the south to catch enormous tuna and the town became Britain's first seaside resort. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mark Veysey from the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre.
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The battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 was the largest naval encounter in history and the most decisive naval battle of the Pacific War. By its end the Japanese navy had been eliminated as an effective fighting force and resorted to using suicide attacks.
The battle was a huge, sprawling affair - not one battle but in fact four separate naval battles - each with its own distinctive characteristics. To understand how it all fitted together requires a birds-eye view.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke to Mark Stille, retired Commander in the United States Navy and naval historian. Mark is the author of the new book Leyte Gulf: A New History of the World's Largest Sea Battle.
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This episode continues our mini series on maritime China with an episode on Chinese shipwrecks found in Southeast Asia and what they tell us about the development of Chinese shipping and trade from the ninth century onwards. The wrecks include the ninth century Belitung wreck, twelfth century Flying Fish, thirteenth century Java Sea, fifteenth century Bakau wreck, and from the seventeenth century the Binh Thuan and Vung Tau Wrecks. Together they provide unmatched insights into world maritime engineering and innovation, industry and manufacturing in China, and a network of trade that linked China to the world beyond its shores. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mike Flecker, one of the world's leading authorities on the development of Chinese shipbuilding and trade, and who led excavation teams on all of these wrecks.
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A Ming Dynasty court eunuch, a diplomat, an explorer, a mariner, a Muslim…Zeng He lived from the 1370s to around 1433 and achieved what many have since considered to be impossible.
Between 1405 and 1433 Zeng He commanded seven expeditionary voyages. He explored the East China Sea, South China Sea, up through the Straits of Malacca to the Bay of Bengal, around India and Sri Lanka to the Arabian sea, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and on to the east coast of Africa. He did this with enormous ships in enormous fleets. If you believe the sources some of this ships were almost twice as long as any wooden ship ever recorded. On the first voyage it is believed that there were no fewer than 265 ships in total, 62 of them being of the largest type, the 'Treasure Ships'. Historians believe these largest vessels had five or six masts and were up to 300 feet long - but that is the most conservative of estimates. There is very little physical evidence to prove any of this with the exception of one 36 foot-long rudder, a monstrous piece of timber that does suggest a ship of at least 300 feet in length.
Zeng He's seven voyages provide a fascinating foundation for historical debate and narrative. Here is an empire using seapower to reach out beyond its borders in a golden time of exploration which does not last. The scale of the fleets, the distance of the voyages, and the activities of the Chinese are all very much unsettled in the minds of modern historians. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Professor Tim Brook, a historian of China at the University of British Columbia.
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The story of HMS Captain is one of the most shocking in naval history. Laid down in 1867 and, unusually, partly funded by the public, she was one of the most innovative warships ever constructed.
She had a very low freeboard and two enormous rotating armoured gun turrets situated very close to the waterline in between the upper and lower decks. Turret ships were not a new invention but, hitherto, had only been used for coastal work: they were essentially floating iron rafts with an enormous rotating gun. With HMS Captain, for the first time we see that principle applied to a fully-rigged ocean going ship equipped with steam a engine and made of iron.
The designer, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles wanted a high-tech man-of-war which could go anywhere and sink anything. As with all turret ships, she was designed with a low freeboard but ended up with a lower freeboard than originally planned, and the vessel’s high centre of gravity made her dangerously unstable.
On the night of 6 September 1870, Captain was part of a combined fleet of the Channel and Mediterranean Squadrons of the Royal Navy, on manoeuvres in a diplomatic show of force, when a fierce gale knocked her down before the crew could cut loose her sails. Nearly the entire crew of some 500 officers and men went down with the ship, including her celebrated designer. Only eighteen men survived.
More English sailors were lost aboard HMS Captain than at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) or at sea during the entire Crimean War (1853-55).
The loss of the Captain was a national catastrophe, touching Queen Victoria personally, and memorialised at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.
The University of Wolverhampton have recently launched a project to find her wreck. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Howard Fuller, the man behind the new project.
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Indigenous perspectives are a crucial and immensely valuable part of the broad narrative of Australian maritime history. Aboriginal people witnessed the arrival of Macassan, Dutch, French, English and American vessels as these people explored, sought out trepang and harvested whales. Some of their vessels were wrecked and their survivors arrived as ‘strangers on the shore’, interacting in a variety of ways with Indigenous peoples. These observations and experiences have been reflected in numerous rock art representations and there are also rock depictions of Aboriginal craft.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mack Mcarthy who worked for many years as Inspector of Wrecks at the Australian Maritime Museum. Mack also headed the ‘Australian Contact Shipwrecks’ Program, an analysis of the interaction of Indigenous peoples with shipwreck survivors, and the study of Indigenous maritime depictions on the Western Australian coast.
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In 1861 the engineering maritime marvel ss Great Britain was chosen to take the first ever English cricket team to Australia. The tour was the brainchild of Melbourne-based businessmen, the caterers and wine merchants Felix William Spiers and Christopher Pond who had failed to persuade Charles Dickens to conduct a lecture tour of Australia. With cricket’s popularity growing in Australia they invited a team of leading English cricketers to tour the country. They arrived in Melbourne to a rapturous welcome on December 23, and played their first game on January 1, 1862. A quarter of the city’s population watched the match. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Natalie Fey from the ss Great Britain to discuss the players who went over on the voyage, how they would have lived and trained on the boat; Victorian cricketing superstar EM Grace, who wrote a very detailed diary which shows his first impressions of Australia; and the ss Great Britain's new mini cricket exhibition which goes on display on the 16th June with newly acquired collection items.
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The pearling industry was one of northern Australia’s major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The historic vessel Penguin was built in 1907 for for a pearling company based on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. She is one of the few surviving pearling luggers to retain much of its original construction and layout, and the only Queensland-built lugger in a museum collection. It is also significant for its association with Japanese lugger builder Tsugitaro Furuta, one of Australia’s major lugger builders of the time; for its service during World War II; and finally for its service to the Dauan Island community. While we were recording the interview shipwrights restoring the hull discovered some beautiful oyster shells which were cleaned for us and shined for the first time in over a century.
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The passing of the Queen in September has encouraged historians to shine a light on the era of her reign - the 70 years between 1952 and 2022 - an extraordinary period in which the world fundamentally changed several times over. One particularly revealing way to look at this period is through the experiences of the Royal Navy.
It’s quite a story. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign the Royal Navy changed beyond all recognition. In 1952 the UK was still a global and maritime superpower with a large empire. It had the second largest navy, the largest shipbuilding industry and the largest merchant fleet in the world. The vast networks of seaborne trade routes were policed by a navy of a size and versatility that it was able to engage independently in most foreseeable types of conflict.
Today, the UK’s superpower role is much diminished, and its empire has gone. The nation’s shipbuilding industry and merchant fleet are shadows of their former selves. This change all happened in the shadow of the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Falkands war, and the Cod Wars - just to name a few of the significant international maritime events of that time.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the maritime historian Paul Brown author of Elizabeth's Navy: Seventy Years of the Postwar Royal Navy
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This episode explores the wonderful Essex coastline – for those of you not familiar with the geography of England, this is the beautiful area a little to the north and east of London.
We find out about boats built in Essex and the history of the boatbuilding infrastructure that created them, and in particular about 130 surviving vessels all built in Essex before 1965 that have somehow survived, many in the most surprising of ways. Some have assumed new roles for which they were never originally intended; others have been rescued from a rotting death on the shoreline and lovingly restored in sheds, up estuaries, on beaches all the way along the Essex coast. They vary from 80ft Thames Barges, three classes of Fishing Smacks to important pulling boats, skiffs and bumpkins.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Lyndon March, who helps run a community dedicated to preserving these wonderful craft and also to telling their story…you can find Essex Heritage Work Boats on Instagram @essexheritageowrkboats
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With frequent headlines in the news highlighting the plight of refugees suffering shipwreck in the Mediterranean, death at sea is an important contemporary issue. This episode explores the historical context of death sea. The age of sail was a period of expedition and conflict where seafarers were increasingly important to the fortunes of the nation. Their work at sea was complicated with many unique hazards which brought them closer to death, whether their own or that of those around them. Accidents and military action were joined by the dangers of disease and nutrition that were amplified in the tightly enclosed world of a floating vessel. Death was another challenge for a crew to overcome and their success depended on.
A focus on the ways in which the dead were treated and remembered by those around remind them is a compelling window into the values of the seafaring community. What were the practical considerations of burying the dead at sea? How was the dead body prepared and disposed of? What was the importance of folklore and supernatural to the seafaring community? How were deaths at sea memorialised?
To find answers to all of these questions and many more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Dan O'Brien, historian of undertakers and funerals in eighteenth century England with a particular interest in death at sea.
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This episode looks at one of the greatest of all maritime mysteries – the extraordinary tale of the Mary Celeste.
On 4 December 1872, in the middle of the Atlantic near the Azores, the brigantine Dei Gratia chanced upon another brigantine. She was under sail but entirely silent, and it soon becomes clear that she was entirely deserted. She was called Mary Celeste.
Ever since - for over 150 years - the mystery of why the Mary Celeste was abandoned and what happened to the ten souls on board has spawned thousands of conjectures, conspiracy theories, fictions and fantasies; mostly myths made from fractured truths.
To find out more – and in a bid finally to unpick the myth from the reality, Dr Sam Willis spoke with maritime historian Graham Faiella, author of The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste: 150 Years of Myth and Mystique . They discuss her story from beginning to end – from her construction in the Bay of Fundy, through her life as a merchant ship, on to her final fateful voyage, and then to the remarkable enquiry that took place in Gibraltar, as British maritime authorities were the first to embrace the challenge of trying to understand what happened.
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We continue our mini-series on the maritime history of Africa with an exploration of the extraordinarily colourful history of Mozambique Island - a UNESCO World Heritage site complete with fortified city and historical links that take us back to the era of the Portuguese exploration of Africa in the fifteenth century. Vasco da Gama was the first European to arrive here in 1498 and returned in 1502 with Portuguese settlers, and it went on to become central in Portuguese plans to control trade in the Indian Ocean. The island of Mozambique was particularly valuable as the first safe harbour after ships had endured sailing around the Cape of Good Hope but still had many thousand of miles to go on their voyage to the east. Unsurprisingly the island has a significant history and heritage that links the African, Arabic and European worlds, and also is surrounded by very important shipwrecks. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Ricardo Duarte, an archaeologist based in Mozambique Island, where he develops research in shipwreck studies and Underwater Archaeological sites, supporting UNESCO efforts to protect this endangered heritage. Ricardo has also studied coastal sites linked to early urban development in Eastern Africa, and the history and social organisation of coastal societies and their relation with the sea.
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The fourth episode on our mini-series on the maritime history of Australia takes us to Perth and the workshop of Gerry Westenberg. Gerry has been hand-crafting scale model ships for well over 50 years and has built more than 130 in that time. He started this lifelong job by trying to modify a 1/600 scale Airfix kit of HMS Ajax to be HMAS Perth...with mixed success. Over time he has improved his skills and found a scale that works for him – 1/192 - based on the Empirical scale of 1 inch to every 16 feet. Over the years Gerry has built ships such as RMS Queen Mary, a Roman bireme, an Egyptian Royal Barge, HMS Hood, HMAS Sydney I, II, III and IV, RY Britannia, and HMS Barham, to name but a few. He has had two exhibitions held at the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle, the first in 2019,
with the second held in 2021, whilst a third exhibition will commence on April 8th this year running for approximately 3 months. The centrepiece of Gerry's collection consists of over 40 Australian fighting ships tracing all major classes from the inception of the RAN to today’s modern fleet. To find out more Dr Sam Willis visited Gerry at his workshop.
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This is the third episode in our mini series on the maritime history of Australia. In episode one we learned about the arrival of the Dutch in Australia; in episode twp we learned about the Dutch ship Duyfken, the first European ship to land men on the Australian mainland; and today we’re moving on in time to hear about William Dampier and his ship HMS Roebuck. Dampier is an extraordinary character. A natural scientist, explorer and pirate, Dampier was the first Englishman to explore any part of Australia as well as the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. Dampier was born in 1651 and died in 1715, and so he lived in this fascinating period in English history in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I and at a time of giant leaps in maritime capabilities. The world was changing at intense speed. Dampier began life in the merchant navy, joined the Royal Navy, fought against the Dutch, joined the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp’s crew’ and sailed around the world, all the while keeping a diary that would become one of the most important and popular travel narratives of the period. He was then given a ship, HMS Roebuck, and a mission to explore the east coast of New Holland, the land we now know as Australia. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with historian and archaeologist Dr Mac MCarthy – the man who actually tracked down and found HMS Roebuck.
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This is the first episode of a new mini-series on the maritime history of Australia. We begin in the port of Fremantle, Western Australia, at the Western Australian Shipwrecks Museum to learn about the long and fascinating history of the Dutch in Australia. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Elly Spillekom, who worked as the coordinator of the Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation, is a volunteer at the Shipwrecks Museum and a curator of the Dutch Australian Foundation. As Sam and Elly explore the museum we hear the story of how and why the Dutch were the first Europeans to sight Australia on board the Duyfken in 1606; how they went on to explore the coast; and why so many of the Dutch ships that followed the Duyfken were wrecked off Western Australia.
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This is the second episode of a two-part mini-series on the history of maritime special forces. In this episode we explore the history of combat divers - an elite within an elite.
Combat divers must pass selection twice – firstly into their chosen elite military unit before passing a specialist combat diving qualification. Units are extremely small; they use specialist kit and vehicles; their work is dangerous and lonely; and their operations are cloaked in secrecy. Their history is rich and fascinating and runs from the Second World War to the present day, as so powerfully shown in the recent attack on the Russian Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. As their kit and equipment has constantly evolved, so has the nature of their work and their capabilities. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with former Royal Marines Commando Michael G. Welham, a man with extensive military and commercial diving experience and author of the recent ‘Combat Divers: An illustrated history of special forces divers’. Sam and Mike discuss the Second World War roots of combat divers working in Grand Harbour, Malta to protect allied shipping; managing risk underwater; navigation underwater; equipment and weapons; the use of marine mammals in underwater warfare; and a variety of operations that highlight the changing challenges of special forces divers over time including the actions of Soviet Spetsnaz divers in Swedish territorial waters during the Cold War.
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The history of time and how it relates to the maritime world is one of the most significant chapters in global history. The question of time is nothing less than the question of civilisation; the question of us. Time itself has been harnessed, politicised and weaponised; clocks have been used to wield power, make money, govern and control; to exchange knowledge and even beliefs. For the maritime world, the history of time takes us from some of the most ingenious inventors and scientists the world has ever seen to the spread of empires around the globe. To find our more Dr Sam Willis spoke with David Rooney, an expert on the history of timekeeping and civilisation who has worked as the Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and is the author of ‘About Time: A History of Civilisation in Twelve Clocks.’
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We continue our mini series on maritime disasters with HMS Gloucester a British warship lost in the spring of 1682 off the Norfolk coast. It’s quite a story: here is a ship with an impressive career that takes us from her end on that sandbar in Norfolk all the way to the British presence in the Caribbean during the Cromwellian Commonwealth – a key moment in global history. Her later career was intricately linked with the troubled history of the Stuart monarchy and when she sank one of those on board was none other than James Stuart, the future James II.
The wreck was recently discovered off Norfolk and to find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Benjamin Redding - Senior Research Associate on the Gloucester Project at the University of East Anglia. Together with Professor Claire Jowitt, he is writing a cradle-to-grave history of this most historically and culturally significant seventeenth century warship.
This episode continues our mini series on maritime disasters: if you haven’t heard any of these so far do please check them out – we have covered so many extraordinary stories including the shocking wreck of the mighty Vasa in the seventeenth century, that magnificent ship that sank on its maiden voyage within sight of shore; the ss Waratah, a huge passenger liner that simply vanished in 1909; Preussen, the enormous and only five-masted full-rigged merchant ship ever built which sank in the English channel in 1910; the early submarine the HL Hunley which holds the record for the vessel being sunk the most times….and so much more! I should add here that we are also working on a future episode on the wreck of the Batavia – a dutch vessel which ran aground off western Australia in the summer of 1629 leading to one of the most appalling horror stories in all of history let alone all of maritime history…
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During the First and Second World Wars British fishing trawlers were turned into the Royal Naval Patrol Reserve to help clear the seas of mines and even take on the deadly U-Boats. They became known as 'Harry Tate’s Navy' - a nod towards the celebrity comedian known for his bungling of everyday tasks and slipshod approach to life. Taking this wry criticism on the chin the fishermen-turned naval personnel embraced it and Harry Tate's Navy became a byword for exceptional resource fullness and courage in the face of appalling difficulty and danger. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the historian and journalist Rose George who is currently working on a major new study of the history of the fishing industry.
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Our series on Iconic Ships continues with one of the most battle-honoured ships of Nelson's Navy: HMS Agamemnon. Today we got back to those days of the wooden walls to hear about this 64-gun Third Rate that saw service in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic War. She fought in many of the major naval battles of those conflicts and had a reputation as being Nelson’s favourite ship. After a remarkably eventful career her working life ended in 1809 when she was wrecked off the River Plate on the coast of Uruguay. The location of the wreck has been known since the early 1990s but in recent months has become the focus of efforts to preserve it, as the wreck is threatened by erosion, treasure hunters and ship worm decay.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mary Montagu-Scott, director of the museum in the historic shipbuilding village of Buckler’s Hard on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, where HMS Agamemnon was built. Mary has always had a passion for maritime heritage, the sea, and sailing. She is currently active in maritime archaeology, keeping boatbuilding skills alive and as a trustee to the National Museum of the Royal Navy, HMS Victory, HMS Medusa and is commodore of her local yacht club. Mary's dream is to dive on the wreck of HMS Agamemnon, built in Bucklers Hard in 1781, and to see this great ship's story brought to life again on the original slipways.
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Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century.
This episode, the last of four, looks at the unique iron vessel that was designed and built to bring 'Cleopatra's Needle' - a 3500 year-old, 224-ton, 21-metre high ancient Egyptian obelisk made of granite - from Alexandria to London, where it still can be seen on the banks of the Thames at Embankment. This is the remarkable story of how it got there.
For the Egyptians, obelisks were sacred objects for the sun god, Ra; it’s thought that the shape symbolised a single ray of sun. They were placed in pairs at the entrances of temples, so that the first and last light of day touched their peaks. The obelisk that became known as Cleopatra’s needle was made around 1450 BC, in Heliopolis in what is now a part of Cairo. It was moved to Alexandria by the Romans in 12 BC, where it remained, lying on a beach, for almost two millennia.
But in 1819, to commemorate Horatio Nelson’s great naval victory over Napoleon in 1798 at the battle of the Nile, the Sultan of Egypt presented the obelisk to the government of Great Britain….but with no suggestion as to how the British might claim their reward. In Ebay terms – this was ‘collection only’. Unsurprisingly, The obelisk stayed where it was.
Fifty-eight years later a Scottish traveller and soldier in the British army, James Alexander, heard of the story and became interested in the challenge that Cleopatra’s needle posed to a mighty maritime Empire. He convinced a wealthy and philanthropic businessman, William Wilson, to fund a project to move the 224-ton granite obelisk, 3000 miles to London – a seemingly impossible task. Enter John Dixon, a talented and energetic civil engineer from Durham, who had made his name building the first railway in China. Dixon’s solution was to make a pre-fabricated iron vessel in London; take it in pieces to Alexandria and assemble it around the obelisk. The iron tube with the obelisk nestling inside, would then be towed back to London. The journey was nearly a disaster...
To go with this audio episode we have created a video animation which explains the history of the needle, the design of the Cleopatra, and her fraught journey to London.
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On 7 December 1872 the Challenger expedition set sail from Sheerness. It’s purpose was conceived just two years earlier, in 1870, by Charles Wyville Thomson Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University. Thomson had managed to persuade the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of the globe….a voyage of deep-sea exploration, unique for its scale of ambition and scope. Their job was to do nothing les than map the ocean floor and search for life in the abyss.
This remarkable expedition was made possible by extraordinary technological and scientific developments, international co-operation on an unprecedented scale and also large-scale co-operation between civilians and naval personnel. Its results did nothing less than change the way that we think about the maritime world.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke the with Erika jones, Curator of Navigation and Oceanography at Royal Museums Greenwich. Erika's work focuses not only on the Challenger expedition but more broadly on nineteenth-century science and the development of modern oceanography.
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Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century.
This episode, the third of four, is on 'Cigar Ships', which, as Guthrie drily notes: 'in this context refers to the shape of the vessel, not her cargo, and this group of steamers represents the railwayman's approach to naval architecture' as they were conceived by the Winans brothers who came from a family of brilliant and wealthy railroad engineers. Their first cigar vessel was built at Baltimore in 1858.
To get a modern historian’s perspective on these extraordinary ships Dr Sam Willis with Stephen McLoughlin, a naval historian of immense knowledge of the period and the many maritime innovations it produced.
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Our third episode dedicated to the maritime history of Africa. We find out about indigenous African whaling; European and American exploitation of African waters; the numerous uses to which whale products were put both in Africa and abroad; the written and the archaeological evidence available for the study of whaling in Africa. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoked with Dr. Lynn Harris who has worked as a maritime historian and underwater archaeologist for over 40 years in South Africa, Namibia, Costa Rica, North and South Carolina and is currently employed as a Professor at the Program of Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. We also hear from Lindsay Wentzel, a third-year master’s student in East Carolina University's Program in Maritime Studies.
If you haven’t heard our previous two episodes on the maritime history of Africa please go and find them in the back catalogue – the first is on the history of indigenous African canoemen and the second on the desolate and vengeful skeleton coast of Namibia, home to thousands of shipwrecks from centuries of maritime trade, war and exploration passing Namibia’s coast.
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The skeleton coast of Namibia is one of the most iconic maritime locations on earth. Here the fearsome Namib desert runs right to the sea. Over the centuries the sand dunes have grown and the shoreline has moved further away as the desert reclaims the sea. The coastline itself is formidably dangerous. Plagued by shallow sandbars, fog and treacherous currents, thousands of ships are known to have wrecked here from the earliest period of European exploration of the African coast. The result is an extraordinary collection of shipwrecks surrounded by desert. To help understand the rich history of this extraordinary place Dr Sam Willis spoke with Eliot Mowa, a lecturer at the University of Namibia with an expertise in maritime history and the maritime culture of Namibia.
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Preussen was a marvel of a ship. A steel-hulled, five-masted, ship-rigged sailing ship built in 1902 and named after the German kingdom of Prussia.
Until the launch of Royal Clipper in 2000, a sail cruise liner, Preussen was the only five-masted full-rigged ship ever built and carried six square sails on each mast.
Not only did she have a fascinating career at a time when the sun was setting on the great clipper ships, she also had a fascinating and abrupt end in 1910, and ended up wrecked in the English Channel near Dover. Parts of her hull can still be seen today.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Frank Scott, a retired naval aviator and qualified square rig ship-master, who commanded various square riggers ranging from 80 to 800 gross tonnes. In his long sail training career Frank served in fourteen square riggers, under seven different national flags.
This podcast goes alongside an animation of the Preussen's rigging plan which can be seen on the Mariner's Mirror Pod's YouTube Channel.
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This begins a handful of episodes that will explore the maritime history of Africa. We begin with the fascinating story of African canoemen.
African indigenous seafaring canoemen operated as middlemen between European traders and the coastal estuaries, rivers and land of West Africa. The topography of the coast often necessitated their involvement in trade because it was variably rocky, broken by sandbars and shallow waters, or treacherous in other ways to large sailing ships. Canoemen allowed access to trade by using surfboats that could surmount the waves on the coast in ways European boats could not. They often were hired as navigators and pilots on European ships or worked as menial labourers or ordinary seamen on European ships. Canoemen also frequently came alongside European ships to board them and trade goods or enslaved people. As a result, when Europeans began to build trading entrepots, such as Elmina Castle in Ghana, Monrovia in Liberia, or Cap Verde in Senegal, they hired canoemen to contract out trade.
To find out more about this little-known aspect of African maritime history Dr Sam Willis spoke with Megan Cructcher, a PhD Student in the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University who is looking into the roles, identities, and material culture of these canoemen in West African maritime history, especially during the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.
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On 26 September 480 BC one of the most historically significant naval battles in history was fought between an alliance of Greek city states and the mighty Persian empire: the battle of Salamis.
Prior to the battle the second Persian invasion of Greece had seen convincing wins for the Persians at the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium. The Greek victory at Salamis became a turning point as the depleted alliance of Greek city states finally thwarted the seemingly unstoppable Persian king, Xerxes. Within a year, two further Greek successes put an end to any Persian attempt to conquer the Greek mainland.
The Persian empire was immensely strong, was able to absorb the naval and manpower losses suffered at Salamis and continued to flourish for another 150 years, but the Greek victory had a profound impact on the sense of Greek national identity and the ideology of freedom. It also ensured that Greek culture would continue to flourish - and thus lay the foundations of philosophy, science, personal freedom and democracy that many societies around the world know and value today.
To find out more about this battle which can claim to be one of the most significant in history, Dr Sam Willis spoke with the military historian and expert on the ancient world, Jeffrey Cox.
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Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description, often directltly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century.
This episode, the second of four, looks at the circular ships, usually associated with the Russian Vice-Admiral Popov, that came to be known as Popovkas. First built in 1873, these vessels were designed for the defence of Russia's shallow Black Sea coasts. With a limited draught of just thirteen feet, these vessels were nonetheless heavily armed and armoured. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the naval historian Stephen Mclaughlin.
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Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description, often directltly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century. This episode, the first of four, looks at Monitors, a vessel type named after the original ship Monitor, built by the Union Navy in 1861 during the American Civil War. She led to an entire class of vessels all of which shared her curious design: an ironclad warship designed to float only just above the surface, with a single turret, to present as small a target as possible. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Andrew Choong Han Lin, a curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London.
Subsequent episodes will look at circular ships, cigar ships and the unique Cleopatra, an iron vessel designed and constructed for the sole purpose of bringing an ancient Egyptian obelisk to London from Alexandria.
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This is the second episode dedicated to that maritime masterpiece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The first episode is a fabulous new reading of the poem with a specially-commissioned composition and soundscape designed to enthral the listener with the poem's weird, ethereal, supernatural glory.
This episode explores the text by crossing the boundaries between history and science, land and sea, past and present. Dr Sam Willis speaks with John Spicer, Professor of Marine Zoology at the School of Biological & Marine Sciences, at the University of Plymouth. John argues hat the poem could teach us a lesson or two about the way we treat our environment today.
In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a sailor kills an albatross, which sets off a chain of events that fundamentally alter the sailor's world. Similarly, today we live in a world in which humankind is increasingly out of kilter withe natural world. The world is changing; it is transitioning. We are grieving for our climate. In particular there are numerous ways in which we have irrevocably altered the marine environment. The ocean's temperature is increasing and it is becoming more acidic. Through our activities that have impacted biodiversity we have set in motion what some scientists consider the greatest extinction of life in its history. Coleridge would not recognise the world in which we live after successive and relentless generations of technical and industrial revolutions, and yet his poem is oddly prophetic.
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This is the first of two episodes dedicated to that magical piece of prose so beloved by all with an interest in the sea – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first published in 1798. Many know of it, some have read it but few people have actually heard it in full, and listening to this masterpiece is the best way of appreciating its full maritime and supernatural glory.
This episode therefore presents The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in full. It is also a traditionally masculine poem, written by a man and usually read or performed by a man, usually an English man – so to help appreciate this story through a different lens, the story is read today by the wonderfully talented Elaine Kingston – who you are soon to discover, is a Scottish Woman. To bring the story to life we have also commissioned the multi-talented composer Jamie Whyte to create an original work that combines music and sound effects. The combination of Elaine's reading and Jamie's soundscape creates a dramatic new interpretation of this poem.
Coleridge’s story begins at a wedding party where a man is accosted by a grizzly old sailor, beady of eye, who begins to unravel his own history. We hear how he sailed from his home harbour south, and is trapped in ice at the South Pole. They manage to break free and the sailors credit their salvation to an albatross; but the mariner then shoots the bird with a crossbow. Although, initially, it seems like a good move for these superstitious folk, things start to go horribly wrong and the murderer of the albatross is blamed. The sailor is forced to hang the carcass round his neck and over time becomes more appreciative of the natural world - which redeems him.
The text is dramatic and haunting and Coleridge explores numerous themes and sub-themes. It defies any single interpretation but you will certainly hear themes of retribution, punishment, guilt, curse and fear.
Part 2 of this episode features an interview with Professor John Spicer, Professor of Marine Zoology at the School of Biological & Marine Sciences at the University of Plymouth, who believes that the poem could teach us a lesson or two about the way we treat our environment today.
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Scholars debate the period when pirates actually ruled the waves - and the answer certainly depends on the location in question - but by general consensus it was all over by 1730 and it had begun some 80 years earlier, around 1650. The Golden Age of Piracy had been born in this crucial period when European maritime powers were flexing their muscles and starting to project naval power beyond the horizon. As empires grew so did the quantity and quality of trade and the seas became littered with merchantmen carrying indescribable wealth across the oceans. And yet this was a time when the maritime geographies of the new empires was imperfectly known, and when navigation was still as much guesswork as it was a science - this was the period immediately before the means to calculate longitude accurately had been discovered. The result was that ships carried this trade at predictable times of year, on predictable routes, in locations that were impossible to police adequately. Although European naval powers did create naval bases in the tropics, it was a slow process and one with many pitfalls. At the same time thousands of young men were learning how to sail and how to fight in a near endless series of maritime wars. The result? A period of piracy so intense and colourful that it still lives on today in myth, legend, and increasingly detailed and accurate histories. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with pirate historian Dr Jamie Goodall.
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Our Maritime Disasters mini series continues with the shocking, and scarcely believable tale, of HMS Guardian. In 1789 this 44-gun 2-decked ship of the Royal Navy was sent to the British colony in Australia under the guidance of the brilliant Captain Edward Riou. She was chock-full of convicts, livestock and provisions for the colony when she left England, and then re-stocked with provisions when the half-way point was safely reached at the Cape of Good Hope. Water was always a problem on such long journeys and any captain took advantage of a source of fresh water whenever it was discovered. Icebergs were such a source of fresh water, but approaching them was always fraught with danger, especially in the Atlantic hundreds of miles off the coast of South Africa when the weather could suddenly change....what happened next has been described as 'almost without parallel' in all of maritime history.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Margaret Schotte, professor of Early Modern History in York's Department of History whose book Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 investigates how early modern sailors developed mathematical and technical expertise in the age of exploration and the print revolution - expertise that helped people like Edward Riou cope if it just so happened that their ship was horrendously damaged by an iceberg miles from home....
This episode includes a rendition of the song "The Forecastle Sailor, Or The Guardian Frigate" by the historian Seb Falk, most likely the first ever recording of the song.
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Our maritime disasters series continues with the anniversary of the first successful underwater trials in 1863 of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley.
Shortly after the Hunley’s first trials in late July 1863 she sank during another test run, killing five of her eight crew. She was raised but then sank again in October killing all eight of her crew including Horace Hunley, the vessel’s designer, before sinking for the last time in 1864, again killing all of her crew.
The story of the Hunley is remarkable - it’s one of those stories that you can return to time and again. The early submarine pioneers were exploring an environment as dangerous as the early space pioneers and did so willingly.
Why did these people willingly get inside an iron tube that was built to operate underwater at a time when the science of operating vessels underwater was not properly understood? Why did they continue to do so when the vessel repeatedly demonstrated it was dangerous?
To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Michael Scafuri, senior archaeologist at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston South Carolina, today the home of the Hunley, as she was raised from the depths in 2000 with all of her secrets perfectly preserved.
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We continue our mini series on maritime disasters with the third part of our episode on the wreck of the magnificent Italian passenger liner the Andrea Doria. Launched in 1953 as a means to rebuild Italy's reputation and status on the world stage after the Second World War she enjoyed a splendid career for just three years before she sank in 1956 after a horrific collision off the coast of Massachusetts.To find out more about the wreck of the vessel itself Dr Sam Willis spoke with the underwater explorer John Moyer who has has dived over 120 times on the Andrea Doria wreck, one of the most dangerous wrecks in the world.
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This episode continues our mini series on maritime disasters and our investigation into the wreck, in the summer of 1956, of the Italian passenger liner, Andrea Doria. This episode includes eyewitness accounts from Linda Hardberger and Mike Stoller. Linda is now 80 and lives in San Antonio Texas – she has been a teacher, librarian, museum curator and is a mother and in spite of her terrible experience on the Andrea Doria has been boating for 40 years. Mike Stoller is now 89, lives in California and is one half of the songwriting team Lieber and Stoller – who wrote, among many other hits, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and Stand by Me. The Andrea Doria was built in the 1950s, born from Italy’s bruised pride after the Second World War, and seen as a way to put Italy back on the map as a major player in the world of transatlantic travel. She became a hugely important ship for the Italian nation, a true icon of Italian culture and history. Launched in 1953 to great fanfare and fitted with the most exquisite Italian art, she enjoyed a successful career – though cut far too short by the events of July 1956.
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We continue our mini series on maritime disasters with the extraordinary tale of the Andrea Doria, a magnificent Italian passenger liner lost off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956 when she was rammed by another liner. The Andrea Doria was built in the 1950s, born from Italy’s bruised pride after the Second World War, and seen as a way to put Italy back on the map as a major player in the world of transatlantic travel. She became a hugely important ship for the Italian nation, a true icon of Italian culture and history. Launched in 1953 to great fanfare and fitted with the most exquisite Italian art, she enjoyed a successful career – though cut far too short by the events of July 1956. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Pierette Simpson who, as a child, witnessed those terrible events and has since dedicated her life to sharing the story of the Andrea Doria so that it is never forgotten. Pierette is the author of Alive on the Andrea Doria!: The Greatest Sea Rescue in History and the award-winning docufilm Andrea Doria: Are the Passengers Saved?
This episode is Part 1 of 3. Part 2 will include two more eyewitness accounts including an interview with Mike Stoller of the legendary songwriting team Lieber & Stoller who wrote hits for Elvis and Ben E. King. Part 3 will be focussed on the wreck itself and includes an interview with marine explorer John Moyer.
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In this episode we head much further back in time than we have ever dared before for an Iconic Ship…to find out about Henry V’s ship Grace Dieu, launched in 1418. And what a ship she was...
Henry only reigned for ten years but in those years he worked harder than any of his predecessors to build a navy designed to destroy French seapower. His ships were not just barges designed for transporting armies to France, but great warships built for prestige and power. It is during Henry V’s time as king that one of the finest of all medieval warships, Grace Dieu, was constructed. Contemporary descriptions marvelled at its size, and modern historians were cynical until her wreck in the River Hamble near Southampton was surveyed. These investigations proved that her mainmast was 200ft tall: she was nearly three times larger than Henry VIII’s Mary Rose which was built nearly a century later, and no warship that rivalled her for size was built for another 200 years.
To find out more about this remarkable feat of construction and the vision to attempt something apparently impossible, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Susan Rose, a legend in the world of medieval maritime and naval history.
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Our 'Iconic Ships' series continues with the magnificent SS United States, published on the 70th anniversary of her maiden voyage. Launched in June 1951 she was the last remaining American superliner from the golden age of transatlantic travel and was built specifically to break the transatlantic speed record. On her maiden voyage she made the transatlantic run in just three and a half days. To this day, she still holds the trans-Atlantic speed record: no other passenger ship has crossed the Atlantic faster in either direction. Not only built for speed, her design was also innovative for a number of different reasons, all of which are crucial in the history of ship design, and in particular in the history of safety in passenger ships, at a time when America was wrestling with Russia on the world stage. With lessons having been learned from the Second World War, in this period passenger ships were designed in a way that made them easily convertible into troopships. Her designer William Francis Gibbs famously summed up his achievement: 'You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her.' The SS United States has remarkably survived the years and today sits at Pier 82 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia while money is raised and plans set in place to preserve her for future generations. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Susan Gibbs, granddaughter of William Frances Gibbs, the ship's visionary designer and President of the SS United States Conservancy, the body dedicated to her preservation.
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On 29 May 1914, the magnificent passenger liner Empress of Ireland sank in the St Lawrence River with the loss of over a thousand people. A full two years after the Titanic disaster, this was a vessel with adequate lifeboats and watertight compartments, and yet she foundered in just fourteen minutes after a collision with a Norwegian collier - ss Storstad - which punched an enormous hole into her side allowing 60,000 gallons of water in. More passengers died in this tragedy than eitherTitanic or Lusitania, both of which have featured in our Maritime Disasters series. She was one of the first two passenger liners built especially for the Canadian Pacific Line’s growing emigrant trade from Liverpool to Canada, her sister ship being the Empress of Britain and they provided a weekly service for emigrants, starting in the Spring of 1906. With so many years of service behind her the Empress of Ireland has an important position in the history of thousands of Canadians today. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dan Conlin, curator at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Our Great Sea Fights series continues on the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Solebay, fought between the Dutch and the allied English and French off the eat coast of England, and one of the hardest-fought battles of the Age of Sail. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr David Davies, historian and author of the Journals of Matthew Quinton, a series of historical novels set in the seventeenth century navy.
This was a fascinating and important period of naval history when so much was still being learned about how to actually fight at sea in broadside-armed ships, and in particular in enormous fleets: in this battle the Dutch had 75 ships and over 20,000 men and they took on a combined fleet of 93 ships and over 34000 men – that’s 108 MORE ships than fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It is also an unusual example of the English actually co-operating – or at least trying to – with the French.
The battle was fought during the third Anglo-Dutch war, a prolonged period of intense commercial rivalry between European powers which had begun some twenty years before hand with the First Anglo-Dutch war in 1652. By 1672 both sides had landed mighty blows but the Dutch and English engines of war that were producing ships and keeping them at sea was now working as well as it ever had, and to complicate matters the French now had a formidable fleet of their own.
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On 24 May 1945 the Supreme Commander of the German Navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz recorded the following words in his War Diary:
‘Wolf Pack operations against convoys in the North Atlantic, the main theatre of operations and at the same time the theatre in which air cover was strongest, were no longer possible. They could only be resumed if we succeeded in radically increasing the fighting power of the U-boats. That was the logical conclusion to which I came and I accordingly withdrew the boats from the North Atlantic. We had lost the Battle of the Atlantic.’
In this episode Dr Sam Willis speaks with U-boat historian Lawrence Paterson to find out how the U-boat shaped the global nature of the Second World War. The U-boat war was not confined to the Atlantic but fought in the Baltic, Mediterranean and in every other sea save for the Southern Ocean. It was a truly global conflict. Overstretched and undersupplied, it was this global nature of the U-boat role that ultimately doomed the campaign from the very start. Lawrence helps reset the mythology of the Battle of the Atlantic within the wider context of the war itself, analysing the chaotic German military and industrial mismanagement that occurred in all the theatres and hamstrung brilliant commanders and crews.
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Folklore, myths and legends relating to the sea have existed for as long as humans have been travelling by sea. The alien nature of the marine environment, the almost inconceivable scale of the oceans, the power of the sea, and the extraordinary richness in the ocean’s biodiversity has led to the creation and development of the most fabulous legends.
And one of the most important of those legends concerns women and the sea – women in the form of mermaids and sirens – both subtly different creatures: the mermaid having the torso of a woman and the tail of fish; a siren being a creature that first appears in Greek mythology, who lured sailors to shipwreck and death with their enchanting voices. Their appearance was different and although written descriptions are few and far between, they are depicted in art as birds flying over the sea and ships, but with the heads of women.
Such a rich story is culturally rather complicated. To find out more Eirwen Abborley-Watton spoke with Cecilia Rose a PhD Student at the university of Exeter whose work focuses on mermaids and sirens as figures of indeterminate gender in the art and poetry of the late Victorian Era and how these figures may still be used as symbols for transgender and non-binary communities today.
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The second of a new mini-series on ship models. Dr Sam Willis explores the extraordinary model of the SS Great Eastern held in the collections of the National Maritime Museum in London.
The Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was one of the most remarkable ships ever built.
She was the largest ship ever built – by an enormous margin.
measuring 692 feet(211m) and 17,274 tons gross she was almost twice as long as any ship that had ever been built.
Her registered tonnage was six times more than any ship ever built and in an age of the most extraordinarily rapid technological development her size was not actually surpassed until the launching of the Oceanic of 701 feet (214m) in 1899 and in tonnage by the Celtic of 21,035 tons gross in 1901.
She was the largest passenger ship ever built and could carry 4,000 passengers - seven times more than ever before. A figure not surpassed until 1913 by the German ship SS Imperator.
She was the first ships to carry three different methods of propulsion – screw, paddle and sail.
She was a pioneer in the laying of subsea telegraphic cables – laying the first successful Trans-Atlantic cable to USA.
For the video check out the Mariner's Mirror YOUTUBE channel!
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We explore the astonishing intertwined tales of both Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk, two men marooned on a desert island, one in fiction, one in real life.
Robinson Crusoe was a novel published in 1719 by Daniel Defoe – that supposedly came from the pen of Crusoe himself – and told the story of how he was marooned and spent 28 years on a deserted island in the Caribbean. The book was enormously successful and is widely considered to be the beginning of realistic fiction as a genre – Crusoe’s tale was entirely plausible at a time when ships were regularly sailing from the northern hemisphere to the tropics; when ships were regularly getting wrecked; when pirates were regularly attacking them; when there was still so much to discover about the world’s geography; when the idea of a sailor finding himself accidentally or deliberately abandoned on a desert island made perfect sense.
Crusoe’s story was based on a true story – the story of one Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish mariner who found himself castaway on a remote Pacific island for four years and four months a decade before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk is a fascinating character – and his history is absorbing, regardless of the fact that he found himself marooned. He was involved in buccaneering and privateering, he rounded the horn and sailed in the pacific where he attacked Spanish ships and towns – and it was here, on an island known as Mas al Tierra, 400 miles off the coast of Chile, that Selkirk chose to be marooned.
To find out more about these two brilliant stories, the way that Defoe intertwined them, and the way that we now believe they are intertwined, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Professor Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College. In 2010 Lambert joined a German expedition to Mas al Tierra – now known as Robinson Crusoe Island, The expedition focused on the relationship between the fictional character of Crusoe, the real character of Selkirk, and the development of British global strategy that culminated in the arrival of Commodore George Anson’s naval expedition in 1741.
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Those of you who have spent any time at sea will know how the unique conditions of being afloat can fundamentally change the way that you think and how you experience the world. It will come as no surprise that there have been occasions in history when humans have been pushed to their absolute limits and their minds have cracked; when a firm grasp on reality has catastrophically failed in a sudden a violent shock, or when doubts and anxiety have crept in like water through a tiny hole the hull of ship, unnoticeable until its weight has become too heavy to ignore and impossible to fix.
Dr Sam Willis explores the troubling history of madness at sea, a fascinating topic that allows us to range freely across the oceans of history, exploring a variety of stories that highlight different aspects of how the maritime environment has affected the mental health of sailors in the past. It's a story of loneliness, hallucinations, psychopaths, endurance and the limits of the human mind. It takes us to the adventures of ancient mythical seafarers, to the age of exploration and global maritime empires, to world wars fought at sea, to the challenges of modern racing and the dangerous pleasures of sailing for fun...
Sam speaks with the author and sailor Nic Compton whose book 'Off the Deep End' explores this theme as never before. Do NOT listen to this episode on your own on a boat, and be certain that safety at sea starts - and ends - in the mind.
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The San Juan was a basque whaling ship that sank in Labrador in 1565, and was rediscovered in 1978.
In the autumn of 1565 several Basque whaling ships were anchored in a remote bay of Labrador, opposite the island of Newfoundland. It was the end of the whaling season, and hundreds of sailors were hurrying up to complete their ships’ cargo of oil barrels. Some were flensing the blubber off the dead whales, some working in the rendering ovens while others were taking the oil barrels on board. All that frantic industrial activity was happening in the wilderness, decades before any Europeans would establish the first colonies of the country that we now call Canada.
In October a fierce storm hit that unprotected, barren coast. Under the strain of the hurricane-force wind, the anchor cables of one of the ships, the 200-tonne San Juan, gave in. To the despair of her crew members, the ship went adrift and ran aground on the small island that closed the bay. We can imagine the titanic efforts the crew members undertook in order to save the ships; nevertheless, the San Juan started sinking very near the shore, at about 10 m depth. The captain ordered to save as many victuals as possible and as much of the ship’s gear, and the crew members managed to save their belongings before the ship sank with nearly one thousand oil barrels on board.
The ship and its associated artefacts were rediscovered in 1978 and subsequently excavated, and have transformed what we know about seafaring in general and of course whaling in particular in that hugely important era where European seafarers were just beginning to stretch their reach across the Atlantic. The San Juan is now being recreated by hand and with the utmost care and attention to historical accuracy in the northern Spanish port of Pasaia To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Saul Hoffmann, an Italian shipwright who has worked on the ship, and Cindy Gibbons, the Cultural Resource Management Advisor of the Western Newfoundland and Labrador Field Unit, and a qualified witness of the impact in Red Bay of the discovery of the San Juan,
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One of the most fascinating periods in all of maritime history is the Viking Age. From around 700 CE and for the next 700 years, Vikings spread out from Scandinavia, reshaped Europe and influenced lands far beyond. It's a story of ingenious maritime engineering, astonishing navigation, fierce battles, culture clashes, trade, language and the rise and fall of a complex society. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Tore Ske, one of Norway’s most acclaimed historians. Tore has written several prize-winning and bestselling works of medieval history that challenge a traditional nation-oriented historical narrative. His latest book - The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire is a bestseller in Norway, won the prestigious Sverre Steen award and is the first of Tore’s books to be translated into English. Tore is a man with a gift for bringing to life the backstabbing, plotting, bribery and warfare of this period and for helping you think about the whole Viking era in a new way.
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In one of the most remarkable maritime history stories of recent years, a team of scientists and explorers are getting closer than ever before to finding the Endurance, the ship that Ernest Shackleton took on his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. An expedition is currently in the Weddell Sea, less than two miles from the last known position of the Endurance and have released an underwater vehicle to scan the sea bed. To find out more, Dr Sam Willis interviewed David Mearns, a professional shipwreck hunter famed for discovering HMS Hood, about the remarkable story that led to Shackleton's ship being crushed by the ice; the challenges faced in identifying its location; and what it would mean if the ship is finally found.
The story of the Endurance is one of the most remarkable in the history of exploration. Shackleton and his 27 men became ice bound on the Endurance in February 1915, having spotted land just days before. Eight months later, having survived the antarctic winter, the ship was crushed and sank. The men camped on the ice and drifted northwards for six months before taking to the sea in the Endurance's small boats as the ice melted. In five days of sailing in open boats, they made it to Elephant Island and set up camp. Ten days later Shackleton and five others set sail once again in one of the small open boats to undertake an 800-mile journey to South Georgia. Two weeks later, having survived the worst weather the south Atlantic could throw at them, they arrived in South Georgia. Three of them then crossed an uncharted mountain range in a 36-hour hike to reach the settlement of Stromness, where they began to plan the rescue of the three members of the crew left around the coast on South Georgia, and the 21 left behind on Elephant Island. It took three separate attempts on three separate vessels to reach the camp on Elephant Island but eventually they were rescued, three months after Shackleton had left. Not a single man died.
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The naval battle of Guadalcanal was one of the most intense and dramatic naval battles of the war, and with with far-reaching strategic consequences. It is the winter of 1942, a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour which brought America into the war. Guadalcanal is the largest of the Solomons Islands, found to the north west of Australia.
In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbour the Japanese had been immensely successful; they had driven the Americans out of the Philippines, the British out of Malaya, the Dutch out of the East Indies. The Japanese had then began to expand westwards in an attempt to build a defensive ring around their conquests and threaten the lines of communication from the United States to Australia and new Zealand. They reached Guadalcanal in May 1942 and invaded.
Three months later, the Americans responded with an invasion fo their own, their first amphibious landing of the war and, crucially, captured the airfield newly constructed by the Japanese. The following six months was spent in a desperate battle trying to hold it against relentless waves of Japanese attacks. The battle reached a crisis point in November with a concerted effort from the Japanese to bombard the airfield from the sea and a corresponding American naval effort to drive the Japanese ships away. They were successful and by February of 1943 the Japanese had evacuated the island, an immensely challenging operation, brilliantly executed.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with the historian Jeffrey Cox.
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This week we are exploring the history of how to become a naval officer, with particular focus on the American experience and the foundation of the Naval War College in Rhode Island. Established in 1884 the U.S. Naval War College offered professional study for naval officers and now offers advanced courses of professional study for all services, U.S. government agencies and departments, and international navies.
In our modern world media interest on naval power tends to be directed towards materiel rather than personnel: recent news stories, for example, have focussed on the USS Nevada, armed with no fewer than 20 Trident II strategic nuclear missiles recently surfacing at the American naval base in Guam in the Pacific – a clear demonstration of strength or in the official wording - of ‘readiness and commitment’ - towards China and North Korea. We do not hear, however, about the personnel wielding this naval power. No news stories ran a feature saying that a particularly successful or maverick or reliable naval officer had been sent to Guam; all we hear about is the submarine.
This is notably different to the way that naval power appears in history, as it is dominated by personalities, whether it is the American Chester Nimitz in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, one of his great rivals the Japanese Chuichi Nagumo, the British Beatty and Jellicoe, in the First World War, Horatio Nelson, John Paul Jones, Francis Drake, …and so on.
So how does the US Navy try to guarantee the competence of the men who lead their fleet now - and how did they do it in the past? To help me find out more I spoke with Dr Evan Wilson, Assistant Professor in the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.
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Dr Sam Willis speaks with Don Lynch, a historian who has spoken to more survivors of the Titanic than anyone else alive and was the official historian for James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic. Sam and Don discuss a number of issues including the concept of ‘women and children first’ and how that actually worked in practice. They also discuss unresolved historical issues relating to the history of the Titanic. This episode is made to go alongside a remarkable new 3D model of the Titanic that has been built using the original plans for the ship and allows us to explore the Titanic in great depth and with great accuracy. The video can be found on the Mariner's Mirror Podcast YouTube Channel.
Laid down in March 1909 she was launched a little over two years later and completed just under a year after that, on 2 April 1912. Her size was immense: at 882 feet 9 inches long, she was the largest moveable man made object on earth. This was a major engineering challenge and it revolutionised shipbuilding. No one had ever tried to build a ship the size of the Titanic or her sister ships Olympic and Britannic, ever before.
It took an entire year to put the Titanic’s frames in place. She was built with 2000 hull plates mostly 6ft wide and 30ft long, weighing up to three tons. The hull was held together with over three million iron and steel rivets.
The radio room with the latest Marconi radio equipment was located on the boat deck, as close to the top of the ship as possible to keep the feed line to the antennae short. The transmitter was the most powerful at sea able to contact either New York or London from the centre of the Atlantic.
The First Class accommodation was high up in the ship away from the noise of the machinery. The suites were lavishly decorated in styles of different historical periods. The largest had their own private section of deck.
The Third Class accommodation was split between either end of the ship in the lower decks. Single men were in the bow and single women and families were in the stern where they were subjected to the noise and vibrations of the engine and propellers.
The 20 lifeboats were carried on the uppermost deck but 32 more, featured in the original design were never put in place, to create space for the wealthy to exercise. This meant that the Titanic only had sufficient lifeboats for 33% of her passengers.
At 11.40 on 15 April 1912, the Titanic was 370 miles south of Newfoundland, in 12,500 feet of water – nearly two and a half miles, travelling just under her top speed of just under ten metres per second, when an iceberg was spotted by the lookout.
He telephoned the bridge with the words ‘Iceberg right ahead’. It was 100 ft tall, the size of an eight-story building, and with no light to reflect it, the iceberg appeared almost black. The order was given hard to starboard, to turn the ship to port but she struck on the starboard side, tearing as many as six different holes in her hull, all along the lines of her hull plates, suggesting that the rivets snapped off.
Water poured in at seven tons per second, fifteen times faster than it could be pumped out. The hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments but they did not extend all the way up to the top of the ship, so the water flooded into each one at a time, as the bow began to sink. Within 45 minutes, 1500 tons of water were in the front section of the ship, and she snapped in half. Each section hit the seabed with such force that it created an enormous debris field, the stern burying itself fifteen metres below the sea bed. 1534 lost their lives.
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We explore the extraordinary story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941.
To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with Mark Stille, a retired commander in the US Navy, who studied at the Naval War College and has recently finished a 40-year career working in the intelligence community, with tours on the faculty at the Naval War College, the Joint Staff and US naval ships; he is also the author of numerous works focussing on naval history.
This episode is designed to sit alongside the most fabulous 3D animation exploring the Shokaku - one of the Japanese carriers involved in the attack. The full video can be seen on the Mariner’s Mirror podcasts’s Youtube and Facebook pages with shorter clips on Twitter and Instagram.
Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, launched by the Japanese against the American naval base in Hawaii, before the formal declaration of war between the two nations. The Japanese goal was nothing less than to destroy the American pacific fleet. From six aircraft carriers, The Japanese launched hundreds of aircraft in two waves. Less than two hours later the Japanese had crippled or destroyed nearly 20 American ships and more than 300 airplanes. Dry docks and airfields were also destroyed. 2,403 sailors, soldiers and civilians were killed.
Importantly, however, the Japanese actually failed in their goal to cripple the Pacific Fleet. By the 1940s, battleships were no longer the most important vessel in the navy as they had been in the previous war: Aircraft carriers and seaborne airpower had now changed that nature of seapower and all of the American Pacific Fleet’s carriers were away from the base on December 7 and escaped destruction.
Moreover, for the the first time in years of discussion and debate about America entering the war, popular opinion now dramatically swung towards joining the fight. The following day America declared war on Japan, and three days later, on Germany.
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In this episode we hear about Thermopylae, one of the most magnificent clipper-ships ever built, and some claim the finest of them all. In 1879, before her second wool voyage from Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald eulogised: 'The fastest and handsomest ship in the world is now lying at the Circular Quay loading for London, and those who take pleasure in seeing a rare specimen of naval architecture should avail themselves of the opportunity of doing so. Of course, we allude to the Thermopylæ, the celebrated Aberdeen clipper. [The] Thermopylæ has all the appearance of a yacht, and yet she carries a good cargo, is a beautiful sea boat, and stands up to her canvas well.'
Built in Aberdeen and commissioned in 1868, but long over-shadowed in public recognition by her rival, Cutty Sark (a ship built specifically to out-pace her in the China tea trade but only once succeeded in so doing), Thermopylæ lives on as arguably the finest all-round clipper of them all.
Clipper ships like Thermopylae were astonishing to behold, and were the culmination of centuries of refinements in sailing technology that led to some of the most beautiful and fastest merchant ships ever built. They revolutionised global trade tearing around the seas carrying tea, wool, luxury goods, and of course people as this era of migration changed the populations and economies of the world forever. Their heyday was short lived, however, as increasingly efficient steam engines and railways changed the way that goods were transported – all over again.
To find out more, Dr Sam Willis speaks with Captain Peter King. Peter recently retired from the merchant shipping industry after over 62 years of continuous service in a wide range of maritime disciplines. In the 1980s, while serving as Managing Director of one of the Christian Salvesen group companies in Aberdeen, he developed an interest in the George Thompson Jnr’s Aberdeen-based shipping enterprise leading to his researching and publishing the first definitive history of Thermopylæ.
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In this our fourth episode dedicated to the maritime history of Wales, Eirwen Abberley Watton finds out about the work of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales who research and record Wales’ history from the tip of Snowdon to the depths of the Welsh coastline. Today we discuss their collaboration with the Lloyds Register Foundation in their hunt for Welsh shipwrecks.
There are many processes involved in the discovery and collection of maritime history, which has been revolutionised thanks to the advancement of technology and the unending curiosity of the Welsh public – many old wrecks are still appearing due to constantly changing tides, and being discovered by surprised dog walkers.
Lloyd’s Register’s records are crucial in filling in the gaps when unearthing a ship’s story and matching new finds to existing knowledge.
Eirwen speaks with Dr Julian Whitewright, the Senior Maritime Investigator at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. Julian is responsible for overseeing the maritime archaeological parts of the National Monuments Record within Wales, as well as advising on marine planning for offshore development. Julian joined the Royal Commission in June 2021 having previously worked in the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton. His archaeological interests cover all boats and ships from the earliest remains to the 20th century but he has a particular love of small craft and is a keen sailor and rower. He lives in Pembrokeshire, a short distance from the sea.
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In this our third episode on the maritime history of Wales we find out about the mysterious 'Bronze Bell' wreck, an early eighteenth-century wreck c.1700, discovered off the coast of Tal-y-Bont, Cerdigion, in 1978. The wreck is very distinctive due to the 65 tonnes of Carrera marble and heavy armaments found on board, as well as the bronze bell for which it was named. The wreck has been investigated as part of the Welsh Climate Change and Coastal Heritage project: 'CHERISH'.
To find out more Eirwen Abberley-Watton spoke with Dr Julian Whitewright and Alison James. Julian is the Senior Maritime Investigator at the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. Julian is responsible for overseeing the maritime archaeological parts of the National Monuments Record within Wales, as well as advising on marine planning for offshore development. He works closely with colleagues from CHERISH, and his archaeological interests cover all boats and ships from the earliest remains to the 20th century. Alison is a Director and Project Manager at MSDS Marine with extensive experience in the management of historic shipwreck sites, volunteer involvement, community engagement and education initiatives. This summer she has been managing work on the Bronze Bell wreck on behalf of MSDS Marine for a project funded by CHERISH, including a recent dive on the site.
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In this, our second episode on the maritime history of Wales, Eirwen Abberley Watton speaks with Dr Toby Jones about a medieval ship that was discovered in the city of Newport in 2002, unearthed by chance during the construction of the Riverfront Arts Centre. The find provoked a huge response from the archaeological and local community who campaigned for funding so that it could be fully excavated. The ship turned out to be an exceptionally rare rind - a clinker built ship from the 15th century whose hull has been beautifully preserved in the mud of the RIver Usk along with several hundred objects including seeds, shoes, cork and coins, allowing historians and archaeologists to recreate the Atlantic world of the Newport Ship. To find out more Eirwen speaks with Dr. Toby Jones, a nautical archaeologist and the curator of the Newport Medieval Ship. Toby has worked on several other projects around the world, including the Red River Wreck in Oklahoma, the Aber Wrac’h I wreck in Brittany and the Mica shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico. He has also participated in shipwreck surveys along the southern coast of Cyprus and in the Algarve in Portugal.
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This is the first episode of our new series about the maritime history of Wales. Our Welsh presenter Eirwen Abberley Watton finds out about the Porth Felen anchor-stock, a unique find for British waters for its age: the Porth Felen anchor stock is believed to be Roman.
It was found in the Bardsey Sound off the coast of the Llyn peninsula in the north of Wales in 1974, a very dangerous (but beautiful) stretch of coast. An anchor-stock is a beam of wood or iron placed at the upper end of the shank of an anchor - transversely to the plane of the arms - and it serves to keep the anchor from lying flat on the seabed.
To find out more Eirwen speaks with Jake Davies, a Welsh based diver and marine biologist with a passion for sharing the underwater marine environment off the Welsh coast. As a diver he's not just interested in marine life but the history and stories that lie beneath the welsh coast. Jake has recently led a series of dives looking for extra evidence relating to the anchor stock
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In this episode Dr Sam Willis explores the troubling history of safety at sea. In the eighteenth century seafaring was a very dangerous business indeed: not only were navigation and safety systems limited but unscrupulous owners of merchant ships would deliberately send ships to sea over-laden, but with enormous insurance raised on the vessel. These became known as ‘Coffin Ships’. To make matters worse, sailors who had signed up for a voyage but then refused to sail in such vessels could be sent to prison. Appalled by such public flouting of responsibility one man - Samuel Plimsoll - took it upon himself to reform safety at sea, taking on the entire maritime establishment. Plimsoll eventually succeeded, but only after numerous knock-backs from politicians in the grip of maritime merchant interest. His solution to the problem, the ‘Plimsoll Line’ - being a safe load-line marked on the hull of a ship - changed seafaring forever and also marked a significant moment in popular democracy when the will of the British public – in this case for the protection of their mariners – was heard. To find out more, Sam speaks with Nicolette Jones, author of the multiple-award winning book ‘The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea.’
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Today we are merging this month's theme on airpower with one of our running series – on iconic ships - in which we ask the curator of an existing historic ship to make the case for their ship being iconic or we ask a historian to make the case for a long-lost ship being iconic. Today we are certainly in the 'long-lost category' as the vessel in question - the carrier HMS Ark Royal - was torpedoed and sunk off Gibraltar in 13 November 1941.
HMS Ark Royal, launched in 1937, represented a breakthrough in the design of aircraft carriers and she went on to serve in crucial theatres at the beginning of World War Two that redefined the nature of air power at sea, being involved in U-Boat hunting, convoy protection, the key naval campaigns in Norway, Italy and Malta and the hunt of the German battleship Bismarck.
To find out more about this extraordinary ship Dr Sam Willis spoke with Matthew Willis, a writer of naval and aviation history. Matt has written numerous titles on the British Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War and interwar period, as well as a biography of 1940s test pilot Duncan Menzies, and runs the website NavalAirHistory.com.
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In this, the first of several episodes on the maritime history of airpower, Dr Sam Willis meets three Royal Naval flag officers to discuss the complexities and challenges of commanding and operating aircraft carriers. Sam's guests are Vice Admiral Jerry Kydd, the current Fleet Commander of the Royal Navy, who served as the very first commanding officer of the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014 and the largest and most powerful vessel ever constructed for the Royal Navy; Rear Admiral David Snelson, who served in the Royal Navy between 1969 to 2006 on both Ark Royal 4 and Ark Royal 5, and was the Commander Maritime
Forces and Task Group Commander for Royal Naval forces in the second Gulf War of 2003; and Rear Admiral Roy Clare who commanded HMS Invincible 25 years ago, seeing operations in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Arabian Sea and The Gulf, with Fleet Air Arm and Royal Air Force squadrons embarked. They discuss a commander's responsibilities with regard to aviation and airspace; the thorny issues of logistics, and how to manage fuel, food and spare parts; the formidable challenges of engineering both in terms of air engineering and weapons engineering, including radars, radios and satellite comms; the challenge of commanding people, of training and handing on skills; and the issues of Task Group command - how does a carrier fit into a Task Group? Does the captain of a carrier also act as the Commander of a task Group?
These remarkable insights from the recent (and sometimes very recent) past help us understand the development and use of carriers and airpower from its inception in the first quarter of the twentieth century until today.
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This week we are exploring the maritime history of the Second World War with Professor Evan Mawdsley. For many years Evan was Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow. His recent book ‘The War for the Sea: The Maritime History of World War 2’ has recently won the prestigious Anderson Medal, awarded each year by the Society for Nautical Research for an outstanding book on maritime history. Evan traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counterattack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea. Covering all the major actions in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as those in the narrow seas, this book interweaves for the first time the endeavours of the maritime forces of the British Empire, the United States, Germany, and Japan, as well as those of France, Italy, and Russia. In this episode Dr Sam Willis spoke with Evan to find out more about his exciting work which challenges our existing understanding of the war.
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This episode explores the fascinating history of RMS Mauretania, which was launched in 1906 and transformed shipbuilding and the expectations of passengers travelling on trans-Atlantic liners. After the launch of Mauretania, sea-travel and the maritime world was never the same again.
To find out more, Dr Sam Willis met with Max Wilson of the Lloyds Register Foundation to explore their archives. The Lloyds Register archives is the best place to go to explore the history of many ships, but particularly something as ground breaking as Mauretania because Lloyds were responsible for certifying the safety of the vessel – this means that there is a whole host of magnificent material to see there, letters, record books, ship plans, technical drawings - all of which reveal the ship and the achievements of her designers and builders in the most magnificent detail.
This episode is part of the 'Iconic Ships' series which features history's most iconic ships - including the Mary Rose, the Mayflower, HMS Hood, HMS Ark Royal, Titanic, USS Constitution, HMS Bellerophon (The Billy Ruffian), HMS Belfast, the Cutty Sark and the ss Great Britain, with many more to come! The video was filmed - so you can watch below to see some of the images we discuss.
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In this episode we explore the fascinating history of ships' figureheads. Why did shipbuilders begin to place carvings of humans and animals on the bows of their ships in the sixteenth century? And why did this practice stop 300 years later? Dr Sam Willis meets Rear Admiral David Pulvertaft, an expert on figureheads, to find our more about these remarkable carvings and to consider a number of examples that exist worldwide.
To go alongside this episode we have created an extraordinary video using artificial intelligence and digital artistry to bring the figureheads to life, showing the real people that inspired the carvers.
This has been a bit of a hit and miss process with a number of failures but we have had success with eleven – and they are fabulous. When the known examples of figureheads are considered as a whole it is immediately striking how diverse are the people depicted. Although the societies that made these figureheads were dominated by white men, the figureheads show a huge range of people – both men and women and from a huge variety of indigenous populations. One of the impacts of this is a powerful reminder of the colonial activities that many of these ships would have taken part in including the buying and selling of humans in the slave trade and the appropriation of vast tracts of land occupied by indigenous peoples.
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Dr Sam Willis meets with the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin to discuss the many challenges the Royal Navy faces exercising sea power in the modern world.
They discuss life on a modern warship; how the sea provides prosperity, security and stability; exercising seapower hand in hand with a Government's policies; G7 and NATO; 'Global Britain' and Britain's overseas territories; the Gulf of Guinea and the Ukraine; the Rule of law, Exclusive Economic Zones; the nuclear deterrent; the new technology of the new aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales; the challenges of providing manpower for the navy; drone technology and naval power; and the role of history and tradition in the Royal Navy.
To see a video of this interview check out the Mariner's Mirror Podcast's YouTube Channel.
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The underwater heritage around Malta is one of the richest collections of maritime archaeology in the world. The quality of preservation is outstanding as well as the number of sites, and yet they are inaccessible to so many of us. Not only do you need to be able to dive to see these sites, but for most of them you need to be able to dive very, very deep and that is only possible for a tiny fraction with the requisite skill, experience, knowledge, equipment, support...and lets not forget courage.
One man has decided that this is not acceptable. Professor Timmy Gambin from the University of Malta has realised his vision for making this deep underwater heritage accessible by creating a virtual underwater museum: 'The Virtual Museum – Underwater Malta' at www.underwatermalta.org This online platform created by an international team of divers, photographers, archaeologists and computer programmers, brings Malta's underwater cultural heritage to the surface and into the homes of the general public. Using 3D, virtual reality and other media, the aim of this website is to provide access to and share Malta’s unique underwater cultural heritage with all members of the public.
Dr Sam Willis and Timmy Gambin discuss a number of the sites that have been re-created online with extraordinary 3D photography including a Blenheim Bomber, a German Junkers 88, an X-Lighter; a collection of victorian guns, a German schnellboot and a Phoenician shipwreck.
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In this, the sixth episode of our Great Sea Fights series, we explore the remarkable events of 19 August 1812 when the powerful frigate USS Constitution fought and destroyed the British frigate HMS Guerriere in one of the greatest shocks to the Royal Navy in its history and one of the most ferocious single-ship actions ever fought. It is an extraordinary story: how did the United States get to a stage where not only could they build and maintain ships but compete with - and in the case of this battle triumph over - ships from the world’s largest navy with centuries of shipbuilding expertise and naval tradition.
This, the final episode in our investigation of Constitution vs Guerriere, explores the broader context of other single-ship actions in this war – for this war of 1812 was very unusual for the amount of single ship actions that took place – as opposed to fleet battles, and the historian Nicholas Kaizer helps us get to the bottom of that curious issue.
Nicholas Kaizer is a young Canadian scholar and teacher, who studies the cultural history of the Royal Navy during the War of 1812, in particular analysing Anglo-Canadian responses to single ship losses of that conflict. He is the author of Revenge in the Name of Honour: The Royal Navy’s Quest for Vengeance in the Single Ship Actions of the War of 1812.
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In this, the sixth episode of our Great Sea Fights series, we explore the remarkable events of 19 August 1812 when the powerful frigate USS Constitution fought and destroyed the British frigate HMS Guerriere in one of the greatest shocks to the Royal Navy in its history and one of the most ferocious single-ship actions ever fought.
It is an extraordinary story – how did the United States get to a stage where not only could they build and maintain ships but compete with – and in the case of this battle triumph over ships from the world’s largest navy with centuries of shipbuilding expertise and naval tradition. It’s a story that allows us to look into the complexities of what took to build, maintain, man, fit out, provision, and send fighting ships to sea for extended periods of time and how men could be recruited, fed, clothed, and kept healthy in unhealthy environments. And all of this within the broader context of how and why Britain decided to go to war with America even though Napoleon was as yet undefeated; and how how and why America chose to pick a fight with the most powerful nation on earth.
This episode - Part 3 - presents the work of the American historian William S. Dudley who has explored the birth of the US Navy in the late 1790s and its workings in the war of 1812 in his recent book Inside the US Navy of 1812-1815. Make sure you catch up on Part 1 -The Events and Part 2 - The Eyewitness Accounts.
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This the third episode in our special series on the maritime history of Scotland. Dr Sam Willis explores the remarkable career of Joannes Wyllie, a Fife man who made a fortune running guns from Glasgow to the confederate south during the American Civil War (1861-5) – revealing Scotland's hidden history of supporting slavery. He talks with John Messner a curator for transport and technology at Glasgow Museums. John was part of the project team for the Riverside Museum-Scotland’s Museum of Transport and Travel, winner of the European Museum of the Year 2013. In 2015 he co-curated a display about Glasgow’s role in the American Civil War which led to his work on the life of Joannes Wyllie.
To pay for the supplies it needed in the war, the Confederacy discovered a new use for its slave-grown and harvested cotton. Once seen as an instrument of foreign policy, it was now employed as a medium of exchange: cotton in exchange for military supplies. Union forces blockaded Confederate ports to prevent the export of cotton and the smuggling of war materiel into the Confederacy. The porous blockade successfully restricted Confederate access to weapons that the industrialized North could produce for itself though weapons, and other materiel were regularly smuggled into Confederate ports from transfer points in Mexico, the Bahamas, and Cuba - it was into this world that Joannes Wyllie sailed...
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In this, our second episode dedicated to the remarkable maritime history of Scotland, we explore the fabulous shipbuilding heritage of Leith, the port just to the north of Edinburgh. To unpick this story Dr Sam Willis speaks with Ron Neish. Ron is a remarkable man with many man stories to tell. Born and bred in Leith he served his apprenticeship as a Ship Loftsman, in the Henry Robb Shipyard in Leith. When it closed in 1984 he worked all over the world but always retaining his love for ships and the sea and never forgetting where he came from. Ron has worked on more than 40 new build vessels, ranging from a 58 foot aluminium fishing boat to 65,000 tonne aircraft carriers. In the past few years Ron has dedicated himself to writing a history of the ships built in Leith, a testimony to the skill of the men who built the ships and to the many men and women who may have sailed or served on them. Leith had begun building ships some 400 years before the great shipyards of the Clyde and these Leith vessels reached all corners of the globe. It’s a story of global economic change, industrial change, military endeavour, and disaster, wealth and poverty, innovation, and above all brutally hard work.
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In the latest episode of The Mariner's Mirror Podcast we begin three episodes dedicated to the maritime history of Scotland. In this episode I speak with Ben Saunders, a senior marine archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, based at their office in Edinburgh, and we talk about the hulks of two X-Craft on the shore at Aberlady Bay, East Lothian.
An innovative video has been created to accompany this podcast showing 3D photography of the wreck, overlaid with a 3D model of what the craft would have looked like.
The 3D survey is the result of an important project run by Wessex Archaeology. The Covid 19 pandemic put enormous strain on mental health and resulted in the cancellation of projects designed to support the wellbeing of isolated veterans. With funding from the National Lottery Community Fund, Wessex Archaeology ran a training and research project based around two WWII mini submarines in Aberlady Bay, East Lothian. The Aberlady X-Craft project, supported by Breaking Ground Heritage, provided hands-on survey training and produced a condition report of the wrecks; while also inspiring eight individually researched projects, five of which have been taken through to completion, and engaging over 30 veterans. The project is part of Wessex Archaeology’s longstanding work using heritage to support mental health and wellbeing.
Using 3d models of the wrecks completed through photogrammetric survey as inspiration, the project assisted the volunteers to develop their own research projects. These included the construction of scale models of an X-craft with training in artefact scanning/photogrammetry; research into the loss of HMS Glorious by a relative of one of the casualties, the use of X-Craft in the Far East, the medical conditions that affected submariners; and the assessment of the Fred Bown archive, one of the survivors from K17, a submarine lost in a training accident in 1917 (the Battle of May Island).
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In this episode Dr Sam Willis explores the Exeter Ship Canal which, with the exception of the Roman 'Fossdyke' in Lincolnshire, is the oldest manmade waterway in Britain. Canal building is usually associated with the canal mania which gripped Britain between 1790 and the 1820s as the early years of the industrial revolution both posed problems and created solutions for those wishing to travel and transport goods across Britain. But the Exeter ship canal is 230 years OLDER than that. It was built in various stages but the first section was built in 1563 - in the Tudor period when Elizabeth I was queen. Sam meets Todd Gray a historian of Devon to find out more. The episode was filmed with incredible new done footage that shows the navigation from the city centre to the heart of the Exe estuary as never before and can be seen on the Mariner's Mirror podcast YouTube channel and Facebook page.
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Today we have episode 7 of our Iconic Ships mini-series in which a curator of a historic ship makes a case for their ship being iconic, or a historian takes a ship from history but which sadly no longer survives and make a case for that ship being iconic.
HMS Bellerophon - known fondly as the Billy Ruffian - was a Third 74-gun ship of the line with one of the most extraordinary careers of any warship in the great age of sail. She was the first ship to engage the Revolutionary French at The Glorious First of June in 1794; she made up the fleet under Horatio Nelson, hunting the French and assisting in their destruction at the Battle of the Nile in 1798; and she fought under Nelson once more against the combined French and Spanish at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. As well as these larger events, she spent time on blockade duty off the coast of France, defended the West Indies whilst based on the Jamaica Station and kept an eye on the Spanish, in Cadiz. She transported Napoleon Bonaparte to Britain after his surrender in 1815, perhaps one of the events she is most renowned for, before ending up as a Prison Hulk on the Medway and then later in Plymouth.
The story is told today by naval historian Kate Jamieson who you can (and should) all follow on Twitter @Kejamieson_
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Today we have episode 5 of our Iconic Ships mini-series in which a curator of a historic ship makes a case for their ship being iconic, or a historian takes a ship from history but which sadly no longer survives and make a case for that ship being iconic. Today we have none other than HMS Belfast. Moored today just upstream of Tower Bridge, Belfast is a true icon of the London skyline and Thames riverscape.
A Royal Navy 'Town Class' Light Cruiser, Belfast was launched in 1938; she played a crucial role in blockading Germany at the start of the war, operating from Scapa Flow in Orkney; became part of a naval strike force base in Rosyth; took part in the Battle of the North Cape in 1943, in which the German battleship Scharnhorst was tracked down and sunk; took part in the operation against Germany's last surviving capital ship, the Tirpitz; and she is is one of only three remaining vessels from the bombardment fleet which supported the Normandy landings on DDay in June 1944. The case for Belfast being 'iconic' is made by Robert Rumble, lead curator of HMS Belfast at London's Imperial War Museum.
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Today we have for you Part 1 of our special episode on the Battle of Jutland because, on this day in history in 1916, the German and British battlefleets met in the largest naval battle of the First World War and one of the largest in history - involving 250 ships and 100,000 men. Parts 2 and 3 will follow in the coming days and will introduce you to a host of original eyewitness sources to the battle with episodes dedicated to the German view and the English. Today we have an outline of the strategic situation and events of the day, and there follows a discussion between Dr Sam Willis and Dr Stephan Huck. Stephan has enjoyed a fascinating career: after some military training he became interested in history – particularly military history - and since 2002 has been head of the excellent German Naval Museum in Wilhelmshaven. He knows an enormous amount about the battle and his perspective is both refreshing and fascinating.
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The final instalment of our 3-part special on the Battle of Tsushima explores the Japanese perspective of the battle including a consideration of the extraordinary growth of the Imperial Japanese Navy both before and after Tsushima. Dr Sam Willis speaks with Kunika Kakuta. Kunika is a final year PhD student in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and specialises in the relationship between politics and the development of seapower.
The Battle of Tsushima was the decisive naval action between Japan and Russia that effectively ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and one of the most important naval battles in history. It was the first in which radio played a major part; the action that demonstrated the power of the all-big-gun battleship, leading to HMS Dreadnought of 1906 and the Anglo-German dreadnought race; the first time a modern battleship was sunk by guns, and largely fought at previously unimaginable ranges of up to 12,000 metres (eight miles); the first, and last, decisive steel battleship action (the Russians lost eight battleships and more than 5,000 men while the Japanese lost only three torpedo boats and 116 men); the first modern defeat of a great European power by an Asian nation; and arguably the battle that made both the First World War more likely and another great fleet action less likely.
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Part 2 of our 3-part special on the Battle of Tsushima explores the Russian perspective of the battle with a reading of the diary of Captain Vladimir Semenoff. Semenoff was a well known Russian naval officer who served in several positions throughout the course of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. His presence during the siege of Port Arthur and later during the Baltic Fleet's long voyage to Tsushima gave him an unusually broad perspective on the war's progress, and he later wrote several titles relating to these experiences. Indeed, he was one of very few Russian officers who could write as an eyewitness to both major naval battles of the war. The account is read by an A-level history pupil at Clifton College, Nikita Gukassov.
The Battle of Tsushima was the decisive naval action between Japan and Russia that effectively ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and one of the most important naval battles in history. It was the first in which radio played a major part; the action that demonstrated the power of the all-big-gun battleship, leading to HMS Dreadnought of 1906 and the Anglo-German dreadnought race; the first time a modern battleship was sunk by guns, and largely fought at previously unimaginable ranges of up to 12,000 metres (eight miles); the first, and last, decisive steel battleship action (the Russians lost eight battleships and more than 5,000 men while the Japanese lost only three torpedo boats and 116 men); the first modern defeat of a great European power by an Asian nation; and arguably the battle that made both the First World War more likely and another great fleet action less likely.
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The Battle of Tsushima was the decisive naval action between Japan and Russia that effectively ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and one of the most important naval battles in history. It was the first in which radio played a major part; the action that demonstrated the power of the all-big-gun battleship, leading to HMS Dreadnought of 1906 and the Anglo-German dreadnought race; the first time a modern battleship was sunk by guns, and largely fought at previously unimaginable ranges of up to 12,000 metres (eight miles); the first, and last, decisive steel battleship action (the Russians lost eight battleships and more than 5,000 men while the Japanese lost only three torpedo boats and 116 men); the first modern defeat of a great European power by an Asian nation; and arguably the battle that made both the First World War more likely and another great fleet action less likely.
This episode, Part 1 of 3 explores the strategic situation running up to the battle and the events of the battle itself.
The script has been prepared with the help of Tim Concannon and Nicholas Blake.
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A very special episode in our new Iconic Ships series, published on the anniversary of the loss of HMS Hood in 1941. HMS Hood is without doubt one of the Royal Navy’s most famous ships. A battle-cruiser, laid down in 1916 and launched in 1918, she was the largest battle cruiser ever built and the largest warship of any type in the world for twenty years. She enjoyed a correspondingly high profile which rendered her loss, with all but three of her crew, particularly potent. On this day in May 1941, whilst hunting the mighty German battleship Bismark, Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded, and sank in just three minutes.
This week is special not only for the subject but also for the historian who makes the case for Hood being an Iconic Ship - it is a contribution made by the late Eric Grove who so sadly was recently lost to us.
Eric was one of the UK's most important naval historians; a magnificent personality, a brilliant teacher and a formidable scholar. His works include Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy Since 1945 (1987), The Future of Sea Power (1990), The Price of Disobedience (2000) and The Royal Navy Since 1815 (2005). He also edited a new edition of Julian Corbett's Some Principles of Maritime Strategy in 1988. He made contributions to many television programmes including BBC2's Timewatch series, Deep Wreck Mysteries, Channel 4's Hunt for the Hood and the Bismarck and the series The Battleships and the Airships.
Grove was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Member of Council of the Navy Records Society and most importantly of course, he was a Vice President of the Society for Nautical Research which publishes this podcast.
This recording was made just the day before his death and was the last piece of work he prepared for publication. HMS Hood was the subject that Eric was most passionate about and in this episode you can hear him explain why she was so important, in his own words, and in his own voice.
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Regular listeners will know that over the past few months we have been reading extracts from the logbook of the whaler Swan of Hull at the start of each episode (with the exception of the Iconic Ships and Great Sea Fights special series). The Swan became trapped in the ice off the west coast of Greenland in the autumn of 1836.
These readings come from a transcription of the logbook held in the archives of the Caird Library In the National Maritime Museum in London. – the transcription has been made especially for this podcast – you are the first people ever to hear these words read aloud. This podcast episode is, itself, a little piece of maritime history.
The episode presents the final entries in her log, in April 1837. Little is known about what happened next but it is clear from the log that they had very little time left. She was discovered by a fleet of whaleships. Ten sailors were put on board her to navigate her home, along with fresh provisions. From her original complement of between fifty and sixty men—including some men of a wrecked ship whom she had taken onboard in the previous summer—only seventeen men were alive when she reached Lerwick. She finally made it back to hull in July 1837, long after she had been given up for lost.
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This is the first of a new sub-series of podcast episodes: ‘Iconic Ships’. The series has been conceived as an opportunity for curators of famous historic vessels to make a case as to why their ship is iconic, but it is also open to historians to make a case for a historic vessel that no longer survives. Once we have sufficient entries we will open this up to the public and run a poll.
We start with the Mary Rose – a Tudor warship that served in Henry VIII’s navy for 34 years before sinking in battle with the French in 1545. She was then raised in 1982 and her hull, and tens of thousands or artefacts raised with her, are now on display in the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. The Mary Rose is, without doubt, one of the most important historical artefacts in the world, let alone one of history’s most iconic ships.
The case for the Mary Rose is made by Chris Dobbs, head of interpretation at the Mary Rose museum and one of the Archaeological Supervisors in charge of excavating the contents of the shipwreck.
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Inspired by the recent BBC series 'The Terror', a chilling tale based on one of polar exploration’s deepest mysteries, Dr Sam Willis explores the history HMS Terror. The TV series is set on the Terror’s last and fateful voyage when, in 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin and alongside another ship, HMS Erebus, Terror sailed into the ice off the west coast of Greenland in search of the Northwest passage. Both ships were beset by ice but the crew stayed with the ships, only abandoning them in April 1848. By then Franklin and more than 24 sailors had died. The survivors attempted to walk to the Canadian mainland and were never seen again.
The TV series is a fictional and fantastical account of what might have happened to the men; the truth is that we know very little indeed about their plight and it remains one of the biggest mysteries of maritime history. The Terror and Erebus were last sighted by Europeans on 25 July 1845, two years and nine months before the final and failed attempt to reach land.
In this episode Sam Willis speaks with Ed Williams-Hawkes, an expert navigator of powerboats, historian, and resident of Topsham in Devon where the Terror was built, and they discuss the fascinating history of HMS Terror, which had enjoyed a long and extraordinary career before she entered the ice with Franklin.
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This third episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers a Spanish perspective on this most extraordinary battle. We hear from Dr. Agustín Guimerá and Dr. Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro, both from the Spanish National Research Centre in Madrid. Dr Guimerá offers an analysis of the battle from the Spanish perspective and Dr Ortega-del-Cerro reads out an extract from the logbook of the Principe de Asturias, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Moreno, and certainly the best Spanish accounts of the battle. Both contributions are presented in English and then repeated in Spanish.
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Dr Sam Willis speaks with Charlotte Ward to explore the remarkable history of Lloyd's Register, perhaps the most influential book for the maritime world ever to be published. It all begins in a coffee house run by Edward Lloyd, and a book, called the Register of Ships, first published in 1764, to give underwriters and merchants an idea of the condition of the vessels they insured and chartered. Maritime history from that moment on was fundamentally changed, particularly in relation to safety at sea. The Lloyd's Register Foundation now curates an immense archive of material relating to global maritime history.
But we begin this episode as ever by catching up on our sailors on the whaleship swan of Hull, trapped in the ice off the west coast of Greenland in the new year of 1837. Each week we have been reading a little from their logbook – which is now kept in the archives of the national maritime Museum in London. They have been trapped now for almost four months. Life has been terrifying and they are entering a period of intense cold. Even the most minor of events is a major occurrence for these men perched on the cliff edge of their existence.
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One of the key aspects of maritime historical research that is helping us understand our modern world is the use of ships logbooks to understand and map climate change in various regions across the world. Today Dr Sam Willis Dr Matthew Ayre, a Climate Detective (or more officially a Historical Climatologist) at the Arctic Institute of North America. Matt uses 200 year old documents surviving from the Arctic whaling trade to look back at the Arctic climate.It's an important topic. Over the past 30 years, the Arctic has warmed at roughly twice the rate as the entire globe, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.
Ships’ logbooks are now an accepted data source in climate change studies.Matt is an expert on the particular issues surrounding logbooks from the Arctic region in what is known as the pre-instrumental period and has tackled important questions linked to this research – how, for example, can you reliably express narrative descriptions of wind, weather and sea ice in index form? An dhow then can you most effectively manage scientific analysis fo such data, which – remember -- was not recorded for such purposes. How do you digitize historical logbooks?
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.