How to Survive the Age of Sail

What was life really like aboard the great wooden ships of the Age of Sail? Dan joins After Dark hosts Anthony and Maddy to step aboard these creaking vessels and uncover who served at sea, what drove them to enlist, and just how slim their chances were of making it home alive. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 1:15Dan Snow?

  Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Now, long time listeners of this podcast will know that if there's one period in history that I would like to go back to, it would be the Age of Sail, when those European powers sent out expeditions, great voyages across uncharted oceans. It was a time of exploration and settlement, a time of pirates and privateers and corsairs. It was plundering and pillaging and violence. There were great sea battles from the Armada to Trafalgar. It's when our European world became much, much bigger. It was a time of adventure and discovery and sails filling in westerly winds, sheets

• 1:54Dan Snow?

  straining at the clues, spice barrels in warehouses of cannon smoke hanging over the ocean. It's a time with some of the greatest stories from our history and it's a time that shaped the world that we still live in today, the good, the bad and the ugly.

• 2:11Dan Snow?

  It was also an era of enslavement, of colonisation, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease and desperation, of clinging on to the taffrail and hurricane forces off Cape Horn, the ice forming on the yards.

• 2:28Dan Snow?

  It's an age that some people romanticise, but was actually pretty dark and pretty grim. Death by typhus or perhaps taking some grape shot to the neck, well, that was just the tip of the iceberg. So for today's episode, we're going to explore the dark history of the Age of Sail. I'm teaming up with my good friends from the After Dark podcast, Dr Maddie Pelling and Dr Anthony Delaney. And let me say, as a man who loves the ocean, loves sailing, and I always used to dream about being part of Nelson's fleet when I was a child, or on Cochrane's crew, or perhaps Captain Kidd's pirate crew, particularly when I discovered that he forced his crew to be in bed by 8pm, I'm here for that. But anyway, after doing research over the last few years, and particularly for this podcast, I'm really not entirely sure I would have been suitable. So please listen, and then you get to decide if you could survive the Age of Sail. Enjoy.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  T minus ten.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unit until they're dispersed in black unit.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Okay, we've done a lot of ship episodes on After Dark. We have done, and I'm going to listen now and you won't remember a single one.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Okay, go on, I'll tell you if I remember them.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  The Terra and Erebus.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Remember that one.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Okay. Mutiny on the Bounty.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  The ghost ship Mary Celeste.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Not a clue.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Really?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Don't remember that.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Wow, okay. The Batavia, you must remember the Batavia.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I remember the Batavia, yeah.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  That was quite sick, and we got a lot of people writing in.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  We did. I still get pictures of the Batavia.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Who'd been to the museum in Australia. Okay, but today, we are joined by the captain of the good ship history himself, our load star and hand on the pillow.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Yes, Maddie, well done. Did you make that up yourself or is it in your notes?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  I absolutely did not. This is part of the script.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Oh, it's in the notes, okay.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Very well done. It's only bloody Dan Snow. Hello, Dan.

• 4:07Dan Snow?

  Hey, guys. I love, I, I've heard many of your ship episodes. I loved the Batavia, that was cool.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Everyone loves the Batavia.

• 4:14Dan Snow?

  And do they do well? Because if so, I've got, I promise you, I've got more where that came from.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Ships do very well.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 4:20Dan Snow?

  And also the stories of the sort of desperate struggle to survive after the ship sinks. Okay, well.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  And I think it's like this.

• 4:26Dan Snow?

  You come to the right place.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Enclosed world narrative, right? Where it's like, everything is happening.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Within this wooden world and people are really intrigued by what.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And when human nature breaks down.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Yes, of course.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  You just can't beat it.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  So Dan, we're talking about the 16th to the 19th century, generally speaking, in today's episode. This is a really formative part of life at sea and what we understand of the history of life at sea. But how kind of wild and dark is this particular time period for naval travel?

• 4:55Dan Snow?

  I mean, it is a formative time, as you say, for life. It's a formative time for our planet. I mean, the reason that the world looks the way it does is because these Western Europeans who played no. They hadn't been at the forefront of sort of human development at that point in history. We're talking about the Basques, we're talking about the Portuguese, talking about the Bretons, the Normans, the Cornish, the people from Devon, people from Bristol. So these are the peninsulas on the end of the peninsula of Eurasia. It just explodes and they start making obviously huge, you know, cultural interaction elsewhere and borrowing technology and the civic. The out of this, the sort of milieu of the 15th century comes these gigantic ships capable of ocean travel, which no.

• 5:34Dan Snow?

  Well, the Chinese had evolved fascinating and sort of turned away from, but, but capable of sailing around the world for the first time, for example, crossing the Pacific for the first time, for example. And those become these engines of unimaginable transformation. They take small pocky America and just Americas alone, Europeans arrived, 90% of the indigenous population in Americas, as I've heard on your podcast many times, will die over the next 200 years. Right? So that's because of these ocean going ships and the disease there and what they traveled across in. They are the most complex objects ever created by human beings to that point in history. Look at HMS Victory in the sort of middle of this period, 1750s, it's laid down and fights the Battle of Trafalgar famously, 805. There's 800 people on board. Can you imagine the logistics to keep them all alive on these long ocean journeys?

• 6:17Dan Snow?

  There are something like 20 miles of rope required. Hundreds of oak trees have gone into the construction of that. There is cutting edge science there in terms of guns, in terms of the navigational equipment. So, I mean, we are talking technological revolution and copper sheathing on the bottom, which in turn is an engine for further industrial revolution. This is military industrial complex stuff, right? So, but for the human beings on board, to get to the point, unimaginable. I mean, unimaginable because sailing is miserable today. I've crossed the Irish Sea many times.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:48Dan Snow?

  And you just wish you were anywhere else in the world, right? There are sea sightings, and that's with GPS. That is with waterproof clothing.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  You have done more than just crossed the Irish Sea, though. So this is why this is really interesting, because actually, okay, I know technology has changed. I know the experience is slightly different, but at the baseline, those waves stay the same. And you have gone quite a way around the world in some of these things. What does that do to you in terms of your understanding of the world? How does that shift things?

• 7:13Dan Snow?

  So what it does to me is I find you can study the history. And then usually when you study history and you go somewhere that you guys have been to places. Oh, yeah, I can understand this beautiful. I get why this story happened in this community and this. I understand less. Like, I've been in a big storm in the Southern Ocean. And I actually go, I have actually no idea.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:34Dan Snow?

  No idea at all how any human being could survive in with the equipment they had.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  In the 18th century.

• 7:40Dan Snow?

  Simply unimaginable.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Is that done? Is that what grabs your imagination about it, though? Because there is that mystery that you can, as a sailor yourself, go out to some of these places. And actually, you're not getting any closer to the history.

• 7:50Dan Snow?

  Yeah, no, you're getting further away.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, is that what appeals?

• 7:54Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I guess so, because you read an account of Vasco da Gama's voyage to India. For the first time, a sort of European ship has left from Europe, sailed around the bottom of Africa and reached India. And I mean, just the weather, the other humans that deal with, the issues within the cruise, the equipment failures in the cruise, I mean, the ship sinking, the scurvy when you get scurvy. Of course, no one knows, no one has a clue about this.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, what it is, yeah.

• 8:18Dan Snow?

  Your old wounds open up, your teeth become loose in the gums. It's unimaginable. You've got corpses lying next to the barely living. You've got just a handful of men left steering the ship. I mean, just total breakdown. I guess what I find fascinating about it, it's a bit like sort of mountaineering. Or when people say, why are you interested in military history? It's not because you're like a sort of bonkers Spitfire passion, you know? I love a Spitfire, but it's.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Roll a factor.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Spitfire people will be writing in.

• 8:43Dan Snow?

  It's never. You cannot find humans placed in more extreme situations than in those trenches of the First World War, or in that front line of Roman Union, or battling around Cape Hall on the wager that's been at the subject to that, or the bounty that you guys have talked about, they had a rough time going around the hall, or Drake entering the Pacific. The humans cannot be in a more, and actually they're artificial, they're not meant to be out there in a wooden tub in the 16th century, eating weird food battered by those winds. We're not designed for that.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Let's talk then about these vessels themselves, because you say they're such complex objects, Dan, and that really interests me. And sidebar, by the way, as someone who grew up in Staffordshire and who, you know, Reginald Mitchell, homeless fit fire, how dare you? Yeah, and it was a long way from the sea, that's very true. Yeah, I'm someone who can appreciate the sea from the shoreline, gorgeous, love it.

• 9:26Dan Snow?

  Nice backdrop.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Don't want to be on the water.

• 9:28Dan Snow?

  Do you not?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  No, absolutely not, under any circumstance.

• 9:31Dan Snow?

  I think I'd like to.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  The only time I want to be on the water is I want to be buried like a Viking and pushed up to sea and set fire to.

• 9:35Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Specifically from Lindisfarne, so if anyone, you know, if anyone I die, could someone do that?

• 9:40Dan Snow?

  Wowee.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, that's the plan. Welcome to After Dark, where we think about our funerals. Of course we do. Yeah, of course we do, I have to. And interestingly, in a ship, but yeah, the rest of the time, no. But let's talk about some of these vessels, because Dan, you've been on replica versions of these. And of course, you mentioned the Victory, is that at Portsmouth or Southampton? Portsmouth.

• 9:57Dan Snow?

  How could you? Only someone from Staffordshire could ask that question.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry, I know. We're getting regional now, guys. It's all just the south to me.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just the south.

• 10:05Dan Snow?

  That's monstrous.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  But, you know, that, I mean, that's, I have been there and I have been on Victory, and it's such an incredible space. Telling that thing I found most interesting was the officers' quarters and the interiors, the furniture, like, that's what interested me, is, and the, yeah, the complete beauty, the complete giving over to aesthetics in a space that is otherwise completely functional, that fascinated me.

• 10:25Dan Snow?

  Designed to inflict murder, it's bizarre.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But, but let's talk about these vessels, though, because you say they're designed to inflict murder. They are designed in this really complex way to keep a whole community of people alive. They are also war machines, they are for going across the globe, getting to places that in lots of instances, people have never gone to before, certainly not Western Europeans. So what is it about these objects that is so remarkable?

• 10:48Dan Snow?

  They are this, they're a product of hellish compromises, because you can build a boat that goes fast, you can build a boat that's safe in big storms, you can build a boat that can carry lots of goods and make lots of money when you get home, or you can build a boat that can put lots of cannon on and rain death down on your enemy. And you can build a boat that's designed to go to uncharted territory with shallow draft and a thick built keel. So if you do bump on the old coral reef, you get away with it. Or you can build a boat which you're very confident in where you're going and you just want to get there, you know, to and fro very quickly. And so what you get in this period is this mad melange where everyone's just going, well, have a bit of this. So everything's a compromise. It's a nightmarish compromise, as you know, from the bounty. They're sort of trying to stick all this breadfruit in. You've got the crew all packed in or falling out with each other.

• 11:27Dan Snow?

  So Captain Cook chooses a, for his trips of exploration to Pacific, he chooses these colliers, these ships that were designed to carry coal from roughly speaking Newcastle to London. And if you choose the wrong ship, you're in big trouble. You're trying to design for all of these different jobs and all of these different conditions. You sail from Portugal to India, you're leaving the North Atlantic. You are going through the doldrums, the place where there's no wind and it's incredibly hot on the equator. You're crossing the line, you're going to go, then you're going around the tip of Southern Africa. It could be gale force winds, hurricane force winds. And then you're going up into the monsoon of India. So I mean, how on earth are you building a ship that's capable? How do you plan for that?

• 12:04Speaker 03

  And I suppose as well, people on board these ships often don't agree what the function of the business. I'm thinking about Cook's voyages when, you know, Joseph Banks, the botanist on board is like, I want to bring all of these plants that we found. And everyone's like, no, there's no, you can bring some of them, but not quite that many.

• 12:17Dan Snow?

  And the owners are always saying to the skipper, like, we want you to make more space for all these goods. We're going to make more profit on the nutmeg. We're going to bring back from Easter. The skipper's like, yeah, but I've got to take more supplies for my crew. And then it's like, I don't want the crew. Come on, there won't be that many left. Let me get back. And the mortality on these ships, it is simply extraordinary to me why anybody went on these ships. You know, Magellan sells around, well, he doesn't make, he's killed in Southeast Asia. I mean, a handful of the hundreds of men that leave. You say this, you say this, but you know you'd be on one too. As an eighteen year old, I probably would have done because, and I think it's the same reason that we send young men into battle because they, at certain stages, passioned off, for example, later. You know, there's going to be horrific casualties and I think every one of those eighteen year olds think it's not going to be them. There's a naivety to it.

• 12:57Dan Snow?

  And I think if you're a second son, if you're in Ireland and you're being beasted by the Protestants, you think, actually, I might just go escape. And like so, the algorithm feeds you the success, right? Yes. Dead men don't tell tales. What you do see is the local lad that's made good. Everyone knows who Sir Francis Drake is, comes from a very modest family, becomes one of the richest men in Tudor England because of his buccaneering piracy, call it what you want, the high seas. And so you're all thinking about Drake, you are not thinking about the hundreds of men that followed Drake. Hundreds of men who are now only watery graves.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Let's talk about then this idea of, you know, we're talking about these people who choose this and who go on this as a form of maybe adventure or escape or whatever it might be. But there are also things called press gangs and press ganging. Tell us what that is, and this could never be me, by the way, I would want comfortable lodgings if I was going to sea. That would be on my rider if I was going, but this isn't exactly what we're getting with press ganging.

• 13:50Dan Snow?

  This is the opposite of riders.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:51Dan Snow?

  So the British government realised, British imperial project realised that defence of the ocean around Britain is so essential that you will allow the navy to breach the God given rights of an Englishman, which are obviously only partially implemented. And there's a lot of hypocrisy, but there was an idea on the continent, if you're a divine right ruler on the continent, you're a tyrant, you just grab anyone you want, sit them in the army and throw them to the front line. In Britain, you're not allowed to do that. You have to actually recruit people. You have to take the king's shilling. Now, there's all sorts of skullduggery in the army, you go and you get them drunk and they sign up, they realise. So, look, it's in practice, I think, may have looked quite similar, but the navy were literally allowed to round people up. They could just come and knock on your door.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  Like, no.

• 14:31Dan Snow?

  And drag you away and then you could be at sea for years. It is hardcore.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:37Dan Snow?

  But typically how this was used, there was the hot press, which was we're just going to take everyone. And that was in the times of emergency, the outbreak in Napoleon, or for example. Typically, what you do is you don't want landsmen on board. You don't want people that don't know the ropes, that expression, because it's incredibly dangerous.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  I've just gotten that expression.

• 14:55Dan Snow?

  I mean, when you go on one of these tour ships, there is a forest of ropes, each one has a very precise purpose.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Know the ropes, of course. Yeah, yeah, that's great.

• 15:02Dan Snow?

  Grab the halyard of the four stasels. I'm like, stop yelling at me, I don't know what to do. Then you get hit with a little whip thing as well. But anyways, so actually you want mariners. So what they do is go to, you go on the quayside, you go to. Sailors pubs and you burst in and just drag them off. So they typically you're taking them from the merchant fleet. So it's not the case on the whole that they're like breaking into your house up country, farming communities. They're just like, sorry lads, you're all coming to see. But there were, you know, there are some examples of people getting caught up in the press.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Wow. And this, it's so telling that this happens for the navy and not necessarily the army. As you say, there are other forms of pushing people into the army. At home, I have an auction. It's an old pewter mug. I think it's from a regiment that was in India in the 19th century. And it has a glass bottom and the idea was that you'd take the king's shilling. So if someone would pop the shilling in your drink and you'd be drinking. And then when you got to the bottom of it, you'd be like, oh, somebody's given this. And the glass was to check that nobody had done that to you. Yeah. So, you know, there were other ways to do that. But I think the fact that this is happening to the navy shows how important the British Navy is in this moment, right? That it just needs a constant supply of men because so many of them are going to die out there.

• 16:06Dan Snow?

  Well, many of them are going to die. They just require huge manning. The peacetime navy was smashed because no one's paying a tax. So it's reduced to a shadow of itself. And then in wartime, you have to take all the wrappers off all those ships that are anchored there in the Medway and Watchtower or elsewhere. And then you just have to surge crew on board them. So there's no sort of TA, no reserve, no National Guard. It's really, really intense. But there is a lot of volunteering. I should say Captain Cook famously volunteered. He left the coal trade and volunteered in the navy. So it could be a route to wealth and a social escalator for men like Captain Cook, who was born in Litterate in Yorkshire. So to a working family. So the navy could be, but and also if a captain's recesses, Captain Cochrane, he was famous for being lucky. And he would often

• 16:48Dan Snow?

  stumble across enemy vessels and you got prize money. You got a share of that. Even the crew got a very small share, but they got a share of that prize money. So he never struggled to get recruits. So people would sign on to serve with him.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  So it's sort of like celebrity captains.

• 17:01Dan Snow?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that idea. Okay. So we've been press ganged. We've made it on to a Royal Navy ship.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Speak for yourself. I definitely have not been.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Some of us are less happy about it than others.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  I'm like the surgeon on board or something. I have to have some form of comfort.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  That you think you have a choice in there.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  I don't know. They wouldn't. Look, come on. If you were press ganging, would you come for me? No.

• 17:19Dan Snow?

  You know, I think you're, whether you're doing this on purpose or not, the famous character from Master and Commander, who's the Irish surgeon, played by Paul Bettany. So I'm seeing the sort of handsome chiseled, rather.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  You can stop there, Dan. It's fine. You've said enough.

• 17:32Dan Snow?

  Slightly uncomfortable in the maritime world around him. And intellectual.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. I'll take all of that. That's what I will be. I'll be the ship servant.

• 17:39Dan Snow?

  I'll tell you what the surgeon has to do in battle.

• 17:43Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow's History here, more after this.

• 17:52Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by Deckagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Deckagon helps companies create personalized, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves.

• 18:36Dan Snow?

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• 19:04Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Okay, so we're on the ship. Obviously, we don't know the ropes necessarily. Well, you might do if you were an experienced sailor already, but we certainly don't. What is life going to be like aboard? What's our daily routine?

• 20:38Dan Snow?

  Okay, so if we're on the Royal Navy.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:41Dan Snow?

  And let's go, sort of roughly speaking, the sort of famous Age of Slay that people be familiar with, the era of Nelson and things. So things are getting sorted out. This is a long way, actually, from the age of Drake, where it was all quite freelancy and just utterly care. I mean, again, how anyone survived in the 6th century, actually, I almost don't know. And Drake indeed did, in fact, die at sea, but he almost died very early in his career in a particularly rough cross the Atlantic, having been ambushed by the Spanish very early on. Anyway, so if you're in the sort of age of Nelson, you're being paid, there is food provided for you. Historians like to argue about this, as you'd expect. A lot of it different from ship to ship, there were some brutal captains, no doubt, sort of traumatised or just psychopathic. So some crews were quite famous, some ships quite famous, being sort of flogging ships.

• 21:24Dan Snow?

  But the captain nine tails would come out, which is a whip with nine strands to it, knotted strands, and there would be none. So captain nine tails, and you'd be flogged for a whole range of misdemeanors. There was also just arbitrary punishment that got banned as you go through the 8th century, which is senior rates could just sort of whack you with a little whip occasionally if you just needed some.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  As long as it's a little whip, then it's all right.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Just needed a little bit of encouragement.

• 21:46Dan Snow?

  Remind you of your duties, yeah. There was a lot of booze involved. I really do think that without alcohol, this age of European expansion, which would rewrite the demography of the planet and the political strategic balance of the planet, it was almost impossible. And unless people are drinking alcohol, I think it would have been completely intolerable.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Isn't it so depressing, though? Can you imagine waking up the next morning with a head on you like a hammer, where you're going? Oh my God, I'm stranded in the middle of, I don't even know where I am. The world that I thought I knew in, you know, Portsmouth or wherever it is, whatever little harbour town.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  The south.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  The general south is totally gone. And here I am with a pounding headache in some kind of a hammock or in some kind of like a wooden slat thing, depending on what the accommodation was. That's not where I'm.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  You'd be used to it, I guess. After a few days, you'd be like, I just live with this.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Yes, true, true.

• 22:34Dan Snow?

  So fourteen inches, by the way, for your hammock, you're bumping up against people all the time. I've read that Drake again, Drake lied to his crew, said he wasn't going around the world. They all thought they were going to the eastern Mediterranean. So he sails past Morocco and they all start going.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  When are we going home? Because I'm tired.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  But do you think that's really interesting though, that you are, you are at the whim of the person in charge of the ship often? And thinking about mutiny on the Bounty and Captain Bligh, and obviously that doesn't go that well for him in the end. But he's someone who has a very strict idea of what discipline should be aboard the ship and how he's going to run it. And is incredibly unpopular from the get go. And if you've been press ganged into maybe an infamous ship where, you know, the crew is brutally punished. The person in charge is someone who's well known for being violent and meeting out these things. I mean, it's not an appealing life. And if you suddenly end up on a ship like that and you realise what you're doing, where you're going, what's happening? You can't turn around. There's no jumping off. You're just stuck in that situation.

• 23:28Dan Snow?

  And yet there's very few examples of mutiny in the Royal Navy in the era of Nelson. There are a few. There's some famous examples around weirdly pay mostly in the 1790s. But there are examples of sort of mutinies that happen on a ship like the Bounty. And there aren't many where the crew just go, I'm absolutely done with this guy. You know, this guy's completely bizarre, like bizarre. The Royal Navy by that period is pretty professional. There is an understanding that actually the best way to get a crew to sail fast and for everyone to win here is to sort of roughly speaking, work with the grain. Now, listen, there are different periods of time, different places. There are obviously slave ships that are just a point where they've taken enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to be sold in the Caribbean and the Americas. Conditions on those unimaginable, huge numbers of enslaved men, women and children

• 24:12Dan Snow?

  dying and being and left in amongst their fellow prisoners shackled. They couldn't sit up, they couldn't stand up below deck. So there are all sorts of different types and the crews on those ships were fantastically cruel. And I think in turn their officers would have been. But by this period, you're in the Royal Navy, you're getting a sense that like, good leadership, there is beginnings, a little bit of HR, there's a little bit of sort of management in the crew. And also, if you don't want the crew to just jump overboard when you do arrive at a port and abscond, which would happen as well. Yeah. You do think, I might try and keep them, keep them a little bit sweet. So it's not. Recent scholarship has said that actually modern humans are able to cope with it. It's a brutally hard life, but punishment wasn't the worst feature of it, probably.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  It's for me, I think this idea that you're talking about of of being rowing together in more cases than not, it's certainly what we encounter. Obviously, when we cover these ship histories, something usually goes wrong. So actually, it's an exception in those cases. And we're very aware that it's an exception. But when you're talking down about like, press ganging and bringing groups of people together who may not necessarily encounter one another in everyday life otherwise, I'm imagining that it can still be quite tension filled bringing and potentially that there's like dangerous elements, individuals that are brought on. Do we have accounts of that happening?

• 25:32Dan Snow?

  Yeah, definitely. So everyone who goes on board a ship at this time says it was an extraordinarily cosmopolitan place. You hear Danish, there are people from North Africa, there are people of colour, there are a lot of Irish, a vast number of Irish.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  We tend to get on the sea if we can.

• 25:44Dan Snow?

  You get everywhere you go. An astonishing portion of them speak Irish, Fáilgáth, Tomhain, Welsh. Yeah, astonishing. I didn't know that.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  We don't know that in Ireland, you know, we're very difficult with those histories.

• 25:54Dan Snow?

  Well, exactly. That's difficult history. And so Waterloo, as you know as well, the land armies famously, these Irish units and Irishmen serving in English units. Anyway, so that's why it's thought rich. And you're all living within unbelievably confined space. So yes, there is a lot of focus on troublemakers, dealing with troublemakers. They might be lash. I suspect you'd get rid of a troublemaker. You'd say, actually, get rid of them at the first port of call. If there's a sort of. Socialist revolutionary on board, the Billy Beak Anachronist, which you do see in some of these East Indies in the 1790s, see kind of individual leaders described as troublemakers, but they got quite political. And just apart from anything else, so less even than the harmoniousness of the ship, wheeing and pooing is a massive issue. Yeah, yeah. Because in the middle of the night, it's howling gale up above, you know.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  And you're fourteen, what, inches from someone else?

• 26:41Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I might just go and have a quick wee down the side of the ship. And French ships were famously unhinged. But the Brits were obsessed with cleanliness because they'd learnt from bitter experience. Yeah. I mean, you're talking fleets get wiped out by disease. There's a French fleet in the 18th century, Seven Years' War, that survives back in Brest, just, and then passes on that sort of plague, basically, to the people of Brest. I mean, wipes out French naval, well, it further undermines the French naval capability in that first, that war. And so the Brits were really, really strict on that. So there were serious punishments, even for having a little wee down the side of the where you think, oh, no one'll notice in there. It's dark pitch black in there, bear in mind, right? Yeah. And no, you had to use the heads, you had to go up to the head of the ship and use the heads and that, where the water would still, seawater would spray and wash off the, whatever it was, you know.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Do you think, I suppose because these ships are floating microcosms of the British Empire, they embody these values. We have the men below decks with their sort of earthenware mugs, and then you've got, you know, beautiful blue and white porcelain in the officers' quarters. Everything is coded according to the structures and hierarchies of the world back in Britain. Do you think it's fair to say, with the exception, I mean, you've referenced the 1790s mutinies, I'm thinking of Spithead and Knorr in particular, which obviously happened somewhere in the south. I don't know, it's just the south, somewhere near there, but you know, very close to home. Whereas, do you think it's fair done to say that the mutinies that occur, the famous ones at least in this period, are happening when ships are getting further and further away from that centre of empire and that?

• 28:07Dan Snow?

  I think a little bit, yeah, when the elastic stretched. I mean, there are, no, there are times when if a ship's company arrives back in Britain and they were expecting either leave or to be released from Paving, Brest. And they literally that day, sorry, turn around, lads, you're all transferring now onto HMS Eurotonan, we're in leaving port tomorrow, and there were issues.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  That still happens in the army today.

• 28:26Dan Snow?

  Well, exactly, well, exactly. But if you're not there because you want to be, then it's quite.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you haven't chosen it, yeah, it's a different thing.

• 28:32Dan Snow?

  But on the whole, yes, if you're by yourself on the other side of the world and things get a bit loose, you can imagine. And the Bant is a great example of that. I think, again, though, I want to say. That the nature of the sea, in the army, posh people can buy a command with absolutely no experience. There's various theories around that. One is that you want posh people in command of an army because they're revolutionary entities. You have the experience of all of Cromwell in Britain and Ireland. You do not want normal, common people being in charge of an army that can march into London and take over power next to the king. So in army, you want posh people. Also, all they have to do really, there's an old expression in the British army, sergeants teach men how to fight, officers teach men how to die. If you just get your gear on, stand up straight back in front of the men as the French are advancing and

• 29:15Dan Snow?

  don't flinch when the bullets start, that's sort of the job of officers. And most people can do that, right, if you want to.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Probably not me, but most other people.

• 29:23Dan Snow?

  Now, you give someone the keys of a naval ship, these are the most expensive things the British state is building at this point. You want somebody who knows what they're doing. Now, there is patronage, surprise, surprise, well-connected and posher people tend to rise to the top, but there are exams that you have to pass. There is an apprenticeship you have to serve. You have to do years at sea. People like Captain Cook can move up the rank. So, so there is a meritocracy there. And therefore, they are, in all the panoply of the Georgian state, there were people who knew what they were doing in charge of these ships, and they knew how to run a crew. They'd gone to sea at fourteen. Some of them didn't need to use the lash, you know, some of them who were good at keeping that very heterodox, crazy, multi-confessional, multi-ethnic ships company, all pointing in the same direction. I think that's just experience. These were really, really good sailors.

• 30:10Dan Snow?

  This is Dan's No History. There's more on this topic coming up.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Sizanalipskam, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, the fact that so many of them have gone to sea so young, I'm thinking of, is it Thomas Raffles, Joseph Raffles, who goes to Singapore?

• 31:08Dan Snow?

  Singapore.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  He was born on a ship.

• 31:10Dan Snow?

  Right.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  So, you know, his mother literally gave birth to him at sea. And so there's so many people like that who are just knocking around the system.

• 31:15Dan Snow?

  Son of a gun.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  We were talking about all of these things. Order is important and it's actually relatively common and sometimes inspiringly so depending on who's at the helm and all of those things. But something you don't have control of, or to a lesser extent, and I'm talking specifically about one of the big things that we all hear about when we talk about these ships' history, and that is scurvy. You know, for me, it's, I think, limes, I think vitamin C deficiency. But what does that actually look like if you are on board on these ships?

• 31:39Dan Snow?

  It's a hellish thing, they didn't know. So no, you can't transport fresh vegetables. So food is salted beef, salted pork, bit of dried fish sometimes, and it's vegetables for first two days, and then hardtack, so bread that's baked super hard and will last. And you whack it till you get the weevils to come out of it, and then you soak it in...

• 31:56Speaker 04

  What's a weevil?

• 31:57Dan Snow?

  It looks like a little caterpillar.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Oh, they're actual insects?

• 32:00Dan Snow?

  Yeah, they're insects, yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 32:01Dan Snow?

  So you whack it. Some people eat the weevils for protein.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Not for me, but okay.

• 32:05Dan Snow?

  And you dip it in your rum, and you try and gnaw into it, your molars will get torn out. And so that is a diet without vitamin C, and that is why, on long journeys like Darghama, like Magellan, like the Wager, like anyone you can mention, oh, like Anson going around the world, he takes a load of Chelsea pensioners with him, these old guys can't find enough people, so he takes old people from the army's retirement community, and all their old wounds from decades before start opening up, your whole body. I mean, scurvy, scurvy is really bad.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  That's quite zombification.

• 32:35Dan Snow?

  Zombification, yeah. I actually don't know why my kids don't get scurvy, because they've always been throughout their...

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Someone in my university hall's got scurvy.

• 32:41Dan Snow?

  Really?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:42Dan Snow?

  That's going some.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  It was a boy, obviously.

• 32:44Dan Snow?

  That's white toast.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. White toast and, like, canter coke, I think that was, like, literally, yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  That's insane.

• 32:49Dan Snow?

  That is insane. So, no, and that's hellish. And then, of course, you've got shipwrecks as well, which is loss of life at sea. I mean, you will lose more men in a shipwreck than you do in a battle.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  You will lose more men in a shipwreck than you will in battle.

• 33:01Dan Snow?

  Yeah, so more people, Battle of Trafalgar, people have heard of, more Brits are killed when the Royal George capsizes off Portsmouth than in the Battle of Trafalgar. More people were killed when Queen Caroline, HMS Queen Caroline, in fact blew up by mistake, than were killed in the Battle of Nantes. I mean, so these are mass casualty events when these ships sink. And then in the 19th century, you've got the complication of they're trying to use all this new technology and incorporate steel and iron and heavy guns and things on all these ships. So you get HMS Captain when it's the highest, the most number of naval personnel killed in an instant between Napoleon at war, 1815 ending and the First World War. Something like 800 people just gone in an instant flash in the most hellish death you could imagine, capsizing, trapped below, boilers exploding, steam fragments obliterating

• 33:45Dan Snow?

  people anywhere nearby, in complete darkness and the ship sinks to the bottom of the sea in the Bay of Biscay. So these are horrific events and, you know, and again, there are ships lost with all hands regularly through this period.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  I want to talk before we kind of wrap up about one aspect of this shipping history that we recently went to Royal Museum's Greenwich and we were looking at some of the pirates exhibition there.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Is this the Royal Week? Because I was thinking, I didn't do this.

• 34:12Speaker 04

  No, Dan and I.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Oh, Dan and you, right, okay.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  And the Royal Week as well. I refer to myself in the third person for now on. But what struck me about that exhibition is just the variety within piracy and what that actually looked like and where it was coming from and the different worlds in which pirates were operating and functioning in different ways as a result of that. Talk to me about that pirate life, say in the 18th, early 19th century. Is it what we see in Pirates of the Caribbean? Is it Treasure Island or is it something far more nuanced?

• 34:44Dan Snow?

  There were a few less ghosts involved, but well, although depending on your point of view, I think Pirate, there would have been a very, very, very fine line between pirates, merchantmen and naval officers and also naval ratings. And actually in times of peace, you've got the navy just fires all of it, so lots of its sailors and lots of its experience, sort of senior sailors and like ships, petty officers and things. And a lot of them would go and work in the merchant fleet and part of the merchant fleet might be, you know, if you sailed past a Spanish ship and there was a war going on and you might, you know, there was a fine line between trading and sort of buccaneering, I think. And you see that, you see it from Drake on Wood. So as you say, it's everything. It's. You know, the dirty world of the transatlantic slave trade, you're down there, you're a ship,

• 35:26Dan Snow?

  you've got some Africans on board, there's another ship trading, you go and take their Africans and sort of kill a few crew members. It's just another little twist in the tale of what is just a sort of monstrous scene going on generally. And so smuggling, where does smuggling tip over to piracy? You're bringing excise free, you know, big tax-free brandy into the coast of England and sort of shots are fired occasionally with some excised men, you're branded a pirate, you know, whatever. So it's a very, very diverse world. But what's amazing, it's our suddenly thought as I say this, is that we haven't even talked about sea battles yet because everyone's perception will be the mass culture. We talked about disease and discipline and ships lost at sea. But of course, we haven't even talked about the horror that would be in a sea battle where you basically, the idea is Nelson's plan was to get as close to you can to the enemy and bombard

• 36:09Dan Snow?

  them at not point blank range, actually at touching range, so much so that when enemy ships catch fire, you have to start throwing buckets of water on your own ship because you're worried the fire's going to spread. I mean, you're interlocked with the enemy ship and you're firing. Are people jumping over them? People jumping over. One famous Irishman at the Battle of Trafalgar climbed up the rudder, climbed up the rudder of a French ship and sort of fought his way through the main. It was full Hollywood. It's an extraordinary story. Yeah, it's full. But yeah, and at one stage, I think it's the Temeraire, a British ship, curiously, crashes into the Reine du Tableau French ship, and the French crew had been gathering on the bows. They knew they couldn't beat HMS Victory in a cannon battle. They began to jump onto HMS Victory and take it over by force, you know, hand to hand. And Temeraire just comes out of the smoke, out of nowhere, crashes into and just

• 36:51Dan Snow?

  fires these Caronaise, these cutting-edge, state-of-the-art guns that just annihilate. I mean, First World War levels of casualties of this French career, just supersonic pieces of iron just scream through these men, shattering limbs, tearing people. When they do hit wood, they gouge splinters. You've got foot-long, sharp splinters of wood just sort of flipping through the air, ripping people to pieces. And that's where the surgeon comes in because he's so vaguely, vaguely. Hiding and then I'll emerge. You know, he's down the depth of the ship and they're carrying people down. Yeah. These long queues. Nelson's carried down at Trafalgar. And everyone goes, the Admiral's here. And Nelson says, there's nothing the surgeon can do for me. I don't want to jump the queue. And he just puts himself in the corner and slowly drowns in his own blood. And the surgeon's just there, his tools are getting blunt, and he's soaring limbs off, trying to

• 37:35Dan Snow?

  save the human life after a limb has been smashed. So those are battles that people know, but they can be terrible enough. But more people die of disease. Yeah, it's not crazy. And whether the story's in the Seven Years' War. Where they're working the sails in sub-zero conditions outside Louisbourg on the coast of Canada, you can imagine stuff, places that we can hardly go today in the winter, they're, they're trying to work sails and ropes. I mean, it's just wild.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  I think that's one of the things I'm going to take away from this conversation is that there's actually very little way that we can really imagine what this would have been like. I think that was a really good point to go, you think you might be able to, oh, I feel a bit seasick. Oh, we're very close together.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And we've seen so much Hollywood.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Depiction.

• 38:14Dan Snow?

  Yeah, because also we don't know just what the months of sleep deprivation of that kind of diet, perhaps some shortages of food, of the trauma that we've witnessed. Like we, I don't think we can begin, you can go, I've climbed a mast and I've in sub-zero temperatures and certainly, yeah, but then you.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  In your, in your modern gear.

• 38:31Dan Snow?

  Then you had hot chocolate or something.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, the kind of soul destroying thing.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, the psychological and the physical effect is.

• 38:38Dan Snow?

  And we know from bones of sailors, for example, the Mary Rose sailors is their skeletons were hammered, you know, they were showing signs of extraordinary hard labour quite early.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  All dying at 32 or something ridiculous.

• 38:50Dan Snow?

  Just grind out.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Okay, my final question before we go is this, if you had to pick one ship.

• 38:57Dan Snow?

  Oh, like, how can you ask me this?

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Because it's a podcast and I've been asked to ask questions. Now, if you had to pick one ship that you could go on the voyage, be that a battle, be that piracy, be that exploration, whatever it might be, what ship would it be on, why?

• 39:10Dan Snow?

  It's too cruel. It's like asking truth to your children, but I think there's a, you'd want to be on a frigate, so fast, free ship operating by itself. You don't want to be in a big battleship where you're being ordered around by the admiral, lots of other battleships around all the time, you're waiting for a battle to occur. So it's 99% boredom, 1% absolute carnage. You want to be on a ship and you're just raiding. So you're just causing trouble. So people might have heard of Thomas Cochrane, Lord Cochrane, he's a character, in fact, who the master and commander of film and books are based on. His job is just to go around the coast of Europe and just make an absolute nuisance of himself. And he lands in the middle of the night and he captures French shore batteries and blows them up. And he captures ships full of wine and silver and he pretends he's Danish and, and attacks a convoy. You know, he's just

• 39:53Dan Snow?

  naughty and brilliant. And he goes on to have this extraordinary career. And he, at one stage, creates a big floating bomb and sails it towards a French fleet at anchor with a gale rising. He sets the, like, the powder thing, jumps off the back of this ship. They row away into this huge storm. The ship blows up and all the other ships go in and try and attack the French. I mean, it was just sunup to sundown. In fact, beyond that, hijinks.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:17Dan Snow?

  So that is the ship I'd like.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  We are overdue, period drama of this. I know there's the film, but they only made one, right?

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Disney can do something or something. And who is your favourite child?

• 40:26Dan Snow?

  Ah, yes, well.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  No, no, okay. We won't make you answer that one. Right, Maddie, do you want to take us out on this one?

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Uh, sure, yes.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Do you not want to answer about the ship yourself?

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Oh, I would know enough about ships to know.

• 40:41Dan Snow?

  The only ships you've covered on this podcast have all ended very, very hard.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  I will say, I am a ship history convert. Before I started doing After Dark, I was like, I don't care about ship histories. But actually, since doing this, I love them now. It's really, and actually, I was talking to you the other day, I'm thinking about writing about a ship history at some point in the future. They really, this world on the sea fascinates me, this little enclosed thing. So I don't have enough broad knowledge to say, but maybe something like the Beagle, where it's a Discovery ship and it's, you know, like, that kind of a thing. I'm a little more gentler.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Something gentle.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And what about you? Do you have one?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Well, I have one in mind, but it's going to be a future book, so I will not.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  Oh, good.

• 41:16Dan Snow?

  Well, there we go.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  But if I could be not an active participant, but a fly on the wall where I don't die and I don't have to partake of the diet or the punishments or anything, it would have to be the terror. I'd want to go and see what happened to those men, what went wrong there.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Except you'd never be able to come back and tell us.

• 41:31Dan Snow?

  If it is the fly.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Well, no, I'd have, like, a hot water bottle and, like, a coat and I'd be fine. I'd just be observing and they wouldn't be able to see me. I'd just like to see what happened.

• 41:37Dan Snow?

  Oh, yeah, definitely. Thank you so much to my guests, Dr Anthony Delaney and Dr Maddie Pelling. You've got to go and check out their podcast, After Dark, wherever you get your pods. It's a phenomenon. And if you'd like more episodes like this, for example, how to survive an era or a battle or an event, let us know. You can email us on [email protected]. Let us know what we need to look into surviving. See you next time.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Addition terms apply for all offers.

• 42:44Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.