Disasters in the Age of Discovery

The dawn of the age of European exploration in the 16th century was absurdly dangerous. Crews on the ships of Christopher Columbus, Vasco De Gama and Ferdinand Magellan often sailed blind into uncharted waters, battling hurricanes and deadly reefs. With crude navigation tools, rotting food, and disease-ridden ships, survival was never guaranteed. Crews were pushed to their limits—physically, mentally, and morally. Some were deceived into the journey, and others driven by blind hope. In this episode, Dan is joined by Simon Parker, an associate professor in Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford, to tell some of the stories of extraordinary failure and disaster in the age of discovery. His new book is called Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery Produced by James Hickmann 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?

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• 2:05Dan Snow?

  In the 1640s, a Jesuit priest named Father Antonio Gomes was shipwrecked on the Swahili coast.

• 2:18Dan Snow?

  He was on his way back from Portugal's Indian Ocean Empire. He was one of the lucky ones, he was washed up on the shore and he dragged himself to the nearest village and asked for the local chief. He described an old man. It looked to Gomes like this man could have been around since Vasco da Gama's era, around 150 years before.

• 2:42Dan Snow?

  Gomes recounts that "I started to complain about the sea, that it had done us so much wrong, and he gave me an answer which I considered very wise. The old chief said, 'Master, if you know the sea is crazy and has no brain, why do you venture upon it?' The African chief had a point. I'm so struck by the fact that long-range voyages at the dawn of the Age of European Exploration were just absurdly dangerous. First, it was the weather. They had absolutely no knowledge at first of hurricane seasons, of monsoons, of El Niños. They could not accurately predict storms and squalls and fog.

• 3:23Dan Snow?

  There are many examples of English explorers getting beaten back into harbour, thankful that they still had their lives after just a day or two at sea in the English Channel, let alone rounding Cape Horn. As well as the weather, they of course had no idea of ocean currents, of the Agulhas current that runs down the coast of southern Africa, of the Gulf Stream. They were sailing into uncharted waters. They didn't know where they were or what was beneath their keels. D'Argama, Drake, Cook, Columbus, Magellan's crews, all hit underwater, sandbanks, rocks or reefs. All of them were lucky to survive as long as they did.

• 4:06Dan Snow?

  They were often sailing blind, just cruising along, day and night, with nothing but a sharp-eyed lad at the masthead scanning the waters ahead for obvious underwater obstacles. And then, there were the ships themselves, the most fragile of things to our eyes, made of wood, bound together by nails and rope. To navigate those ships, they had the most primitive equipment. They needed clear skies to get celestial readings. They would try and calculate the angle of the sun at noon above a pitching deck in a tumultuous sea. Food, well, food was grim enough on land. At sea, it was foul.

• 4:49Dan Snow?

  Rotting meat, weevil-filled hard bread or biscuit, as they put it. No fresh veg. Ships were breeding grounds for disease the sailors brought with them from the slums of European ports. And scurvy obliterated entire armies and fleets in this period. Crews of scared, exhausted, traumatized, lost, hopeless men then also had to contend with another threat: each other. It really is a mystery why anyone set out on these expeditions when they knew full well they had a good chance of never coming back. Well, perhaps sometimes it was done through deception. Drake lied to his men about the length of their voyage.

• 5:33Dan Snow?

  Dargama took along some criminals who had no choice. Some crewmen would have been desperate. Others would have had that strange optimism that you can see in the young men who marched willingly towards the front line of the First World War, knowing the risks, but certain it would not be their corpse on the barbed wire that night. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and today we're going to be talking about some of the disasters of that age of discovery. The successes, they're well rehearsed. What about the disasters that were equally important, really loomed equally large in the minds of the audiences back home at the time? I've got Simon Park on the podcast. He's an associate professor in medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University

• 6:17Dan Snow?

  of Oxford, and he studies the history and the literature of the Portuguese-speaking world in this period. He has just written a brilliant book, Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery. And he points out that that age of discovery is defined, it's shaped, as much by its failures as its stunning successes. We're going to talk about a few of those disasters, and in particular, one that every Portuguese schoolchild would have known in this period: the terrible story of Manuel de Souza de Sepulveda and his ill-fated ship.

• 6:51Dan Snow?

  The Sow Jau. And at the end of this interview, I was still not sure I could answer the question posed by that African chief. Why? Why did they set out on these journeys? Enjoy.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  T minus 10.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  The Tommy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black, white unity till there is first and black unity.

• 7:14Speaker 04

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

• 7:23Dan Snow?

  Simon, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:27Dan Snow?

  Now, if like me, you were brought up on strange Victorian illustrated plates of explorers in very nice outfits, like Vasco da Gama and Drake, always looking in very, very good nick, sort of spying art foreign shore, you might be surprised to learn that it was just an unimaginable cluster. You know, you call it violent, messy and improvised. I mean, give me a sense of just how much of a break with the norm, you know, with the European norm, these long range journeys were, and then some of the challenges they faced.

• 7:57Speaker 06

  At the end of the 15th century, you've got this massive change where not only were ships going further, but they were going to places that they'd never been to before and didn't even know existed. So if you think about Columbus crossing the Atlantic, he was intending to get to Asia and then sort of crash landed, as it were, in a place he hadn't thought about and spent time trying to figure out that in fact it wasn't the place that he had kind of intended to go. And then if you think about Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese had been heading south from Portugal, around the coast of Africa throughout the 15th century, kind of inching their way down gradually decade by decade, until in the 1580s, they finally managed to circle around the Cape of Good Hope, right at the bottom of the African continent.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  And then with Vasco da Gama's journey, right at the very end of the 15th century, then entered into the sort of Indian Ocean space, climbing up the eastern coast of Africa and then reaching India. So going further than really anybody had been before, anybody could imagine that they would be able to go. They didn't really even have a sense of how far these distances would be. And obviously, when you're doing that, you're having to encounter all of the kind of dangers that nature can throw at you, whether that's being in a storm, ending up crashing because of that, ending up in a calm, which was equally as terrifying, I think, for ships as being stuck in a place where they have no means of propulsion because the wind has sort of disappeared.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  And that's to say nothing of what happened when they actually arrived in these places. And the various people that they encountered had differing responses to their intentions and also kind of pushed them out of places or laughed them off in a number of circumstances.

• 9:42Dan Snow?

  And Simon, talk to me about the ships they sailed in. And wood just degrades very, very fast in a maritime environment, particularly when you're smashing it all day in a mighty sea and really huge storms, winds, great enormous pressure being put through the rigging. I mean, it is astonishing that these ships were able to, for me, that these ships were able to make those journeys, even in relatively good conditions.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  Actually, if you go and look at these ships or you look at diagrams of them in any detail, particularly the early ships, you think these things must have been massive. You know, one has the kind of cruise liner sort of scale in one's head, but actually, many of them are kind of caravels. Were pretty small to imagine the people packed in there, let alone what pressure they were put on it. It's kind of amazing. They sort of got bigger and bigger as particularly the Portuguese got more confident in their shipbuilding and wanted to transport more goods. But you were in a pretty confined space, something made from wood and nails. You were, as people often like to remind sailors, only a few centimeters away from the sea, which could be your destruction.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  And yeah, it was, I think, extremely dangerous, kind of terrifying and precarious in all sorts of different ways.

• 10:59Dan Snow?

  I suppose that one of the weaknesses, but it could also be a strength, is that they almost had to entirely rebuild their ships when they stop, you know, when Drake is on his circumnavigation or, you know, Magellan's expedition. You're stopping, you're sticking on a beach, you're turning on its side, you're scraping the hull, you're replacing planks, you're replacing masts and spars. The dodgy bit is that it's all very, very vulnerable, but the sort of upside is that from locally available materials, you can just sort of patch it up and sail on.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  And because of that, you know, they would often abandon certain ships. There was a certain amount of Ikea kind of deconstruction happening and then you take a bit from one ship and put it on to another. It is kind of amazing, but at the same time, you also had these instances where people didn't really know what they were doing, made mistakes, cut corners with the ships that they were supposed to be taking care of because they thought, oh, it's kind of floating, it's going to work out. And then would go on these long voyages and find, oh, actually that maintenance was absolutely essential and that you had to be sort of proactive about it. And sure, in a very, very long voyage like Magellan's, you were prepared, I guess, for that kind of improvisation.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  But on more routine journeys later in the 16th century, there ought to have been the kind of procedures and processes that I guess are familiar to us from seeing people in yellow jackets doing the kind of maintenance on an aeroplane before each flight. You would expect that sort of thing to become routinised, but it didn't always turn out that way and then also resulted in these disasters.

• 12:31Dan Snow?

  So let's talk about some of the major successes people have heard of. We've got Dargama, you've just mentioned, 1490s, astonishing voyage, probably the greatest voyage to that point in history, outside Polynesia, we should say, but anyway, the greatest, truly remarkable, the first European hull and crew to sail around the entire southern tip of Africa and arrive in India. But I mean, we talk about success, but a fraction of the men returned and on the way back, they got the monsoon right, didn't they, by chance? Because the monsoon winds are very predictable, they could blow one way, then the other in the Indian Ocean. On the way back to the coast of Africa from India.

• 13:08Dan Snow?

  They were hours, certainly days away, from absolute annihilation, from oblivion. I mean, there were sort of two or three guys left able to sail the ships at that point, wasn't there?

• 13:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's even this note in the ship's log saying everybody who was good at navigating was either too sort of incapacitated or dead, that they weren't entirely sure where they were or what they were doing. I mean, they were very close to not making it back.

• 13:32Dan Snow?

  And we should say there, the role of indigenous people is something else that we've traditionally overlooked slightly. I mean, I'm struck by Dagama was saved by certain friendly groups that he met in East Africa, for example, who were able to give him navigators and advice and fresh supplies. I mean, without them, he would simply not have made that journey.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  Malindi is the famous place where Dagama got a warm welcome, where elsewhere on the eastern seaboard of Africa, he did not receive such a warm welcome, partly because of his own behaviour. And that really made a massive difference, made the success, in inverted commas, of the journey. And it's interesting when you look at sources, because they all speculate upon why it was that he received a positive reception there. And some of them imagine that news of the Portuguese had somehow reached Malindi overland, and that was why they responded positively. The kind of historical narrative now is very much that the ruler there was making a tactical decision to ally himself with these new arrivals

• 14:32Speaker 06

  in order to build his own position in relation to the kind of rivals along the coast. But yeah, it's fascinating to see that this kind of decision that somebody made when Dagama arrived really influenced what we think of, I think, as typically a sort of Portuguese history, but who does it really belong to?

• 14:52Dan Snow?

  Yeah, that East African leader saw those cannon and thought, these people could be useful. Tell me about Magellan, 151922, first expedition around the world. Although he doesn't make it, so also reflecting some of the dangers they faced.

• 15:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean Magellan's an interesting one because he is associated with the circumnavigation of the world, but he actually ends his life in the Philippines, having picked a fight with a local ruler and bitten off more than he can chew and gets killed by Lapu Lapu on the island of Mactan in the Philippines. But still had travelled an extraordinary length and had crossed the Pacific Ocean, which was untold in its sort of dimensions and sitting there taking the prevailing winds across the ocean for weeks and weeks on end, not really knowing when it would end. The descriptions on the ship of the scurvy that struck the men because they were sort

• 15:44Speaker 06

  of trapped in the hulls of the ships, just moving towards where, when they would eventually reach land are extraordinarily gruesome. So he ends in disaster, doesn't quite achieve what the kind of story that he's often associated with.

• 16:01Dan Snow?

  Well, yeah, you mentioned disease, I mean, as if the elements aren't enough to get you, or uncharted rocks, as if those things don't get you, it's the disease will get you, right? I mean, astonishing scurvy, lack of it in sea, just wipes crews out. Admiral Anson's journey around the world in the 18th century, people's old wounds opening up, teeth falling out. I mean, it's just so grim. I think it was Hawkins, when he got back from one trip to the Caribbean and he'd been ambushed by the Spanish, he got back and said, "The story of our misfortunes would be bigger than the Bible." You can believe that, right?

• 16:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can believe that. I think the misfortunes were plenty. I think the misfortunes that they also caused were plenty too. It's kind of two sides of the coin.

• 16:44Dan Snow?

  Yeah, important point there, of course. In the Americas, the arrival of the Europeans was followed. Now, what is the, they think it's something like 90% of the indigenous population in the Americas would die over the next few centuries of the diseases that... The way we're naive to that were prevalent in Eurasia and Africa. So astonishing largely unchronicled demographic catastrophe.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  Smallpox, diseases that were bad enough in Europe at the time, entering a population that didn't have any herd immunity at the time, just ravaged populations and caused migration also away from the coastlines where the Europeans were arriving. So yeah, the sort of disease side of things was both the men on the ships, but also the people that they then encountered. And again, I think those stories ring very differently now. I think having been through the pandemic and having thought about microbes in a way that maybe many of us didn't think about before, those kind of stories, I think, ring very differently now.

• 17:42Dan Snow?

  And then obviously the gigantic enslavement of West Africans that followed that European sort of exploration of the Atlantic world is an oft-talked-about and oft-lamented aspect of this story as well. Let's come back to the explorers. And then interestingly, that first few generations after explorers, because some of them, like Diaz, you know, that he arrives at Southern Africa but perished on a later expedition, doesn't he? So you've crunched the numbers. Tell me about how dangerous it was to not only go on the first expedition, but to go to go on some of the follow-ups.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  Historians have long tried to figure out what was the kind of percentage of the ships that foundered during their journeys. And in the 16th century, we usually put it around 12%, although there's this particular moment in the latter half of the 16th century where that comes close to 18%. So almost one in five ships at that point, which is not exactly the kind of odds that you might want to choose for those journeys. And a lot of that was down to human error at that point. It wasn't that the monsoons were unpredictable. It wasn't the the kind of errors that people have made were not well documented. It was often about people making poor choices about stacking their ships with too much stuff

• 18:53Speaker 06

  and ending up sitting too low in the water and then not being very maneuverable. And then in other contexts, hundreds of wrecks from the Spanish have been catalogued by historians in Spain. And it's a kind of frequent and statistically, I think, still important aspect of of journeying even in the 16th century.

• 19:13Dan Snow?

  Yeah, if you looked at space travel now, which is a sort of interesting parallel, if one in five crude launches exploded or didn't come back, I mean, we would just think it was just bonkers. It wouldn't happen. It would be grounded. It's amazing, isn't it? And English attempts to found colonies reasonably unsuccessful early on. And you point out that seven of Spain's attempts to colonize Florida in the 16th century failed.

• 19:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, and we sort of forget about these things, that there were multiple attempts to colonize particular spaces and then they didn't work out for all sorts of reasons, whether that was because of tactical errors, because lack of provisioning, because of strategic errors in trying to reach a particular place. The French, even though we still think of Quebec as being kind of French-Canadian, the initial French voyages to Canada didn't really establish a permanent colony there during the 16th century. That was a later development. So these early starts, or even not so early starts, this is almost getting on for a century after Columbus, were still

• 20:15Speaker 06

  not really achieving their grand imperial ambitions. So the timeline of what we often call discovery is a long one and perhaps a slightly more chaotic one than we often describe.

• 20:29Dan Snow?

  Yeah, and I think reading your work really helps me to understand, because there's that assumption, particularly in the sort of heyday of empire, that the future would belong to the Europeans and they would all benefit from these global systems and extract all these resources and boss the world. And how stupid of these early governments and early people not to kind of immediately jump on that and just grab as much land as they could. But of course, you're right, looking back, these were expensive, futile, bloody, costly, nightmarish propositions, which had no clear... they didn't know about the oil sands of Alberta or the rich farmland of the American Midwest, whatever it might be, you know. So they just didn't think they'd be able to transport food back, even if they did know about the fertile land. So you can see why this imperial history is quite contested,

• 21:12Dan Snow?

  even at the time, people saying this is a total waste of our money and our effort. And speaking of which, let's look at one catastrophe that you tell the story of, because it's just so brutal. Tell me about, well, I'll let you pronounce the name, but the wreck of the Sao How.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  The Sao Joao.

• 21:29Dan Snow?

  Joao.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  Joao.

• 21:30Dan Snow?

  There we go.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  That's often the sound that my students, when they're learning Portuguese, have to pronounce in their first week and practise, the nasal vowel. So Manuel de Souza de Spulveda and his wife Leonora are the captain, and interestingly, his wife is on the ship as well, and she's one of the rare women who really gets a lot of narrative attention in these shipwreck stories. And he was a kind of noble, a captain, did various different activities in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, along the coast of India in particular, and then ended up in 1554 taking this ship back to Portugal.

• 22:08Dan Snow?

  Let's look at his experience in India first, I suppose. The Portuguese had been there for about 40 years by the time he arrives.

• 22:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the Portuguese by this point had reached all along the coast of India. They had been to the Arabian Peninsula, they had been further afield, and Manuel was one of those people who went out in the 1530s as a kind of soldier captain, wanting to make a name for himself. And he was involved in various major events of that early part of the 16th century as part of the Portuguese Empire, most particularly a massive siege of a place called Diu in today's Gujarat, in the northern bit of India, which was a place that the Portuguese were desperate to get hold of because it was a point of

• 22:57Speaker 06

  connection between all sorts of trading centres. So it was connected to the Ottoman Turks, it was connected eventually to the kind of growing Mughal Empire, and the Portuguese wanted this as a kind of stronghold. And he ended up there, being besieged for months. The kind of story of the sieges of Diu, because there were two major sieges in the 16th century, became the stuff of legend. I mean, there was an epic poem written about one of them because this siege was seen to be so incredible that the Portuguese had survived.

• 23:30Dan Snow?

  Because Diu is a really important in the early, very, very early 16th century because there's a sort of attempt by the Egyptians and some Indians, I think with a bit of Venetian money as well to sort of kick the Portuguese out of Diu, there's a major naval battle there. Because I guess everyone's arguing about this, this trade of these, this rich spices and all this trade, does it go along the traditional routes into what we now call the Middle East, through Venetian markets into the rest of Europe, or do we allow these Portuguese interlopers to short circuit this trade and take it all in their holes around Africa? So Diu's clearly a very important place. What does Crane India tell us about the nature of Portuguese rule? Because he seems to be all over the place. It's a sort of maritime empire, isn't it? It's not an empire of big chunks of pink on the map like we might come to assume from other periods. It's outposts, isn't it? All around the Indian Ocean.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  Often, yeah, the word empire kind of conjures up exactly that, big swathes of territory coloured in the colour of the European nation they're connected to. But the Portuguese, their strategy in the 16th century was this kind of chain of interconnected forts along the coast, where they were really interested in controlling the seas, they were interested in controlling the connections between places, the ability to be able to control trade, to be able to draw taxes and other forms of sort of extortion on other people's activities across that network of places. And so, yeah, when you look on the map, you see these little dots that were the Portuguese places, whether that's Diu

• 24:57Speaker 06

  and then Versailles, Goa, Koulao, Kochi today. You see all these little dots and that was really the Portuguese speaking world. And Manuel was very much part of that. So you see him being asked to go and help out when there's a problem in Calicat, in Cogicat, and then there's an issue in Koulao, so he ends up going there, he ends up coming back to Diu. He's really moving around. And that shows you that this was quite a diffuse network of different places, often with quite large distances between them.

• 25:29Dan Snow?

  That also means that there isn't a strong central governing authority that we might associate with modern empires. So it's a different entity, isn't it? And is that reflected by the sort of looseness? When he goes back, he leaves India on his ship and he's taken lots of shortcuts. He sort of, it seems like he's half working for the government and half working for himself, doesn't he? And that is just one of the, I guess, the kind of original sin, one of the, in the DNA of this exhibition, something that perhaps condemns it.

• 25:55Speaker 06

  The thing is, when you were a captain of one of these ships, particularly returning to Portugal, you wanted to get a profit out of it. So you wanted to have your portion of the goods that were sent back. And that doesn't necessarily lead you to make good decisions about how you're loading the ship up with cargo. And that very much happens with Manuel. He struggled a little bit to get the total amount of pepper onto the ship, the many tonnes that made up often the bulk of the cargo on these ships. But for various reasons, the locals weren't playing ball and not giving him the high quality stuff. So he had to go to several places to be able to load up. And then added, because he still had space in the hold, various other things like fabrics

• 26:40Speaker 06

  and porcelain. In fact, this porcelain is kind of amazing because there have been recovered fragments of this porcelain that are now in a museum in South Africa. So we actually have these kind of material vestiges of the wreck that would then happen that still exist and a very clear index to what he had aboard. So he piled all of this up. This obviously meant that the ship was less seaworthy because it sat lower in the water and he had clearly not done his due diligence in taking care of the ship and repairing it. So there were no spare sails. And as we might delve into as the journey goes ahead, various bits of the ship start falling apart quite disastrously.

• 27:23Dan Snow?

  And that's what those ships do. I guess it's how you're prepared to respond to it. They leave in February 1552. Two hundred people on board are Portuguese, the rest are enslaved people.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  Yep, that's the record that we have from the one account, surviving account that we have of the ship, which is kind of surprising. We typically think of the Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, as being the core of the story of this history of European exploitation. But in fact, in the Portuguese case, that transit also was across the Indian Ocean between India and Africa.

• 28:02Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's History, we're talking about disasters at sea. I'm in my happy place, more coming up.

• 28:13Dan 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.

• 28:57Speaker 01

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• 29:20Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 29:53Speaker 07

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• 30:32Dan Snow?

  And are these enslaved people, they're going to be sold somewhere? Or are they sailing the ship? Are they just chained up in the hold?

• 30:38Speaker 06

  It's not totally clear from the description. So some of them will have been people who were being transported back to Portugal. They may have been transported on from there. We see that the Portuguese had enslaved people all across their empire. Some of them had kind of local knowledge and became interpreters and go betweens in different scenarios. So they played all sorts of different kinds of roles. And I think it's telling from the story in particular that they're not given a lot of narrative attention. Everything is really focused on the captain, his family, his wife. And everybody else is a kind of statistic that is mentioned as the numbers who remained alive kind of dwindled.

• 31:22Dan Snow?

  So they set off. When do things start to go wrong and how?

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Pretty quickly, things start to go wrong. I mean, this ship is doomed from the beginning. As they're crossing the Indian Ocean, they find out that the pintles that are the rods on which the...

• 31:40Dan Snow?

  You want to watch your pintles?

• 31:43Speaker 06

  The amount of vocabulary I learnt in exploring maritime, maritime adventures.

• 31:49Dan Snow?

  In Portuguese as well, you are truly a genius because I've struggled in English, let alone trying to do this and then translate into Portuguese and back in. My goodness.

• 31:58Speaker 06

  I have an ongoing glossary of different words and you learn. There are some things that are really, really difficult to translate into English because they didn't necessarily exist on other kinds of ships. So sometimes you're having to give a sort of description of the thing that you know what it is and you have a word for in Portuguese, but you don't have a word for in English. It's quite interesting.

• 32:20Dan Snow?

  A pinto's a little bit like a tow bar on a car, isn't it? It's the little bobble that sticks up at the back of your car that you can then slide a trailer onto. That holds the rudder onto the ship. And the rudder is the most important part of it. If you cannot steer a ship, you are doomed.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not doing well. So there are fractures that are appearing. And in fact, we're told in the narrative that the person who spots this happening doesn't really want to tell anybody because he doesn't want everybody to panic. So at first, there's this great cinematic moment where you can see the failure that is about to occur. And yet it hasn't quite happened. And then eventually the rudder fractures and falls off, which leads them obviously to be worried about how they can control the direction of the ship.

• 33:05Dan Snow?

  So that's the worst thing that could happen is your rudder falling off. Their sails, I think, are in a ragged state at this point. Was it particularly bad weather or was this just a hopelessly maintained ship?

• 33:14Speaker 06

  It was bad weather. You know, they encountered a storm.

• 33:17Dan Snow?

  So where is this storm?

• 33:18Speaker 06

  So we're crossing the Indian Ocean at this point. We're getting towards what would today be South Africa. That's the kind of trajectory that we're heading on. The narrative that we have is not a formal ship's log. So it doesn't have very detailed latitude references or anything like that. So we're slightly going off somebody's memory of the journey. But that's roughly where we are and eventually we'll end up drifting into the coastline of South Africa. So we know we're somewhere in that vicinity. So the sails are torn off. The weather is so bad that they start to become worried about this because essentially the master's acting as a lever on the ship, putting it under a lot of pressure.

• 34:03Speaker 06

  It's cranking almost the hull open, acting a bit like a crowbar or something like that, which is obviously causing a lot of stress on the ship. They decide to try and chop it down, which again, we've already talked about this way in which the ships were sort of built and rebuilt. There was also this sense that sometimes you needed to damage your ship. It was a bit like a sort of amputation of the ship in order to make it survive. If you had sort of gangrene, you needed to remove your leg. If your ship was in danger and your mast was having this action on the hull, you needed to chop it down. So they chopped it down. But you can see when you're in that situation, you're in a lot of danger.

• 34:43Dan Snow?

  Yeah, cutting away the rigging is a glorious part of the naval tradition. And then they use bits and bobs, spars and scraps of sail to try and jury rig it, can you, to create this sort of little mini emergency set of rigging to try and get you to the nearest bit of land?

• 34:55Speaker 06

  That's what they tried to do. The crew on the ship are trying to bring together all bits of fabric. It becomes a sort of tailor's shop on the sea where they're trying to create something like a set of sails that they can use and this kind of stumpy mast that again, might be able to give the ship some propulsion.

• 35:15Dan Snow?

  Does it work? Where do they get to?

• 35:17Speaker 06

  It sort of works. I mean, they start drifting towards the coast of South Africa. Once they've seen land, they then start thinking about abandoning ship. They take one of the boats to shore and begin this process of decanting the ship and escaping from it. But they don't really manage to do it quick enough. And they've made only sort of a couple of little journeys to the coastline before the ship actually founds itself and then starts falling apart. And you have this amazing woodcut illustration in the 18th century copy of this text, which I think so vividly shows what this shipwreck was like and that people were just clinging on to bits of the timbers from the ship. But

• 35:58Speaker 06

  also the ship falling apart was itself not just the kind of means of floating on the surface, but actually a danger. And you often have in these shipwreck stories where somebody has managed to find a barrel or a bit of timber that has become a raft, but then something crashes into them from the ship or the nails kind of cut into them. And it becomes this horrific sight where even those who have managed to survive and not drown are then still in danger from the ship that has fallen apart.

• 36:26Dan Snow?

  So how many people survive and make it to the shore approximately?

• 36:31Speaker 06

  They make the estimation that several hundred managed to make it to shore of the 600 who were originally there. And then it's what happens on land that then becomes really disastrous for them.

• 36:43Dan Snow?

  Okay, so actually, the worst is yet to come. That's happy news. So if you survive that appalling, traumatic shipwreck, which by the way, is not just a moment at which you risk death, but you've lost your home and all of your possessions and all of your wealth and your tools in which to try and presumably hack out a life in this new land. So how do they cope when they go ashore?

• 37:05Speaker 06

  They stay on shore for a little while. They try to salvage things from the ship as it's broken apart, whether they can get bits of rice or nails from the ship, which they then use to try and barter with local people. Yeah, they're left quite exposed and under-resourced at that point.

• 37:25Dan Snow?

  And there are local people?

• 37:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are local people. One of the fascinating things is that often you find in these descriptions of shipwrecks that people willingly start throwing their things overboard during the shipwreck because they know that was the reason. So you mentioned the wealth of people. It's fascinating to see in these narratives that all of a sudden people's priorities suddenly crystallize in a new way. And they begin to think that all the things that they had tried to enrich themselves with were no longer that important. And actually, the things that became valuable to them were things like nails, which they had probably never thought about, but that they knew that they could barter with the local people. So while they're on the coastline, they go looking to people. They actually

• 38:08Speaker 06

  only find some abandoned huts to begin with. And then a few days while they're really getting quite desperate, they then see on the crest of a hill, a group of people with a cow. And then suddenly think, oh, this would be good. We need to get this. We need to trade for this. And this will give us our dinner. And to begin with, it seems like they might get what they want. But eventually their meal gets herded away from them and the locals are reluctant to trade with them for this now very valuable commodity, which is food.

• 38:39Dan Snow?

  I suppose you've always got two options when you have shipwrecks on a hostile shore. You try and build a little small boat, small ship, and try and go for help. Or you've just got to walk out of there. What do they choose to do?

• 38:49Speaker 06

  They choose the trek, so they want to go north towards the Maputo River in today's Mozambique. They want to reach the shore there where Portuguese trading ships would often pass. So that was their hope, that if they managed to make their way far enough north, they would be able to get a journey back to Portugal. That was the risk that they took.

• 39:11Dan Snow?

  How are they survive? Are they able to live off the land at all? Have they got supplies?

• 39:15Speaker 06

  I mean, they have a bit of supplies. So the narrative describes the rice that they had. It says that they went foraging for bits of fruit that they could find in the bush. But they had very little. And there are these descriptions of how those who had managed to get some fresh water after days would then end up being able to sell that to other people that were part of this trek party for extortionate amounts of money. And people were unwilling to sell it. And there are descriptions in other stories, so not just this one, but a number of Portuguese ships ended up facing a very similar fate. You have these descriptions of finding a dehydrated, sort of totally desiccated snake

• 39:58Speaker 06

  skin and trying to dip it in water to make it soft enough that you could eat it. Descriptions of people eating things on ships also were terrible. You know, you have people eating the leather of their shoes, trying to get something out of them. So these were quite desperate times.

• 40:16Dan Snow?

  More on the terrifying shipwreck after this. Don't go away.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 41:34Dan Snow?

  What's the cohesion of the group like? I mean, is Manuel still in charge? Or people just said, we're not listening to you anymore, mate? And enslaved people, do they say, why are we still listening to you? Like, what's the dynamics of the group like?

• 41:44Speaker 06

  Well, it's interesting because it begins off quite orderly with Manuel at the front. He's still in charge. They're walking almost in formation. His wife is being carried on her journey to begin with. Her children are being looked after. So it all seems like the sort of hierarchy of the ship has remained. But then as they go along and people start dropping off, because enslaved people decide, we've had enough of this. They decide to make their own way. Some of the Portuguese get lost. One of Manuel's illegitimate children gets lost at a certain point. He's desperate to persuade someone to go and look for him, but nobody will, so he just gets abandoned and they need to keep walking

• 42:27Speaker 06

  because any delay was just extending the amount of time that they had to live off the very meager food that they could scavenge. So as the journey continues, the numbers slowly diminish, either because people have left or have sadly perished.

• 42:45Dan Snow?

  So it's just a death march, there's people dropping by the wayside.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 42:48Dan Snow?

  What are their relations like with the local people who are passing by?

• 42:53Speaker 06

  So the first place that they reach, they actually get a bit of support again, as we talked about before. Very much in these scenarios, the Portuguese finding themselves dependent on the goodwill of local people. They get some provisions, they're supported for a little while, but Manuel is very keen to keep moving on. So by this point, they actually are more or less where they had intended to be, which was around the Espírita dos Santos estuary, near the mouth of the Maputo River. But they found themselves in this village, they'd been supported, and they want to continue moving on because they think that they need to keep going to get to where they wanted to be.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  This local chief tells them, "Don't go on, the person across the river is not going to treat you as well. This would be a fool's errand to continue on your journey, stay here." But Manuel by this point is kind of losing his grip and he really wants to press on. He sort of makes a plan to steal some canoes in order to get across the river. That doesn't work out. Eventually, he manages to persuade the village chief to let him continue, and he does manage to get across the river. But people are beginning to think that he is, yeah, losing his grip.

• 44:07Dan Snow?

  And all the time, the group is getting smaller and smaller, I suppose. So they're less able to defend themselves if locals had been hostile.

• 44:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. There's still around 100 people left by the time they've crossed this river and they get to the next village along. And there, things really become difficult and Manuel is not making the best strategic choices. Because the local chief keeps them out of the village for a few days. He then asks them to split up. So, "Oh, we can't manage to give provisions to you all here, so you need to spread yourself out amongst various different settlements in the vicinity, and we don't like your weapons, we don't want you to have your weapons. You need to give those up if you're going to be kind of welcomed into these places."

• 44:55Speaker 06

  Obviously, as soon as Manuel does that and they have been disintegrated as a group, things get really bad. That is really when, I don't know whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the end begins.

• 45:08Dan Snow?

  Yeah, it feels like the end of the end here.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  This ending is the thing that made this story get retold so many times in the 16th century. It was republished in Portugal multiple times. It was turned into stage plays in France and in Spain. People found it so gruesome, the end, which is that Manuel and his wife are attacked by the locals. They have all their possessions taken off and all of Leonore's clothes are taken off her. They're going to go and trade the fabric, we kind of intuit. And she feels such shame at being stripped naked that she begins to dig herself a hole in the ground to be able to cover up her body so people can't see it.

• 45:54Speaker 06

  Manuel is trying to console her at this point. He gives these sort of biblical verses of naked we came into this world, you shouldn't feel shame about this. But she clearly a boundary has been crossed for her. She sort of digs the hole so deep that she is there in the ground, her hair long and straggly by this point, and she never gets out from this hole that she has dug for herself. It's like she has sort of buried herself in the ground. And at that point Manuel walks off and is never seen again. And that is the ending of the sort of main part of the story.

• 46:30Dan Snow?

  But because we know about it, there must have been one or two survivors. How many made it back to Portugal or Portuguese territory anyway?

• 46:35Speaker 06

  About 25 eventually made it back and it was only seven Portuguese and the rest were enslaved people from the ship and they made it back to Portugal. And then we don't know who was the person who wrote the story of this when it was printed as a pamphlet, this little story that would have been strung up on strings in a bookseller shop in Lisbon. It was written anonymously, but it was one of the survivors and that's how we came to know about this story and how it made its way then throughout the rest of Europe.

• 47:09Dan Snow?

  The wreck's been found, so there's some interesting archaeology connected with the story.

• 47:13Speaker 06

  So a number of these wreck sites have been discovered. There are a whole lot in the same area. If you look at a map of shipwrecks in the 16th century, you find a whole cluster of them in this bit of the eastern coast of South Africa. And yeah, a number of things were recovered. The porcelain, they also found a cannon that was stuffed full of cowrie shells that also points to this history of slave trading. So we have all of these kind of objects that have been pulled out of the sea and then have ended up in museums.

• 47:45Dan Snow?

  It's such an interesting story to focus on because it shows the Europeans, they've got this extraordinary maritime technology, they can travel long distances, they've got amazing gunpowder weapons, but in many other ways, it's not the unequal relationship with the rest of the world that it was, say, in the late 19th century. There were times when indigenous groups were able to overcome and defeat them militarily, the Europeans militarily. It's an interesting period, isn't it?

• 48:09Speaker 06

  I think it's a more fraught period than we often realise because we think about ships going further and further afield, but actually the reality on the ground was much more of a negotiation. If you think about the coast of Brazil, where there were all sorts of European interests there, you know, the French and the Portuguese to begin with, then the Dutch. The French and the Portuguese allied themselves with different local groups. Imperial rivalry was calc'd on to actually local rivalries that existed and they depended on the locals to provide them with food and labour. And so it wasn't quite ever this total annihilation right from the beginning in lots of different places.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  And I think we often forget about that because we're looking back retrospectively and we know where we end up. We don't see that that beginning was, in fact, much more conflictual, much more fraught, much more chaotic than we might imagine.

• 49:06Dan Snow?

  Why did young men go to sea? I suppose that's the strange thing about humans is we're sometimes not very good at judging risk, but it's amazing that more and more people ignored stories like this and thought they were always going to be the ones that returned with a hull full of gold.

• 49:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's incredible, really. And you can sort of, the really sort of pioneering voyages that go into the unknown, you can have that slightly romantic idea about what they were trying to do. But a lot of the journeys of the 16th century were, if not routine, they were sort of regular. They were yearly voyages that people went on and those were still dangerous. And that was where lots of the shipwrecks happened. And in those voyages, the kind of motivations are much more obvious and were often described to be basically greed. And lots of texts of the 16th century say this. There's this amazing story in Portuguese of a man, Fernando Menchpin, who ended up in all sorts of places as far as Japan.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  Part of his story may be made up, but the word that comes up on almost every single page of his book, as he suffers shipwreck after shipwreck, he's kidnapped multiple times, is the Portuguese word, cobiça, greed. He's just like, we suffered this because we're really greedy. We made a tactical error because we're really greedy. We're being punished for this because we're really greedy. And so that kind of very human dimension, I think, comes through particularly in the latest 16th century. And as we perhaps move away from the voyages that have become the ones that we really remember, but that were only, as you say, a tiny fraction of the voyages that were actually taking place in the period.

• 50:45Dan Snow?

  Wow. It's hubris. It's punishment for our arrogance and our greed. That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast and telling us that story. Tell us the name of your book.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  It's Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery.

• 50:57Dan Snow?

  Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me.

• 51:02Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure, if you want to keep it going, that is, to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically by the power of tech. You can listen anywhere you get your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. Imagine a world, just imagine, where you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean, it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  With a Discover Cash Back card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 52:42Dan 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.