After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Britain's Bloodiest Mutiny

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

The captain of the HMS Hermione was a sadist even by the not-very-high standards of the British Royal Navy in the 1700's. He was a prolific flogger, subjecting his crew to the cat-of-nine-tails. It was hardly a surprise when his crew rose up and mutinied. Even if the British Navy couldn't for one second let them get away unpunished.This is the brutal and bloody story of Britain's most horrific mutiny, told by the one and only Dan Snow!This episode was edited by Anna Brant. The producer was Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.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.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click here to place your vote! Thank you! https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listener, never fear tis I, Dr. Anthony Delaney from the After Dark podcast. And I am possessing your phone or your car radio or whoever it is that you listen to podcasts to ask you to vote for us in the Listeners' Choice Award at this year's British Podcast Awards. Ooh, it's that time of year again. You can vote for us while you're folding laundry or learning about mass poisonings or while you assemble furniture and contemplate mutiny, which I would mutiny if was assembling furniture, or while you're lost in a graveyard that you thought was going to be a shortcut, but now you find yourself in the bowels of hell. Either way, you can simply go to

www.w.com British Podcastawards.com forward slash voting and search after dark. Okay, off you go and do that, and I promise we'll stop possessing your phone. Thank you, love you, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. It is the night of the 21st of September 1797, and the air aboard HMS Hermione is thick with tension. Men move silently through the darkness, hands tightening around knives and cutlasses. Every creek of timber threatens to give them away. Above them, Captain Hugh Piggott sleeps, unaware that his crew have reached breaking point. Now within hours, one of the bloodiest mutinies in Royal Naval History will leave officers butchered,

a warship handed to Britain's enemy and an empire reeling. This is more than a tale of murder at sea, though. It's a story of power, brutality, and the moment discipline gave way to chaos. From the blood-stained decks of HMS Hermione, this is After Dark. Hello everyone, and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And I hope you've brought your sea legs, listeners, watchers, friends, because we're going aboard HMS Hermione on today's episode,

and it is a bit of a bloody and dark history. It is. It is right at the end of the 18th century. You know we love a bit of Georgian frivolity, but this is not very frivolous. But we love a bit of Georgian history nonetheless. And to help us guide our way through this dastardly cruel history, actually, we have the one and only, of course, Dan's now.

Oh, you're back. You're back. You're back. If you haven't listened to Dan's other episodes that we have done with him this month, then go and listen to that. We just did the... We've gone ship crazy. We've gone ship crazy this month and Dan has helped us on our way.

Now, Dan, we're going to get straight into this one because we've been talking about chips this month. So we have a little bit of background going on. Life in the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th century, walk me through it. Disaster or grey crack? So the Royal Navy people, Winston Churchill called it rum, sodomy and the lash. Stop, of course he did, yeah. So the implication is it's your kind of your morale's propped up by that tot of rum, which was to true to that extent.

But, and then I'll leave part of the sodomy there. and you know what he meant by that? And then the lash, it refers to the fact there's very, very strict display on board ships. So you're being physically beaten. There's something called the cat, nine tails, about a metre and a half long piece of rope as big as your wrist.

The last 60 centimetres of that piece of rope are, you've undone the strands into the smaller kind of cords that make up a rope. And then you tie knots in those and then you get a big strong boatswain's mate to lash the naked back of a miscreant. He's tied to the shroud or tied to a gorge,

gun and for insubordination or in fact nearly anything you could think of a man that can be flogged in that respect so because that happens it's brutal it's bloody foreigners comment on it the chinese we have chinese sources you go god these brits are wild like thrashing each other it's horrible people have got there's a big debate in the world of history like was it awful to be on a georgian ship or was it and actually the answer is it could be and we'll discuss that today the captains had a lot of latitude. So some captains were floggers, others weren't. And we are going to meet a really, really statistic captain today who I think we can say was a horrible man. I went to the National Maritime Museum recently and they do have a cat of nine tails on display. And when you get up

close to an object like that, you can almost kind of feel the lick of it. It's a really brutal thing. And obviously something that would do enormous damage to a human being. And people did die from laid your ribs and spine bare if you get enough lashes. Yeah, which isn't great when you're on a dirty ship and you have a job to do and all of that. Of course, at the end of the 18th century as well, Britain famously fighting the Spanish, the French. Everyone.

Napoleonic Revolutionary Wars against France. So for the previous 100 years, Britain has been fighting France, pretty much a sort of global mastery. And there's been a series of wars which we have discovered, and I've talked about, and people will be familiar with. And the American Revolutionary War comes in the 17, 1780s. then we get the French Revolutionary World's 1990s.

And they are clashing in all the oceans of the world. Britain's launching military expeditions to Cape Town into the Caribbean, which are very important sugar grown on those islands, the super commodity of the time. And ships are going out. They have little isolated worlds. They are very, no contact with home. The captain is second unto God.

So the captain and the officers will sort of determine the nature of that ship, how happy it is or unhappy. Very interesting this story because if the Royal Navy can't be as bad as everyone says, people might think, because there are very few mutinies in the Royal Navy in the 8th century. Interestingly, very few times

when the crew rise up and just kill the captain. The times they do happen are super famous. We know about the mutiny on a bounty. There are the interesting mutinies in the 1790s in Britain, which are around paying conditions. So sort of park them slightly. They're around the sailing.

not getting enough money. There was never a question that it's not thought they were kind of political, radical revolutionary. It was like you're not paying us enough. We're annoyed about this. Spithead and North. Really interesting stories. You guys do them. And terrifying. I mean, that almost is the moment. That's almost Britain's sort of Russian Revolution moment. If those had spiraled out of control. Yeah. I always want to make a film of those, but because they take place just off the coast of Britain, they're not very cinematic necessarily. And they're just, yeah, they're an interesting time and place. But in terms of a sort of a ship that rises up against an unpopular captain because he's an absolute dick, there's very few of those. And that's what's so

interesting about what we're going to talk about today. Well, we have one of those to discuss today. Anthony, do we know much about Captain, Captain Hugh? Why aren't you asking me? Because this is your episode. Yeah. Sure, Dan, you tell us all about Captain Hugh. Well, his dad was an admiral. So it's one, again, one of these families where naval, there's a naval tradition in the family. But it doesn't mean it's sort of you just get parachuted into important positions. As we've talked about in previous podcast, you have to know what you're doing in the Navy. So that gives you kind of an entrance. It gets you work experience. And it helps your career, of course, but it's not everything. So you get age 13, his dad's influence gets

some a spot on a ship. But he has to sort of work his wrap and prove himself. And he does prove to be, on the whole, Britain produces unbelievably good sailors at this point. There's a sort of vicious learnings because you're either, you know, and perhaps this Captain Pickett shows you're fighting the elements, you're fighting disease, you're fighting the French and Spanish, you've got to, if you're not good, it's kind of a bit Darwinian. If you're not good, you're going to, it either makes sure it breaks you, right? It does. And in fact, that's what we're going to find out. He does survive a few early breaking opportunities. He drives his ship into other ships twice and blames the other captains, which is perhaps forgivable. So there are some question

marks around his aptitude. He does though keep getting appointed to come on. Now possibly that's patronage, a sign of kind of corruption. But, you know, but also he may be decent. And, but what's clear from the beginning is as a flogger. He flogs like he orders his heart, something like half his ships come to be whipped. And for comparison, historians looked at a wider sample of a, of a particular fleet in this period. And he thinks about nine percent of sailors would be flogged in this period. So half is crazy. So he's got, he looks like he's a bit incompetent. He's not quite good enough and he looks like he's a bit brutal. It's difficult for us to say at this range. And that, therefore, it's not, it's not a surprise that this mutiny will happen under his command. Yeah, I mean, obviously,

discipline's very important aboard these ships and we've looked at things like mutiny on the bounty. We know that when this command structure breaks down, things can go terribly wrong. But even so, I mean, he's an extreme case. He looks like he's on the out. he's an outlier. He's got a sort of he's these top men, the people call top men who go up to the ray up into the mast, they're young, very keen, very agile boys and men. And they set the cells. And, you know, sometimes in a storm, the ship's going like this in the waves. And they are up there fighting trying to get the, so can you imagine the angle they're going through up there on the top of the life? I mean, the physical fitness you would need to do that and to not die.

Extrity, fitness, bravery. And then he, but he goes, they're doing an exercise or a training. and the last of them to get back down the deck healed is to be flogged. Yeah. Which is wild. We're in September 1797 now. And we have, some of those top men have already died from falling as well. Yes, that's what we should say. So that's suddenly you get accidents because they're desperate.

They're falling. Yeah. Terrible. And it also says something, which I think is really interesting and so easy to overlook, about the expectations of responsibility of these captains on board here. You're talking about, you know, should have been in and around 9%. that's being flogged on, but we're looking at 50% here. And already that's causing upset and concern and unhappiness on board.

So there's this perfect storm starting. These three young boys are falling. They're dying. The crew is their world, their wooden world at sea is being upset by the attitude of this captain. And that's unacceptable to the crew in many ways. Because the whole thing does, there is a contract here, isn't there? Which is the captain will... The Hollywood version of the captain's like a mad tyrant.

It doesn't make sense. The captain depends for his survival and career progression on the crew being good at what they do. And there's a sort of mutual understanding. And actually, I think, a lot of the time, they would have been real communities these crews. And what do you do when it when, look, what do we all do? When we're in a tyrannical situation, when the person in charge of us, with life and death, power over us, is an incompetent sadist. That is a scary moment for us all. And they're on these chapters.

It's kind of, the turning point seems to be when he humiliates another officer, which is interesting. It tells you about the hierarchy. I mean, this just shows that he fundamentally doesn't understand his position and how to maintain it, right? That he is not only having people much lower down the scale from him flogged in this brutal, routine way and making that sort of ordinary in terms of his command. But then he's also trying to undermine people who hold power on the ship as well. It's wild. You guys have got, you guys rating social. especially, you probably know better than me. So, like, socially, it does, it's another

transgression when you humiliate, you try, he tries to get another, the most junior officer on board, effectively, who are very young, but they're often, would be, I think, socially regarded as kind of equals. Yeah. He humiliates him in front of the rest of the, well, he tells him to get down on his knees, doesn't he? He's a pot beg for forgiveness. He strips him from his command. And again, you guys probably understand that better than me, but that is, again, a sort of line is crossed. And amazingly, the men, the sailors, seem to be, yeah, he's awful and horrible to them, but it's, it's when he's turning against some of his own kind, they go, this guy's. Wow. And that transgression upsets. It says something about

how this midship, shipman, whose name was David O'Brien Casey, that he starts to represent order on this ship, this middle person. And as soon as he, so he's asked to get down his knees and apologize for this, you know, relatively. He refuses twice. And he refuses twice. And he is lashed. then 12 times for that. And this is seen as the transgression. So this is all building. This unhappiness is really, really growing. I love this idea of a contract, Dan,

that you were mentioning there, this invisible contract. That's now being broken, essentially. And what happens next, which we'll find out after the break, is the mutiny that we've come here to talk about. By the way, we should probably say, Dan, we're on HMS Hermione here. it is 1797. We've had this unhappy lot on the Hermione.

Bring us to the group that's led by a man called Thomas Nash. There is a lot of unhappiness on board. It's an unhappy ship. They are in a cauldron of heat. They're on the Spanish main, which is the coast of central, south central, and up into Mexican coast. It's a tough place to be.

There's disease. It's hot. It's sweltering. You're real like that you've lost respect for the command structure. And therefore the ship's just going to fall apart. The whole thing operates on. You've got to trust the person above you that you think he knows what he's doing. And if you come to that decision, I can't imagine how intense that quadrant. You're bumping shoulders of each other all the time. You're in a football crowd with these officers. You know their smell. you know so and and a group of men decide that enough is enough and they're going to kill him now this guy this this is an irishman he's a boatsman's a boatsman's a professional bossan's mate is one of like more kind of professional backbone of real like tough salts on board veteran veteran sailors probably and he takes it by himself to lead a group of men and they're going to kill the captain and this is obviously a hanging offense this is

mutiny this is this is it shows how intense things have got and they break in the stern area of the ship is where their officers, officers sleep. They're separated from the rest of the ship's company by Marines, by soldiers at sea for their own safety. So these contingencies are planned for, but they get some Dutch courage. They break into the stores. They get drunk on rum. And then they overpower the Marine sentry at the captain's door and they stab the captain to death. It's such a remarkable moment, isn't it? Because like you say, Dan, it's the extreme situation that has arrived on board that has led them to make this decision. This is, as you say, it's a hanging offence.

This is not a decision that's taken lightly. No, it's not. And what I don't know about is that what's interesting is that 11 officers are killed on board as well. So I think the officers have to make a snap decision at this moment. They know the captain's a nightmare. Some of them were probably picked by it. Some of them are probably loyalists. Others have to immediately choose in the middle of the night.

as a drunken crowd of sailors a rampage of the ship, they've thrown the mortally wounded captain overboard. Yeah, I mean, they throw him over before he's actually quite dead, right, which is just so, pretty grim. And they have to make an immediate decision because the minute they go, well, they don't have a point.

They are complicit in high tree. They're complicit. So they, a lot of them are killed. And you can imagine that would have been heartbreaking. That violence begets violence. And I imagine a lot of them were like, I unfortunately, even though I hated that captain, I now have to fight back against these mutineers.

What I think is interesting in this kind of, as you say, crazed moment, everyone is drunk, everyone's making these snap decisions, is the kind of decisions that I made. So I think I write in saying that Casey himself, who is humiliated and made to go down his knees, that, you know, is one of the reasons why this happens at the first place, is spared when the officers are killed. But they kill people like they kill the ship's surgeon. That doesn't seem very smart when you're floating around the Caribbean at this point. I just think it's inside of the intent.

and the red mist and the frenzy and the chaos and the misunderstanding, you know, a surgeon comes out of his cabin door with a loaded pistol and gives his noises, I mean, what, you know, what, it's also transgression, right? Because if it was, the captain was the problem and they decide to mutiny against him, getting rid of him as one thing, but then killing the 11 officers starts to transgress. Again, it's this unwritten, and this is fascinating about life at sea at this moment time. There are written rules very clearly so, but then there are unwritten rules and killing those 11 officers is one of the unwritten rules where he starts to go, Nash and his comrades start to go beyond what potentially would be somewhat acceptable based on the, on Piggott's behaviour.

But we now don't have a captain, so Nash takes control. What happens next? Nash has now taken over control of one of the king's ships and killed the officers on the cat. So he is now going to die if the British Empire get their hands on him again. most of the crew are now guilty by association. They either were absolutely involved or they didn't fight back against the mutineers. Because there will be an expectation, right, that they should have stood up for the officers and fought back. So they, everyone's got a big problem, but in a way that makes the decision for them. So they just have to sail to the nearest enemy port and hand the king's ship over to the enemy.

Because my enemy's enemy is my friend here. And so they sail into a Spanish port. Imagine that. Spanish could not believe their luck. So they sail into Venezuela, which is, as you say, under the control of the Spanish. And the Spanish give the mutineers $25 each in return for this ship, which seems like a pretty miserly amount for the prize that they're handing over and for the risk that is taken and the kind of, I suppose,

the punishment that is floating over their heads should they make it home. It's also something to be said about the fact that we're talking about mutiny, right? but they've crossed a barrier again from mutiny now into treason. So the crimes are, the death crimes are adding up here. They are not doing themselves any favour, although I totally appreciate what you're saying done in terms of my enemy's enemies, enemies, my friend. And I will also point out, as the Irish man on the podcast would probably,

this is 1797, Nash is Irish. I have a feeling Casey was probably Irish too based on that name. Piggots also another very strong Irish name. So I don't know how Irish this is. But 1798 in Ireland is the year of attempted revolution, turns out to be a failed rebellion. So Irish sentiment in terms of its identity amongst the British, so we talk about this being treason, but if you're Irish, I wonder how that sits with you and where on the treason line your experience. Yeah, that's a really good point.

And that's what they work. The British would worry about that all the time. And what they would work, that's the great mutinies in British homewaters. There was a, yes, they often begin a triggered by pay, conditions, terms, an officer being a dick. But there's always a terror that once you taste that sweet, sweet revolution, that freedom, you go, yeah, by the way, another thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's when, and that's when you get so-called agitators emerge with a more political bent, go, while we're complaining, should we kind of get some Thomas Payne going in here and say,

why do we, why have we got a king anyway? So that's the kind of the danger of these moments. And so I'm sure you're right that it begins with this kind of, there's a crisis, but quite, it's easy for these things to take on a dangerously revolutionary or political bent and we're in Irishness or around class consciousness as well. And there is real fear about this. So the Navy do get wind of it, as you would imagine. The news does travel back. And there are survivors who don't stay with the Spanish who end up making it back into British-held territory. And the narrative that is given back to the British is, I mean, I have a quote here from one of the survivors saying, this had been.

in their, meaning the mutineers, this had been in their minds for months before it happened. So there's a sense that certainly this version of events that the mutineers meant to do this, that it was this planned thing that was against, you know, king and country, against the might of the British Navy and not a sort of reaction to Piggott in real time in that kind of, you know, the heat of that melting pot that you talked about. Do you think there's a sort of discrepancy there in terms of hard stories being told. It's hard. It's so the people that, the loyalists, if you like, so there's people like the carpenter who go, well, I never wanted to be part of it. They made me, they made me come along. And the minute I got to Spanish territory, I escaped and I made my way

back to British territory. And they tend to get a kind of, they tend to, and they get a good hearing, I think, when they get back. And everyone is trying to sort of justify this disaster and trying to kind of wash their own reputations. Yes, they were just to come back to, if you get back to Jamaica and you've survived this meeting, in your back, you don't go, yeah, look, I didn't want to be part of it, but the captain was a real nightmare. So what you're probably more like you say is, yeah, they're total wrong ones. They just go, we were, it was all fine. You know, you can understand why some of the survivors are desperate to clean their reputations, get back in British good books, survive, just get them with their lives.

Yeah. And it's quite easy to throw me eveners under the bus. And if the authorities are like, the authorities want to hear that there was just a bad, a bunch of bad apples. It's embarrassing for the authorities to hear that there was a sadistic captain who had it coming to him. even if, by the way, the authorities sort of know that. And there are other examples of collective action that fall probably slightly short of mutiny where it is the men are not punished. Quietly, officers are removed. Like these naval officers, people know what's going on.

Admirals have served on ships. They know about all this stuff. They have, it is a gossipy, smallish organisation. You know that so-and-so served with so-and-so and he's an absolute knobhead. So, but I think in public-facing terms, you just want to hear there were a group of naughty, naughty men on board. And you disrupted the running of His Majesty's vessel. And that's kind of easier to deal with, I think.

Yeah, I mean, you get that in the famous mutiny on the bounty, don't you, that Captain Bly is kind of crap, he's petty, he's, you know, there are lots of issues. Exactly. And yet the narrative that is told there is, again, it's a selection of black holes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Much like the bounty, though, the mutineers are not going to be allowed to get away with it.

Obviously, in the case of the bounty, some of them do escape and fast. their own colony, Pickett is dead, the mutiny has happened. The mutiniers have thrown themselves on the mercy of the Spanish, but they cannot be allowed to be walking around the world. Having committed this crime against the Navy, there's a bit of a manhunt now, isn't there? It's difficult to exaggerate the threat that this represents the Navy. If crews rise up, take control of naval ships, the most precious, expensive items that His Majesty's Government has purchased and hands that over to the enemy and then flaunt it. That's not that is not going to work. You cannot allow that. That is an existential threat to the Navy. That's more important, I think,

almost than it. So they launch a massive manhunt. They need to, they, they, the British need to tell their own workforce. You will be hunted down and exterminated if you do this. And, and indeed, and we will cap, if we can, we're going to capture that ship back as well until the stain on our honor is a race. So there is a sort of enormous manhunt. They're marked. men, they disappear, they change names, they go and live in the young, the new republic, the United States of America, but the British make that a top priority. They're hunted down. And indeed, they make a top priority to get their hands back. They can't have the Spanish colours flying at the mast of this British ship. That is just humiliating. I think it says so much

about how much the Navy would not allow this, how much of, as you say, an existential threat it was right, that even in a time of global warfare, when the Navy is engaged in fighting, you know, on all fronts, they're still prepared to give resources to hunting down mutinators. But it shows, doesn't it? Yeah, which shows how important is. And he is hanged from the rigging of a Royal Navy ship. You couldn't, you couldn't have more a statement of that. Fleet would have seen, it's like raising a flag. I mean, the fleet would have seen a corpse swinging in the shrouds. They'd have seen him kick. They'd have seen life drain from him

and they'd have seen his lifeless corpse hanging up there. And that was deliberate. They wanted the whole fleet. Anyone in Harbour would have seen it and they'd of course told. that news would have spread like wildfire through ships, crews over the months and years that followed. And indeed, I think about 30, there's just some mid-30, it's about 30-something people are recaptured, of which 25 or so are killed. Crews are moving around all the time. Everyone knows each other. There's powerful links.

You're coming into harbour. You're drinking with each other. Those stories. People, the Navy, need everyone to know what happened to those meetings. Can you imagine? When you use that meeting, he gets to your ship and lying in your cot and I'm thinking, on a hot night and off the Spanish main, thinking, is my crew going to come for me?

I mean, it's very, very destabilizing. You want to be able to focus on the enemy, the weather. There's lots of things that can kill you at sea. And you're really low, you're really hoping that on that list is not your own lads. Yeah. Because that just makes it intolerable. You can't trust your own men. None of this works.

What I love about this is love, strong words, is the idea of the mechanism of empire, even at this point. So you're talking about a manhunt that's essentially being, operated from mainland Britain, but now is reaching other parts of the globe. And we're talking about, of course, print culture here. This has to spread the word. We're talking about word of mouth.

We're talking about other ships carrying the news of this mutiny and then resulting treason around the globe with them. And so it tells, it gives this idea of storytelling and how storytelling can knit the Navy together. Even over those vast distances. In this really remarkable way that means that these men are on the run. Talk to us about the recapture of the HMS Hermione then done, because as you say, this is a matter of national pride now.

So what are the, what's the situation in which that they managed to get this back? The Hermione is recapt of the coast of Venezuela, and it's just a classic, it's a cutting out expedition they're called. Oh. Very gallant and dashing. You go have a ship anchored off the coast, and at night you go in. and you kind of clamber aboard take it by stealth under the guns of the enemy

you know enemy forts you cut the anchor cable and you sail it back out and it's it's a classic French Revolutionary War and a Polonate War Royal Navy operation someone needs to make a film of HOS Y and E they do actually how has this not been done yet this is so cinematic film featuring where the establishment Royal Navy wins at the year it's classic Hollywood I can see that

falling over themselves to make that The heroic Irish mutiny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what they're going to say in it. Oh dear, yeah, maybe not. What do you think the legacy of this mutiny is? Because we have a handful of really famous mutiny stories in this period and we know how important discipline is to the British Navy

the extent to which they're prepared to go to meet up punishment and to warn people off doing this in the future. What's the legacy of this particular case? Well, the immediate legacy, yes, is that the British Empire asserts itself and control and it leaves no ambiguity around what will happen to people that do this. But there's a longer more subtle legacy, which is these people are not monsters and they realize that to have an effective rule navy, you can't rule by fear. There has to be that, those contracts have to be observed. You know, you are only as good as your crew who will sail and fight the ship. You are asking them to risk their lives on a daily basis sometimes, to storm ashore an enemy ship.

following you. Nelson didn't ever look around check if men were following him. When he, when he on Valentine's Day at the Battle of Capes and Vincent, when he attacks not one but two Spanish ships. He just leads his men. He knows they're behind him. Because he looks after them. Nelson's letters are full of discussions of food and water and cleanliness of his ships. So I think the longer time is that you do see a real discussion around flogging. This is part of that. Within a generation or two, flogging will be ruled out of Royal Navy ships. Even corporal punishment under flogging. So starting, there was a sort of knotted little rope that some people had just whack people occasionally as they go past, which is a parent. I must say, I started to. Quite fun to that.

I do not do that, but I understand why it might have been a useful kind of crowd control mechanism. And so things like that become, there's more regulations put in until that's kind of phased out as well. So I think, yes, the short-time consequence is. is smash, they are crushed. This is the Royal Navy maker statement. But long term, the Navy are learning and thinking and discussing with like this. We can't let sadists do this to the men. And there's a sort of jet, there's a slower decades-long shift.

I want to, as a kind of a reflection over the last two episodes that we've done together, Dan, just talk a little bit about Captain Anson again now. So this is from the previous episode we did with Dan, where we asked was it the most disastrous royal. Navy expedition that had ever happened. And actually, what's more remarkable now that we've spoken about Piggott and the fallout of that is actually how incredibly gifted a captain, Anson, must have been, given the conditions that that fleet endured to hold those men together, because that's all disaster, well, on the surface of it, that looks disastrous too. We have scurvy, we have

storms, we have all of this, but they stick with him. And they come, those of were left alive, not many in the end, 180, whatever it is, but they come back with him and he has another fleet, as you say, that's, again, very successful. I think it might be really easy in some ways if you just center the heroism of these men to go, oh, swash-bookling, blah, blah, blah.

But actually, the psychology behind somebody that's Anson successful and the interpersonal skills that he has to have, and you're talking about Nelson and talking about provisions, actually what it comes down to is that you're a bloody good administrator in some capacity. Anson was one of the greatest administrators the Navy has ever had.

He, in the seven years war, he transforms the supply of ships at sea, the health and welfare of the men. And he's doing that. Yes, I think they're doing that because there is a sense that it's sort of the right thing to do, just keep men alive under your command. But of course they're also doing that

because that is your greatest resource. You can more effectively take the fight to the French if your men are healthy, if they've got some energy in them, if they're having a decent diet, if they're not coughing up blood in the scuppers. So the Royal Navy, its reputation is of a kind of violent,

tyrannical organisation, but it wouldn't have been as effective if that was true. And there are hundreds and hundreds of ships. And many of them get into the most unimaginable scrapes, terrible examples throughout history. And 99% of the time, the crew do not rise up and kill their officers.

99% of the time, they work together and get themselves out of that scrape. and that is really very striking. Dan, thank you so much for sharing this history with us. If you are out there and you're a filmmaker and you want to make the film of HOSMI&E, get in touch. We will maybe rewrite some of the histories. Oh, I don't have time.

You can, I'm not. I'll do it. Get in touch with me. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can leave us a five-star review wherever you get a podcast. And if you want to be in touch, if you want to suggest more ship histories to us, then you can do so at afterdark at a history hit.com.

See you next time. .