After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Dark Reality of Life at Sea

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Dan Snow joins After Dark to reveal the brutal reality of life of sailors during the golden age of sail. From the cat o' nine tails, to the pressgang, from scurvy to mutineers. How did people survive the most extreme conditions imaginable?Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick and Mariana Des Forges. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign 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.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. We all have a picture in our heads of what life was like in the golden age of sailing. We think of adventure, buried treasure and swash-buckling heroes. But the reality was far from romantic. This was an era where more sailors died from disease than they did in battle.

Life at sea in this period was a daily struggle for survival, encamped, scurvy-ridden, rat-infested exile in the middle of the ocean. But today, we are going to explore this brutal reality and find out what it really took to survive a life on the high seas. Welcome to After Dark. You look up into the ragged sky. The ship's ropes are coated in ice. All other storms are nothing compared with the violence of these winds

that are raising mountainous waves. Any one of them could send you straight to the bottom. These are days of continual terror. The ship rolls incessantly, gunwale too, so violently that you're in danger of being dashed to pieces against the deck or sides if you ever lose your grip. Already one of the best seamen in the crew has been decanted overboard and drowned. Another dislocated his neck, a third sent crashing through the hatch to break his thigh. The most remarkable thing about all this? It's only going to get a few lines in a book you'll eventually write about your adventures at sea.

It'll be just a passing mention amidst the tales of mutiny, scurvy, and the hunt for treasure on the high seas during the glorious and gloriously dark days of the age of sail. Okay, we're going to be. After Dark, we have done, and I'm going to list them now, and you won't remember it, a single one. I'll tell you if I remember them. The Terra and Erebus. Remember that one? Okay.

Mutiny on the bounty. Yes. The ghost ship Mary Celeste. Not a clue. Really? I don't remember that. Wow. Okay.

The Batavia, you must remember the Batavia, yeah. And we got a lot of people writing in. We did. I still get pictures of the Batavia. In Australia. Okay. But today, we are joined by the captain of the good ship history here himself, our load star and hand on the killer. Did you make that up yourself or did you?

I absolutely did not. This is part of the script. It's in the notes. It's only bloody Dan Snow. Hello, Dan. Hey, guys. I've heard many of your ship episodes. I love the Batavia.

That was cool. Everyone loves the Batavia. And do they do well? Because if so, I've got, I promise I've got more where that came from. Ships do very well. And also the stories of the sort of desperate struggle to survive after the ship sings. Okay, well, guys, you come to the right place. Enclosed world narrative, right?

Where it's like everything is happening within this wooden world. And people are really intrigued by that. And when human nature breaks down. Yes, of course. You just can't beat it. 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? 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 hadn't been, at the forefront of sort of human development to 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 cultural interaction elsewhere and borrowing technology. Out of this sort of milieu of the 15th century comes these gigantic ships capable of ocean travel, which the Chinese had evolved, fascinating and then sort of turned away from, 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 smallpox in America, just as Americans alone, Europeans arrive, 90% of the indigenous population of 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 wittantly travelled across in.

They are the most complex objects ever created by human beings to that point in history. You look at HMS Victory in the sort of middle of this period, 1750s, it's laid down and fights to Battle of Trafalgar, famously 805. It is, there's 800 people on board. You imagine logistics to keep them all alive on these long ocean journeys. 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, you're 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? But for the human beings on board, to get to the point, unimaginable. I mean, unimaginable, because sailing is miserable today. Right? Sailing.

Like, I've crossed the Irish Sea many times. Yes, as of I. And you just wish you were anywhere else in the world, right? There are seasets, and that's with GPS. That is with waterproof clothing. You have done more than just across 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. And what does that do to you in terms of your understanding of the world? How does that shift things? 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 place, oh yeah, I can understand this is a, you know, this beautiful, I get why this story happened in this community in 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.

Yeah. No idea at all how any human being could survive with the equipment they had at the time. In the 18th century. It's simply unimaginable. Dan, 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. You're getting further away.

Yeah. Like, is that what appeals? Yeah, I guess so. Because you've written a count of Vasco Dargama'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 they're to deal with, the issues within the cruise, the equipment failures in the cruise. I mean, the ship's sinking, the scurvy, when you get scurvy.

And, of course, no one knows, no one has a clue about this. Yeah, what it is. Your old wounds open up, your teeth become loose in the gums. Yeah, it's unimaginatory. We've got corpses lying next to the barely living. You've got just a canful 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, for me, it's probably a spitfire piece will be writing in. It's never, you cannot find humans placed in more extreme situations. Yes, I agree. Then in those trenches the First World War or in that front line of Roman Union, or battling around Cape Horn on the wager that's been the subject to that, or the bounty you guys had talked about, they had a rough time going around the horn, or Drake entering the Pacific.

The humans cannot be anymore, and actually are 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. 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, is someone who grew up in Staffordshire and who, you know, Reginald Mitchell, home of the Spitfire, how dare you?

And it's a long way from the sea, that's very true. Yeah, I'm not. I'm someone who can appreciate the sea from the shoreline. Gorgeous, love it. Nice backdrop. Don't want to be on the water. Do you not? No, absolutely not.

No, absolutely not. I think I'd like to do it. 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 Sapphire 2. Specifically from Linda's Farn. So if anyone... Love to hell, really? She's thought about this. Oh yeah, yeah, that's the plan.

Welcome to after dark. Where we think of that, our funerals. Of course we do. Yeah, of course you do. I have to. And interesting 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 know, you can still, you mentioned the victory. Is that at Portsmouth or Southampton, Paul Smith? How could you? I knew someone who's taffish could ask that question. Yeah, sorry, I know. We're getting regional now, guys. It's all just the south to me. Yeah, it's just the south.

Why, that's monstrous. 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 the thing I found most interesting was the officers' quarters and the interiors, the furniture. Like, that's what interested me is. Beautiful. And the complete beauty, the complete giving over to aesthetics in a space that is otherwise completely functional. That fascinating.

designed to inflict murder. It's bizarre. Yeah, exactly. 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? They are 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 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 to and fro very quickly. And so what you get in this period is this mad melange where everyone's just going, we'll have a bit of this. Everything's a compromise. It's a nightmarish compromise, as you know, and 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. So Captain Cook chooses a, for his trips of exploration to the Pacific, he chooses these colliers, these ships that were designed to carry coal from, roughly speaking, Newcastle to London. So you're always choosing the right, and if you choose the wrong ship, you're in big trouble. So that you're trying to design for all of these different jobs and all of these different conditions. You sell 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 driving. 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 of, how do you plan for that? And I suppose it's where people on board these ships often don't agree what the function of them. As 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. of them, but there's not quite that many. And the owners are always saying to the skippers, 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 the Easter skips. Like, yeah, but I've got to take more supplies for my crew. And then it's like, I don't write the crew. Come off, there won't be that many left at the time you get back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the mortality on these ships, it is simply extraordinary to me why anybody went on these shit.

You know, Magellan sells around the, he doesn't make, he's killed in Southeast Asia. And, 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. Well, I tell you, as a younger, as an 17-year-old, a problem with them, and I think it's the same reason that we send young men into battle because at the battle of Somme, they know it's going to be, well, maybe not the Somme, but at certain stages, Passiondale, for example, later,

you know there's going to be horrific casualties, and I think every one of those 18-year-olds think it's not going to be there. There's a naivety to us. And I think if you're a second son, if you're an island and you're being beasted by the Protestants, you think, actually, I might just going to see. And like, so the algorithm feeds you the success, right? The dead men don't tell tales. What you do see is the lad, 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 Schueder England because of his buccaneering piracy, call it what you're on the high seas. And so you're all thinking about Drake. You are not thinking about the hundreds of men that follow Drake. Hundreds of men who have only watery graves.

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 see. That would be on my rider if I was going. But this isn't exactly what we're getting with press gangings. This is the opposite

of riders. Yeah. So the British government realized that the defence of the ocean around Britain is so essential that you will allow the Navy to breach our sort of 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 rule on the continent, you're a sort of tyrant, you grab anyone you want to 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, so you take the, you know, 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. 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. Like, no one. And drag you away. And then you could be at sea four years. Oh, God. It is hardcore. But typically how this was used to, so it was the hot press, which was just going to take everyone, and that was in times of emergency,

the outbreak in the Pollynet War, 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. It's incredibly dangerous, don't. I've just gotten that expression. I mean, when you're on one of these tall ships, there is a forest of ropes. Each one is a very precise purpose.

Don't know the ropes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. You could go grab the halid of the four stasel. I'd be like, stop yelling at me. I don't know what to do. Then you get hit with a little whip thing as well. But anyway, so actually you want mariners. So what they do is go on the key side.

You go to sailors pubs and you burst in and just drag them off. So 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just like, sorry, lads, you're all coming to sea. But there are some examples of people getting caught up in the press. 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 a, I caught it, at an auction. It's an old pewter mug that's got, 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 take the king's shilling. So 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, shit, somebody's giving me this. And the glass was to check that nobody had done that to you.

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. Well, many of them are going to die. They just require huge manning. The peacetime Navy was smashed because it's always paying any tax,

so it's reduced to a shadow of itself. And then in wartime, you have to take all the rappers off all those ships that are anchored there in the Medway and watch sir 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 and literate to a working family. And also, Captain's Successful, Captain Cochran, he was famous for being lucky and he would often stumble across enemy vessels. And you've got prize money. You've 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. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids,

and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we've been press-ganked. We've made it onto a Royal Navy ship. Speak for yourself. I definitely have not been pressing. Some of us are less happy about it than others.

I'm like the surgeon on board or something. I have to have some form of course. You think you have a choice in there. I don't know. They wouldn't, look, look, come on. If you were press ganging, would you come for me? No. But 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 Bettney. So I'm seeing the sort of handsome chiseled, rather. You can stop there, Dan, it's fine, you've said enough. Slightly uncomfortable in the maritime world around him. But an intellectual. Yeah, sure. I'll take all of that.

That's what I will be. I'll be the shit show. I'll tell you later what the circus has to do in battle. Oh, shit. I haven't seen that show. that film. I need to watch it, actually. I think I quite like it. Okay, so we're on, 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? Okay, so if we're on, sorry, listen, this is all very, I mean, if we're on, if we're on, let's go, Royal Navy. Yeah. And let's go sort of, roughly speaking, the sort of famous age of cell that people'd be familiar with, the age of 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 freelance. sea and just utterly chaos. I mean, again, how many one survived in the sixth 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 in the Atlantic, having been ambushed by the Spanish very early on. Anyway, so if you're on in the sort of age of Nelson, you're being paid, there is food provided for you. There's a lot of, historians like to argue about this, as you'd expect. A lot of it different from ship-chip, there were some brutal captains, no doubt, sort of traumatized lunatics or just psychopathic. Some crews were quite famous as being sort of flogging ships, where the Cat and Nine-Tales would come out, which is a whip with nine strands to it, knotted strands,

and it would be none. So Cat-N-Tales, 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 18th century, which is senior rates could just sort of whack you with a little whip occasionally if you just need. As long as it's a little whip, then that's why. Just needed a little bit of encouragement.

Remind you of your duties, yeah. There was a lot of booze involved. I mean 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 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 is, whatever little harbour town, the South, the General South, is totally gone. And here I am with a pounding headache in some kind of a hammock or on some kind of like a wooden slat thing, depending on what the accommodation was, that's not where I'm... We'd be used to it, I guess. After a few days, he'd be like, I just live with this. Yes, true, true. 14 inches, by the way, for your hammock, you're bumping up against people all the time. I've read to Drake again, but 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 sells past Morocco, and they all start going... Let's not a second, too. When are we going home because I'm tired. But I do you think that's really interesting, though, that 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 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. And yet, there's very few examples of a mutiny in the Royal Navy in the era of Niles. There are a few, well, there's some famous examples, but 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 it. this guy. You know, this guy is completely bizarre, like bizarre. And I think 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 be, to everyone to win here is to

sort of roughly speaking work with the grain. Yeah. And it's not, now listen, there are all, like there are different periods, different times, different places. There are obviously slave ships that are just a point where they've taken slave Africans across the Atlantic to be sold in the Caribbean and the Americas. Conditions on those unimaginable

huge numbers of enslaved men and women and children dying 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 by this period you're in the Royal Navy

you're getting a sense that like good leadership there is the beginnings a little bit of HR there's a little bit of managing the crew and also if you don't want the crew to just jump overboard when you do arrive at port and abscond, which would happen as well, you do think, I might try and keep them a little bit sweet. So it's not.

Recent scholarship has said that actually it was, I mean, modern humans and be able to cope with it. It's a brutally hard life, but punishment wasn't the worst feature of it, probably. For me, I think this idea that you're talking about of 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 and potentially that there's, like, dangerous elements, individuals that are brought on. Do we have accounts of that happening?

Yeah, definitely. So I don't want to get the old woke history. Don't slide into our DMs on the woke history, but everyone who goes on board a ship at this time says it was an extraordinarily cosmolitan place. You hear Danish, you hear, there are people from North Africa. There are people of colour. There are a lot of Irish.

A vast number of Irish. We tend to get on the sea if we can. You get everywhere. An astonishing portion of Wilson feet at Trafalgargraf tommet. Wow. Astonishing. So we don't know that. We don't know that in Ireland.

You know, we're very difficult with those histories. We're not comfortable with them. That's difficult history. And so obviously, Waterloo, as you know as well, the land armies famously these Irish units an Irishman serving in English units. Anyway, so that's why it's thought, and you're all living within unbelievably confined space.

There is disease. There is a lot of focus on troublemakers, dealing with troublemakers. They might be lashed. They might... I suspect you'd get rid of a troublemaker. You'd say, actually, get rid of them at the first port to call.

If there's a sort of socialist revolutionary on board, the be a bit of anachronistic. You might... Which you do see in some of these... These scenes in the 1790s, see kind of individual leaders described as troublemakers, but they got quite political.

And discipline, apart from anything else, so less even than the harmoniousness of the ship, weeing and pooing is a massive issue. Yeah, yeah, of course. Because in the middle of the night, it's howling gale up above, you know. And you don't actually... What, inches from someone else?

Yeah, I might just go and have a quick weed down the size of ship. And French ship were famously unhygienable. But the Brits were obsessed with cleanliness because they'd learn from bitter experience. Yeah. I mean, you're talking, 1500, 600, fleets get wiped out by disease. There's a French fleet in the 18th century.

is seven years war that survives back in Brest, just, and then passes on that sort of plague, basically, to the people of breast. I mean, wipes out French naval, further undermines the French naval capability in that for the start 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, where you think, no one'll notice in there. It's dark, pitch back 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 there where the water would still, sea water would spray and wash off the, whatever it was, you know. Do you think, I suppose because these ships are floating microcosms of the British Empire, they embody these values. We have, you know, the men below decks with their sort of earthenware mugs and then you've got, you know, beautiful blue and white porcelain in the office's 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, referenced the 1790s mutinies. I'm thinking of spitheaded nor in particular, which obviously happened somewhere in the south. I don't know. It's just the south, somewhere in there. But, you know, very, very close to home. Whereas, do you think it's fair down 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 idea of home? 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 having breastcount, and they literally that day go, sorry, turn around, lads. You're all transferring now onto HMS, you know, Tonnan. We're leaving port tomorrow. and there were issues.

That still happens in the army today. Well, exactly. But if you're not there, if you're not there because you want to be, then it's quite... Yeah, if you haven't chosen it, 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 Bounty's 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. Because the theory,

there's various theories around that. One is that you want posh people command of 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 take over power next to the king. So in army, you want posh people. Also, all they have to do, really, is show that there's an old expression of the British army. Sargent's teach men how to fight. Officers teach men how to die. So if you just get your gear on, stand up, straight back, in front of the men, as the French are advancing, and don't flinch when the bullets start,

sort of the job of an officer. That's how you're going to do us. Most people can do that, right, if you want to. Probably not me, but most other people. Now, you give someone the keys of a naval ship. These are the most expensive thing the British state is building at this point. You want somebody knows what they're doing. Now, there is patronage, surprise, surprise, well connected and posh of 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 right. So there is a meritocracy there. And therefore, they are quite, given the, you know, in all the panoply of the Georgian state, there were people who knew what they were doing in charge

these ships, and they knew how to run a crew, they'd gone to see it 14. And so I think they were quite good at, and some of them didn't need to use the lash. Some of them 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 experienced. These were really, really good sales. Yeah, the fact that so many of them have gone to see so young, I'm thinking of, is it Thomas Raffles, who goes to Singapore, he was born on a ship. And 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 this system.

Son of a gun. Yeah, who literally... Maddie, fancy giving birth on a ship? Oh, my God. That's a no. I'm in denial and will not be giving birth at any point. Thank you very much. It's not happening.

It's not how I choose not to. We were talking about all of these things that, you know, you're talking down about keeping 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 some things 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 seed efficiency but what does that actually look like if you are on board of these ships it's a hellish thing they didn't know so no for it you can't transport fresh vegetables

so the food is salted beef salted pork bit of dried fish sometimes and it's vegetables for the first few days and then none and hard tacks a bread that's baked super hard and will last and you whack it so we get the weevils come out of it and then you soak it in...

What's a weevil? A weevil's just a little... It looks like a little caterpillar. Oh, they're actual insects? Yeah, they're insects, yeah. Oh. So you whack it. Some people ate the weevils for protein.

Not for me, but okay. And you dip it in your punch and you try and sort of gnaw into it your molars and get torn out. So that is a diet without vitamin C and that is why, on long journeys, like Dargama, like Magellan, like frankly, like most of what,

like the wager like anyone you can mention that oh like Anson going around the world he takes a lot of Chelsea pensioners with him these old guys can't we can't find enough people so he takes old people from the from the army's retirement community and all their old wounds from decades before starting out of the whole body

I mean scurvy scurvy is really bad that's quite zumbification I actually don't know why my kids don't get scurvy because they have always someone in my university hall has got scurvy really yeah what's going some it was a boy obviously

that's white toast yeah yeah yeah white toast and like cans of coke i think that's like literally that's insane 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 you will lose more men in a shipwreck than you will in battle trafalgar people heard of more brits are killed when the royal george capsizes of portsmouth than in the battle trafalgar more people were killed with queen caroline h miss queen caroline in fact blew up by mistake at then we're killed in the Battle of Nile.

I mean, so these are mass casualty events when these ships. So then in the 19th century you got the complication of they don't really, 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

where the most number of naval personnel killed in an instant between the Napoleon War 1815 ending and the First World War. Somewhere 800 people just got on it in an instant flash in the most hellish death you can imagine capsizing, trap below, boilers exploding, steam fragments, obliterating people anywhere nearby. It complete darkness and the ship sinks the bottom of the sea and the Bay of Biscay.

So these are horrific events and again there are ships lost with all hands regularly through this period. In a world where swords were sharp. And hygiene was, actually, probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis. And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

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. Is this the Royal Weeks? I was thinking I didn't do this. No, Dan and I. Oh, Dan and you, right. Okay.

And the Royalry as well. I refer to myself in the third person for now. 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 a treasure island or is it something far more nuanced? I think there were a few less sort of ghosts involved. but although depending on your point of view I think pirate there would have a very very fine line between pirates merchantmen and naval officers or certain naval ratings and actually in times of peace you've got a massive all the navy just fires all of it

so lots of its sailors and lots of its experience of senior sailors and like ships of 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 if you sail past a Danish ship and you had a rather if you sell 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 onwards.

So, as you say, it's everything. You know, the dirty world of the transatlantic slave trade. You're down there. You're a ship. 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 tail of what is just a sort of monstrous scene going on generally

in the same way that you might, you know, a bit of, 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 you sort of shots are fired occasionally with some ex-sides men, you're branded a pirate, you know, whatever. So it's a very, very diverse world. But what's amazing, as I suddenly thought, as I was saying this, is that we haven't even talked about sea battles yet, because everyone's perception will be the mass capes.

So 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 the idea is Nelson's plan was to get as close to you can, to the enemy and bombard them at not point blank range, 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 then? People jumping over. One famous Irishman at the Battle of Trafalgar 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, HMS victory, and actually, I think it's the Temerere, in a British ship, curiously, crashes into the Ré de Tabler French ship, and the French crew had been gathering on the bouts. They knew they couldn't beat HMS victory in a cannon battle. They'd be gathered on to jump onto HMIS,

which can take it over by force, you know, hand to hand. And Temerere just comes out of the smoke, out of nowhere, crashes into her and just fires these carones, these cutting-edge state-of-the-art guns, that just annihilate. I mean, First World War levels of casualties of this French crew. You know, supersonic pieces of iron just scream through these men

shattering limbs, tearing people. When they do hit wood, they gouged splints out. You've got a foot long, sharp splinters of wood just flipping through the air, ripping people to piece. And that's where the surgeon comes in, because he's sort of vaguely, he's hiding and then I'll emerge.

No, he's down the depth of the ship and they're carrying people down. These long queues. Nelson's carried down at Schoferga. And he says, 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 on his own blood. But, you know, so the surgeon's just there whose tools are getting blunt and he's soaring limbs off trying to save limbs that have been smashed. Or rather trying to save the human life after a limb has been smashed.

So those are the battles that people will know about, and they're terrible, they can be terrible enough, but more people die of disease. Yeah, isn't crazy. And, you know, whether the story's in the 70s war, where they're working the sales 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 trying to work sails and ropes. I mean, it's just wild. I think that's one of the things that we'll take away. We do have a closing question for you, but before we get there, 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. And we've seen so much Hollywood depiction. Yeah, because also we don't know, 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 to sort of, you can go,

I've climbed a mast and I've, in sub-zero temperatures and certainly, yeah, but then you... In your modern gear that's keeping you warm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of soul-destroying thing. Yeah, the psychological and the physical effect is... 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 labor quite early in life.

Oh, dying at 32 or something ridiculous. Just grind down. Okay, my final question before we go is this. If you had to pick one ship... Oh, like, how can you ask me this? Because it's a podcast and I've been asked to ask questions. No, 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 be on why? Well, it's too cruel. It's like asking truth between your children. But I think there's 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

there's lots of other battleships around all the time. You're waiting for a battle to occur. So it's 99% boredom, one percent, absolute carnage. You want to be on a shit and you're just raiding. So you're just causing trouble. So people might have heard of Thomas Cochran, Lord Cochran. He's the character. In fact, who the Master and Commander film and books are based on,

his job is just go around the coast of Europe and just make an absolute new stuff. of himself. And he lands in the middle of 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 attacks a convoy. He's just naughty and brilliant. And he goes on to have this extraordinary career. And he at one stage he creates a big floating bomb and sails it towards a French fleet at anchor with a gale rising. He sets the counter 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 trying to attack the French. I mean, so it was just sun up to sundown. In fact, beyond that, high jinks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is the ship I'd like. We are overdue a period drama of this. I know there's the film, but they only made it last, right? Disney can do something or something.

And who is your favourite child? Oh, yes, well. No, no. Okay, we won't make you answer that one. Do you not want to answer about the ship yourself? I would know enough about ships to know. The only ships you've covered on this podcast, they've all ended very, very hard. 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. 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. Something gentler. Yeah, yeah. And what about you?

Do you have one? 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. Except you'd never be able to come back and tell us. 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.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. That cold. I'd like the cold. Anyway, okay, go on. Well, there we go. If you have any ship recommendations, that's ship recommendations for episodes, then do email in at after dark at history hit.com we really want to hear. We want to do more. I think and also

the other day we did a train episode and now I'm obsessed with doing more trains. We need all crimes on trains. So any kind of transportation. Yeah, basically. We're open to all transport. Do you leave us a five-star review wherever you get podcasts and we will see you next time. Goodbye.