After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Most Disastrous Voyage in Navy History

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

It's hard to wrap your head around all the disasters that befell Captain Anson's Royal Navy voyage around the world in the 1740s. Rampant scurvy, horrendous storms, marooning and mutiny to name but a few. 90% of the original crew never returned. Those who made it back to Britain were hailed as heroes for surviving!The one and only Dan Snow joins Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling for this unbelievable tale of naval adventure and endurance.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.

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. Imagine setting sail onto the open ocean with nearly 2,000 men, six walls, warships and orders to attack the enemy Spanish across the Pacific. Now imagine returning four years later with a single ship and only a few hundred survivors. That was the result of the voyage undertaken by Captain George Anson, one of the most disastrous and most consequential journeys around the world ever undertaken. Welcome to After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony.

And I'm Maddie. And today we are talking about a very tumultuous naval expedition, something that we have come to know and love here on After Dark. And it will feature a man whose name might be somewhat familiar to you, Commodore Captain Anson. And we'll be asking the question if this is the most, I can tell you now it is, the most disastrous naval expedition that was ever undertaken. I think that is a fair analysis. This is a story about the British Empire, about I suppose, the struggle for human ambition and the fight for survival as well, really.

Joining us for this discussion is none other than Dan Snow. Welcome aboard, Dan. Oh, it's good to be here. We're going to go hard on the ship metaphors today. Yeah, I've already run out of ship metaphors. It says in my script, ohoy, Dan. As a mariner, is that something we should say to you? That would be great.

That was one of the, when they invented the telephone, that was one of that we didn't know what we should. say on the telephone and one of them was you go, Ahoy! I'm adopting that instantly. Could never be me, but... Every voice note on what's up to you now. I'm all, y'all. Yeah, you're gay.

When I got the message that you guys wanted to talk 18th century naval warfare again, I got so happy. I'm here. And you have very little happiness in your life generally, so you can thank us for that. Yeah, you're very welcome. You are not dressed for the occasion, though, Dan. We were discussing off mic, your

proclivity for dressing as certain 18th century characters. I'm not because to be honest you two wouldn't be able to concentrate on the job. I would just look so fabulous. You're just too appealing. Fact. Right, come on. We've got a lot to get through in this episode. 1730s. Should we do, should you and I do a bit of context? Then we'll hand over to Dan for the most specific of some of the days. We have 18th century PhDs. We know a thing or two. Do you? Yeah. Go on then. Off you go. Well, so what we're talking about here is we're in the 1730s and then we will go into the 1740s for this specific history. We have.

have unrest and action going on between the English and the Spanish for certain territories, this is going to coalesce around this particular fleet as they set sail to try and regain some of that land from the Spanish. But it is not going to go. We've also had the war of Jenkins ear, right? One of my faves. Yeah, yeah. Great old, great old title there. And so now we're heading off and to help us on our way, Dan, introduce us to George Anson, who is he? So George Anson is a professional Navy officer, goes to see as they do age 14, 15, very young, as a boy. And he serves a kind of brutal apprenticeship. He is a member of the British elite. He's got very, you know, his brother, he was taught math by one of Isaac Newton's friends.

He comes from a big estate. But he's a younger brother, so he needs to make his own sort of fortune in life. And there's a really important thing about the Navy. So it's, it's a merit of organization, it obviously helps a lot. If you have a great education, great connections, you can get those kind of key initial starts in life. But you need to know what you're doing. So there's a great expression in the 18th century Navy, a great expression about Britain, which is in the army, in the army, some crazy Toff, some rich guy, aristocrat, doesn't really have to know what he's doing. He just goes and stands there, wears a red coat, and stands bolt up right as bullets are whizzing round his head. And that's kind of what he's going to do. So there's an

expression. The sergeants show men how to fight. The officers show men how to die. So you stand up and you show bravery, face the French, and then just the sergeants will shout for your soldiers to shoot it. The enemy. That's not true in the Navy because these are the most expensive things the British States ever purchase these ships. They are the most sophisticated objects on earth at the time. Miles of rigging. Dozens and dozens of guns in the case of Anson ship that he sells around the world in. They're incredibly expensive. They're incredibly precious, they're very delicate. You're going to the most dangerous places on earth. Frankly, the Thames Estuary is one of the most dangerous places on earth. But if you're so wild, either Irish

sea on a good day is a horrible place. So you need to know what you're doing. So he is learning, he's passing exams for lieutenant. He is, yes, he's being helped in his career because he's an aristocrat's got great, but he's, you have to get where you're on time. So he is a phenomenally effective naval officer. And Britain, unusually the war of Jenkins here, which starts when a merchant's sailor or slash smuggler gets a bit of his ear chopped off by the Spanish Coast Guard. He's smuggling sugar into Spain's Empire in South America. The Tory

party parade this guy around Westminster with bit of his ear missing. And they sort of try and put pressure to go to war. They like, Britain is unusually experienced quite a long period of peace at this point. And Britain is, there are people who just want to fight

the French, fight the Spanish, fight the Catholics, get at it, you know, and the natural posture of Britain should be taking the fight to the enemy and Robert Warpole, who's the first prime minister and has been ruling a long time, he reluctantly agrees to go to war and there's one of the most catastrophic expeditions to the Caribbean.

They do capture Portobello, hence Portobello in London and Portobello in Edinburgh. And there's a Spanish port in Panama. And that's where they compose Royal Britannia as well. But they then send out, then there's a complete disaster also in the Caribbean, but they send out Anson to sail around the world, which no British naval expedition's ever done before into the Pacific.

That is surprising. It is surprising. Drake has done it. Drake's a kind of freelance crazy guy in the Judah period. Obviously, Quinilism is kind of backing with money and so and do it. But he's a freelancer. This is the Royal Navy projecting power in the Pacific for the first time. Quite interesting.

What I love by Anson is he is, like me, from Staffordshire, a landlocked county. Also, for after-dart listeners who might be interested, he comes from the Shugborough State, which is just a few miles from Ruzli, where Palmer the Poisoner is from. We've done multiple episodes on him. He's a little bit later into the 19th century, but interesting little connection there.

So Dan, talk to me about why Anson specifically is selected for this, and what the mission is. You say he's going to go out into the Pacific, he's going to circumnavigate the globe, but there's also this kind of idea that he's going to antagonize the Spanish at every opportunity, right? He's just going to take the fight for the Spanish. I mean, it's an amazing.

If you're a naval officer, this is a dream job. It's sort of an open. contract, right. You're far in no one. There's no emails. There's no phones, no VHF, no tele, but you are out. So he's given that job because he's very, very good. And he's thought worthy of a detached command.

He's a good chap. He's reliable. He's not to do anything absolutely bonkers. He's not going to, he knows the mind of the politicians because he's frequently, hangs out with them, he shoots them, he makes love to their sisters, whatever it is, right? So this is, he's a reliable member of the elite, knows what he's doing, great sailor. And he's going to go into the Pacific. Now, why he's going to get the Pacific?

Because Spanish money is into, the whole Spanish imperial project is dependent on this massive mountain, literal mountain of silver in Peru. And that gets mule trained down to the coast in what is now Lima, on the coast. And then it sells up the coast, Acapulco, well, it's a very special, it's a Panama, where it's then put, say, over the ethmos, another mule train, and it sales off to Spain across the Atlantic. or it plugs into East Asian trade because the Spanish also in the Philippines they got trade with China and various other places

and so there's a huge trading highway to Acapulco in Mexico over to that so his job is to get amongst that and cause maximum trouble In fact his job weirdly is to go to Peru and try and ferment like a major rebellion against Spanish like maybe even replace Spanish power with sort of British power or a kind of puppet state

like really ambitious crazy stuff It's a bold plan isn't it? This is bold as hell Yeah it's this sort of thing like the beginning of an adventure film or novel, isn't it? It's just sort of ridiculous. It's good, but it is actually. It's kind of like you're going out on an astonishing mission.

It's the kind of mission that you, I think, you also come up with when you've been at peace for a couple of decades and you've sort of forgotten how hard it is to fight war. And you've got high on your own supply and there are examples that you will all be able to think of a little bit close to our period of time. And you've, the older politicians have sort of, they've forgotten what it's like to look at an army coffee, like. you know, loosing their guts in trenches and coughing blood up and typhus ripping through forces and money and just disappearing into a black hole of violence.

That's not in the consciousness. You're like, we're great. We're all Britannia. We're the best. Like, let's send out this fleet of the Pacific and just to reorder the entire geopolitical order. So it's, but it's the dream job for him. So he goes out with six warships and two merchant vessels, right, that he takes out. There's one kind of reasonably serious warship called the Centurions, some smaller ones and some

merchant vessels. And who is aboard? We know Anson is trusted, he's experienced, who are the people who are serving under him? Well, his crews are good, he got good sailor. I mean, they know, they are sailors. It's the beginning of a war, so a lot of them will have been press ganged from the merchant routes, so from

merchant ships, some unwillingly famously for the Royal Navy. But there are also, I think what we're getting at here, there's an idea that's going to be amphibious operation, which is just so bold. So the idea is, you know, 500 soldiers on board, they're going to storm ashore and capture the heart of the Spanish Empire in Peru and stuff. Well, it's crazy.

By the way, we haven't got any soldiers, so just try and find somewhere. They find those soldiers in an invalid hospital. They sort of affect with the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. People are familiar with that. So these are old and infirm pensioners. They fought in wars 30 years before. It is wild. They carry their old wounds. Lots of them just say, we're not going and abscond. A bunch of them do tell them. It was about 250, I mean.

Many of them on stretcher. They are stretched onto the boat. This is not D-Day, lads. You can see the holes in this plan already. It's also still an incredibly ambitious to project force that far. In fact, I'm wondering if any military operation in history has ever tried to project an amphibious force that far before in history. So the other side of the world, when your supplies spoil, we do not understand the causes

or the cure for scurvy. If you pack salted pork into a barrel, that barrel, that barrel, technology, if there's any floor in that barrel, it's just going to rot straight as you can imagine. You're carrying your water. They're traveling across the Atlantic. It depends on good weather. I mean, this is astonishing, ambitious. And what we see is that everything does go wrong. We have this idea that we are now packed into these collection of ships. We are setting sail from Britain. We're heading to South America. Growning. Like, there are cows and sheep on the decks. There are supply.

You can't fight the ships because they're so covered in supplies. So if the enemy term, you wouldn't be able to like, the cannons kind of lash the side. They're just like mounds of supply. Have to move the sheep first. Yeah, exactly. Old people being sick. And the people on the stretchers. I mean, it's a motley, motley set up.

And also like loads of young people recruited who've never been to war before. So it's this mixture of just like readiness with the absolute on readiness going. And straight away there's portance of doom because. they set sail from Britain and the winds are against them. It gets disastrous pretty quickly. I mean, this is the problem, right? I mean, even on a good day, the problem is the wind in the winds in the English Channel are a nightmare

and they blow in the direction that you wish to travel. So it often takes a long time to leave your own environment. And so that is a problem. You're trying to keep this unwieldy group of ships together. Listen again, no. You have to like see each other. Yeah. So like if you get lost, you kind of have to rendezvous and wait and tack back and forward on the same degree like line of longitude, like latitude.

It's, it's difficult. But these are things that they would expect to happen, right? They would have some level of preparation and anticipation for this at this stage. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I don't know. I mean, this is where you just think I don't really understand what they were people knew like, like McGellen went around the world and well he didn't. He was killed halfway. McGillen's off. People know that if you sail around the world, nearly all of you aren't coming home.

Like everyone knew this. People are sailing to India in this period. And yet people, people go, I mean, some of them are impressed, but plenty of them would have been up for it. And it's just very difficult sometimes to kind of put yourself in their position. I think this is a particular story where there is this kind of this huge force of British ambition in this moment. And it's something that, you know, I think maybe in our modern mindset, we slightly can't. tap into that, this idea that you would sacrifice yourself for your nation, that this sense of duty and this kind of, yeah, national hunger for power and success would drive you as an individual. But also we are going to see that very human need for survival as well. And these things are going to come into conflict. You bet. Now, we should say in this period, naval warfare is weird. So if you capture an enemy ship, you share the value on that ship so that you'll motivate our money. And I, you know, you guys talk a lot about this in your podcast. But it's very difficult for us to me. If you're an 18 year old or 20 year old, your choices at home in Staffordshire, in Devon, in in Connort, in, you know, Perthshire, like, what are your life chances looking like? How hard is your life there? Do you think, yeah, let's just gamble it? You watch friends dropping dead from appendicitis.

You don't know why at age 19, 20, 30. So you're thinking, well, may as well have an adventure. Let's have a go. And of course, as we all know, like, look at, I mean, like young kids sign up to football, soccer academies here in the UK. None of them are going to make it. But they all do because we all know the names of the 50 who do make it, right? So there are famous stories in England and Ireland and all these at the time of people coming back

going, I am incredibly rich. And you go, well, like, you know, dead men don't tell tales. And the stories you hear are the fabulously successful ones. So I guess, you know, they are heading out into the anti-the-the-the-food is. As you say, the winds are terrible. Food is spoiling straight away. The ships aren't working. These things are made of wood.

The ships aren't the highest quality in some cases. Bits falling off them. Sea sickness, brutal. I mean, and that's before, hardly, we've hardly left yet. I'd be throwing up in the channel. I'd be like, just drop me somewhere. Like, I'm just, I'm not going out. Yeah, exactly.

So we get out of the channel. We are at sea. Disease hits pretty quickly. Dissetries tearing through the ships, right? Yes, actually, you're right. So there's the, we should, there's various categories, the various bins of disease that unpercent things can have to get at sea. Give us the full list.

So, yeah, there's the ones that are connected with diet. And so you're scurvy and that will, we can probably come onto that and say it. But, I mean, that just destroys, that almost destroys this operation. And scurvy is a horrific disease caused by the lack of vitamins, like fresh fruit and vegetables in your diet. So at this stage in the 1730s, they didn't know. We don't know. They didn't know to take lemons with them and things. No lemons, no limes.

No limes yet. Right. And it's vegetables spoil at sea, right? So it's very difficult. Eventually people start experimenting with like sauerkrauts. It's quite difficult thing to keep on fresh food on long voyages. So there are diseases that come from the hardship of being at sea or ailments. Scurvy will, your teeth fall out.

Old wounds open up. So all the old soldiers I've mentioned, if they had a wound fighting King Louis the 14th men back in the old war under Queen Anne, Those wounds start opening up again and bleeding. You can imagine the conversation's happening on board then that these men are sort of like, where did you get that? You know, and then you can imagine there's sort of histories that are being told as the pussy. Very rich podcast environment, guys. There's content flying around.

You guys. So, you know, teeth fall out, hair falls out and you fall into a stupor. It's a nightmareish disease. But also they apparently bring with, as inevitably happens, when you're recruiting from urban sports and urban area slums, people bring on board virulent disease. So quite early in the Atlantic, just people are dying of communicable disease

because you're crowded in these environments. There's all sorts of rules on Navy ships about do not defecate, do not urinate below decks, and it's like absolutely, people are so strict on that. But inevitably, your disease is very, it's very rare. Your hammock space is kind of 28 inches or something and you're bumping into someone else all night. I mean, you are coughing, sharing lights, whatever.

Yeah, the proximity. proximity on board never fails to surprise me and I think unless you go onto one of the spaces like HMS victory for example on the south coast and you were in that space you can't really compute it I think we just we have such distance between us now in the modern world that you can't imagine living and working in some 800 men aboard HMS victory so you're just packed in the whole time and just sharing disease so they do make it all the way to Brazil yeah in the December of that year and they, I mean, this is so grim. They decide to drop anchor there and to basically move all the people who are suffering from disease,

of which there is now a large number, onto the shore, so they can clean the ships and try and get some semblance of normality back. But of course, you move people onto the shore where they contract further disease. So it's a real disaster. Yes, I should mention the third bin of disease, which are the diseases that Europeans are, when Europeans go to different latitudes and yellow fever is so famous one that used to kill people in the West Indies

for example, what Europeans go to the West Indies in just vast quantities, malaria famously in West Africa. So yeah, no, that's right, I forgot about that. So there's also, and there's a lot of things and we haven't got, and we are not, no one's shooting at us yet. So let's not forget that. But it's coming. And the other thing that's coming is, and Dan kind of referenced this already,

is that for now we're together. We're about three, four months in. We've reached Brazil, but we're about to get separated. And this, for me, is actually one of the scariest things about having to regroup. But we will talk about that when we come back after this short break. So I mentioned before we went to break that I have this fear of this fleet breaking apart slightly and being thrown to the winds and they're on separate parts of the sea and they're having to renegotiate themselves back together.

And that is what happens now, Dan, with HMS Pearl, is separated from the rest of the fleet. And this leaves them particularly vulnerable, doesn't it? Yeah, it leaves them very vulnerable because they're safety in numbers. Yeah. They are not a particularly well-armed ship. The Spanish know that the Spanish and French have been like Qualimintelligence. They know that this operation's underway. They tried to, they actually tried to ambush them in Madeira in the Portuguese island.

That didn't quite work out very narrowly. The Brits managed to avoid that. And now pearls by herself and is attacked. Yes. So she runs into its Spanish ships disguised as English ships, right? Which is, I mean, just the bad luck of this. And I think as well it kind of speaks to the fact that the Spanish know about Anson's mission. They have got wind of it.

And they have been briefed to look out for them and to cause havoc back, right? So they are not only having to deal with the weather, the seascape itself, what's happening on board disease, the rapidly diminishing rations, all of that. They have to watch out for the Spanish who they are there to fight and to intercept and all the rest of it. But the Spanish are willing to fight back. Yeah, the Spanish enter the chat. And this is Spanish territory. They know this coast better than the Brits.

This is that they are, you know, they have their own challenges. But yeah, this is their empire. And they are, they spring up. They attack the Pearl. And Pearl has to do that thing, which is throw a lot of its supplies over the side to escape. Yeah. And which is actually as disastrous as being badly damaged. because you then can't really go on

if you've chucked all, what pressure supplies do you have, you've chucked into water. Well, they probably went earlier on, right? I'm imagining if they're probably already eaten. So am I right thinking the captain at the Pearl dies, I think he is killed in this skirmish before they managed to regroup?

Do we know this? Yes, sure. The captain, the pearl, so the captain's killed, which is always bad for morale. Not great. And so they sustain losses. And so Pearl is effectively going to get

knocked out of this. So the flotilla is just going to get whittled down. Yeah, and it continues to get whittled down. They do manage to regroup under Anson, and they head towards Cape Horn. But they're now going into this very dangerous part of the world at completely the wrong time of year, aren't they? And they're now going to have to compete with the weather. We're now heading into March 1741, right? This is not ideal.

I'm sort of laughing in a way because of all the things we've already discussed. The idea that you then arrive at Cape Horn is just the most. monstrous. I don't know how it's even, the Cape Horn is the worst place on Earth probably to sail. Have you sailed there? No, I'm not crazy. So Cape Horn, around the bottom of the Earth, there's the only, world's only circumpolar ocean. So there's an ocean that goes all the way around the world, unbroken by land. And as a result, the wind absolutely whips around. It's called the roaring 40s and the furious 50s degrees of latitude. And it wants the expression, they say, like beneath in the 40s there's no there's no law and in the 50s there's no god because

it's like it's just god's not watching if you have to you have to do anything you have to survive no one like yeah anyway so they try and sail the wrong way this is the other issue is the wind is blowing against the wind just whips around and they they and you're trying to sail against the wind and get round so the one piece of land that does stick into this ocean is the bottom of argentina chili it's cape horn so you've got to go down into that ocean just to sail around that bit before you get out of it. And it is famously just a nightmare and it swallows up men and ships throughout history.

It's still a horrible place today. And they get caught in the most astonishing storms. What's morale like on board at this point? Oh, disastrous. You know, your fight, well, it's disastrous, but in a way you're bonded by the fact that you're all going to die. So your only hope of survival is to trust your command structure.

And if the captain is like, tack the ship you even if you're scurvy ridden broken by now also we you know have exposure issues cold weather injuries food you're you're you're you're taking on this enormous physical challenge that today all these kind of like cool you know guys take on and it's really really challenging day but they've got you know all their left food and they've got their you know they're they're all prepared and they're all doing lots of instagram videos about how tough they are well you're you're doing this having had the worst six months of your life leading up to it so you're you're you've tritted your body already.

In your 18th century clothing as well. You're not protected. Yeah. So morale's kind of bad in that no one's having great time, but it's not, it's not kind of disrupt, I don't think disrupting the workings of the ship because... Command is still in place. Yeah, because if you fall out, you could die, you know, unless you work together on these ships and these rigs.

But, yeah, on one ship, the wager, for example, everyone's starting to realize that there's problems with leadership and, like, it's just, it's going to destroy any of. We should say, for listeners, that the wager is, one of the ships in this fleet and it is going to splinter off and have its own adventure, its own disastrous story. And there's a great book by David Gran about just this. Yeah, which is really fantastic. You must have done that podcast. We haven't. Oh, well, you've got to do the wager. It's a favourite book of both of us, so we absolutely should. You'll do the wager. So it goes off on its own adventure. It disappears. In these terrible storms, it's separated,

it then crashes into the coast of South America. I mean, can imagine how terrifying in Patagonia. You're at the lookout, your child, you have no idea where you are. You've been You've been blown around by the wind at night. You haven't seen the sun for days. You can't take your celestial readings. You think we probably went about 20 miles last night, mostly in westerly direction, I guess. Then one morning, you know, the clouds lift a bit

and you just see the savage coastline of a foreign shore, white waves crashing on rock. And you're like, well, okay. And you have to think, so I suppose, about the 18th century European imagination, right? That even though a lot of people on these ships will have gone to places like that before, potentially, or at least they've seen a bit of the world.

There is a sense that these are unknown, strange and dangerous lands to go to. And Byron, who's, I think, the captain on the wager, does come back to Britain. Is it after that expedition or maybe it's a previous one where he basically claims that he has seen giants in Patagonia? There are giant men and people in London are like, yes, we buy this. That's terrifying and exciting. Because that is the European imagination of these lands. You're in a place that you can't imagine. And they do have interactions of Indigenous people

and in fact are saved in some examples by those because they've got knowledge, they know what plants to eat, what to avoid, like kind of stuff. But yeah, it's just you're in a different world. Yeah, exactly. The other thing, I mean, you mentioned there about being scurvy ridden. Let's just talk about the state of people's health at this point because scurvy is now a huge problem as well as the weather, isn't it?

Scurvy by now is causing, there's people, the below decks are just crowded with people that are listless, are unable to participate. So as your ship is fighting for its life, people down below are starving. They are crushed by scurvy. There are occasions when you do get so close to the coast, they just, when they go, my God, we've got to attack

or we've got to turn the ship around. There's a cow of people sort of try and lift themselves in their bunks and just stack and crawl up onto the deck to try and pull a little bit of rope or something. I mean, it's just, the hardships are, you can't really imagine. and anything like. There's a quote here from Pasco Thomas, who's on board the Centurion. He says, I've seen four or five dead bodies at a time, some sewn up in the hammocks and others not

washing about the decks for want of help to bury them at sea. I mean, it's bleak stuff. You're too tired to bury the dirt, yeah. Yeah. And then they, and then navigations are, we never, this is another one for a little bit. Navigations, they don't really know where you are. And so there's these tragic moments when they, he just gets it slightly wrong and they sail for ages in the wrong direction, expecting to sort of hit my island. And then they have to realize they've gone. And they go all the way back. Like, it's just... I can't stand that if my sat nav goes wrong.

And then I'm like, I've gone 10 minutes in the wrong direction. That really pisses me off. I wouldn't survive this anyway. That is that feeling, but times... A thousand. Infinite ocean. Yeah. Right, let's take stock here because Anson was taking stock at this point.

We're at June 1741. We are left with 335-ish men from a total of in and around 2,000 that initially set sale. in any measure this is a disaster and yet we are about to potentially turn a corner quite literally

into what they are going to see as a success they've arrived yeah they've lost most of their ships they've lost the vast majority of their men men who've died men who've died disease men who've been sucked down

to the icy depths men who've turned around and gone home but they've arrived and I wonder at this stage I mean you say disaster I wonder if he would have thought of it disaster I wonder in his head when he left London

I wonder what he would have thought was a sort of acceptable losses. I mean, naval operations in this period, this is interesting talking about the First World War is that nine out of ten British and Irish soldiers and Commonwealth soldiers come home in the First World War. It's crazy to think. You know, in these Georgian expeditions, although the numbers are much smaller, proportionally, like far less like... You can expect to die, essentially.

So they're in the Pacific, yeah. So he takes the fight for Spanish. This is the dream. Yes. So he's finally doing the job he's meant to do. Good job, yeah. How does that go down? How do they engage the Spanish?

Not, they land, they do that classic British thing. You know, the British are the Vikings in the early modern period. They land, they burn, they loot, they smash, they move on. They do not ferment a rebellion. It's a time-honored tradition. Time-on-traded tradition. Still conducted by British old-day makers this day. And sucker fans.

And so they do not form it. It's not strategic particularly. I mean, they don't bring about great big rebellions in Spain's. South American colonies, empire. The strategy is chaos, right? Yeah, it's a hit and run. It's obviously all taking place on a smaller scale because he's got no men left.

But he does capture a very, very valuable galleon. And having sort of raided and caused trouble for the Spanish on this coastline, which sort of roughly fulfills some of his plans, some of the strategy on which they set out to achieve,

they realize they have to sort of go home. No small feet. And I said at the beginning that second navigate the world, but actually that was a bit of a spoiler because the plan was to just get home, however. They didn't really mean to do it. They didn't really mean to do it.

But they went through the same process as Francis Drake gone through. Having arrived on the West Coast of Mexico, you think actually the easiest way home is to sail around the world, which is crazy. You go, we are not going back to the Southern Ocean. I've seen that place.

Don't need to see it again. It's a ship killer. It's a widow maker. I'm never going there again. I'd rather die of heat and thirst in the middle of the Pacific than dip my toes back into that foaming nightmare.

And so they decide, it's crazy. They're in Acapulca, they're in West Coast, Mexico, and they just turn their ship towards the setting sun and sail across the flipping Pacific, the world's largest ocean. Not a small task. Let's go to a break, and then we're going to find out

how exactly they go about doing this. Okay, Dan, we have to get back to Britain now. We're turning the ships around. We're circumnavigating the globe because that's the choice that has been made. how does that go for them? First thing they do is they which is not uncommon in this period

these ships, one good thing about these ships they're full of raw materials and they can even interchangeable so they just pirate one ship for cannibalize one ship for spare parts because it's just hopeless and it's about to sink so they consolidate the crews

and any sort of non-rotting bits of wood and a couple of cannons I find that's so interesting and compelling about ships in this period that are sort of like organic beings and you can add and take away parts and then they're sort of you have to keep them floating

to keep surviving, but you can sort of swap in bits and bobs from them. Yeah, and make everything, nearly everything, not the cannon, but nearly everything the ship needs to sell you can sort of make as you go along. If you've got wood, you've got some iron, you can get some iron ore and heat it up and smack it into the right shape. Pretty much everything. I was once in a sailing up a Viking ship up the replica, up the coast of Denmark, and we we pulled up on the beach.

We have very different lives done. We pulled up on the beach because we broke a little piece of the ship, and we went into a supermarket car park and we asked permission and we chopped down a sapling there were supermarket car parks they kind of grow little trees and we ripped it up because the sapling's roots

are very supple and so then we used the sapling we put it through a hole inside the ship and then we tied the roots around the steering wheel and that was the repair we pushed off and sailed on

amazing experience but that's what they would be doing as well so to a certain extent you know you can these boats are as you say they're organic the crew can heal the ships of the sailing

Yeah. So they have, they're in the Pacific now. And, you know, we've, we've talked about going under Cape Horn and the drama of that and the danger of that. What is awaiting them in the Pacific specifically? Like, what is it like to sail there? Well, it's very, very, it's a very long. It's a real big ocean. So a big bit of water. Look at them out. They don't know. The British Navy has never officially had an expedition to those parts. So there are the sort of institutional memory, which are important. Sailing plans. and trarts. Now you can steal a lot of that from Spanish people and stuff. Because there's a lot of Phantom Islands on maps of this time, aren't there? So it's really unknown what land masses are actually out there. The Pacific, unlike the Atlantic, is in part quite shallow so you can hit things. Oh, okay. You want a nice deep ocean.

So you want an accurate map? You certainly want an accurate map, and those are not available. And there is also weather, of course. The Pacific was, Pacific means peaceful. It was because the first time Europeans happened to see it, the exhibition under McGillan, It was very calm that day. So it's Pacifica. It's great. But it is not always like that.

And there are typhoons that these people experience. So there are hideous storms. There are islands. I mean, it's just the vast distances, the uncertainties. So they are blown, of course, by this weather. They were hoping to it in two months, taking them six months. I mean, soul destroying. Soul destroying.

They are blown, of course. I mean, they're not really, they don't really know what course they should be on. So I guess they're blown of course. Well, yeah. They're in the wrong place. And they go to the on. Tinian. in the marianos, which is interesting because that's a big, famous battle of the Second World War,

where there's currently an unbelievable diving, what a great huge Japanese fleet lies at the bottom of these crystal clear waters. I've always wanted to go there. But they end up there. But their other ship by now gone as well. So they're down to one ship consolidated all the crew. The Centurion is still going strong. And they land and try and do what you do when you land,

which try and find fresh water and edible, edible, yeah, plants, roots, vegetables. Now, this story is full of so many twists and turns and there are moments in it that are frankly just ridiculous and I think this is one of them right, where some of the crew go onto the shore to go to the islands, get resources, etc., etc. Now, a typhoon strikes, it snaps the cable lines of the Centurion

and it drags the ship out to sea which only has a skeleton crew of like, I think, 100 or so people on. Yes, yeah. So you know weather forecasting, folks. And not much in the way of learned experience of the Pacific weather patterns. Yeah. Oh, those clouds are forming. I wonder what that.

Okay. So even these experience sales, they're not looking at the rising going, they're not. They would be very comfortable in the North Sea and the English weather. Yeah. So they, this very serious storm hits, the ship's blown offshore and just leaving 100, I just over 100 men on the shore. Yeah.

And they have to trust. Just disappear. That's their link with home. the men on board ship, all of those sales, you know those big tall ships, all of those cells require individuals to go up and release them and then pull them in and put, so it's a very labour-intensive. In the weather as well, it's dangerous. So skeleton crew means very, very small crew, minimum number of men conceivably that could operate that ship. And 19 days they're on that island.

And you can imagine how they were feeling every day they're staring out there at that seaset. At what day do you think you would give up hope of them coming back? Hour two I'm so pretty patient I'm a bit of a fidgety built a raft Yeah yeah Dan would be like

I've built a Viking long boat We're going home now But it's astonishing that they Again it's astonishing That the coherence endures I mean it's credit to Commodore Anson really That leadership persists

Yeah And that the ship does come back They don't kill each other And try and yeah But the ship And then the ship comes back The ship comes back So joyous scenes

Joyous scenes. Can you imagine the lookout on the hill? If the real time, the small rise, just screaming and charging. I mean, God, the happiness. I wonder if there's a moment of panic, though, when you see the ship on the horizon before you can see the colours that it's flying, anything, is that the Spanish. If it's Spanish, yeah.

They're not picking you up and saving you. So they all get back on board. It's all a relief, and they set sail again. And by now we're towards the end of 1742. We're in November. China is the next. They get to Macau. Yeah.

Extraordinary. What I find interesting about this is that they stay there. And of course it's necessary, again, just in purely practical terms. They stay there for seven months. The timing's involved in this. You know, when did we leave? 1740 initially. So now we're in 1743.

Yeah. And we're in Maca. This, well, actually, we arrive in 1742. But by the time we leave, we're in 1743. And obviously, the ship needs to be recalibrated. the men need to try, the few remaining men that there are need to try and get a little bit of health back. You're suddenly living as somebody who might have come from bloody Portsmouth and never gone beyond the shores of England in Macau for seven months. It's crazy.

It's unbelievable. And you think of all of those men as well who've just stepped out of their lives back home in Britain and presumably have people waiting for them, children, growing up without them, all of that. there must have been thoughts of home constantly percolating. Well, I wonder, I mean, again, you know, you've talked about this so often, you guys. I've heard you know, the modern mind. How are people in the past just able to live in the present in a way that we, you know, we're holding so many different places that we love and people that we love. We're so used to operating in this world of communication and knowing our siblings are probably

maybe they were able. I'd love to know, maybe they were able to just go, well, we're alive. We're very grateful for that. my mission now is to survive the next week and then a week after and just take each days it comes I don't know I think there's certainly a sort of acceptance isn't there an expectation that yes we're going to be gone for years we might not come back that's how it is we're getting on with it yeah and my life at home sucked anyway I'm not here I'm if I'm not in Macau I'm in some other goddamn port yeah taking shit you know so I don't know

I don't know yeah fascinating very free okay so so they've survived all of this wild venture, they've gone under Cape Horn, they've been stranded on islands, the ships disappeared into the horizon. It's come back. They've survived, which is a success. They have projected British power into the Pacific. It hasn't really been very exciting. It folds far short of the ambitions that have been set out for it.

So far. So far. But there is, they do snatch, they do snatch something from the jaws of defeat in a way. So they get wind that there is a big Spanish ship nearby. What are they going to do? Because at this point, if you're the crucial, you're thinking, can we just go home? Do we need to do this? Can we just, do we need to risk our necks for this again?

Well, this is the thing, the Spanish have been running this empire on the cheap. They've been shipping silver up from Peru up to the Isthmus of Panama and across and across back to Europe. But they've also been engaging with the so-called China trade, the Indies, which was the whole, that's what got us here in the first place. All these mad Western Europeans are trying to short-circuit the Stilt Road. It's been going for centuries where people stick silk and nutmeg. and pepper and sophisticated objects like paper onto the backs of horses and donkeys and camels and mules and take it all the way across Eurasia

and then flog it in Venice and beyond, right? So you get these mad, mad sea dogs on the western edge of Eurasia, on the peninsulas of the peninsula, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Cornish, you know, the Kerrymen, right? And they are just on these insane voyages to get to the source of all that, all that goodies

and bring it back to Europe in their own holes. Cutting out the middleman, like we've always talked about the internet, right? So you can offer lower prices. And the Spanish has been doing that very successfully. Huge galleons groaning with lovely trade goods go across the Pacific to Mexico where they're trans-shipped and again off to Europe, right?

So that's the new kind of, they're rewiring global trade. And they're, by the way, taking... Payment species, bullion, silver from their South America and buying bought to buy all this lovely stuff in China. So, you know, you're either capturing ships full of silver or ships full of the trade goods. And the Anson gets intel about one of these massive ships.

And they, now the good news for his crew is it's not really protected. It hasn't got a sort of naval flotilla around it. It's got a few can on board. So it's worth the risk. But it's a merchant ship, really. It's a container ship. It's not really designed for fighting, whereas Centurion, despite everything it's been through of allegedly a warship, right?

And so they spring a little trap. The interesting thing about this now is that three years earlier, yes, three, they had set off on this task to do something for the glory of Britain and to be part of this naval success and bring home either news or of a bounty or actual bounty. After everything they've been through, this now seems like the most unlikely thing that could possibly happen. And I don't know how the ship was able for it, the crew was able for it. Anson had the imagination and determination to still go for this. But they end up confronting the Covent. The Nuestra Senora de Covodonga.

Very good. Well done, Dan. It came in there. Well done. Thank you. I was like, oh, Jesus, looking at this on the page. Now I have to say this. And bloody hell they come across a bit of a windfall.

Yeah, they do. And then they bring it, well, we won't go. too fast forward yet, but we're talking a lot of money here. Yeah, the advantage of they have is that there's, like the Straits of Hormuz today, ships have to, in those ships travel in really quite defined sea lanes. There are certain pinch points to get round a headland, to get through the Straits Hormuz, to get through the Malacca Strait. And if you sort of hover in those places, the chances are you will put yourself across

one of these great sort of trade... So, Aungson just has to wait for it to turn up. He knows it's coming, he knows, roughly speaking, where you have to wait for. They don't want to sail right round. They don't want to go across big uncharted stretches of ocean because there's little islands and reefs that are on the chart. So there is that, that's a kind of it. It's not pure, you know, it doesn't just happen across it in the Pacific,

so he's kind of waiting for it in this place. There's a 90-minute exchange of fire. The Spanish fight very bravely, actually, but they are outclassed by the Centurion, which has got 60 guns and crews and had to fire it amazingly still. And this is where, by the way, so we're talking about morale, this is the crew going, We're snatching to victory from the jaws to fear.

This is cash. There's cash money on this ship. And even the common sailors get a piece of it. Don't get me wrong. The captain gets a big old slice of it. But the common sailors would get enough to sort of change the course of their lives probably. Yeah. And to feel that the last three years at this point was worthwhile.

It hadn't been pointless. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is a success, isn't it? The Spanish ship has 67 dead, 84 wounded. Anson's crew has only one dead and 17 wounded. That is a success in terms of a skirmish. this kind, right?

It's not fair fight. Yeah. And there are well over 30 tons of silver. So from South America, taken up here to buy stuff to buy goodies, the finest thing is that China can offer. Yeah. And it's just, I mean, 30 tons of silver is crazy. I have it written here that that is the equivalent in 2011, specifically.

I'm not sure why. It is, in that point in time, it was the equivalent of a $54 million. dollars. Oh yeah, but I just think that that just undersells it. Doesn't even meet the thing. I mean, in terms of purchasing, you know, this is an unspeakable amount of money. I'm going to slightly skip forward now because remarkably, again, there's so many different twists and terms, but we're heading home and they get home relatively easy with this loot and

with this bounty. They get home, well, you know, it takes time, but there's not as many deaths and scurvy's and storms and all this kind of thing. But maybe something that gives us a little bit more of a, of a, in the, you know, Ference of how much money this was is that Anson, when he gets home, is now a remarkably rich man and attracts, you know, suitors. It changes his life altogether. The sailors, as you're kind of pointing out there, Dan, I think they end up getting each the equivalent of what they would have earned over 20 years when they set foot back in Britain. You know, this is life changing, as you say, Dan. I mean, that's... Yeah, it points, it points to this thing of going, this is why you do it for the hope of, okay, yeah, we've lost nearly everybody. For the 118 or whatever it is, that ended up coming back. Around 180 men of that original 2000 comes back, which is wild.

The stats aren't great. But again, what stories are you reading about in the increasing number of newspapers that are available? What the tales and the taverns of Bristol and Cork and Portsmouth? It's like, oh, do you hear about that? You know, he came back when he's spending money hand over fist. The young boys 14, 15 years old, their eyes are lighting up. You don't think you're going to be the guy who spits his blood out into the... the scuppers of a ship dying at age 18. You think you're going to be the guy swaggering back

with a bit of lace on the front of your jacket impressing the ladies, don't you? Of course you do when you're 17. I like that lace on the front of the jacket is the thing to go for. Dan, what does this do then for the British Empire, for the British Navy, for morale, for the ambition in terms of global power and naval dominance? I think they survive. I mean, all these things are about the story you can tell. Yeah, they fall far short of their ambition. It's great for Hansen goes on to Hansen does it. So you say, It's a kind of disaster. He does amazing to get them all home. He does amazing to capture that ship, for example. So he becomes first Lord's Admiral. He becomes the most senior and plays. He is the first, he is the British naval mastermind in the most successful war in British history. It's the seven years war, which is going to be effectively the next one of these wars. The wars start coming like buses in the second half of the 18th century. And every generation, much more than that, you get these wars. Seven years war, unbelievable naval success. Anson in charge, pretty important. And, an Hansen learns from that expedition personally. He has seen the effects of scurvy. He understands. So he organizes, blockades the French coast, fresh provisions getting shipped out, rotation of ships, cleanliness, all sorts of things that he is introducing into the Navy as a result, this appalling apprenticeship that he suffered, which will help turn the Royal Navy into the most effective naval force that world has ever known to that point in history.

Well, there you go. People from Staffordshire, very important. And Chug, and personally changes the fortune of his family. Shugbrunnel, massive house, National Trust, lovely place. Palatial, palatial, stately home. Well, Dan, that has been so interesting. Do you think, before we wrap up, that this expedition, this voyage is a catastrophe of success? If you had to, if you had to pick one, what do you think is the nature of this adventure? I mean, guys, this is a, you know, this is a human, this is a human catastrophe.

Obviously, it's a human catastrophe. There's people dying in horrendous ways around the world. Every ship lost. But in terms of the story that the British Empire can tell, which sitting behind that big desk in London is what you want. It's actually a reasonable success. It's eye-catching. They march the silver through the street, I think, when they go back.

That's right. So that's a big success. And British force has been projected into the Pacific. And that's the start. And that, of course, Captain Cook will go third. 30 years later and expand on that. So it kind of is a success. But as so often in our human story,

it's all very well for us to go, oh, that's big success. But of course, the human cost, the cost borne by those people who died unimaginable deaths, was appalling. So it's, like strangely, it's both, you know, that even events later, the Battle of Somme, military historians,

like, actually, it was a strategic success. You're like, oh. Don't want to see a failure. Tell that to the men of the Newfoundland. So it's one of those difficult things that we wrestle with, I think, and when we're trying to evaluate them. I love a ship's history. I've really enjoyed this.

You make me so happy when you do. We have more coming. We have a lot of ships, yeah. This is not the end of Dan on the sea. You're mining a rich seam. You're saying with the wind in your sail. And other nautical things. On that note, thank you very much for joining us.

from watching. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe, leave a five-star review, wherever you get your pods. And if you want to get in touch with the show, you can do that at After Dark at HistoryHit.com.