Dan Snow's History Hit - How to Survive the Age of Sail

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

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

Hi folks, welcome to dance news history. Now, long time less to this podcast, we'll know that if there's one period in history that I would like to go back to, it would be the age of sail. When those European powers sent out expeditions, great voyages across uncharted oceans, it was a time of exploration. and settlement, time of pirates and privateers and corsairs, there was plundering and pillaging and violence. There were great sea battles from the Armada to Trafalgar. It's when our European world became much, much bigger. It was a time of adventure and discovery and sails filling in westerly winds, sheets straining at the clues, spice barrels in warehouses of cannon smoke hanging over the ocean. It's a time with some of the greatest stories from our

history and it's a time that shaped the world that we still live in today. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was also an era of enslavement, of colonisation, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease and desperation, of clinging on to the taffrail and hurricane forces off Cape Horn, the ice forming on the yards. It's an age that some people romanticised, but was actually pretty dark and pretty grim. Death by Typhraille. or perhaps taking us from grape shot to the neck. Well, that was just the tip of the iceberg. So for today's episode, we're going to explore the dark history of the age of sail.

I'm teaming up with my good friends from the AfterDart podcast, Dr. Maddie Pelling and Dr. Anthony Delaney. And let me say as a man who loves the ocean, loves sailing. And I always used to dream about being part of Nelson's fleet when I was a child or on Cochran's crew or he perhaps a captain kid's pirate crew, particularly when I discovered that he forced his crew to be in bed by 8pm. I'm here for that. But anyway, after doing research over the last few years, and particularly for this podcast, I'm really not entirely sure I would have been suitable. So please listen, and then you get to decide if you could survive the age of sale.

Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black quaint unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift-off, and the shuttle has cleared the power. Okay, we've done a lot of ship episodes on 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 remember that. Wow. Okay. The Batavia. You must remember the Batavia. 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 loads star. Yes, Maddie, well done. Did you make that up yourself or as it in your note? I absolutely did not.

This is part of the script. Very well done. It's only bloody Dan Snow. Hello, Dan. Hey, guys. I love, I have 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, yes. 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 sinks. Okay, well.

And I think it's like this, 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 what. And when human nature breaks down. Yes. Yeah. 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 for our planet. I mean, the reason that the world looks the way it does is because these Western Europeans who played, no, they hadn't been at the forefront of sort of human development 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 and the civic, out of this, the sort of milieu of the 15th century, comes these

gigantic ships capable of ocean travel, which no, well, 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 arrive, 90% of the indigenous population of America's, 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 wittanyly traveled across in.

They are the most complex objects ever created by human beings to that point in history. Look at HMS victory. In the sort of middle of this period, 1750s, it's laid down and fights the Battle of Trafalgar, famously 805. There's 800 people on board. 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 talking technological revolution and copper sheathing on the bottom, which in turn is an engine for further industrial revolution. This is military, industrial complex stuff, right? So, but for the human beings on board, to get to the point, unimaginable.

I mean, unimaginable, because sailing is miserable today. Right? sailing. Like, I've crossed the Irish sea many times. Yes, as I live. And you just wish you were anywhere else in the world, right? There are seasings. 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. 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 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. Is that, 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 an account of Vasco-Darama's voyage to India for the first time a sort of European ship has left from Europe, sailed around the autumn of Africa and reached India. And I mean, just the weather, the other humans that deal with, the issues within the cruise, the equipment failures in the cruise.

I mean, the ship's sinking, the scurvy, when you get scurvy, and of course, no one knows, no one has a clue about it. Yeah, what it is. Your old wounds open up, your teeth become loose in the gums. It's unimaginatory. You'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. He's all we'll 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 that 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 foods battered by those winds. We're not blind for that. Let's talk then about these vessels themselves, because you say they're such complex objects down, and that really interests me. And sidebar, by the way, as someone who grew up in Staffordshire

and who, you know, Reginal Mitchell, home of the Spitfire, how dare you? Yeah, and it's a long way from the sea, that's very true. Yeah, I'm someone who can appreciate the sea from the shoreline. Gorgeous, love it. Nice feet, nice backdrop. Don't want to be on the water.

No, absolutely not. No, absolutely not. Oh, 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 sat fire too. Specifically from Linda's Farn. So if anyone, you know, she's thought about this. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the plan. Welcome to after Dahr, where we think of at 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 mentioned the victory is that at Portsmouth or Southampton, Paul Smith?

How could you? I need someone who staffers you could ask that question. Yeah, sorry, I know. Paul Smith, we're getting regional now guys. It's all just the south to me. Yeah, it's just the south. Wow, 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 office's quarters and the interiors, the furniture, like that's what interested me is. Beautiful. And the, yeah, the complete beauty, the complete giving over to aesthetics in a space that is otherwise completely functional, that fascinated way. Design 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. So everything's a compromise. It's a nightmarish compromise, as you know, from the bounty. They're sort of trying to stick all this breadfruit in. You've got the crew all packed in all 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. And if you choose the wrong ship, you're in big trouble. You're trying to design for all of these different jobs and all of these different conditions. You 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. Then you're going around the tip of Southern Africa. It could be gale force winds, hurricane force winds. And then you're going up into the monsoon of India. So, I mean, how on earth are you building a ship that's capable of... How do you plan for that? And I suppose it's where people onboard these ships often don't agree what the function of them. I'm thinking about Cook's voyages when, you know, Joseph Banks, the botanist on board,

is like, I want to bring all of these plants that we found, and everyone's like, no, there's no, you can bring some of them, but not quite that many. 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, don't write the crew. Come on, there won't be that many left, but tell me yeah, 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. I mean, a handful of the hundreds of men that leave. You say this, you say this, but you know you'd be. on one, too. As an 17-year-old, a problem with them, and I think it's the same reason that we send young men into battle because they, 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 naivity to it. 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 go see. And like, so, the algorithm feeds you the success, right? Yes. Dead men don't tell tales. What you do see

is the local lad that's made good. Everyone knows who of Francis Drake is, comes from a very modest family, becomes one of the richest men in Schuader 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 followed Drake, hundreds of men who are no, 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.

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 gang. This is the opposite of riders. Yeah. So the British Imperial Project realised that defence of the ocean around Britain is so essential that you will allow the Navy to breach the God-given rights of an Englishman, which are obviously only partially implemented and there's a lot of hypocrisy. But there was an idea on the continent, if you're a divine right rule on the continent, you're a sort of tyranties, 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 take the King's shilling. Now, there's all sorts of skullduggery in the army, you go and you get them drunk and they sign up. They really like, so look, in practice, I think it may have looked quite similar. But the Navy were literally allowed to round people up. They could just come, knock on your door, and drag you away, and then you could be

at sea four years. It is hardcore. But typically how this was used to, the hot press, which was just going to take everyone, And that was in the times of emergency, the outbreak in Napoleon at 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 go 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. Grab the haliad of the four stasel. I'd 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 to say, you'd go on the key side, you go to sailors pubs, and you'd burst in and just drag them off. So they, typically you're taking them from the merchant fleet. So it's not the case on the whole that they're like breaking into your house upcountry, you know, farming communities. They're just like, sorry, lads, you're all coming to see. But there were, you know, there are some examples of people getting caught up in the press, yeah. Wow. And this, it's so telling that this happens for the Navy and not necessarily

the army. As you say, there are other forms of pushing people into the army. At home, I have an auction. It's an old pewter mug. I think it's from a regiment that was in India in the 19th century, and it has a glass bottom. And the idea was that you'd take the king's shilling, so if someone would pop the shilling in your drink and you'd be drinking. And then when you got to the bottom of it, you'd be like, oh, somebody's 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 going to die. They just require huge manning. The peacetime Navy was smashed because it was totally town. 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 there 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.

It was born and literate in Yorkshire. So to a working family. So the Navy could be, and also if captains were 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. So it sort of celebrity captains. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love that idea. Okay, so we've been press ganged. We've made it onto a Royal Navy ship. Speak for yourself. I definitely have not been press gang. Some of us are less happy about it than others. I'm like the surgeon on board or something. I love the idea that 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. 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. You can stop there, Dan, it's fine, you've said enough.

Slightly uncomfortable in the maritime world around him. An intellectual. Yeah, sure. I'll take all of that. That's what I will be. I'll be the shit show. to what the search has to do in battle. This is Dan Snow's history here.

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

be familiar with, the era of Nelson and things. So things are getting sorted out. This is a long way, actually, from the age of Drake, where it was all quite freelancy and just utterly care. I mean, again, how anyone survived in the 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 crossing the Atlantic, having been ambushed by the Spanish very early

on. Anyway, so if you're in the sort of age of Nelson, you're being paid, there is food provided for you. Historians like to argue about this, as you'd expect. A lot of it different from ship's ship. There were some brutal captains, no doubt, sort of traumatized or just psychopathic. So some crews are quite famous, some ships quite famous being sort of flogging ships, where the cat and nine tails would come out, which is a whip with nine strands to it, knotted strands, and it would be none. So, cat, nine tails, and you'd be flogged for a whole, 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 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. 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,

whatever little harbour town. The South, generic. The General South is totally gone. And here I am with a pounding headache in some kind of a hammock or in some kind of like a wooden slat thing, depending on what the accommodation was, that's not where I'm 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 that Drake again to, Drake lied to his crew, said he wasn't going around the world. They all thought they were going to the eastern Mediterranean. So he sails past Morocco, and they all start going. That's a way, yeah, yeah, yeah. When are we going home? Yeah, exactly, yeah, 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 realize 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, 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 this guy.

You know, this guy is completely bizarre, like bizarre. The Royal Navy by that period is pretty professional. There is an understanding that actually the best way to get a crew to sail fast and for everyone to win. here is to sort of roughly speaking work with the grain. Now, listen to different periods of time, 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 being, and left in amongst their fellow prisoners shackles. 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. think in turn their officers would have been. But by this period, in the Royal Navy, you're getting a sense that, like, good leadership, there is the beginning is 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 a port and abscond, which would happen as well, you do think, I might try and keep them, keep them a little bit sweet. So it's not. Recent scholarship has said that actually modern humans are able to cope with it. It's a brutally hard life. But punishment wasn't the worst feature of it probably.

It's for me, I think this idea that you're talking about of being rowing together in more cases than not. It's certainly what we encounter. Obviously, when we cover these ship histories, something usually goes wrong. So actually it's an exception in those cases. And we're very aware that it's an exception. But when you're talking down about like press ganging and bringing groups of people together who may not necessarily encounter one another in everyday life otherwise, I'm imagining

that it can still be quite tension-filled, bringing, and potentially that there's like dangerous elements, individuals that are brought on. Do we have accounts of that happening? Yeah, definitely. So everyone who goes on board a ship at this time

says it was an extraordinary cosmolitan place. You hear Danish. There are people from North Africa. There are people of colour. There are a lot of Irish. Yes. A vast number of Irish. We tend to get on the sea if we can.

You get everywhere you go. An astonishing portion of Wales Fleege of Toméy and Welsh. Yeah, astonishing. I didn't know that. We don't know that in Ireland, you know. We're very difficult with those histories. We're not comfortable with.

That's difficult history. And so, Waterloo, as you know as well, the land armies famously these Irish units and Irishmen serving in English units. Anyway, so that's why it's thought, and you're all living within unbelievably confined space. So yes, there is a lot of focus on troublemakers, dealing with troublemakers.

They might be lash. I suspect you'd get rid of a troublemaker. You'd say, actually, get rid of them at the first port of call. If there's a sort of socialist revolution on board, the Bidabek and Agnostic. 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 for anything else so less even than the harmonious and the ship weeing and pooing is a massive issue because in the middle of the night it's howling gale up above

and you don't actually what inches from someone else I might just go and have a quick weed on the size ship and French ship were famously unhygienable but the Brits were obsessed with cleanliness because they'd learn from bitter experience

I mean, you're talking, fleets get wiped out by disease. There's a French fleet in the 18th century, 70 years war, that survives back in breast, just, and then passes on that sort of plague, basically, to the people of breast. I mean, wipes out French naval, well, it further undermines the French naval capability in that for the first out war.

And so the Brits were really, really strict on that. So there were serious punishments, even for having a little wee down the side of the way, you think I 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,

ship and use the heads and that they're 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 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 quarters that 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 Naur in particular, which obviously happened

somewhere in the south. I don't know. It's just the south, somewhere near that. But, you know, 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 times when if a ship's company arrives back in Britain and they were expecting either leave or to be released from having a breastcount, and they literally that digger. Sorry, turn around, lads. You're all transferring now onto HMS, you know, Tonin. We're leaving port tomorrow, and there were issues. That still happens in the army today. Well, exactly. Well, exactly. But if you're not there because you want to be, then it's quite...

Yeah, if you haven't chosen it, it's a different thing. 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 bansies, 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 their experience. There's various theories around that. One is that you want posh people in command of army because they're revolutionary entities. You have experienced of all of Cromwell in Britain and Ireland. You do not want normal, common people being in charge of an army that can march and London take over power and execute the king. So in army, you want posh people. Also, all they have to do, really,

there's an old expression of British army, sergeants teach men how to fight, officers, teach men how to die. If you just get your gear on, stand up straight back in front of the men as the French are advancing and don't flinch when the bullet start. That's sort of the job of that. 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, yeah. 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 posture 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 rent. So there is a meritocracy there. And therefore, they are. In all the panoply of the Georgian state, there were people who knew what they were doing in charge of these ships, and they knew how to run a crew, they'd gone to see it 14. Some of them didn't need to use the lash. Some of them who were good at keeping that very heterodox, crazy, multi-confessional, multi-ethnic ships company, all pointing in the same direction. I think that's just experience.

These were really, really good sailors. There's a Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up. Yeah, the fact that so many of them have gone to see so young, I'm thinking of, is it Thomas Raffles, Joseph Raffles, who goes to Singapore, he was born on a ship. Right. 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 the system. Son of a gun.

We were talking about all of these things. Order is important. and it's actually relatively common and sometimes inspiringly, so depending on who's at the helm and all of those things. But 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 C deficiency, but what does that actually look like

if you are on board on these ship? It's a hellish thing. They didn't know. So no, you can't transport fresh vegetables. So food is salted beef, salted pork, bit of dried fish sometimes.

And it's vegetables for first few days and then hard tacks, so bread that's baked super hard and will last. And you whack it to get the weevils come out of it and then you soak it in... What's a weevil? It looks like a little caterpillar. Oh, they're actual insects. Yeah, they're insects, yeah.

So you whack it. Some people ate the weevils for protein. Not for me, but okay. And you dip it in your rum. And then you try and gnaw into it, your molas and get torn out. And so that is a diet without vitamin C and that is why, on long journeys,

like Dargama, like Magellan, like the wave, like anyone you can mention. Oh, like Anson going around the world, he takes loads of Chelsea pensioners with him, these old guys 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 up the whole body. I mean, scurvy, scurvy is really bad. That's quite zumbification. It's zonbification, yeah. I actually don't know why my kids don't get scurvy because they have always been sure. She's getting to someone in my university hall's got scurvy.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's going some. It was a boy, obviously. That's white toast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. White toast and like cancer 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 a battle. So, more people, battle, Trafalgar people heard of. More Brits are killed when the Royal George capsizes off Portsmouth than in the Battle of Trafalgar.

More people were killed when Queen Caroline, H. Miss Queen Caroline, in fact, blew up by mistake, then were killed in the Battle of Not. I mean, so these are mass casualty events when these ships. Sinking then, in the 19th century, you got the complication of they're trying to use all this new technology and incorporate steel and iron and heavy guns and things on all these ships. So you get HMS captain when it's the highest, the most number of naval personnel killed in an instant between Napoleon War 1815 ending and the First World War. So about 800 people just go 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 Biscuit. So these are horrific events.

And again, there are ships lost with all hands regularly through this period. I want to talk before we kind of wrap up about one aspect of this shipping history that we recently went to Royal Museums 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 Royal Re 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 ghosts involved. Well, although depending on the point of view, I think pirate there would have a very, very, very fine line between pirates, merchantmen, and naval officers and also at naval ratings, and actually in times of peace you've got, the Navy just fires all of it, lots of its sailors and lots of its experience of senior sailors

and like ships, petty officers and things. And a lot of them would go and work in the merchant fleet, and part of the merchant fleet might be, you know, if you 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.

It's, 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. And so smuggling, where does smuggling tip over to piracy?

You're bringing excise free, you know, a big tax-free brandy into the coast of England. and sort of shots are fired occasionally with some ex-sized 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 cowats who we talked about disease and discipline and ships lost at sea.

But of course, we haven't even talked about the horror that would be in a sea battle where you base 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, actually at touching range, so much so that when enemy ships catch fire, you have to start throwing buckets of water on your own ship because you're worried the fire's going to spread. I mean, you're interlocked with the enemy ship and you're firing.

Are people jumping over then? People jumping over. One famous Irishman at the battle, 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 story.

But yeah, and at one stage, I think it's the Temerere, being a British ship, curiously, crashes into the Red de Tables of French ship, and the French crew had been gathering on the boughs. They knew they couldn't beat HMS victory in a cannon battle. They'd be gathered on us,

to jump onto H Smith's friction and take it over by force to hand to hand. And Temaire just comes out of the smoke out of nowhere, crashes into it and just fires these carinets, these cutting-edge state-of-the-art guns that just annihilate. I mean, First World War levels of casualties of this French career, just supersonic pieces of iron just scream through these men, shattering limbs, tearing people. When they do hit wood, they gouged splints out.

You've got foot-long, sharp splinters of wood just sort of flipping through the air, ripping people the piece. And that's where the surgeon comes in, because he's vaguely hiding and then I'll emerge. He's down the depth of the ship and they're carrying people down. These long queues. Nelson's carried down at Schoferga. 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. And the surgeon's just there. His tools are getting blunt and he's soaring limbs off, trying to save the human life after a limb has been smashed. So those are battles that people who know about. They can be terrible enough.

But more people die of disease. Yeah, isn't crazy? You know, where there's stories in the 70s, where they're working the sails in sub-zero conditions outside Louisburg on the coast of Canada. You can imagine stuff. Places that we can hardly go today in the winter. They're trying to work sales and ropes. I mean, it's just wild. 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 just what the months of sleep deprivation of that kind of diet, perhaps some shortages of food, of the trauma that we've witnessed. Like we, I don't think we can begin. You can go, I've climbed a mast and I've, in sub-zero temperatures and certainly, yeah, but then you... In your modern gear, it's keeping you warm, yeah, yeah, yeah, the 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. They were showing signs of extraordinary hard labour 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? It's too cruel. It's like asking truth to your children. But I think there's a, you'd want to be on a frigate, so fast, free ship operating by itself. You don't want to be in a big battleship where you're being ordered around by the Admiral, lots of the battleships around all the time. You're waiting for a battle to occur. So it's 99% boredom, 1% absolute carnage. You want to be on the 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 of Film and books are based on his job is just to go around the coast of Europe. just make an absolute nuisance 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 creates a big floating bomb and sails it towards a French fleet at anchor with a gale rising. He sets the powder 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, it was just sun up to sundown. In fact, beyond that, high jinks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is the ship I'd like to. We are overdue a period drama of this. I know there's the film, but they only made it wasn't, right?

Disney can do something or something. And who is your favorite child? Yes, well, no. No, no. Okay, we won't make you answer that one. Right, Maddie, do you want to take us out on this one? Sure, yes. Do you not want to answer about the ship yourself?

Oh, 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. They really, this world on the sea

fascinates me, this little enclosed thing. So I don't have enough broad knowledge to say, but maybe something like the beagle where it's a discovery ship and it's, you know,

like that kind of a thing. I'm a little more gentler. And what about you? Do you have one? Well, I have one in mind, but it's going to be a future book, so I will not think of. Oh, okay. Nice. But if I could be not an active participant, but a fly on the wall where I don't die and I don't have to partake of the diet or the punishments or anything, it would have to be the terror. I'd want to go and see what happened to those men, what went wrong there.

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. Thank you so much to my guest, Dr. Anthony Laney and Dr. Maddie Pelling. You've got to go and check out their podcast After Dark, wherever you get your pods. It's a phenomenon.

And if you'd like more episodes like this, for example, how to survive an era or a battle or an event, let us know. You can email us on ds.h.h.h at history hit.com. Let us know what we need to look into surviving. See you next time. Thank you.