Dan Snow's History Hit - Templar's Tunnels, HMS Victory and Troy: History's Best Historical Sites with Dan Jones

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

The two great Dans of history - Dan Snow and Dan Jones - team up to explore the stories behind some of the world's best historical sites. Dan Jones explains the mysteries of the Templars' Tunnels in the Old City of Acre and Dan Snow tells the story of Nelson's last moments on HMS Victory (now in Portsmouth's historic dockyard). They explore the myths and reality of Harselik - believed to be the site of Troy- as well as Easter Island and Runnymede where the Magna Carta was signed.If you want more of Dan Jones, you can check out his podcast This Is History. They are giving History Hit listeners 90% off their first month on Patreon. Consider it This Is History’s royal court with bonus episodes, BTS, ALL ad-free. Claim your place just in time for their new season, The Tudors, launching on September 22. Use code: DAN at checkout! https://www.patreon.com/c/Thisishistory/membershipDan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign 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 also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Hey folks, welcome. Dan Snow's history hit. Now, if you're in the northern hemisphere like me, well, it's guys, it's high summer. Like me, maybe your routine's a little different. The kids are off school. The days are long. We're spending long evenings sitting out. Beer in hand in the pub garden. So in that spirit, I'm going to bring you something little different on the podcast today.

Something different to our usual offering. Some bit loose on these hazy summer days. I'm not sadly in a pub garden, but the vibe is the same. I'm hanging out with my great friend, my fellow history, obsessive. History's other great Dan Jones. Dan, how you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Thank you for talking to me. Well, this is nice because the last time we were together, we're in our nice, cozy studio. We're last time we were together, we were freezing our little nagers off in Roneemite, the place where Magna Carta was, to which the seals were affixed to Magna Carta. It was bone-shatteringly cold that day, so much nicer to them.

It was obviously a high summer day. And thank you, because you've invited me to your lovely podcast studio. You're recording This Is History. Richard, your podcast. Thanks for having me in. We're going to talk about things we get asked about quite a lot so I thought we could just do it together. Well, thank you very much for coming into the studio. One of the things I've been wanting to talk to you about for ages is your favorite places that doing history has taken you around the world. Because one of the great pleasures of this job, as I see it anyway, is the opportunity to travel to explore, to go places for research.

So I thought that we could have a little discussion of our favorite places. And we're going to put this out on the This Is History feed and on our YouTube job. Yes, you can listen to it here. You can also watch on this history YouTube. You certainly can. Go and check it out. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. Thanks, hi me. I want to talk today about the greatest places that we've visited in the course of doing history. Because I think one of the great privileges and pleasures of this job is it kind of takes you around the world.

And I don't know. Is there a continent you haven't been to? There is not. I have the, I'm involved. I've been to Antarctica. Although I've stood on the ice off Antarctica, which I think counts. I spent three weeks trapped in a vessel in the ice of the Weddell Sea and some absolute nobs said to me yeah, I haven't been to Antarctica, have you? But it's like if you're in Lyme Bay, if you're in Lyme, if you're in the gut in the Bristol Channel

for three weeks, I think you're allowed to say you've been to Europe, aren't you? I think you are. I think you've been to Antarctica. You've certainly been closer than I have. But what I want to do is talk about some of the most memorable historical places that you've been in the past. and I'll throw in some of my own. I thought maybe we could start with the last place,

I think I saw you, which was in Rone Meade. Because we were down there. It was quite a cold day, as I recall. But we had rather a nice time talking about Magna Carta there. It was 2015 was the big anniversary for Magna Carta, so that was the 800th anniversary. And I live about three miles away from Rone Mead. So despite all your travels, actually, you came home.

So you've been down there before. I've been done there at least, but it was brilliant going with you, and it's a very particular, it's quite fun. Sometimes you go to historic sites, don't you, where the geology or the farming or there's been urbanisation, and there's almost no reason for being there. When you're at Roneymead, it all makes sense. It's like a water me. The Thames is there. You can see it, and you can imagine it burst. And you to explain to me that it was flat, it was, but it's, but it's damp. It's a safe place for meetings. It's a place where people go to Pali, and actually the geography is quite important there, isn't it? Well, in 1215, and listeners to our regular fixture, a dynasty to die for, will cast their minds back and remember when we were talking about King John.

But in this time, you know, you had the barons, very angry with John for all of his manipulations of the law and all of his oppressions and all of his tyrannies, camped in stains, and then you had the king at Windsor, and it was this sort of meeting point in the middle where because of the geography of the river, it was almost impossible to, launch an ambush.

Yes. Whenever we think about historical places, I think it's always worth trying to go. Do you agree? If you're trying to narrate a story about a place and you haven't, you don't know what the physicality of that spot is like, you can often miss the most obvious things about a story. There are

two kinds of historians in the world. And there are those who go away on holiday and lie on a sun lounger and chill out. And then there are those who immediately scale the cliff behind the hotel to go and look at the castle or the gun battery. Do I need to ask which one you? No. Well, and what I like about you, Dan Chos, is you are absolutely in the last category

because I think it does matter. And when you're writing wonderful narrative history like you do or talking on the pod so eloquently, it's nice to be able to say now that problem with that slope is, you know, the gravel's very loose. And it, which is true. Right. It is true. And it's like the First World War, you walk across the Somme after it rains, which is most days. And within five minutes, you've got a plate of clay, the size of a,

plate, a large plate thing, a salmon serving dish on each foot, because that is the nature of the soil. So you're like, and that is something actually, you can read about it, you know, well, mud on feet all the nail, complaining about. You know, there's certain things that in the comfort of your own library, it's very hard

to internalise. And so I have enjoyed enormously going to places and getting that sense of things and as of you through the writing, I can tell you, always try and whatever I talk to you, you're always going somewhere to do some research. And I do think if you're privileged enough to do that, it is absolutely essential. really helps to the geography, the geology, the weather can really help to sort of, just fill the picture out when you're telling the story.

And I guess the interesting about running me, the last thing I'd say about my own just creepy is I do think that in 2015 we might. So it did feel important because at the moment we are now wrestling again with this. And actually it's the oldest question in human existence, which is how do we normal people exert any control over the over those who rule over us? Right. And that question seems quite lively again now today, right? How do we go, hang on, mate, person who rules over us for reasons that sometimes slightly obscure. You can't, we need you not to do certain things. We need to do. And I think that feels to me when I was at school and growing up, I thought those questions were settled. Turns out that's not settled anymore. And if you're in China, if you're in Russia, if you're in other countries, those are really very live questions. And Magna Carta is essentially what it's about, right? It's interesting that we're sitting here marveling somewhat. I mean, and not just sitting here in this room at this moment, but sitting here in society, marvelling at the idea that these individual leaders can be out there,

making decisions and then just kind of doing stuff. Because the way I see it, for the most part in human history, that's been normality. That's normality. And the questions about how do you restrain a leader who really goes a bit off-grid, as it were, off the rails. But we being of the same generation have grown up through probably the most unusual time in human history. Precious.

In which we probably grew up in the high point of the rule of law, of international norms. Not everywhere, but by and large being like, okay, we really do have restraining mechanisms on individuated power. And all of that seems to be regressing towards the historical mean. It just seemed like that bit, yeah. Running me is close to home for me. Yeah, I grew up nearby, but I understand where you've chosen it. But what about you? Well, weirdly, I've also chosen ones close, I wouldn't it?

It's a bit embarrassing. We both, promising to tell stories of the far off and exotic, but I guess this is a landscape and a seascape. It's very close to me. The solar is the strip of water, for those who you don't know, between the south coast of England, between the Isle of White, which is a sort of a diamond-shaped island off the south coast.

You have Portsmouth and Hailing Island in the east, It runs all the way through to sort of her spit, some amazing geology. World's oldest boat building site has been found there, a Mesolithic boat building site, sustenage boat building site. So you've got hollowed out canoe, evidence hollowed out canoes,

world's oldest. You've got, and then you've just got a very dynamically, lots of Romans, Vespasian as a young legionary commander, invades, past the Claudian invasion of the 40s AD. He invades and captures the Isle of White.

We know that. And then you get lots of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Viking activity. You've got the big cities of Southampton where Henry VIII leads to... Where do you stand on Southampton? There's a great rivalry for international viewers and listeners between Portsmouth

and the nearby town of Southampton. I live close to Southampton, so I'm afraid I'm a Southampton guy. What's the name in Portsmouth for Southampton? The Wonderful Saints. I thought it was the scum. The scum, yeah. I may have got that wrong. It's the... No, there is an antipathy between the two cities,

as only neighbours can have. So, Portsmouth, great naval base. Henry 8th does a lot of work there and then subsequently that's the site of HM's Victory now and it's wonderful it's also Britain still Britain's Premier Naval Base and Southampton's more a commercial trading city, very interesting position on the

where two rivers converge and it's got this beautiful deep water harbour Titanic leaves from Southampton Henry the 5th leaves St. Hampton D-Day roughly speaking a huge number of the largest fleet of ships from the largest fleet ever assembled in human history in June 94. They leave from

Southampton, Portsmouth, other other ports from there and the solent, which the stretch of water, was so busy, it was said you could walk from one side to the other without getting your feet wet. So, I mean, I cannot tell you the history. So in a way, it's the sort of the epicentre of naval history, really, in I think so. I like to think of the epicentre of all history. No, but yes, naval history, maritime history, a lot of important maritime history, a lot of important maritime history. Which is kind of your, you're like nerd specialty, right? No specialty. You're a naval guide. Maritime guy, absolutely, yeah, for sure. Until, you know,

1830, when George Stevenson got that little old train running down between. Liverpool and Manchester. If you had a heavy object and you want to take it somewhere, you did it by on the water, you did it by boat. And you see this, you know, at the very dawn of our species, you see it with Stonehenge, whatever, and it's so that

the sea, if you looked out to the sea, now it looks empty, one enormous container ship going past carrying the entire gross natural product of a small country every week. But the rest of the sea looks quite empty and the sea would have looked busy until the modern world. So there would have been fishing boats, there had been coastal

traders, there would have been passengers, there would have been little pirates, whatever it might have been. The seas around Britain, the seas around France, the seas of the Mediterranean, would have just been crowded with sales. That's where humans did their business. It's where they traded, traveled, moved. And that's something I think it is difficult for us

to get our heads around now. Well, so in a way that sounds a bit like a kind of unseen revolution in human history. I talk a lot about the pain revolution at the beginning of the 20th century when pain effectively became somewhat optional with the with the availability of anesthetic

and its introduction into everyday life as well as the medical system as being one of these massive revolutions that we kind of forget about because we live on the other side of it. So I wonder if we've lived through a similar one in terms of transport, where it's so hard for us to imagine the world

when seaborne power was and was everything. And you've written about this so beautifully. But now, if you look, show you someone on the map, the blue bit is like, oh God, C-6, a barrier. And on a moment, map, there's the highway map, the motorway map here in the UK. It's the big arteries of travel. You get from London to Manchester really easily. As you well know, until very recently, the links between Brittany, Cornwall, Normandy, Southern England, Norfolk and the low countries,

absolutely vastly more important the links between Norfolk and Chester. Yes. Right? So, so you would, in terms of language, marriage, power structures. So, and trans maritime empires would have been very, very common. And so that is just something, that has been a revolution. We see the water as a barrier. The water traditionally was a bridge, a bridge to places. And so that has been, that is a challenge of telling that story a little bit. It's what? I mean, yeah, it's madness.

That makes it. I don't want to travel across water. It's a pain. I'd feel ill. Yeah, I feel ill. Dan, where's one of the best places, a little further away? Where's one of the best places you've been? Well, so one of my favorite places that I've visited is probably the Templar Tunnels in ACA.

This is northern Israel, just near the Lebanese, border. order. And you can, these dates to the era of the Crusades, so it's high middle ages, but they're tunnels that run under the city from what was probably the Templar base through to the port. It's somewhere that I had a really interesting time visiting and don't think I could have really got into the history of this particular bit of history without seeing. I found that this took me into both the real history and the sort of the mythology of a subject, which in this case is the Knights Templar. Gosh, nearly 10 years ago, I read a book about the Templars

and you can't really go into temple history hoping that you won't encounter temple mythology as well. And there's a really interesting place in the city of Acha in Israel where you sort of get a feel for both. Acha was once the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. After First Crusade, Jerusalem was in Christian hands, but after Saladin, Jerusalem was lost. And so ACA became the toehold, doesn't it?

Acca became the capital and eventually the last city standing of the Crusader Kingdom. And the Templars set up one of the great headquarters in this town and had tunnels that seemed to have run from the temple headquarters to the port. I mean, possibly so they could evade taxes, but probably just to give ease of access. And you can still go down into these tunnels today. I think, I'll stop my head there. There are a couple of hundred meters long. And in themselves, they aren't particularly spectacular. They're tunnels.

But they take you into this world, firstly of the Templars, in their real crusading historical setting, you know, in this time when there was this coming together of religion and of military conquest and of trade and of all of these things sort of piled together in this really quite small bit of the Mediterranean, the Eastern Mediterranean. But just by virtue of saying Templar tunnels, it implies this sort of deep... Oh, yeah.

What the hell were they up to? You got me there. And that I found so fascinating when I was doing a lot of work on the Templars and still do now, because it's an organisation where people almost... I mean, they want the mythology to be there. And you're in this position as a historian. When you start to say, well, I don't think the Templars necessarily did hide the secret bloodline of Christ and take a load of treasure up to Scotland

and the hide Shakespeare's real writings on Oak Island. They feel you're really disappointing people by not playing along. But you're allowed to tap into it. You have fun with it, though. I mean, that's great. Well, I think that's the key. If you just sort of put your foot down and say, no, absolute bollocks, don't be so stupid,

you kind of drive people away. Yes, well, what we tell each other, isn't it, Dan, that we tell each other, in fact, the true stories are more exciting. So you go, come for the Temple of Gold, but actually leave, much more nuanced understanding of the Templars. And that's the real. That's the friends you make along the way. Yes, it's about having

this attitude of welcome in. There's a reason why people are interested in the Templars. And if one approaches the subject by saying, well, there's a perfectly good hospital of fortress and Acker. Don't see why you're not as interested in that as the Templar Tunnels. In fact, well, that happens to be true. Also, people are allowed to be interested in what they're interested.

I mean, you have to meet people where they are. I've always found, you can't get angry at people very interested in things. And it's just wonderful. It's a great spring board in. You wrote a great book on Templars. Wonderful. Those people bought it. It's fantastic. Everyone's happy. You got a lot of credit for it. I get around the world getting thanked for it. I take that credit. Everyone's a winner. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit. Don't give up on us just here. There's more coming. But when Acre Falls, unbelievable siege, go and check it out of one of the great medieval

sieges. They kill, is it the hospitlers that they slaughter or that is at the temple? I think it's... Well, at various times in crusading history, they both get it quite literally in the neck. So after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, the Templars get lined up there. The Templars and the Hospitlers, because they're kind of the crack troops in the crusading army, Saladin kind of, he's willing to ransom everybody of any value except for the Templars and Hospitals. So even King Guy of Jerusalem, yeah, off you go. But the Templars Hospital is, I mean, it's like having all the Navy SEALs and the SAS. Yeah, you really can't let them go? I think it might be better just chop all the heads off.

And so chop all the heads off is what he does. But I suppose it's the ultimate backhanded compliment. I suppose so. I suppose so. That's true. That's true. Tough for them. So I,

my equivalent of those tunnels, which I would love to see out on part of my eyes, is HMS Victory, which I think is a massive 18th century battleship that you can still see today. It's the ship that was Nelson's flagship Battle Trafalgar. Where is it? It's in Portsmouth,

obviously. It's one of the best things in the world's going to see. So this is at the time, the biggest warship ever laid down. ever built in Europe. 1759, the keels laid down. The year of victories,

when Britain wins all these victories over the world. So it's called HMS victory, awesome. And it then serves from 759, amazing investment all the way through

the battle of Trafalgar 1805. It goes on serving after that as well. So you're getting, they're getting their money's worth. It, 2,000 oak trees

went into building it, something like 60 acres of trees, 27 miles of ropes and rigging. It's got over 100, just over 100 guns. Like, it's the, it was the most complicated

item on earth, like if a giant picked up something on Earth at the time, that was the most complicated single thing that existed. Because again, remember, matched with the thing that the ports, ports are very important. And so if HMISFitary drops anchor off your port and you're in China, you're in

Peru, you're in wherever you are, it's like, okay, now we've, we can't, this person's just got their heel on our jugular, you know, on our windpipe. So that's why in, that's why, Navy's sort of matter so much in that period. And it's capable of obviously defeating the enemy fleet in battle.

It's just as astonishing. But to build it, to man it, it's crew, it to ensure no one crashes it into rocks. You need an incredibly sophisticated. The beginnings of a really early, interesting modern state. You need officers who can pass exams who are not just there because their granddad is posh. You need, you know,

army's fine. The army, you can have officers that are posh and thick, because they're only job, an officer's only job in the army is to show the men how to die. To not flinch and bullets go past. Sergeant, show the men out to fight, officers show them out of time. But that's not good enough in the Navy.

You need exams. You need, you need a sort of objective criteria which to test people on. You can't give them that much responsibility and not have them know what they're doing. And so this is the beginning of a kind of meritocratic state. It's the beginning of state. It has to find funding for this.

It has to upkeep. You can't just, you can, as you know, medieval army, if you've got gold, you can sort of get an army together. You've got a problem retaining it, but you can just get it together. Our men, you can train peasants in a year or so, you know, give them a primitive firearm,

maybe a few months you can get them going. You can't wish a navy into being. You need dry docks. You need seasoned oak. You need canvas. So you're talking about a multi-year, multi-generational project. A, build HMS, which,

and B, keep it going. And so if people listening to thinking, I'm just to sort of war, you know, excited about war, yes, that's an amazing, you know, extraordinary part of it. It's, its story at the Battle of Trafalgar is, is unbelievable. But actually what I love about it is what it represents in terms of what the, it's the tip of the iceberg and what's going underneath it.

And that talks a lot about, you know, why Britain, France and these other European countries sort of conquer the rest of the earth in this period. They put together all these kind of killer apps. Is there a moment from the represents the beginning of that process if HMS's victory is the kind of, you know, the high point of it? I mean, when does this all begin in terms of the... It's so interesting. Because Europe is this just little promontory on the end of Asia, and most of the action in the economic and political military action throughout much of history has been Indian Ocean, you've got Persia, empires of India, slightly adjunct South China Sea over there. And suddenly, these mad little Europeans. And it's the great expression on the peninsulas of the peninsula.

So not just in Europe, but in Devon, in Brittany, in Portugal and Spain. So these are the outside bits of the outside bits. They sort of put together, they put together shipbuilding technology, navigational advances, heavy weapons cannon, and they start saying very long distances, reasonably safely. I mean, still, I wouldn't want to do it, but reasonably safely. They're highly competitive, these absolute blighters, you know, Spanish, Bretons, Portuguese, Brits, Scots, all compete. So, so arms race, absolutely frantically, nicking each other's talent, nicking each other's braids, McGellin's going here, Columbus is going there, cabots going over there. They're stealing ideas from each other.

They're perfecting. They're getting a bit of kit and adding onto it. And so, yeah, from about 1,500 and then it just starts to, it's the kind of snowballs. And initially, as you know, the British military will turn out English and British military will turn up a place like India. And they'll fight a reason to be

even battle for a couple hundred. And then suddenly you just see, weirdly, these Europeans just screaming ahead. And that's the other thing about navies. Very hard to catch up. Like, insanely difficult. If you're a very wealthy a Mughal emperor you look at you can summon a lot of troops together

but you look at a navyship you're like I don't know how to get one of those I need I need factories I need I need iron works it's a lot of tech I mean it's making me think at the moment of the age that we're living in

and there are several parallel huge technological leaps forward one of them is the sort of latest age of space exploration and I wonder if the comparable capital spend and just vision and just like dogged determination

and belief that this technological revolution and everything that will have to go into it is, you know, is the Musk and to a slightly lesser extent, Bezos. Oh, this PMM. Encouraged and supported by the American economy, saying, you know what? We can build this new generation

of ships that will take us reliably back and forth and back and forth to the moon and eventually to Mars. I mean, is that too far-fetching analogy for what happens in Britain. All the analogies, as you know in history, you have to take with a pinch of salt. I think it's a really useful way to think about that. And I think we need to think about the rest of us, who aren't like enough to have

our own space companies, need to think about the consequences and how we kind of regulate and go, well, when we get to Mars, when we got to North America, all we did was like, right, this is what? Let's immediately export our European squabbles to North America. So do we want to get to a world where there's American flags and Chinese flags and then private company flags being planted on Mars? Or do we want to kind of head that off before we get there and really try and learn the lessons, I guess, of that period of the dash for global empire? Well, here's a big historical question. Do people

ever learn the lessons? I don't. Or do they just think about it? You get asked. I get asked at every talk, don't you? You same thing. I'm sure you get the same thing. Like, do we learn the lessons? I think, I'm, I suppose on this subject, I'm increasingly pessimistic, but not for the old reason. I used to be pessimistic. I used to think, People repeatedly make the same mistakes in different areas of history because they don't know enough about history. And then the more sort of powerful, political people I kind of bump into or off as I grow up. The more I think, no, they usually know quite a lot about history. But they, it's usually, no, no, I've read a lot of history and now I'm not going to do the same thing.

Next time, I'm going to invade Russia in the summer. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Or no, I'm still going to invade it in the winter, but I, because I know. I've got tech. Yeah, yeah. Get some coats. So my thinking about that is with regard to, you know, it would be very nice for us to go and colonise the moon and Mars and then not immediately have a massive war about who gets the best bit of it.

It would be lovely. I know, look, I hear what you're saying. And I also, they think, well, we're sort of, we are learning something. Otherwise, we'd all be still living in, like, Wattle and Torp houses. So it feels like in some ways we are learning. but obviously there's eye-catching examples of areas in which there are certain human problems seem to be kind of intractable they seem to be baked into the way that we do things.

Yes, and that's why I suppose certain foundational religious texts just endure in their moral dimension because typically they're dealing with the seven deadly sins. Yeah, we have fatal flaws. Talking of ancient texts, you're going to love this segue. I mean, I just think I'm so good. I'm here for it. This is where do you want to go?

Where do you want to go in the world? I want to go to Hissarlic. And actually, we were just talking about it before we started recording. This time almost exactly to the day, I went down to the putative site of the Trojan War. That's cool. Absolutely amazing. So this is in southwest Turkey on the Gallipoli, the Dardanelles, most famous historically for the Gallipoli landings. For the Gallipoli landings.

but there's an archaeological site since the middle of the 19th century there which is associated with whatever the historical event was that we now call the Trojan War. That's a hell of a mouthful because nobody knows the exact history of the Trojan War and the delineation between myth and history.

But there is an exciting destruction layer at about 1180 BC or something which is 12,500 BC which is about right, which is so exciting, isn't it? It's about right for possibly the events described. So that's cool. I agree. It's an amazing place.

And this is, this was somewhere that I went because I was, you know, I wrote this book about castles. And I was trying to trace the origins of fortifications and of the human, you know, thinking about war in the West at any rate back to this, this moment, which if it happened at all, happened in about 1180 BC. But then that there's an actual place which certainly since Roman times, you know, Caesar visited. Oh, yeah, people went. Was associated with the Trojan War. is extraordinary and there's actually quite a... You've been there, right? Skeptic.

There's still quite a lot of it left. Despite the efforts of the first guy to excavate it, Heinrich Schliemann, whose chief tool of excavation was dynamite. So just dynamite at a gigantic trench to the middle. But people should go and check out. Google images of... He found some jewelry in a... He found a burial, which is actually before the period.

He thought it was... He thought it was the right period. and he called it Helen of Troy's jewelry and he got his wife to dress up in it so you go see some amazing 90-century images

of his wife looking at Helen which I think got to take it back to Berlin and I think the Russians stole it after the Second World so I think it's now in Moscow weirdly that

yeah the Emmetaj or somewhere like that Are you into the classics is this something that gets you going What classics I mean these great sort of epics Yeah I love them mate Love them so I've just come back

from Greece where we were sailing around the island of Ithaca So were you indeed Yeah it was great We were going to make a show there I said but what I speak saying where I've always wanted to go. So my version of Troy is Easter Island. That's

for me, that's the one I love Polynesia. Yeah. Not just because I watch Moana with my daughter and her sort of epic meltdown. Basically, Moana is a movie about a dad and a daughter that loves sailing, oral historical tradition,

but the dad's too scared to leave the reef and his daughter goes off and saves the world. And that I think really does roughly reflect me and my daughter's relationship. So I was, I was shaking like a leaf coming out of there. And East Ireland is the furthest of this gigantic Pacific diaspora. And there's a great argument about East Island is they make these huge heads. The heads now are all knocked over.

There was a theory that there was a sort of environmental eco-side. They did chop down the trees, which was bad. We can all agree that there was trees, humans arrive, chop them down, bring in invasive species, destroy much the floor and fauna. They build these amazing heads. They quarry these amazing heads. And it was thought that by the time the Europeans arrived, they'd already smashed the whole thing up with a few hundred people alive.

and it was all a kind of Mad Mac style kind of lesson to us all about Ecoside. I think the latest, it's fun because it's nice when the disagreement on scholarship. The latest scholarship is that actually there was a pretty thriving community when the Europeans arrived. And the Europeans...

Don't tell me the Europeans are the bad guys again. Well, you'll be amazed to find out. And partly, they did shoot a few people when they accidentally arrived. There was a misunderstanding. But most importantly, of course, disease. They were carrying disease on their ships that they had no natural ability to withstand.

And so this Dutch expedition arrives about 1722. The heads upstanding. They report a community of about 3,000 people well-organised. Then it's about 80 years where another ship goes past. And at that stage, it's just chaotic. Heads fallen down, a couple of hundred people scrabbling, loss of ability to make significant boats. And it thought probably that's because of disease. So catastrophic pandemics.

And then possibly other ships visiting. who haven't left a good record. Because we know that after that, slavers came through would take the people of the islands into enslavement in South America. So just a complete catastrophe on every front, really. And I love the fact that, A, I like monumental sort of archaeology, and I find that very romantic,

go to those out-of-the-way places, or the idea of the siege or anything. But I also like, yeah, I like the idea of that, really trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened. Because it's quite important. you know, it's quite important to learn what happens to societies when they chop down the trees or when they encounter pandemic disease or, you know, those things I still think are quite, they're very thought-provoking, aren't they? Very important, speaking of learning lessons.

So, yeah. You mentioned Stonehenge very briefly in passing earlier on. Are you up on the Stonehenge mythology, not the mythology, the theories about how do they get it? One of those stones came from Scotland. Also stone came from Scotland. Is it exciting? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. What does that tell you about the Isles? fascinating to me.

More than once, I've almost crashed into the ditch going past Stonehenge just because, you know, there is always a traffic jam going past it. Even though, when compared to the pyramids,

let's be honest, it's not be funny. It's less good than the pyramids. It's much less good than the pyramids and evidence to rehearse an early part of this conversation that for most of history, the very edge of Europe

has been really quite primitive compared to the sort of beating heart of human civil. But put that aside, Stonehenge is still good. You go past it, you go, oh my God, they did what? And that's like the new bit of the monument. They brought some stuff from Wales. Yeah, amazing.

And something absolutely wild was happening in the very, very, very late Stone Age in that part of Britain. Dan Snow, what are you up to at the moment? What should people be looking out for? I've had lots of fun this summer. I got to make a, went on a great journey around the Greek islands to make a podcast series and TV show about The Honesty to time with the movie. So speaking of Troy.

So yeah, just check out Dan So's History wherever you get your pods. Fantastic. Check that out. And for our royal favourites, This Is History, please listen to this week's bonus episode where Dan and I will be dissecting

your favourite places teeming with historical intrigue. You can listen to that at patreon.com forward slash This Is History. Well, folks, thanks for listening. I really enjoyed that. It was great.

Nice summer chat. Please go and check this You can go and watch this if you want to on the This Is History YouTube, and this history is available wherever you get your podcasts. Go and check those out if you want more Dan Jones. Who doesn't? See you next time, everyone. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era?

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