Dan Snow's History Hit - The Great Storm of 1703

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

A Stuart time capsule has emerged from beneath the sand after 320 years. In early December 1703, barometers across South-Eastern England plunged as a cyclone made landfall in Britain leaving a path of destruction in its wake. In London, the roof of Westminster Abbey was ripped off and hundreds of ships in the Thames smashed together and left in heaps. 2000 Chimney stacks were destroyed and Queen Anne cowered in the cellar of St James Palace.But the biggest damage was done to the Royal Navy; over 1000 seaman drowned and a fifth of its fleet was wrecked overnight. One of those ships the HMS Northumberland has recently begun to appear thanks to the shifting sediment of Goodwin Sands on the South-East coast. On the podcast to tell its story in the storm is archaeologist Dan Pascoe who is working with Historic England to dive on the wreck and learn what he can before it disappears once again forever.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is the story of a night of terrible losses for the Royal Navy. A disaster for English sea power and much else besides, because this was a defeat not at the hands of the enemy, but at the hands of the weather. The reason we talk about it now is because a survivor has emerged from the sands of the English Channel. This is the story about the great storm of 1703 and HMS Northumberland. In early December 1703, the barometers plunged and a cyclone smashed into central and southern England. In London, something like 2,000 chimney stacks were knocked over.

The roof was blown up Westminster Abbey. Queen Anne took shelter in the cellar of St James's Palace. Hundreds of ships were smashed together on the Thames and left in a great heap. Thousands of homes were flooded along the River Thames. Hundreds of windmills were destroyed. Religious folks obviously declared that this was a sign of God's fury with the sinful state of the nation. Daniel Defoe, who wrote an entire book about the storm,

blamed it on God being angry that England wasn't doing well enough in the war of Austrian succession. But the greatest damage was done to the fleet of the Royal Navy, the ships anchored off the coast of England, many of which were in very, very secure anchorages. It shows just how hard these hurricane force winds were blowing. The Royal Navy is thought to have lost around 13 ships. Daniel Defoe says it was about a fifth of the entire fleet, so far more catastrophic than really any battle in terms of

losses the Royal Navy has fought since then. Over a thousand seamen were drowned and among the ships lost in the supposedly secure anchorage off Kent, the Downs, was HMS Northumberland. Everybody aboard was killed and for 300 years, it has lain covered up by the sands of the Goodwin, obscure to the eyes of divers. Until now. Recently, shifting sands have unveiled the Northumberland. And you see this huge wreck mound when we kind of land on the seabed where

the shot goes in and you go down this shot line to the seabed, which is normally offset from the wreck. And you start swimming along towards the wreck mound and it just towers up in front of you and you see cannons sticking out of the sand, muzzles pointing towards you. I've got Dan Pascoe on the podcast. He is a marine archaeologist. He's director of Pascoe Archaeology and he works as a researcher at Bournemouth University. He is all over the Northumberland site and he's being supported by Historic England monitoring the site, which is terribly at risk. This is a Stuart time capsule of the scale and magnificence of the Mary Rose, that famous Tudor time capsule, a ship that sank around 150 years previously. It's a story that I'm heavily invested in. History Hit will be going out, filming on the Northumberland, so keep an eye on your feeds, folks.

This is not the last you've heard in Northumberland. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Dan, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me along. I guess, first of all, can you tell me a little bit about this terrible storm? I just want to reinforce to people, this is not just the average little blow. No, this was the greatest storm. And in fact, Daniel Defoe wrote about it in his novel, The Storm. And it was the worst in recorded history. So we're going back to 1703, the night of

the 26th of November, 1703, and the navy, the Mediterranean fleet, had just returned and they were anchoring in the Downs. And they were in a terrible state, they had a long campaign in the Mediterranean, there was a lot of sickness on board, they'd lost a lot of crew due to disease. And things were just going to get worse. They got hit by this terrible storm that was coming from across the Atlantic. And it caused widespread destruction across southern England, wrecking hundreds of ships, including four Royal Navy ships on the Goodwin Sands. So hundreds of men, I think around about a thousand men were lost that night on the Goodwin Sands. So hundreds of men, I think around about a thousand men were lost that night

on the Goodwins alone. There are other losses, of course, across the country, but on the Goodwins, four Royal Navy ships, everyone was lost on board the Northumberland. There were three other ships, the Restoration, the Stirling Castle and the Mary. And only a few survivors came from the Stirling Castle and the Mary. And only a few survivors came from Stirling Castle, and one survivor from the Mary, which was probably the luckiest person alive. He was swept off the deck of the Mary onto the Stirling Castle. The Stirling Castle then wrecked and he was rescued from the Stirling Castle. So he was incredibly lucky. Tell me about the Downs and the Goodwin Sands, because it's not really seen as one of the great harbours anymore. We're talking about the coast of Kent. Describe the geography to me. Okay, so the Goodwin Sands is a series of mobile sandbanks.

It's roughly 19 kilometres long from north to south, seven kilometres wide going from east to west and it's about six kilometres offshore from Deal which is on the east coast of Kent. So just around the corner down towards the south you've got Dover and up to the north you've got Ramsgate. And these sands have been a hazard to shipping since seafaring began really, so for thousands of years. So we have all sorts of wrecks on the Goodwins. It's known as the ship swallower because it has this amazing ability to engulf shipwrecks. So when a ship strikes the sands, once it sinks, the sand draws that ship down towards the bedrock and just encapsulates it and completely buries it. But because they're mobile sands, every so often the shipwreck will emerge.

And that's what's happening with the Northumberland. It's been preserved for over 300 years by the sands and now they've shifted and the ship is just coming out of this sandbank. What we're finding is that there's an incredible amount of the ship that survives, a huge amount of material contained within it. But that sand that has been protecting it for 300 years is rapidly moving away due to strong tides and currents. And it's not surprising because this happened with another casualty of that same storm,

the Stirling Castle, which, tell me, was once there for divers to see and archaeologists like you, and now is completely covered over again. Exactly. So in 1979, divers were investigating fisherman snags, and that's when they found the Stirling Castle. And the first divers reported seeing this wooden warship complete on a keel, complete from the gun deck all the way down to the floor of the ship with even guns sticking out the gun ports and even some divers reported being able to swim through one gun port and out through the other now the problem with that is because it's come out the sands the sand within that ship was starting to cause the sides to bulge out so all that weight

of sand was just pulling the ship apart and this this is what happens. There's a very short period of time that enables you to make the most of the opportunity before it starts breaking up and deteriorating. And then you've got other things like shipworm that are attacking all the organic remains. And this is what's happening to the Northumberland now. I mean, for the last 30 years, the Northumberland has always been in the shadow of our sister ship, the Stirling Castle. But now the Stirling Castle is completely covered over. There's nothing you can see of her at all. She's still there under the sand.

I mean, in fact, you could run aground over the Stirling Castle. You could even get out your boat in that low tide, probably have a game of cricket. But the Northumberland, the reverse is happening. The sands have gone the other way, and there she is. So we've got a early 18th century, late 17th century warship, not quite as complete as the Stirling. She's more of a, what you would say, a traditional wreck,

a bit like the Mary Rose, where you have one side complete. This is what I think we have, is that she's preserved from stern to bow, probably from the gun deck down to the floor, but on one side of the ship rather than sitting upright. And the tides and currents must have moved thousands of tonnes of sand. Well, we've been monitoring the site since 2017. And when I say monitoring, we've been using geophysical survey techniques such as multi-beam bathymetry, which maps the seabed. Not only does this map the seabed, it maps the exposed wreck, but it's been tracking the movement of this sandbank. We've compared the various data sets,

so we've got four data sets, and we've compared the changes in depth over the site and we've calculated nearly 10,000 cubic meters of sand has gone from the wreck site that's the equivalent of four olympic swimming pools so that's a huge amount of sand that's been protecting that site which is now gone and it's not coming back so the seabed that's sort of behind that sandbank doesn't have a significant depth to cover the wreck so we have calculated that the depth of stratigraphy on the wreck is around three and a half to four meters and the seabed now surrounding it is only half a meter deep so you can see what's going to happen that over a very short period of time the sand that is still on that wreck mound is going to get blown away by the tides and the currents and there isn't a sufficient burial

environment to preserve it anymore so we kind of need to do something about it and record the archaeology before it gets ravaged by marine boring organisms like shipworm or fishing nets. There's a lot of fishing that goes on and you don't necessarily know there's a wreck down there. And you get trawl nets going through a wreck site that's pulling stuff out. I mean, the site is absolutely strewn in commercial fishing nets. So the site is extremely vulnerable. Now the sands have gone. March 2023 marks 20 years since the start of the Iraq war. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end marred in controversy. So why did the Iraq war go so badly wrong? And what legacies has it left behind

today? Well, I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history. We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq and could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind? But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare podcast from History Hit as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

So the sands have gone. The Northumberland is re-emerging. Tell us about the ship itself. When was it launched? So she was launched in 1679 so this is during the reign of King Charles II and the Restoration Navy and really the mastermind behind the Northumberland was Samuel Pepys. The Northumberland was part of a great shipbuilding program known as the 30 ships that he got permission from Parliament in 1677. We had just finished the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and the Navy was in quite a poor state.

It needed a bit of a shake-up, it needed new ships. The Navy was pretty vulnerable at the time, and Pepys realised that improvements had to be done, not just in the building of new ships, but also with the professionalism of the Navy, making it also in the production and manufacture of ships and also all the materials that you need to provision a ship. We needed to make that more efficient to make the Navy a more effective fighting machine.

So it's a very important period in the development of the Royal Navy. And the North London was one of 20 70-gun warships that was built. There were nine second rates of 90 guns and one first rate of 100 guns. So that's 30 ships. That's the largest and most ambitious shipbuilding programme of its time. And is she more famous for her sinking than her service, or did she have a lively career?

She had an extremely lively career. After the first few years, when she was laid up in ordinary, there wasn't anything going on. These great ships were launched in 1679 and 1680, but there's nothing for them to do. So a lot of them were laid up in ordinary, basically an anchor at port, rotting away. And it wasn't until the 1690s when things started to kick off again. And we see her being part of some of the most famous battles of the late 17th century. So we've got the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690,

fighting the French, and we actually lost that one. And then in 1692, we have the Battle of Bafleur. And then in 1695, there was the bombardment of Saint-Malo. And actually the captain of Northumberland at that time was Captain Bembobo and he led that bombardment of Saint Marleau. And then just before Northumberland wrecked, she was with Claude de Sauvel's fleet down in the Mediterranean around 1702 and 1703 and her last operation was blockading the French at Toulon. So she was involved in a lot of battles during that late 17th century, early

18th century. It was a very busy time. The Navy was developing into this great sea power. And so how many men would have been on board? So at the time of the wrecking, we think there was around about 250, which is quite a small number considering this is a 70-gun warship. But quite a few men were lost on the voyage back. They'd spent a long time in the Mediterranean, a long campaign. I mean, really, you don't want to be coming back around in the autumn time because you get very strong gales and that's exactly what happened. So I think she was probably under crewed at the time of loss. If you compare her with her sister ship, the Stirling, had around 325 men on board, I believe. So she was probably undermanned at the time of the loss, which may

have contributed to the loss of the ship, but we will never know. Was there a public outcry or was this seen as an act of God? That is a good question. I mean, in those days, people were probably religious and probably saw it as just something that happened. There's nothing you could do about it. It's a tragedy. Ships were at anchor in the Downs, which is normally an area where they're protected by the land. So if you've got bad weather coming from the west, southwest, you should be protected in the Downs because you have the coast of Kent to your west., you should be protected in the Downs because you have the coast of Kent to your west. And you should be protected from the east by the Goodwin Sands. I mean, this demonstrates how bad this storm was, that the land offered no protection for these ships.

Their anchors dragged and cables parted and they were blown onto the sands. The sands are just like concrete, really. The ships get pulverized on there. In some cases, the Stirling Castle, they were lucky enough, their anchors must have held on just long enough to stop the ship being completely wrecked. And it only foundered and people were unable to get off and survive. But for other ships like the Mary, it got completely smashed to smithereens. And we've seen from geophysical surveys, this kind of debris trail of guns, and there's not much lift to the ship. The Northumberland is in between that. It was more violent, her wrecking, but she didn't get completely blown across the sand. She's gone down in one place. And we can see that through

the magnetometry in the sub-bottom that there is a wreck mound that's 50 meters long and 15 meters wide containing everything there is no scatter it's a wonderful place to now start exploring because we're trying to work out what happened that night and we're only going to really understand more about what could have happened if we get to investigate it more intrusively you've've been down there, you've dived on the site, what's there? It's a really exciting place to dive. It can be exciting in the way that it's very adventurous and it's dark and murky and you're often bumping into things like 32 pounder cannons with parts of their carriages surviving. And then you have some days where you've got five to ten meters visibility and you can just see it all laid out on the seabed and you see this

huge wreck mound when we kind of land on the seabed where the shot goes in and you go down this shot line to the seabed which is normally offset from the wreck and you start swimming along towards the wreck mound and it just towers up in front of you and you see cannons sticking out of the sand, muzzles pointing towards you. Some of them have fallen over and you can see their carriages, parts of their carriage still attached. At the southern end of the site there's a huge concretion that is full of shot. So you've got the round shot, you've got double-headed shot, which is like the bar shot. And this would have been in the central part of the ship.

And it towers, it's about three meters high. And because it's made of iron, it forms this concretion, which is like concrete and other artifacts have got stuck to it. So we can see barrels that have become concreted next to it. We've got wooden staved buckets. We've got pulley blocks and pulley sheath. These were probably all spare equipment that were associated with different rooms on the ship. And at the northern end of the site, as you swim across more guns and you think you're just coming to the end, there's these kind of spiky things sticking up out of the sand. And at first we didn't know what they were.

And then when we looked closer, we realised that this was just a huge pile of swords, what they used to call hangers, which are these kind of like cutlasses. And they're still in their scabbards. We know this because we sampled a section. We saw this beautiful leather scabbard with the remains of the sword inside. And then next to that we saw a big pile of muskets so this is obviously the armory on board the ship where the small arms were kept and every time we go back to the site more and

more artifacts are becoming exposed and a really exciting find because you just don't know what's in it we've came across a chest and it's completely intact all of the sides are there. Again, it's got this thin layer of concretion on it. So there's no way of knowing what's in it unless you recovered it. But who knows what's there? Every time we go back, we find more and more things. We haven't been back for over a year now. So who knows what else is emerging? The thing is, you don't get much time. The seal has been broken.

Everything's attacking it, wants to degrade it. Yeah, we should reinforce the fact that these swords, this armoury, it's been uncovered very, very recently. And now it's wonderful that you can see it, but it is now in the process of being destroyed by the sea, by the worm, the microorganisms, by corrosion, all this kind of stuff. Exactly. And everything's now getting covered in fishing nets. So that damages it too. I don't blame anyone. This is just what happens. You know, there's so many shipwrecks on the Goodwin Sands, you can't help but hit a shipwreck if you're fishing. But yes, you've got a biological

environment, marine boring organisms, and obviously the physical environment with the sea, strong tides and currents. But all of this is increasing because we seem to be getting more frequent high energy storm events, possibly down to climate change. The seas are warming up. The sea is now 21 degrees around the wreck site. So you've got more marine life that is potentially feeding on it. So everything is acting against the site now and deteriorating it. As archaeologists, we're not just interested in the objects or just the ship. We're trying to understand the people and the culture and how the Navy developed. And you find that out through the details on the artefacts, such as tool marks, carpenters' marks, or where artefacts are found on the ship.

So their contexts, their association with the ship and other objects, the exposed material loses that surface detail because you've got all this erosion going on. So if we want to form a connection with the people on board, we need to get to the material before it's exposed. It's a race to get to well-preserved, clean surfaces. And it's not very far underneath the surface. You know, it wouldn't take very much to get down to those pristine layers. But everything is telling us,

the remote sensing that we've been doing that is recorded what lies beneath the sand is telling us that there's a huge amount of archaeological material preserved within the ship. So what's the plan? How can you get in there and excavate and look at this before it's, well, sadly, suffers much more damage on the seabed? It sounds like it's an at-risk wreck. It is an at-risk. There's 57 protected sites in England and only four of them are what you call at high risk. They're on the Historic England's at risk register as high.

And this is for the reasons that we just said, that it's now vulnerable. Historic England have supported my research on the site since I started monitoring it back in 2017. research on the site since I started monitoring it back in 2017. So at the moment, we're at this stage where we're trying to put together a plan that kind of fits with Historic England's aims and objectives and one that is affordable. But it's a challenge. This is the biggest challenge now, is to try and demonstrate why money should go towards investigating this shipwreck. It's not a challenge for me, Dan. If I was in charge of historically, I'd write you a massive check tomorrow and we'd all go down. But we are, you and I actually are hopefully going to go down for a dive, no matter what funding or no, we will try and get a dive on the site this year, I think. So that is a history hit

and Dan Pascoe plan. So very much looking forward to that. I hope you'll hold my hand and point me in the right direction down on the seabed. I will, Dan. And it'd be great if you could come along and be part of the project. I want, you know, the whole of the world to enjoy it and to see it for what it is and what we can learn from it

and how exciting the Goodwin Sands is in general and that we should be doing a lot more to understand and protect its underwater cultural heritage. Definitely. And that's where we can come in and help, Dan. And look, for a maritime history geek like me, it's from the late 17th century.

So this sits almost exactly in between Mary Rose and HMS Victory. So this is a sort of, it's a missing link for people if they want to chart the development of our warships right up to the present day. So we'll get something going. People, watch this space.

More coming up on this story. Dan, how can people learn more about it in the meantime okay so we have on social media we have on facebook the northumberland rec site page we also have short films and videos on pasco archaeology youtube channel and just keep an eye out on Twitter. Hopefully things will start picking up again. Now we've got a plan for the summer and spring. And Dan, if you come out, we can do another podcast and show off the site. We'll be doing all that, buddy. Thank you very much for coming on, Dan Pascoe. What an exciting story. Thank you, Dan.