Dan Snow's History Hit - The Tragedy of HMS Captain

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

As a crew of over 500 boarded HMS Captain in the autumn of 1870, none of them knew their fate was sealed in the offices of the dockyard. The Captain was one of the Royal Navy’s first steam powered battleships- both innovative and formidable - three masts with wrought iron armour, but it was no match for the treacherous storm it came up against one September night in the Bay of Biscay. As the Captain was battered and swallowed by the Atlantic, the men onboard suffered terribly: some washed overboard, some caught in steam explosions below and others trapped in the rigging and sails as she disappeared. Only 18 survived, by rowing scantily clad, barefoot and traumatised through the darkness until daybreak. The tragedy ripped through Victorian Britain and quickly questions started to be asked about how this could have happened and who was responsible.Today, over 150 years later, Dr Howard Fuller from the University of Wolverhampton and his team have made a breakthrough in their search for the wreck off the coast of Spain. They're almost certain HMS Captain lies off Cape Finisterre and are working on a campaign to explore the wreck, to discover more about the ship and its sinking. Part of the project is to find out more about the last moments of the men on board, most of whom lost their lives, for their descendants and families who are still looking for answers. You can find out more and donate to the Find the Captain fundraiser project here: findthecaptain.co.uk Produced by Mariana Des Forges, sound design and mixing 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.

The Bay of Biscay, the Gulf of Water, bracketed by France and northern Spain, known as the Valley of Death by sailors. Spring and summer can be cool and foggy, but autumn brings the rain and winter storms whip up, huge swells and dangerous winds. Some of the worst weather in the Atlantic, and therefore the world, can be found right here. Anyone willing to brave the fearsome conditions risk seasickness at best and wrecking at worst. Over the centuries, the shipwrecks in the area have mounted into the thousands,

while the number of souls that have perished there is far higher. worst. Over the centuries, the shipwrecks in the area have mounted into the thousands, while the number of souls that have perished there is far higher. It's 1870, on board HMS Captain. It's one of the Royal Navy's first steam-powered battleships, both innovative and formidable. Three masts with wrought iron armour. Its 900-horsepower engine thrusts it through the water at pace, but at a price. It sits low and sleek in the water, but that means the waves reach up to the bulwark, can even lick the deck.

From the very beginning, concerns are raised about the design of the ship. This low freeboard makes her vulnerable to flooding. Meanwhile, the chief constructor, Edward James Reid, fears that she'll be top-heavy, her centre of gravity too high, which will compromise her safety. Still, building commences in Birkenhead in 1867. When she's complete, she's almost 750 tonnes heavier than planned. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1870, she begins to participate in gunnery trials with great success. Again, Reed raises concerns about her seaworthiness.

Again, they're ignored. It proves a disastrous mistake. As a crew of over 500 Royal Navy sailors board HMS Captain in the autumn of 1870, none of them know their fate has already been sealed in the offices and on the slipway of the Laird Brothers shipyard. It's autumn 1870. Captain sets off for more gunnery trials. On the 6th of September, as part of the 11-strong Mediterranean and Channel Squadron, she passes by Cape Finisterre, the edge of the world, the most western point of mainland Spain. Through the afternoon, the winds pick up and the swell gets larger.

As night falls, the storm gets stronger. Sails are taken in to stop the ship being pushed over onto its side. Shortly after midnight, when a new watch comes on duty, the ship heels to 18 degrees. She's built to withstand a 21-degree heel. After that, capsizing becomes a very real possibility. The crew feel the ship lurch to starboard twice. Force 9 to force 11 wind speeds are reported, around 60 miles an hour. 50 foot waves envelop the captain. The ship trembles and groans. Some men desperately try to right the ship by taking in more sails,

while others are washed straight off the deck into the black Atlantic. Others rush to the lifeboats. One newspaper article published in the aftermath from interviews with survivors read, On the hurricane deck were stored three boats, one inside the other. The largest outer boat was a pinnace, a large eight-oared and steam-powered boat. Inside this a smaller launch, capable of carrying 50 men, and inside this again the smaller galley or captain's gig. The launch in which Thomas Kernan had taken refuge had separated from the bigger pinnace when thrown off the ship and was floating right way up. Amongst the first to get to it were able seaman Davis Driver and leading seaman Charles Tregener.

Both had been working on deck and as the ship rolled over, got to the high side of the deck. As it rolled further away, both walked round the revolving hull to the keel, before the ship sank under them. The steam pinnace, although floating, had not righted itself as it should, but was to initially help six survivors. Captain Burgoyne was on the deck at the time of the capsizing, giving orders for the taking down of the sails. In the water, he found himself close to the gunner's mate, James Ellis, and able seaman John Hurd. The two seamen managed to get themselves and non-swimmer Captain Burgoyne onto the inverted pinnace, where they were joined by the most senior survivor, gunner James May.

He had gone on deck around midnight at the height of the storm, as was his custom in bad weather, to check on his guns. He was inside the aft turret as the ship rolled over and managed to get out through the top turret sighting hole. Also joining them here were Boyd First Class James Saunders, Ordinary Seaman Robert Tomlinson, and Able Seaman William Lawrence. The wind drifted the launch towards the pinnace, and in the stormy, wave-tossed conditions, those on the pinnace started to transfer to the launch. All were transferred, except for Captain Burgoyne. Despite pleas from the rest of the seamen, he appears to have made no attempt to reach the launch. He was not seen again.

The ship capsizes, swallowed by the hungry waves. Of 501 crew members, the men named and 11 others are all that survive. 483 go down, trapped on or inside the ship. Today, over 150 years later, archaeologist Howard Fuller and his team have made a breakthrough in their search for the wreck of HMS Captain. They're pretty sure they've located where it sank off the coast of Finisterre and are working on a campaign to go and explore the wreck to discover more about the ship and its sinking. It's an exciting project and a sombre one.

Unlike our discovery of endurance this time last year, the wreck of the Captain is both an artefact and a gravesite. And part of the project is to find out more about the last moments of those 500 men on board, the vast majority of whom lost their lives. Many of their descendants and families are still looking for answers. So I'm very glad to welcome Howard Fuller onto this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. T-minus 10. The atomic 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. Howard, thanks for coming on the show. Hi Dan, thanks for coming on the show. Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me. Tell me about the Royal Navy in the 1860s. What kind of institution or organization are we talking here? Well, the mid-19th century is often considered to be the sort of height

of the so-called Pax Britannica. The Royal Navy had been enjoying peacetime maritime naval supremacy since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. It had emerged from the Crimean War relatively unscathed and unchallenged in operations against Russia with France. budget so that the Admiralty was fairly confident that it was maintaining a strong balance of power, not just against its closest traditional rival, Imperial France under Napoleon III, but also against any possible coalitions like with particularly say Russia or some other European power in particular. The problem with the 1860s, and this is something that began to emerge during the Crimean War, is that in the larger context, it's other, and a series of nationalist movements, but also wars and wars of expansion taking place both in Europe, in sort of Central Asia, is one of the reasons why the Crimean War had broken out, but also overseas in the United

States, particularly the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, which technically might not represent a conflict of interest with mid-Victorians. But at the same time, they found themselves directly invested in the outcomes of many of these conflicts, particularly American Civil War in the 1860s. So there is this sort of dichomedy going on here between a period of profound peace and stability and relative supremacy. But at the same time, many challenges were taking place that threatened a sort of change in the order of things. Certainly a large degree of increasing unpredictability. Okay, so it's an era of changes of nationalism in Far Eastern Europe, and it's an era of extreme partisanship in North America. I mean,

this sounds crazy, Howard. It's a world that we struggle to recognize today. Tell me also, this is a time of enormous technological change, right, as well. Right. So as a lot of historians obviously pointed out, in addition to the social and political upheavals going on by the mid-19th century, you also had full-on effects of the Industrial Revolution taking place. The Industrial Revolution itself, in many ways, built upon the age of science, the age of reason, and creating basically the sort of industry of technology for the first time. And in the 1840s, 1850s, particularly by the 1860s, there was a sort of industrialization of technology as applied to the military.

So the army, certainly things like mass-produced muskets and rifled muskets, more precision firearms capable of greater firepower, but at sea, the same thing. So steam propulsion, paddle wheel turning to screw propelled, better improved guns that could fire farther with rifling and fire exploding shells. And then finally, the advent of armor plating, which was a technological innovation introduced by the French for the first time during the Crimean War as a response to the danger posed by shell firing guns fired by Russian forts, which tended to keep wooden warships at a distance in the Black Sea and in the Baltic. So all these kinds of changes, steam, shell fire, armor plating, were likewise threatening to sort of change the

rules of the game, as it were. And it did force the Admiralty to adapt as rapidly as it could, and yet do it cautiously at the same time. Because, of course, the problem with technology, even as we know today, is that sometimes it can go very well, but sometimes it can go disastrously. Sometimes the technology doesn't work. It has to be foolproof time and again. It requires a lot of investment and a lot of patience. As it turned out in the 1860s, patience was something that was running out very quickly, given the turmoil of surrounding events, given the rapid pace of technological advancements, particularly when you got into the so-called guns versus armor race on top of everything else. The Victorian public became increasingly nervous, we might say, losing a bit

of confidence in the overall situation of things, a sense that things were changing beyond their control, and a sense that something had to be done quickly and faster. And all of these types of events help explain why mid-Victorian taxpayers would even consider putting pressure, I should say, on a very conservative, very closed-door institution like the Board of Admiralty in terms of shipbuilding policy. And this, of course, is what helps explain how you get a first-rate capital ship ironclad like HMS Captain being produced. It was an exceptional ship built under exceptional circumstances. And you can't quite rationalize the captain's existence without understanding first all the other things that are going into it. I think we tend to condemn the captain's creator, Calpicole's and his supporters in the press and parliament for pressuring the Admiralty they should have left well enough alone. But we also have to ask

ourselves what made them think that the Admiralty needed any help or pressure to begin with? And that's where we get into sort of larger context of the story. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, there's more coming up. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit, we talk about everything from what Queen Consort Tudors, from History Hit, we talk about everything from what Queen Consort Camilla could learn from the Renaissance. Really, when we begin to look at Queen Consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways that women could have authority through their relationship with the king. To how you should never upstage Henry VIII.

You'd have been a very unwise individual turning up to court probably with a larger codpiece than the king, I suspect. From the real Matawaka, better known as Pocahontas. She's brought and presented to the king and queen as this shining example of what we could achieve. To how to tell someone to get lost. You could say, turd in your teeth. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week, every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. 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. And you've mentioned Coles there. Tell me about this Captain Coles, because he championed this whole concept. Yeah, well, Coles, like many in the Admiralty and the Navy at the time, was a veteran of the Crimean War, the so-called Russian War. It was very recent. A lot of the Navy were stationed in the Baltic or the Black Sea or sometimes both. Coles was there as well. The fundamental problem was how to get ships to engage with coastal defenses, Russian forts. They were everywhere. There were batteries everywhere. How do you actually project naval power decisively? Because the Russians have been working on making their coastline and their harbors, places like Sevastopol or Kronstadt,

impregnable. So it is a sort of problem. And one of the solutions that Coles was keen on was the idea of a very light draft vessel, practically a raft that could be pushed up very close up against an enemy fort on the shore. And using a revolving gun, give it extra range and maneuverability and accuracy that a large ship of the line parked 500 yards or 1,000 yards offshore just wouldn't be able to give in quite the same way. Now, he did have the backing of Lyons, the admiral in charge. There was a sort of family connection there as well that helped. He sort of pursued this idea. A lot of historians are sort of unclear as to what kind of influence people like even Scott and Brunel actually had on Coles coming up with the turret concept. But certainly, Coles was a really big innovator in his own right. He was very imaginative, very creative, not quite so technical, never quite styled himself an engineer. But he could come up with an idea, he could visualize it, and he was usually pretty good at getting other people to try to work it out for him.

gun seemed to make perfect sense. It solved a lot of problems. It offered a lot of possibilities. This is also what we were calling sort of age of progress, where the future looked bright. The future was what you made of it, self-made Victorian ideal, idolized inventors and technical innovation and people who could make systems more efficient and make changes that would better humankind. So the 20th century was like this gilded golden horizon, you know, flying cars, all the rest of it, that seemed inevitable. But extraordinarily, Coles gets the Admiralty to agree to let him kind of build his own ship, which is bizarre. It's built in Birkenhead, very quick, laid down in 1867, finished in 1869. And initially, it wins rave reviews, right? Tell me about the captain. Tell me how it handles. And also, tell me about some of the people on board. What kind of jobs have they been doing in this

kind of new Navy? A proportion of them were people who could operate guns. Handling the guns inside the turret is a sort of operational art they had to work out for themselves. But it's still a lot less gunners that you need as such than on board the Warrior, for example. But what hasn't changed from the Warrior is the fact that Coles is insisting with the captain design concept on a full rig of sail. In the end, as a lot of people have suggested, it's the masts and the sails, this is Tophampton, which proves to be the doom of the captain in many respects. So a sleek, low-lying hull, but with this giant spread of masts and sails above it. So you can see already there's some things pulling in different directions here.

Yeah, the idea of the captain in many ways was to build a perfect ship, an invincible ship, a ship that would be as invincible tactically, you could say, as a monitor with a very low profile, the maximum concentration of guns and armor, the biggest possible guns that you could ever float because it's in a turret and can be rotated, perhaps maneuvered by steam power as well. And at the same time, it's a ship like the warrior that can defend all corners of the empire. So you could send this to trouble spots in the Far East, to China or Japan, because again, conflicts against Japan had started around this time as well. You could take it to South Africa if there were problems going on there. You could take it to New Zealand if

there were problems going on there. And in particular, they were talking about taking it to North America. So if things got ugly with the Northern states and after the Civil War, even if things got ugly over things like the Alabama claims, then again, you wanted a ship that could project presence unquestionably in a way beyond that Warrior could anymore. It performs well in its trials. It seems like they might have created the ultimate ship. You've got guys deep down in the bowels of the ship shoveling tons of coal. You've got guys high up in the sails practicing the art of seamanship like their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers would have done.

So it's a world brought together. So in 1870, in September 1870, it's cruising in not just any old bit of sea, but one of the roughest, most notorious stretches of ocean on Earth. It's only, well, it's what, six months old at this point, a bit less than that. How did it start? Because it's pretty summery in early September. You'd expect decent weather down there. They had been doing firing exercises during the daytime.

doing firing exercises during the daytime. The captain was testing its guns and the admiral in charge of the combined squadron, Sir Alexander Milne, was a top-notch admiral. In fact, he was soon to be the first sea lord. He had come on board the captain. It was the last ship he was visiting and he was given a tour. The gunnery on the captain was very good, but he was very concerned about how low the ship was in the water and, like a monitor, how water was flowing over the ship and then flowing back off again. So the water was actually coming up over the deck and splashing up against the turret walls and then washing back off again. That was new to Milne and a lot of officers and men.

And Coles and Burgoyne were both like, nope, this is fine. It's standard procedure. The water comes in, the water comes off. Most of the people were concerned about how you could fight guns when the water was coming up half the turret side like that. But there were other people who were saying, this can't be right, that the vessel is swamped like this and it's sort of pushing through the water like this. It can't be the right way to go.

It doesn't seem natural and a bit dangerous. And ironically enough, they had invited Milne. It can't be the right way to go. It just doesn't seem natural and a bit dangerous. And ironically enough, they had invited Milne. It was getting dark. They'd invited Milne to stay on board the captain that night instead of going back to his flagship, this sort of high freeboard broadside central battery ship, the Lord Warden. And he was like, no, I think I'll sleep aboard my flagship. Thanks. The ship seems very wet and I'm a little bit nervous. And I think I'd rather get back to my own ship. And in fact, just getting the Admiral back on board the boat when the captain was swamped over was almost dangerous in its own right. There's some counts. And he did manage to get back to his ship. Everybody battened down for the night. The weather was getting bad and it

wasn't until about 10, 11 o'clock that night that the conditions had picked up enough where things started to get very strange. And this is sort of corroborated with the other testimonies, but also the ship's logs of the squadron that night, that the conditions became very strange. Sort of cross-sea conditions were taking place where you've got the sort of tide and the current clashing against one another. That's dangerous for ships in its own right. But here you've got a low freeboard ship, the wind blowing from the west, it's heeling over, water's coming in, it's rolling very slowly and it's very sluggish. But it's the wind, I think, that finally comes in at the end. So that just as the deck watch changes at midnight, so everybody had gone below, it's a bit confused and they're still running some sail. This came up later confused. And they're still running some sail.

This came up later on. Why were they still running sail? Obviously, when the seas get kind of rough, what you should be doing is just relying strictly on your engine power. And you bring the sails down. But again, they're testing this ship. They want to prove that it can still be managed in rough weather, including sails. It's part of the sort of shakedown for the crew as well to get them to raise and lower sails in terrible conditions, this kind of thing. After the watch had come on and things were still confused, the ship was heeling over so bad. But at one point, Dan, I think that the sea had basically grabbed the captain and turned it over

very close to its tipping point. And then it gets hit by, on the other hand, a freakish wind, like a freakish wind that basically tore through the entire squadron that right and almost every single ship. And the squadron that night was damaged from this crazy strong burst of force that rips through the fleet like that. That's the wind that does the captain over. It's not just the fact that the captain was healing over. It was the sea plus the wind hitting it in just the right way, which put it past its banishing point and then rolled the ship over like that. It would have been, obviously, a terrible experience for the men on board and a very different one. Perhaps we could explore some of the men up in the mast and the rigging, probably trying to take sail in.

They would have been plunged straight into the water with rope rigging wrapped around. Others would have been presumably way below the waterline and suddenly their world would have gone dark, twisted upside down, everything flying everywhere. The firemen, the people loading the coal into the furnaces, that would have been a horrific place to be as well. It's unusual for ships to capsize. It's unusual for government ships that have gone through contracts and supervision and checks for ships to capsize. It was almost unthinkable that this would take you back to the Napoleonic Wars. So that's a generation or two already. The key reaction, I think, to people on the captain when this ship rolls over like that after midnight is surprise. We were always kind of wondering what was going through Coles' mind because Coles was on the captain. He was a VIP on board the ship. He was there with the trials. He had a lot wrapped up in the success of this vessel. So he was there. He was in the stern of the ship in sort of guest cabin. What went through his

mind when the ship rolled over like that and it started to sink stern first? You might think, well, Coles' reaction was, oops, I guess I got it wrong after all. No, I think his reaction would have been just simply surprised. It was unthinkable to him that a low freeboard ship, a ship this large, a ship this well-constructed, could capsize. And everyone below the deck was doomed. Everyone who survived, they were on the deck. And most of them all got washed over into the sea. It's a raging sea at night. It's beginning of September off the coast of Spain. It's cold. The water's freezing. A lot of people are thrown into the water.

We have some accounts where they literally scrambled up the side of the ship and climbed over the hull, onto the build kill, upside down in the hull, because it's the only thing that's left. And meanwhile, they can hear screams of hundreds of men trapped below, suddenly wakened up. Fires burst out. There's a steam explosion basically underneath. Everyone's getting scalded and screaming. It's all coming up through the vents.

It's a horrific nightmare. And a lot of men were trapped in the rigging and the sails as it tipped over. Some men managed to break free. Many men did not. Most of the people that were on the deck watch, say 100 men, were drowned. And only a few managed to get into the water clear or not dragged down by the captain because the captain sank within about five or 10 minutes of rolling over. Water flooded into the vessel and it went down stern first, upside down pretty quickly.

Burgoyne himself was thrown into the water, the captain. There is the account that as the ship was thrown into the water, the captain. There is the account that as the ship was peeling over very sharply, he became alarmed and he ran up onto the deck basically in his nightgown, right? And looked at the situation, there were guys screaming, people were afraid at that point. And he looked up and he said, cut it, you know, cut the rigging, get it out, get the sails out. And just as they were clambering up there and trying to do that, it was too late. So he was washed overboard in the sea. A couple of penises and boats were rolled off the wreck, fortunately. And he was there clinging to part of the wreck as well. And I think the account is that Burgoyne couldn't swim, like a lot of people in the Navy

couldn't swim. But he basically gave himself up. He wasn't especially interested in being rescued. He was the captain of the ship. This is a terrible disaster. What's happened, who knows what's going through his head as well. But he did manage to urge some of the other guys that were on an overturned boat to swim towards a launch that was upright with some men in it, going around trying to grab survivors in a raging sea at night. Everyone's shouting, screaming. The captain's going down. Burgoyne just basically waved them off and he just disappeared, mountainous waves, and they never saw him again. I don't think he wanted to survive that night. How many men did survive out of the

crew? 19 men managed to get into the boat and a large wave came over in the course of the night as they were rowing frantically and he was swept overboard and lost. So only 18 made it to the shore. They rowed all night. They had no idea where they were going. They couldn't see the stars. There was one officer, a gunner's officer, who made it aboard. And he was nominally in command. But they decided to give it to someone who had more nautical experience, sort of seamanship, to try to get them to land. They knew that they were close to land, maybe 15, 20 miles. But they couldn't see it. And if you can't see the lighthouse at Cape Finisterra or nothing, it's just dark. You're in the middle of a raging sea. Most of them were barefoot. They were

scantily clad. They were soaking wet. They were terrified and they were traumatized from what had just happened to them. Because remember, this is the one ship in the fleet that everyone on board was saying, this is the best ship in the fleet that everyone on board was saying, this is the best ship in the fleet. This is the strongest armed, most thickly armored, most powerful warship in the world. And it's gone. It's just suddenly gone. They can't believe it. They're in shock.

They're basically all in shock. And they managed to row through the night. And they managed to survive. Incredibly, actually, they managed to survive and make it to the shore. Light came up. They saw the lighthouse. Then they eventually saw the coastline, and they made their way there. So the captain's dead, Coles is dead, the man who invented her and did so much to bring her into life. What was the effect when the news arrived back in the UK? It's hard to describe. It's absolute shock, disbelief, horror. It's one of these things on the sort of mid-Victorian timeline where Britain is hit with a horrible event like none other. It hits home in ways that it's difficult to imagine today. I mean, close to 500 men are suddenly gone. Husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, friends. If you're a large Victorian family and

you've got four or five, six, seven children, now you've got six or seven orphans. You've got widows. This is still a time in mid-Victorian British society where there aren't a lot of social safety nets in place, including for sailors, widows. A lot of people said, we have a lot of people now that have to be taken care of. So they did get together a charity fund. They raised quite a bit of money to help provide relief to these families now who've lost their means of income. But it's really devastating. It rips through the country very quickly. A lot of people are struck down, they say, with grief. They're actually paralyzed with just grief. So there was a lot of reaction of the press like,

what the hell has just happened? And then of course, the immediate question was, why? Why did this happen? How could this have happened? And then as the days proceeded in mid-September when news came back, the question then evolved into who's responsible? Who's responsible for this? How do we prevent this kind of disaster from ever happening again? Let's move on. I want to bring the story up to the present day, because you're doing something pretty remarkable at the moment. You think you may have found the shipwreck of the captain, and you're working with descendants of those people that were on board. So the question was, well, someone should find the wreck. The wreck should be found. And we began saying ourselves at the University of Wolverhampton, where I'm a reader in war studies,

so maybe we could sort of lead the effort to do it. And as it turned out back in January, about this time last year, I was giving a talk about the captain. And afterwards, someone from Spain contacted me, and they were with a Spanish documentary team based in Galicia. And they were under a mandate from the local Galician council to explore the wreck of the captain, to tell the captain's story and if possible to find the wrecks. I said, well, we're actually looking for the wreck of the captain. I said, well, you know what? We're looking for the wreck of the captain, too. I said, why don't we combine our forces as such? And we've done a lot of research in the archives in Britain

and pulled together a lot of evidence and clues where we think we've got a search box worked out where the captain went down. And they said, well, look, we've been doing it differently. We've been interviewing local Galician fishermen who trawl these waters off Cape Finisterre, doing it for generations and snagged their nets on all manner of wrecks over subsequent generations. And they said, there's a couple wrecks that they're convinced one of them is the captain. So we hit a couple of wrecks. We hit four wrecks in four hours and the fourth wreck had dimensions that were almost exact to the captain within a meter. The general multi-beam echo sounder resolution, the image we got, seemed to correlate with the captain's general structure

very, very closely. It was in about 150 meters, about 500 feet of water, so not that deep compared to other wrecks, certainly compared to, say, the Euterans or wrecks in the Second World War in the Pacific, for example, but at the same time, deep enough where you can't just dive on this kind of thing. So very tantalizing. We were at the limits of the technology using a multi-beam echo sounder. We didn't have a side scan sonar that we were ready to deploy. After that, and with this mystery wreck now sitting there, we know exactly where it is. This could be the captain. The question was whether we're going to use a side scan sonar on a subsequent survey or just lower a camera on an ROV. And everyone's saying, just lower a camera,

just get a camera down there and just see what it is. So we want to go check that out. And this whole terrible, horrible story of the captain is sort of waiting to be retold. And as you know, there's nothing like a shipwreck. There's nothing like an actual historical artifact to stimulate people's imagination, even though this is a mass gravesite. So, I mean, we consulted very closely with the Royal Navy and the word back from the Royal Navy is, okay, we just remember, you know, our policy is look, but don't touch. And that's what we're trying to do. We're just trying to find a wreck, positively identify its location. No one's talking about touching anything or artifacts and all the rest. Once you get identified, the idea is to protect it and then come back later and then do a proper survey.

Let's do a proper scan of it. Let's get the debris field all charted out. Let's try to find out more about what happened that night. Titanic is now safe in history, and we would like to do that at the captain. We need to rescue that ship and the story and the stories of the men who died from oblivion. Now, the good news for people listening to this podcast is they can get involved. How can people get involved? Well, Dan, we've set up a trust through the University of Wolverhampton, and the trust is through a website. It's findthecaptain.co.uk. Website tells you about the project, the history of the ship.

Lots of survivors' counts that are unpublished. We have lots of great things in there, news about the activities that we're doing, public talks, all the rest of it. And there is different levels of funding donations that you can do it. Howard, this is a big story. We are supporting you all the way. I'm going to be encouraging all my listeners and social media followers and stuff to head over to that webpage, findthecaptain.co.uk. Make sure you donate there.

And people listening to this podcast will be glad to hear that this is not the last they'll have heard of The Captain. We're with you all the way here, Howard. Watch this space, folks. There's more Captain coming up this year thanks dan