Dan Snow's History Hit - The Voyage That Changed the Way We Eat

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

3/4 In February 1882 the SS Dunedin departed New Zealand on a voyage that would revolutionise the way we eat and kickstart the world's food supply chain. Aboard were thousands of mutton, lamb and pig carcasses as well as 250 kegs of butter, hare, pheasant, turkey, chicken and 2226 sheep tongues. This cargo would be kept fresh in the ship's hold using a state-of-the-art Bell-Coleman compression refrigeration machine and would mark the first time fresh goods had ever been transported over such a distance. However, the route was far from plain sailing... For the third story in our series 'Ships that Made the British Empire' series, Dan is joined by Senior Archivist Max Wilson and former colleague Charlotte Ward from Lloyd's Register Foundation whose archives hold the greatest stories of Britain's maritime history. You can find out more about Lloyd's Register Foundation's history and its work that supports research, innovation and education to help the global community tackle the most pressing safety and risk challenges. Just go to https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Peta Stamper is the production manager for this series, 'Ships that Made the British Empire'.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

In March 1890, a ship travelling from New Zealand to Britain, with a cargo full of fresh meat, vanished, seemingly into thin air. A New Zealand newspaper, the Oamaru Mail, ran an article. The inquiry into the circumstances attending the loss of the ship Dunedin, which left Oamaru on March 19, 1890, bound for London, and has never since been heard of, was opened at the Customs House, Oamaru, on Monday. Captain Ferriers of the ship Marlborough Hill was the first witness called. He stated that he was acquainted with the Dunedin and considered her a good ship, well fitted out for the voyage and with a good crew.

The last time he saw Dunedin was on the 22nd of March 1890, when she was off Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, with the wind at northwest. Dunedin was then steering to go through the Foveau Strait. The weather was fine at the time. The witness was asked if he'd ever known of a ship being missed after passing through the Foveau Strait, and he replied that he had never known of such a case. In Maritime Circle, the disappearance really didn't make much sense. The ship was considered well built and equipped, and the crew was experienced. What made it all the more weird was that that same year in 1890, another ship from the same company, the Marlborough, also went missing without a trace on its voyage from New Zealand to Britain.

It didn't take long for the mystery of these ships to capture the Victorian imagination as theories and rumours about their fate swirled. Some suggested that the ship had run into icebergs, and others said the ships had been found floating on the open ocean with just a crew of skeletons. It does seem, to be honest, like the former is more likely, and given that the crossing from New Zealand was very perilous, it was a journey that British traders had to make,

as by the end of the 19th century, Australasia was where the money was at. It was the dawn of a new era. There was refrigeration, there was mass migration, and there was industrialisation that meant that more people, food and commodities, were passing from country to country via the seas. You'll listen to Dan Snow's History It in collaboration with Lloyd's Register Foundation. Their long history is entwined with the stories of the ships that kick-started the global food chain and revolutionised our ability to traverse the oceans with less to fear than ever before. They are the world's first ship classification

society. For this episode, I'm joined by their senior archivist, Max Wilson, and Charlotte Ward. This is episode three in our miniseries, Ships That Made Britain's Imperial Century, with the story of the Dunedin. By the way, this episode was recorded back in 2021, and I'd made the crazy, vain decision to try and stave off the inevitable march of old age by having braces put on my teeth. So if I sound a bit different, that's why. Charlotte and Max, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.

It's so interesting to think about the globalisation of food production. And your archive is a great place to see that happening almost in real time. Absolutely. I think we're very, very fortunate in that we do have a huge number of records which do tell this story in these small milestones in the development of the preservation and practice of preserving food for long distances and over very long periods. So the issue of preserving food over very long periods is not a new issue as such. These practices such as drying, fermenting, they go back thousands and thousands of years. Fermenting least about 10 000 years that we know of but all of these other methods such as pickling or smoking or

curing food as i say very very long established legacy i suppose really in the modern period probably one of the major milestones really in the development of food preservation is a practice of canning where goods like meat vegetables fruit, other foodstuffs are thoroughly cooked through, sealed in sterile tins or jars, and then subsequently then boiled to preserve them. This process had been more or less industrialised, and despite some pitfalls, it had been more or less perfected by the early 19th century. So we know, for example, that the French Navy were consuming canned food as early as 1806, and famously the Royal Navy proudly boasted the as early as 1806. Famously, the Royal Navy proudly

boasted the use of tins of meat and vegetables in their voyages to far-flung places such as the Arctic. But of course, domestically, whilst they did enjoy some popularity in Europe to begin with, they were very expensive for a start, but they were also seen as quite a low-quality military foodstuff. And obviously at this time, domestic producers of fruit, vegetables, and meat and dairy had really extolled the health benefits and superior taste of fresh food. And this was really something that canned goods manufacturers were really unable to convince consumers of. So gradually over the course of 19th century, the challenge of being able to connect consumers with these rich overseas

resources and to try and keep them as fresh as possible had huge economic potential, but could also be potentially financially ruinous as many records within our archive show. Listen, Max, you're talking to a guy who has been on a replica Viking ship and has eaten some kind of herring, somehow preserved, i don't know what the hell was going on with reindeer droppings i don't know what that was about maybe it was just to play the gag on the weird british guy that was on the boat but anyway so yeah both of you i mean what are the big steps forward we've got the canning revolution what happens next that we can see in your archives

happening that is another step on the journey that takes us to the present where I'm nibbling on my raspberry that left Ethiopia about 10 minutes ago. Yeah. So really the idea comes out that why not try to refrigerate cargo and keep it cool? So to transport anything sort of frozen or to keep it cool would often involve ships deliberately traveling during winter months or to go through colder climates. That obviously wasn't always possible. It was slow and it wasn't reliable. So we know that in 1875, there was a successful delivery of frozen meat to Britain from America. They used what was a cold bank and it had like cold powered fans over large blocks of ice.

But again, you can imagine that is unreliable and would demand speed. So it's not actually a refrigeration system. It's just loads of ice. Yeah. And then fans to kind of keep them vaguely chill. Like, okay, amazing. Basically, yeah. So give it a go.

Why not? See what happens. Yeah. So then around this time as well, we actually have terrestrial refrigeration. So in Australia, the world's first freezing plant had been set up in Sydney's Darling Harbour. So that was able to receive ice railway carriages and everything. So on land, it was working.

But as you can see on sea, it still wasn't. And we can see the early attempts in our collection trialling these new methods. And we can see the early attempts in our collection trialing these new methods. So we know that a French steamer called the Paraguay in 1878 successfully delivered 5,500 frozen carcasses between Buenos Aires and the Hague. And that was by ammonia compression. So we can see the attempts are being made. The problem Lloyd's Register would have had in working with these types of ships was that Lloyd's Register needed to know that these new feats of engineering were safe. Because if you're going to put anything on a ship, be it a new engine or a new system, how do you know that it's going to be safe and how do you know that ship's going to sail?

So although these attempts were being made with refrigeration and obviously ships that weren't passed by Lloyd's Register were making attempts, Lloyd's Register itself was still sort of saying, ah, what if something happened to the ship with this type of machinery? So as you can imagine, this is quite a long process that kicks off in the middle of the 19th century. So Max, now tell me about the first ship that manages to put all this tech safely, as Charlotte says, into place. So there have been, as Charlotte was saying, some really huge leaps in refrigeration technology, and there had been some success, very, very early success in being able to transport refrigerated goods across the Atlantic. But really one of the biggest milestones comes in about 1880 with the Strathleven, which we're lucky enough was a Lloyd's Register class ship. So we have the records and survey reports for the Strathleven. Inspired by the Paraguay, a load of enterprising and engineering Queenslanders fitted out the Strathleven with refrigeration machinery. So it's a system of compression refrigeration. And ultimately Strathleven was able to successfully

deliver 50 tonnes of Australian beef and mutton to London, which was a huge, huge undertaking. And it really did prove the ability of ships to be able to transport refrigerated goods over very, very long distances. But despite this being a historic voyage, Strathleven, she was a steamer. She relied on speed. She'd also taken a much shorter route from Australia via the suez canal and so some people and again these were things which were largely expounded by domestic producers said well you put some frozen meat on a very fast chip that's not really necessarily the biggest test of refrigeration machinery and technology could you do the same thing and convey a frozen cargo around the globe without demanding speed?

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really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. But this is revolutionary stuff. I mean, a generation before, you're sailing to Australia. I mean, it's taking months, years. I mean, it's just bonkers. And now you are transporting food produced in the Australian outback to be eaten on a dinner table in Clapham. This is a monumental jump on this journey towards the globalisation that we recognise today. Absolutely. And of course, in achieving this, you really have to examine the Bell-Coleman machine that was used. It was so instrumental in achieving that. And it was a system of mechanical dry air refrigeration, which was essentially put together by the Bell-Coleman Mechanical Refrigeration Company, which was a company set up by Henry and James Bell of a Glasgow shipping company, John Bell & Sons, in collaboration with Joseph James Coleman, who was a fellow of the Chemical Institute. And they decided to collaborate on this task of creating a means of mechanical dry air refrigeration. And they formed a patent that

same year in 1877 and exhibited this machine model at a naval and submarine engineering exhibition at London. What was particularly exciting about this was that they'd also boasted at the time that this new type this was that they'd also boasted at the time that this new type of machine that they'd been able to create was small enough that it could potentially be used on board a ship. So that was something that was incredibly revolutionary and one that really caused quite a stir among high society at the time and in the financial market.

Charlotte, so as Max referred to there, take me through the next stage of the challenge, the round-the-world trip with a cargo full of frozen meat what ship was required to do that yeah so as Max said the Strathleven had obviously done incredibly well but being a steamship was fast so they wanted a ship that was still had a reputation for being fast but wasn't a steamship so the Dunedin which was constructed by the Albion Shipping Company in 1874 and built at Port Glasgow, she was a two-deck, three-mast ship. So she was still a sailing ship, even though she was iron, she still had sails. So she was originally built to convey emigrants from the UK

to New Zealand. And under her captain, John Whitson, she gained this incredible reputation in shipping circles for being fast as a sail ship. And she could complete her journeys in under a hundred days, which was quite remarkable at the time. So this ship and the Strathleeson and the Bell Coleman machinery caught the attention of a man called William Davidson, who was the director of the New Zealand and Australian Land Company. So he had roughly over 186,000 acres of farmland across New Zealand and Australia and was one of the biggest producers of meat and wool in that region. and was one of the biggest producers of meat and wool in that region. Now, he wanted to expand his trade overseas, and he was able to convince the board of the land company to invest in this new technology

and to get the owners of the Dunedin to fit out the ship with this brand new Bell Coleman mechanical refrigeration system, which took place in 1881. Now, one of our records that we have shared with you was a survey report for the Dunedin. So ships would often have maybe annual, biannual sometimes, surveys to see how they are. And on it, it notes that the ship was fitted out with a Belcom mechanical refrigeration system. So the surveyor has noted that this new technology has been put in the ship

and has still given the Dunedin its classification. So that one line in our survey report is actually such an important part of history. And it's just sort of nestled in our survey there. It took various people and some like-minded people, all with the right ambition to get meat from New Zealand to the UK to finally get this ship fitted out. And the journey had its drama. Tell me about what Captain John Whitson did in the doldrums. After a bit of a false start on the 5th of December, I finally managed to get to see on

the 15th of February, 1882. The Dunedin sailed from Otago. She was carrying about 4,331 slabs of mutton, 598 pieces of lamb, and 22 pig carcasses, 250 cakes of butter, a number of hare, pheasant, turkey, chickens, and 2,226 sheep tons. But not long after they'd gotten underway, there were sparks that had been noted from the compressor's boiler, which created a fire hazard. So when the vessel had becalmed in the tropics, the crew noticed the cold air in the hold wasn't circulating properly. There were two potential problems with this. The first being that the boiler could overheat and explode. And secondly, if there wasn't sufficient means of ventilation, then the historic cargo could thaw and be lost entirely. So in order to save this cargo, Captain John Whitson crawled

inside this insulated coal chamber. They had a number of crew who tied a rope around his waist and basically lowered him down into this insulated coal chamber so that he could bore extra air holes through the chamber with a hand drill. He managed to do it and managed to save the cargo and to save the cycle, nearly froze to death in the process. And I think I believe fainted and had to be pulled back in by the other crew members and resuscitated. The journey itself took 98 days. And despite this very, very brief issue with the cycle, the Bill Coleman cycle did manage to keep the temperature between about minus 9.5 degrees Celsius and minus 11 degrees Celsius. So yeah, very successful. It's astonishing. Aslotte said the good old dunedin came in under 100 days always reliable even under sail power incredible stuff and what was the impact i mean this is like connecting up a community to fiber internet for the first time i

mean this is transformational right that you can now get meat that's as good as fresh from the other side of planet earth yeah it's quite something i mean when the meat was finally delivered to london obviously there were a lot of people who were incredibly skeptical about this meat notably again lots of domestic butchers and domestic producers they were very very skeptical about the quality and the freshness of the taste but when it arrived it was sold over about two weeks by John Swan and Sons. And they famously quoted in the press that directly the meat was placed on the market and its superiority over the Australian meat struck us and, in fact, the entire trade. And so really, that sign of approval from those butchers at the Smithfield market,

who were the very first to sample this meat from the Dunedin, really helped to bolster the confidence in the refrigeration process. Charlotte, Dunedin, I now learn, should be a name that we place alongside Golden Hind, HMS Victory, SS Great Britain. What happened to Dunedin? So once this voyage has been successful, she was really hailed in the press, both in the UK and New Zealand. In New Zealand, it was said that now refrigerated meat from New Zealand was an easiest source of supply for the London market as Yorkshire or Devon. She really cemented this connection that we had overseas. So within those five years, there were over 170 shipments of frozen meat from New Zealand. And the Dunedin was still a significant part of that. She completed nine further voyages. It was still

going really, really well. Unfortunately, she is mysteriously lost in 1890 with 35 hands on board. No one knows what happened to her. She just disappeared. It's another great maritime mystery as well. But her legacy, it said that she was the ship that has accomplished a feat, which must long have a place in commercial, indeed in political annals. So she was so important, unfortunately was lost. And for some reason also then got lost to history as well, I think.

As Indiana Jones said, she should be in a a museum what a tragic story about being lost and very rapidly I mean by I don't by the outbreak of the first world war from memory I mean a huge proportion of British meat was arriving from far afield overseas. As you say yeah it was by about the first world war it was about 40 percent of meat that was consumed had been imported from overseas and even by that point it was about 40% of meat that was consumed had been imported from overseas. And even by that point, it was still referred to as a Kiwi miracle, this idea of refrigerated meat and the transportation. And the way that it had opened up the trade entirely was just something that really took hold very, very quickly, considering how slow it was really

to develop. But as well as obviously meat and poultry and dairy, it also offered exotic fruits and vegetables that could be enjoyed for the first time all year round. You no longer had to wait for seasonal harvests in quite the same way that you did. And of course, with the construction of refrigerated empire food ships of the 1930s, the economies of Australia and New Zealand were really firmly established as agricultural world leaders. And these ships would eventually obviously pave the way for the post-war innovation in the 40s and 50s. They improved insulation, minimised the loss of chill there. And by the time you get to the post-war period in 1968, Lloyd's registered classes two very historic sister ships, the Port

Caroline and the Port Chalmers, which are the largest refrigerated cargo ships afloat at that time, about 16,200 gross registered tons. And again, you know, today in the age of containerisation, each box possessing its own freezing unit, about 100 million tons of frozen cargo is carried per year, but it all goes back to the Dunedin and to these early innovations in refrigeration technology. Max and Charlotte from the Lloyds Register Foundation, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You've been listening to our mini-series,

Ships That Made Britain's Imperial Century. You can catch the previous two episodes via the links in the show notes. One is about Cutty Sark, once the world's fastest tea clipper, making runs from China. And the other is about its exhilarating race with Thermopylae, the only ship to come close to its record-breaking speed. Keep an eye out for our next and final episode in this series, coming on the 25th of July, about SS Politician, a ship carrying 50,000 bottles of of whiskey it ran aground in the hebrides during

the second world war the islands went to incredible lengths to get their hands on the ship's precious cargo the authorities went to even greater lengths to try and stop them they say that even today if you dig a garden path or a foundation on the island of eriske you'll likely hit a full bottle of whiskey buried beneath the earth. Thanks so much to Charlotte, Max and the Lloyds Register Foundation. You can find out more about their history and their work that supports research, innovation and education to help the global community tackle the most pressing safety and risk challenges. Go to hec.lrfoundation.org.uk Thank you.