Dan Snow's History Hit - The Voyage That Kickstarted Globalisation

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

In February 1882 the SS Dunedin departed New Zealand on a voyage that would revolutionise the way we eat and kickstart the globalisation of 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 Bell-Coleman compression refrigeration machine and would mark the first time fresh goods had ever been transported over such a distance. However, the journey was far from plain sailing though as you will hear in this episode.To tell the Dunedin's story and to celebrate the new digitisation project by Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s Heritage & Education Centre Dan is joined by Charlotte Ward and Max Wilson from the Foundation. This episode was first released on 30th June 2021.The audio editor for this episode was 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!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. You know, another day, another wonderful archive and library announces some massive digitisation project. This is just great. The Lloyd's Register Foundation's Heritage and Education Centre. They are the custodians of an archive collection of maritime and engineering, tech and social and scientific economic history that stretches back to 1760. From that point in the 18th century, you know I love the 18th century, when ship owners and merchants got together and realised they needed to start collecting information about ships, about wrecks, about near misses that would help them improve the

safety record of their industry and thus drive down insurance rates and make it more profitable. And those archives are all still there. And in this episode, I'm going to talk to Charlotte Ward and Max Wilson from Lloyd's Register about some of their favourite things in the collection, but particularly, particularly the Dunedin. The Dunedin, the famous ship that we should know more about. It's one of the most important voyages in maritime history and deserves to be more famous because it is the start point really for our globalized food transportation network. We now

think nothing, nothing of getting an orange that was grown in Tasmania. That's just, you know, fine, totally normal to see that. Until 150 years ago, that would have been the most absurd, the most mind-blowing, impossible feat. It was scientifically inconceivable. And then someone invented a refrigeration system. Someone invented reliable navigation, ships that were fast and safe. And before you know it, you've got food being embarked in New Zealand, being sent to the imperial capital, and being given the thumbs up from those hard-to-please

wholesalers down at the docks in Canary Wharf. This is the story of Dunedin, the first really successful refrigerated cargo ever to go from New Zealand to London, but it came close to failure. Of course it did. Like all good stories, this has a few twists and turns. You're going to love it. Here's the wonderful Charlotte Ward and Max Wilson from the Lloyd's Register Foundation. Enjoy. Charlotte and Max, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. I have been desperate to have you guys on for a long time because you're one of my favourite

archives in the world because I love maritime history. and you've got the archive of maritime history stretching back 250 years, over a million records, and you've got all the best ships in there. You've got the famous ones. Yeah, we do. It's quite a remarkable archive. We started in 1760s, the history of Voyager 1 started then, and it was the first marine classification society. So it's all about making sure ships were safe before they left port and sailed off around the world. They started by surveying ships, by classing them, and putting them all into the register book, all the Lloyd's register ships.

So yeah, we've had everything from Cutty Sark to the Mauritania to the Apotania and pretty much everything else in between. So we're a fantastic maritime archive. And that's fascinating. I'm just listening to you there, thinking to myself, that's one of these little quiet revolutions that helped turn Britain into this kind of industrial trading superpower. Because I guess if you're an investor or a merchant, you want to get your cargo safely somewhere, you think, yeah, those guys out of London, they keep the records, they make sure

the ships are seaworthy. That's a really important part of the London story, isn't it? It really is. It's something that I suppose we don't always think about. We assume today that if you get on a ship or a plane or even in your own car, that it's going to be safe, you'll be safe and it will make its voyage. But that wasn't always the case. And this is where the group at Lloyd's register at the Lloyd's coffee house said, actually, why are we letting ships sail around the world that aren't safe? We need to make sure that anything that leaves is safe. And then of course, this was happening around the industrial revolution. And then just for the 19th century and trade and

globalization boomed. So you needed to make sure that ships were safe, particularly with new materials, new technologies, new versions of engineering ships. So that register book becomes so important to anyone wanting to buy a ship, sail on the ship, or invest in shipping. It was so, so important in Britain and the world's history. Max, tell me what it's like working in that archive. I mean, is it what I imagine? The 18th century section must be just wicked. I must admit it is an awful lot of fun, really. And I think we're incredibly lucky just thinking about the range of material that we do have. And also, I think we're still discovering new things all the time. So that's the really exciting thing. So right now, at the moment, we're in the middle of quite a wide, expansive digitisation project

of one of our larger collections collections which is our ship plan and survey report collection which consists of survey reports ship plans certificates forms letters correspondence all around a design construction and maintenance of vessels large and small and so of course you know we're delving into those boxes there's 4,000 odd boxes of about 1.25 million records. It's a huge, amazing journey it's been, really. We have about 600,000 of these online at the moment, so we're only really about halfway through in terms of getting these online. It's been an amazing process.

So great news for historians, great news for family historians as well, because there'll be lots of vessels there which will have carried ancestors here and there. In fact, I might go and check out where my Scottish ancestors left the Mull of Kintyre, left Campbelltown, headed over to Canada. I finally might go and see if there's any records pertaining to that. Anyway, we're not here to talk about my family. We thought it would be really interesting when I was chatting with you guys, we thought it would be interesting to talk about food.

There's a lot of discussion around animal welfare, food imports, exports. And I think it's so interesting to think about the globalisation of food production very, very recently. 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, especially at 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 the practice of canning, where goods like meat, vegetables, fruit, milk, 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 industrialized. 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 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. foodstuff. And obviously at this time, domestic producers of fruits, 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? 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 travelling 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 coal bank, and it had coal-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. 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.

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 that 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, 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'd 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? This is Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about maritime history. I'm very happy more after this. 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. 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 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 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 markets. 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 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 100 days which was quite remarkable at the time so this ship and the Strathweven 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. 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. 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 this ship was fitted out with a Velcom mechanical refrigeration system. So the surveyor has noted that this new technology has been put in this 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, they finally managed to get to sea on the 15th of February 1882. And the Dunedin sailed from Otago.

She was carrying about 4,331 slabs of mutton, 598 pieces of lamb and 22 pig carcasses, 250 kegs of butter, a number of hare, pheasant, turkey, chickens and 2,226 sheep tongues. But not long after they'd gotten underway, there were sparks that had been noted from the compressor's boiler, which had created a fire hazard. So when the vessel had becalmed in the tropics, the crew noticed that 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. He had a number of crew who tied a rope around his waist and

basically lowered him down into this insulated cold 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 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. As Charlotte 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 fibre 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 sceptical about this meat. Notably, again, lots of domestic butchers and domestic producers,

they were very, very sceptical 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 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 easier 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 sort of lost to history as well I think as Indiana Jones said she should be in a museum what a tragic story about being lost and very rapidly I mean by I mean, by the outbreak of the First World War, from memory, I mean, a huge proportion of British meat was arriving from

Farrer Field overseas. As you say, yeah, it was by about the First World War, 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 the Kiwi miracle, this idea of refrigerated meat and the transportation. The way that it 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, you know, 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 that improved insulation, minimized the loss of chill there. And by the time you get to the post-war period in 1968, Lloyd's Register 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, today in the age of containerization, 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. It's such an amazing story, particularly now because we are talking about trade with Australasia again. Fascinating stuff. Before I let you go, because we could do so many podcasts together, I hope you come back on and do some more.

Charlotte and Max, just quickly tell me what's one of your other favourite ships that you've stumbled across in your collection with a great story? There is one in particular that actually, again, links in quite nicely with food and the difficulties of food transportation as well. So we hold records for a Greek iron screw steamer

called the Elpis, which was discovered during this digitization project. And the wreck reports for this ship, which was Piraeus registered ship, essentially acts like a death certificate for a ship, these wreck reports. It shows that the Elpis sprang a leak and foundered off of Haifa in modern day Israel in April 1921. So this seems at first glance quite a standard ship loss, but there's a follow-up letter on the 22nd of June 1922 by one of the engineers on board the Elpis, a man called Nick Diamantis, and it's intended for the representatives of the Lloyd's underwriters, but it's translated by Lloyds Register clerical staff before it's sent on and explains a more suspicious reason for the sinking. So just to give a bit of context to

it, a few months prior to the sinking of the Elpes, the Maritime Bank, which had been founded to basically serve the interests of Antonios Pallios, who was a very large Greek-based shipping agent, they had purchased from the Panagallopoulos brothers about 2,000 tons of South American beans, which they hoped to make a really tidy profit from. But by the time that the shipment from South America had arrived in Athens, the price of the beans had been so badly reduced that the Maritime Bank then tried to turn responsibility for the loss onto the Panagallopoulos brothers by suing them, which ultimately failed. So throughout the entire ordeal, of course, you can imagine you've got these 2000 tons of South American beans that are slowly spoiling and rotting on board. And so of course, by this point, this would have meant the

loss of about 3 million drachma to the Maritime Bank. And so there's this huge depreciation in the value of steamers following the end of the First World War. And so what they decided to do is to move these beans onto the Elpis, because the Elpis wasn't really worth an awful lot, and to insure the ship and cargo again, and then to save the situation by sinking the ship. And Diamantis says in quotes, in an artful way, and then collect the insurance. So we don't really know exactly what happened after this, but we do have a letter from the Lloyds underwriters thanking Nick Diamantis and Lloyds Register and giving thanks for the insight and saying that it's very illuminating that they're going to look into it.

It's a slightly later example, but again, it also shows even by the 20s of pressures of transporting foods in really tight situations. Very nice. If you had one, Charlotte, that'd be great. If not, don't worry. So one of my favourite ships in the collection, it's quite relevant now because it has a link to the FIFA World Cup. So I know it's the Euros right now, but still the FIFA World Cup. It's the SS Conte Verdi and she was this beautiful cruise liner, those sort of classic 1930s style ships but she was used to transport the four teams from Europe to play in the first ever FIFA World Cup in Uruguay only four teams wanted to compete from Europe because of the journey but once again it's another example of how ships were able to link across the world and start the World Cup that, you know, we still

follow and is so popular today. And apparently it was a lovely voyage. The teams were able to train on the decks and they had gyms that they could use. So she's one of our favourites that we've stumbled across in our collection. Brilliant. That's so fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I can't wait to have you back on and learn about more of your favourite ships. I could talk about this all day. Thank you, Max and Charlotte, very, very much indeed. How do people find ships for themselves? Where do they go? They can go straight to our website. That's hec.lrfoundation.org.uk. That's hec.lrfoundation.org.uk and they can go to our archive and library collections and they can search on our ship plan survey report collection for all of our new digitized records

as well as any other bits and pieces that are on our website that are all brand new and gleaming and lovely i know i'm doing this afternoon max and charlotte from the lloyds register foundation thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having us. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. you