This the third episode in our special series on the maritime history of Scotland. Dr Sam Willis explores the remarkable career of Joannes Wyllie, a Fife man who made a fortune running guns from Glasgow to the confederate south during the American Civil War (1861-5) – revealing Scotland's hidden history of supporting slavery. He talks with John Messner a curator for transport and technology at Glasgow Museums.  John was part of the project team for the Riverside Museum-Scotland’s Museum of Transport and Travel, winner of the European Museum of the Year 2013.  In 2015 he co-curated a display about Glasgow’s role in the American Civil War which led to his work on the life of Joannes Wyllie. 

To pay for the supplies it needed in the war, the Confederacy discovered a new use for its slave-grown and harvested cotton. Once seen as an instrument of foreign policy, it was now employed as a medium of exchange: cotton in exchange for military supplies. Union forces blockaded Confederate ports to prevent the export of cotton and the smuggling of war materiel into the Confederacy. The porous blockade successfully restricted Confederate access to weapons that the industrialized North could produce for itself though weapons, and other materiel were regularly smuggled into Confederate ports from transfer points in Mexico, the Bahamas, and Cuba - it was into this world that Joannes Wyllie sailed...

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