The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

During the First and Second World Wars British fishing trawlers were turned into the Royal Naval Patrol Reserve to help clear the seas of mines and even take on the deadly U-Boats. They became known as 'Harry Tate’s Navy' - a nod towards the celebrity comedian known for his bungling of everyday tasks and slipshod approach to life. Taking this wry criticism on the chin the fishermen-turned naval personnel embraced it and Harry Tate's Navy became a byword for exceptional resource fullness and courage in the face of appalling difficulty and danger. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the historian and journalist Rose George who is currently working on a major new study of the history of the fishing industry.

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Our series on Iconic Ships continues with one of the most battle-honoured ships of Nelson's Navy: HMS Agamemnon. Today we got back to those days of the wooden walls to hear about this 64-gun Third Rate that saw service in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic War. She fought in many of the major naval battles of those conflicts and had a reputation as being Nelson’s favourite ship. After a remarkably eventful career her working life ended in 1809 when she was wrecked off the River Plate on the coast of Uruguay. The location of the wreck has been known since the early 1990s but in recent months has become the focus of efforts to preserve it, as the wreck is threatened by erosion, treasure hunters and ship worm decay.

To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Mary Montagu-Scott, director of the museum in the historic shipbuilding village of Buckler’s Hard on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, where HMS Agamemnon was built. Mary has always had a passion for maritime heritage, the sea, and sailing. She is currently active in maritime archaeology, keeping boatbuilding skills alive and as a trustee to the National Museum of the Royal Navy, HMS Victory, HMS Medusa and is commodore of her local yacht club. Mary's dream is to dive on the wreck of HMS Agamemnon, built in Bucklers Hard in 1781, and to see this great ship's story brought to life again on the original slipways.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century.

This episode, the last of four, looks at the unique iron vessel that was designed and built to bring 'Cleopatra's Needle' - a 3500 year-old, 224-ton, 21-metre high ancient Egyptian obelisk made of granite - from Alexandria to London, where it still can be seen on the banks of the Thames at Embankment. This is the remarkable story of how it got there.

For the Egyptians, obelisks were sacred objects for the sun god, Ra; it’s thought that the shape symbolised a single ray of sun. They were placed in pairs at the entrances of temples, so that the first and last light of day touched their peaks. The obelisk that became known as Cleopatra’s needle was made around 1450 BC, in Heliopolis in what is now a part of Cairo. It was moved to Alexandria by the Romans in 12 BC, where it remained, lying on a beach, for almost two millennia.

But in 1819, to commemorate Horatio Nelson’s great naval victory over Napoleon in 1798 at the battle of the Nile, the Sultan of Egypt presented the obelisk to the government of Great Britain….but with no suggestion as to how the British might claim their reward. In Ebay terms – this was ‘collection only’. Unsurprisingly, The obelisk stayed where it was.

Fifty-eight years later a Scottish traveller and soldier in the British army, James Alexander, heard of the story and became interested in the challenge that Cleopatra’s needle posed to a mighty maritime Empire. He convinced a wealthy and philanthropic businessman, William Wilson, to fund a project to move the 224-ton granite obelisk, 3000 miles to London – a seemingly impossible task. Enter John Dixon, a talented and energetic civil engineer from Durham, who had made his name building the first railway in China. Dixon’s solution was to make a pre-fabricated iron vessel in London; take it in pieces to Alexandria and assemble it around the obelisk. The iron tube with the obelisk nestling inside, would then be towed back to London. The journey was nearly a disaster...

To go with this audio episode we have created a video animation which explains the history of the needle, the design of the Cleopatra, and her fraught journey to London.

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On 7 December 1872 the Challenger expedition set sail from Sheerness. It’s purpose was conceived just two years earlier, in 1870, by Charles Wyville Thomson Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University. Thomson had managed to persuade the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of the globe….a voyage of deep-sea exploration, unique for its scale of ambition and scope. Their job was to do nothing les than map the ocean floor and search for life in the abyss.

This remarkable expedition was made possible by extraordinary technological and scientific developments, international co-operation on an unprecedented scale and also large-scale co-operation between civilians and naval personnel. Its results did nothing less than change the way that we think about the maritime world.

To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke the with Erika jones, Curator of Navigation and Oceanography at Royal Museums Greenwich. Erika's work focuses not only on the Challenger expedition but more broadly on nineteenth-century science and the development of modern oceanography. 

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Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, reports and records of conventional ships. But this left a gap in their knowledge - 'But what of the unorthodox ships, the rebels from tradition: those monsters and freaks of the nautical world which, throughout the whole of the 19th century attained transient fame (or notoriety) before disappearing from the scene for ever?'. Guthrie's pamphlet aimed to answer that question by exploring some of the most radical nautical designs of the nineteenth century.

This episode, the third of four, is on 'Cigar Ships', which, as Guthrie drily notes: 'in this context refers to the shape of the vessel, not her cargo, and this group of steamers represents the railwayman's approach to naval architecture' as they were conceived by the Winans brothers who came from a family of brilliant and wealthy railroad engineers. Their first cigar vessel was built at Baltimore in 1858.

To get a modern historian’s perspective on these extraordinary ships Dr Sam Willis with Stephen McLoughlin, a naval historian of immense knowledge of the period and the many maritime innovations it produced.

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Our third episode dedicated to the maritime history of Africa. We find out about indigenous African whaling; European and American exploitation of African waters; the numerous uses to which whale products were put both in Africa and abroad; the written and the archaeological evidence available for the study of whaling in Africa. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoked with Dr. Lynn Harris who has worked as a maritime historian and underwater archaeologist for over 40 years in South Africa, Namibia, Costa Rica, North and South Carolina and is currently employed as a Professor at the Program of Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. We also hear from Lindsay Wentzel, a third-year master’s student in East Carolina University's Program in Maritime Studies. 

If you haven’t heard our previous two episodes on the maritime history of Africa please go and find them in the back catalogue – the first is on the history of indigenous African canoemen and the second on the desolate and vengeful skeleton coast of Namibia, home to thousands of shipwrecks from centuries of maritime trade, war and exploration passing Namibia’s coast.

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