The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

By The Society for Nautical Research and the Lloyds Register FoundationSociety & Culture Education History

The Mariner's Mirror Podcast episodes

April 15, 2022 Titanic's Anchors
In April 1912, the Titanic - the largest vessel in the world, and the largest man-made moving object that had by then been created - struck an iceberg, split in half and sank in the middle of the Atlantic, taking with her around 1500 souls. Her early demise meant that one of her most important pieces of safety equipment - her anchors - were never used as intended. In this fascinating episode Dr Sam Willis speaks with Clare Weston from the Black Country Living Museum about the fabrication of Titanic's anchors and the crucial role that Britain's industrial heartland played in creating a powerful maritime economy and empire.
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33 min
April 11, 2022 The Search for the Northwest Passage
In the Arctic there is a sea route which passes from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It passes up the west coast of Greenland into baffin bay before taking a sharp left turn through a maze of islands that lie off the northern coast of Canada. Once through these islands the route passes to the north of Alaska and then through the narrow straits between Russia and Alaska into the Bering Sea and from there to the Pacific. This 'Northwest Passage', the fabled northern route linking East with West, was not successfully navigated until 1906 by Roald Amundsen. Today we talk about the four centuries of exploration before then, when European maritime powers and private companies attempted to find a route to the Pacific and to map to their attempts. It's a story of exceptional courage, perseverance, folly, competition, greed and culture-clash. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Katie Parker, a historian specialising in Pacific history, the history of the book and the map, and the history of empires in the long-eighteenth century.
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37 min
April 05, 2022 Madness At Sea - A History
Those of you who have spent any time at sea will know how the unique conditions of being afloat can fundamentally change the way that you think and how you experience the world. It will come as no surprise that there have been occasions in history when humans have been pushed to their absolute limits and their minds have cracked; when a firm grasp on reality has catastrophically failed in a sudden a violent shock, or when doubts and anxiety have crept in like water through a tiny hole the hull of ship, unnoticeable until its weight has become too heavy to ignore and impossible to fix.

Dr Sam Willis explores the troubling history of madness at sea, a fascinating topic that allows us to range freely across the oceans of history, exploring a variety of stories that highlight different aspects of how the maritime environment has affected the mental health of sailors in the past. It's a story of loneliness, hallucinations, psychopaths, endurance and the limits of the human mind. It takes us to the adventures of ancient mythical seafarers, to the age of exploration and global maritime empires, to world wars fought at sea, to the challenges of modern racing and the dangerous pleasures of sailing for fun...

Sam speaks with the author and sailor Nic Compton whose book 'Off the Deep End' explores this theme as never before. Do NOT listen to this episode on your own on a boat, and be certain that safety at sea starts - and ends - in the mind.

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40 min
March 29, 2022 Ultimate Ship Models 1: HMS Royal George
The first of a new mini-series on ship models. Dr Sam Willis explores the extraordinary model of HMS Royal George held in the collections of the National Maritime Museum in London. The Royal George is widely considered to be one of the finest eighteenth-century ship models ever made. It was made for the King in the 1770s, as a means of encouraging George III to take an interest in the Royal Navy and some of the finest artists in the kingdom worked on it, resulting in a model that not only showcased the power of a First Rate ship of the line, but also the artistic ingenuity and skill in the kingdom. The ship modelled is the First Rate Royal George, launched in 1756, at the time the largest ship in the world, that would have had a crew in excess of 800 and was armed with 100 guns. The Royal George played a significant role in the Seven Years War (1756-63) and the war of American Independence (1775-1783) but sank at her mooring near Portsmouth in August 1782 in one of history's worst maritime disasters. More than 900 souls died, including 300 women and 60 children visiting the crew.
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39 min
March 22, 2022 Iconic Ships 14: The San Juan, 1563
The San Juan was a basque whaling ship that sank in Labrador in 1565, and was rediscovered in 1978.

In the autumn of 1565 several Basque whaling ships were anchored in a remote bay of Labrador, opposite the island of Newfoundland. It was the end of the whaling season, and hundreds of sailors were hurrying up to complete their ships’ cargo of oil barrels. Some were flensing the blubber off the dead whales, some working in the rendering ovens while others were taking the oil barrels on board. All that frantic industrial activity was happening in the wilderness, decades before any Europeans would establish the first colonies of the country that we now call Canada.

In October a fierce storm hit that unprotected, barren coast. Under the strain of the hurricane-force wind, the anchor cables of one of the ships, the 200-tonne San Juan, gave in. To the despair of her crew members, the ship went adrift and ran aground on the small island that closed the bay. We can imagine the titanic efforts the crew members undertook in order to save the ships; nevertheless, the San Juan started sinking very near the shore, at about 10 m depth. The captain ordered to save as many victuals as possible and as much of the ship’s gear, and the crew members managed to save their belongings before the ship sank with nearly one thousand oil barrels on board.

The ship and its associated artefacts were rediscovered in 1978 and subsequently excavated, and have transformed what we know about seafaring in general and of course whaling in particular in that hugely important era where European seafarers were just beginning to stretch their reach across the Atlantic. The San Juan is now being recreated by hand and with the utmost care and attention to historical accuracy in the northern Spanish port of Pasaia To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Saul Hoffmann, an Italian shipwright who has worked on the ship, and Cindy Gibbons, the Cultural Resource Management Advisor of the Western Newfoundland and Labrador Field Unit, and a qualified witness of the impact in Red Bay of the discovery of the San Juan,
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33 min
March 10, 2022 Great Sea Fights 9: The Egadi Islands 241 BC
The battle of the Egadi Islands - or the Aegates - is one of the most significant naval battles of the ancient world. On 10 March 241 BC the mighty naval powers of Rome and Carthage met off the coast of Sicily. The Carthaginian fleet was ambushed by the Romans in a well-planned and brilliantly executed trap leading to a decisive Roman victory. This was the battle that ended the mighty First Punic War which had dominated both Roman and Carthaginian history for two generations; it marked a turning point in the histories of both empires; it was the moment that marked Rome as having the potential to be far more than a local power in the Mediterranean; and it is the ONLY naval battle that archaeologists have managed to identify. The finds raised from the seabed across this enormous battle site are unique and astonishing. To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with Peter Campbell, an archaeologist who has been involved in the project to survey and excavate the battle site for many years.
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30 min
March 08, 2022 The Vikings
One of the most fascinating periods in all of maritime history is the Viking Age. From around 700 CE and for the next 700 years, Vikings spread out from Scandinavia, reshaped Europe and influenced lands far beyond. It's a story of ingenious maritime engineering, astonishing navigation, fierce battles, culture clashes, trade, language and the rise and fall of a complex society. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Tore Ske, one of Norway’s most acclaimed historians. Tore has written several prize-winning and bestselling works of medieval history that challenge a traditional nation-oriented historical narrative. His latest book - The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire is a bestseller in Norway, won the prestigious Sverre Steen award and is the first of Tore’s books to be translated into English. Tore is a man with a gift for bringing to life the backstabbing, plotting, bribery and warfare of this period and for helping you think about the whole Viking era in a new way.

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35 min
February 25, 2022 The East India Company
In this episode Dr Sam Willis and the multi winning historian William Dalrymple discuss the extraordinary story of the East India Company's dominance of India. It is still too easily assumed that the British conquered India through imperial conquest but the reality is even more shocking and relevant to the present day - because India was subdued not by a government, but by a private enterprise with global reach - a business, almost entirely unregulated, and controlled from a small office in London. How did a private enterprise come to control an entire subcontinent? How does maritime trade and seapower fit into this picture? The East India company was born out of Tudor seafarers, explorers and pirates. By 1803 it had its own navy, an army of 200,000 men, and had subdued or directly seized India - and it had done so in less than fifty years. It's a story of global trade in spice, textiles and tea; of shipbuilding, British-Indian warfare, British-European warfare, politics, law and terrifying amounts of murder, and it is a key moment in the shaping of the modern world.
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58 min
February 17, 2022 The Hunt for Shackleton's Endurance
In one of the most remarkable maritime history stories of recent years, a team of scientists and explorers are getting closer than ever before to finding the Endurance, the ship that Ernest Shackleton took on his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. An expedition is currently in the Weddell Sea, less than two miles from the last known position of the Endurance and have released an underwater vehicle to scan the sea bed. To find out more, Dr Sam Willis interviewed David Mearns, a professional shipwreck hunter famed for discovering HMS Hood, about the remarkable story that led to Shackleton's ship being crushed by the ice; the challenges faced in identifying its location; and what it would mean if the ship is finally found.

The story of the Endurance is one of the most remarkable in the history of exploration. Shackleton and his 27 men became ice bound on the Endurance in February 1915, having spotted land just days before. Eight months later, having survived the antarctic winter, the ship was crushed and sank. The men camped on the ice and drifted northwards for six months before taking to the sea in the Endurance's small boats as the ice melted. In five days of sailing in open boats, they made it to Elephant Island and set up camp. Ten days later Shackleton and five others set sail once again in one of the small open boats to undertake an 800-mile journey to South Georgia. Two weeks later, having survived the worst weather the south Atlantic could throw at them, they arrived in South Georgia. Three of them then crossed an uncharted mountain range in a 36-hour hike to reach the settlement of Stromness, where they began to plan the rescue of the three members of the crew left around the coast on South Georgia, and the 21 left behind on Elephant Island. It took three separate attempts on three separate vessels to reach the camp on Elephant Island but eventually they were rescued, three months after Shackleton had left. Not a single man died.

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37 min
February 07, 2022 The Battle of Guadalcanal, 1942
The naval battle of Guadalcanal was one of the most intense and dramatic naval battles of the war, and with with far-reaching strategic consequences. It is the winter of 1942, a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour which brought America into the war. Guadalcanal is the largest of the Solomons Islands, found to the north west of Australia.

In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbour the Japanese had been immensely successful; they had driven the Americans out of the Philippines, the British out of Malaya, the Dutch out of the East Indies. The Japanese had then began to expand westwards in an attempt to build a defensive ring around their conquests and threaten the lines of communication from the United States to Australia and new Zealand. They reached Guadalcanal in May 1942 and invaded.

Three months later, the Americans responded with an invasion fo their own, their first amphibious landing of the war and, crucially, captured the airfield newly constructed by the Japanese. The following six months was spent in a desperate battle trying to hold it against relentless waves of Japanese attacks. The battle reached a crisis point in November with a concerted effort from the Japanese to bombard the airfield from the sea and a corresponding American naval effort to drive the Japanese ships away. They were successful and by February of 1943 the Japanese had evacuated the island, an immensely challenging operation, brilliantly executed.

To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with the historian Jeffrey Cox.

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44 min

About The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

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The world's No.1 podcast dedicated to all of maritime and naval history. With one foot in the present and one in the past we bring you the most exciting and interesting current maritime projects…