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

August 11, 2021 Great Sea Fights 5: A Tudor Battle, 1512 Part II: The Contemporary Accounts
In this, Part II of our special episodes on the battle of St Mathieu in 1512 and its aftermath, we hear three contemporary accounts. The first is from the Venetian Ambassador Nicolo di Favri, fascinating as it includes a great deal of information on life and manners in Tudor England as well as war news. The writer was newly appointed to the court of Henry and was a member of the Venetian elite who served in the Councils of the Republic, and finds the English somewhat eccentric. The second is a letter from Thomas Wolsey to the Bishop of Worcester August 1512. At the time of writing Wolsey had been appointed almoner of Henry VIII – so responsible for distributing alms - and was therefore a member of the Privy Council. The final account is from Edward Etchyngham to Thomas Wolsey written in May 1513 and explores the events of the summer after the battle of St Mathieu when Edward Howard launched a bold attack on a squadron of French galleys at Blancs Sablons near Brest, losing his life. Etchyngham was the commander of the fleet of victuallers which reached Howard’s fleet off Brest shortly before the events in the Bay of Blancs Sablons. He was therefore well placed to give an account of the battle and the loss of Howard.
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27 min
August 10, 2021 Great Sea Fights 5: A Tudor Battle in the Reign of Henry VIII, 10 August, 1512.
In this, the fifth episode of our Great Sea Fights series we explore the remarkable battle of St Mathieu, of 10 August 1512. In one of the earliest engagements of the Mary Rose a French squadron is surprised near Brest, and it ends with two major warships one French, and one English - and the largest in both fleets, on fire. It is also possibly the earliest naval battle fought with cannon, firing through gunports. This episode explores the events of the day and also its aftermath, following the narrative up to the summer of 1513 and the extraordinary story of the death of Edward Howard at the battle of Blancs Sablons.
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21 min
August 06, 2021 Maritime Scotland 3: A Blockade Runner from Fife in the American Civil War
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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37 min
August 05, 2021 Maritime Scotland 2: The Forgotten Shipbuilders of Leith
In this, our second episode dedicated to the remarkable maritime history of Scotland, we explore the fabulous shipbuilding heritage of Leith, the port just to the north of Edinburgh. To unpick this story Dr Sam Willis speaks with Ron Neish. Ron is a remarkable man with many man stories to tell. Born and bred in Leith he served his apprenticeship as a Ship Loftsman, in the Henry Robb Shipyard in Leith. When it closed in 1984 he worked all over the world but always retaining his love for ships and the sea and never forgetting where he came from. Ron has worked on more than 40 new build vessels, ranging from a 58 foot aluminium fishing boat to 65,000 tonne aircraft carriers. In the past few years Ron has dedicated himself to writing a history of the ships built in Leith, a testimony to the skill of the men who built the ships and to the many men and women who may have sailed or served on them. Leith had begun building ships some 400 years before the great shipyards of the Clyde and these Leith vessels reached all corners of the globe. It’s a story of global economic change, industrial change, military endeavour, and disaster, wealth and poverty, innovation, and above all brutally hard work.

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46 min
August 04, 2021 Maritime Scotland 1: The WW2 Midget Submarines of Aberlady Bay
In the latest episode of The Mariner's Mirror Podcast we begin three episodes dedicated to the maritime history of Scotland. In this episode I speak with Ben Saunders, a senior marine archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, based at their office in Edinburgh, and we talk about the hulks of two X-Craft on the shore at Aberlady Bay, East Lothian.

An innovative video has been created to accompany this podcast showing 3D photography of the wreck, overlaid with a 3D model of what the craft would have looked like.

The 3D survey is the result of an important project run by Wessex Archaeology. The Covid 19 pandemic put enormous strain on mental health and resulted in the cancellation of projects designed to support the wellbeing of isolated veterans. With funding from the National Lottery Community Fund, Wessex Archaeology ran a training and research project based around two WWII mini submarines in Aberlady Bay, East Lothian. The Aberlady X-Craft project, supported by Breaking Ground Heritage, provided hands-on survey training and produced a condition report of the wrecks; while also inspiring eight individually researched projects, five of which have been taken through to completion, and engaging over 30 veterans. The project is part of Wessex Archaeology’s longstanding work using heritage to support mental health and wellbeing.

Using 3d models of the wrecks completed through photogrammetric survey as inspiration, the project assisted the volunteers to develop their own research projects. These included the construction of scale models of an X-craft with training in artefact scanning/photogrammetry; research into the loss of HMS Glorious by a relative of one of the casualties, the use of X-Craft in the Far East, the medical conditions that affected submariners; and the assessment of the Fred Bown archive, one of the survivors from K17, a submarine lost in a training accident in 1917 (the Battle of May Island).
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27 min
July 28, 2021 The Oldest Canal in Britain? The Exeter Ship Canal
In this episode Dr Sam Willis explores the Exeter Ship Canal which, with the exception of the Roman 'Fossdyke' in Lincolnshire, is the oldest manmade waterway in Britain. Canal building is usually associated with the canal mania which gripped Britain between 1790 and the 1820s as the early years of the industrial revolution both posed problems and created solutions for those wishing to travel and transport goods across Britain. But the Exeter ship canal is 230 years OLDER than that. It was built in various stages but the first section was built in 1563 - in the Tudor period when Elizabeth I was queen. Sam meets Todd Gray a historian of Devon to find out more. The episode was filmed with incredible new done footage that shows the navigation from the city centre to the heart of the Exe estuary as never before and can be seen on the Mariner's Mirror podcast YouTube channel and Facebook page.

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20 min
July 23, 2021 Iconic Ships 7: The Billy Ruffian - HMS Bellerophon
Today we have episode 7 of our Iconic Ships mini-series in which a curator of a historic ship makes a case for their ship being iconic, or a historian takes a ship from history but which sadly no longer survives and make a case for that ship being iconic.

HMS Bellerophon - known fondly as the Billy Ruffian - was a Third 74-gun ship of the line with one of the most extraordinary careers of any warship in the great age of sail. She was the first ship to engage the Revolutionary French at The Glorious First of June in 1794; she made up the fleet under Horatio Nelson, hunting the French and assisting in their destruction at the Battle of the Nile in 1798; and she fought under Nelson once more against the combined French and Spanish at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. As well as these larger events, she spent time on blockade duty off the coast of France, defended the West Indies whilst based on the Jamaica Station and kept an eye on the Spanish, in Cadiz. She transported Napoleon Bonaparte to Britain after his surrender in 1815, perhaps one of the events she is most renowned for, before ending up as a Prison Hulk on the Medway and then later in Plymouth.

The story is told today by naval historian Kate Jamieson who you can (and should) all follow on Twitter @Kejamieson_
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30 min
July 21, 2021 Iconic Ships 6: USS Constitution
Today we have episode 6 of our Iconic Ships mini-series in which a curator of a historic ship makes a case for their ship being iconic, or a historian takes a ship from history but which sadly no longer survives and make a case for that ship being iconic. Today we have the magnificent - and surviving - warship from the great age of sail, USS Constitution, otherwise known as 'Old Ironsides'. A wooden-hulled masted frigate, launched in 1797, she is a truly magnificent survivor from a lost age, and from all of her very many reasons for being considered iconic, perhaps the most historically significant is that she is the oldest ship of any type still afloat. Most famous perhaps for her actions in the war of 1812 against the British - and you can still see her at the excellent Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston.
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25 min
July 12, 2021 Iconic Ships 5: HMS Belfast
Today we have episode 5 of our Iconic Ships mini-series in which a curator of a historic ship makes a case for their ship being iconic, or a historian takes a ship from history but which sadly no longer survives and make a case for that ship being iconic. Today we have none other than HMS Belfast. Moored today just upstream of Tower Bridge, Belfast is a true icon of the London skyline and Thames riverscape.
A Royal Navy 'Town Class' Light Cruiser, Belfast was launched in 1938; she played a crucial role in blockading Germany at the start of the war, operating from Scapa Flow in Orkney; became part of a naval strike force base in Rosyth; took part in the Battle of the North Cape in 1943, in which the German battleship Scharnhorst was tracked down and sunk; took part in the operation against Germany's last surviving capital ship, the Tirpitz; and she is is one of only three remaining vessels from the bombardment fleet which supported the Normandy landings on DDay in June 1944. The case for Belfast being 'iconic' is made by Robert Rumble, lead curator of HMS Belfast at London's Imperial War Museum.
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26 min
July 07, 2021 The 'Sunken Library': An extraordinary collection of books found in a 17th century shipwreck
In August 2014, a group of amateur divers revisited a known shipwreck from the seventeenth century but found that shifting tidal patterns had exposed much more of the wreck than had previously been seen, including a number of wooden luggage chests. Over the course of two days around a thousand items were brought up from the wreck, comprising silk textiles, women’s clothing, furnishing items and objects related to life on board ship, many in a remarkable state of preservation. The divers also retrieved a large number of leather bookcovers, the remains of books packed into one of the luggage chests. By paying close attention to the manufacture and design of these bookcovers we are able to gain significant insights both into the collection and the identity of its possible owner, as well as understanding better the international connections of books and their readers at this date. To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with Dr Janet Dickinson whose research focuses on the nobility and the court in early modern England and Europe and who recently formed part of an Anglo-Dutch project studying the remains of these remarkable books.
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31 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…