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 01, 2021 The Falklands Sinkings: The Untold Story
Dr Sam Willis speaks with historian Dr Paul Brown about the extraordinary events surrounding the Falklands War in 1982, a pivotal event in British history. When Argentinian forces invaded the Falklands in April 1982 the British Government responded by sending a task force to the south Atlantic to seize back the islands. In the subsequent conflict cruise missiles, nuclear submarines and vertical/short take-off and landing aircraft were tested in combat for the first time, and to devastating effect. In the aftermath of the war official documents were released but heavily redacted, and others kept under wraps as top secret. Using the Freedom of Information Act of 2000, Paul Brown has now uncovered many new facts about the naval events, in particular about the several ships that were lost. The torpedoing by the British of the Argentinian light cruiser General Belgrano is well known, but what of the SIX British ships that were sunk? nearly 40 years after the conflict, the full story can now be told.
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35 min
March 29, 2021 The Channel with Charlie Connelly
This week Dr Sam Willis talks with bestselling writer and award winning broadcaster Charlie Connelly about the fascinating history of the English Channel. Is it a bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange, a challenge to be conquered? It is all those and so much more: The Channel is many different things to many different people, and in our new age of Brexit it remains as important as it ever has been. It is still the busiest shipping lane in the world and hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings each year. Charlie entertains us with an extraordinary mix of characters: geniuses, cheats, dreamers, charlatans, visionaries, eccentrics and naked balloonists, whose stories have all made the English Channel the cultural icon it is today.
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39 min
March 23, 2021 How to Remember Captain Cook
Dr Sam Willis explores the fascinating problems posed by Britain's complex imperial history by thinking in particular about Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century British explorer and navigator famous for his three voyages to Australia and the Pacific (1768-1779). Sam talks with with Kevin Sumption – the Director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum. They range widely over issues raised when planning for the 250th anniversary in April 2020 of Cook's arrival in Australia. Why are multiple perspectives important in a narrative like Cook's? And how did they go about including First People's narratives of Cook's arrival? Sam and Kevin also explore two intriguing items in the museum's collection: A bronze bust of Captain Cook with his head covered by a black balaklava made by the Australian artist Jason Wing, which challenges the colonial history of Australia from an Aboriginal perspective, and an eighteenth-century japanned tea tray by the artist Edward Bird depicting the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779.
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40 min
March 15, 2021 'Titanic in Miniature' - The Wonderful ss Shieldhall
Dr Sam Willis speaks with Graham Mackenzie, chief engineer of SS Shieldhall, one of the most fascinating ships in the UK's historic fleet. The Shieldhall is unique as a time capsule providing a working example of steamship machinery that operated ships in the oceans of the world from the 1870s for a century. In particular her triple-expansion steam engines, scotch boilers and steam-assisted steering gear is almost identical to that which was used in the Titanic - only in miniature. The episode is designed to give important (and entertaining) historical context to an animation we have created showing exactly how the boilers and steam engine of the Shieldhall work.
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40 min
March 09, 2021 Navigation Masterclass: Secrets of the South Pacific Wave Pilots
Dr Sam Willis speaks with John Huth, the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard who works mainly in the field of experimental particle physics. He is in fact a member of the international team that discovered the Higgs Boson particle. He has also, however, written a rather wonderful book on navigation – The Lost Art of Finding Our Way – in which he contends that even the most confused of us can improve our navigational understanding by paying closer attention to the world around us. Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. And the question John wants an answer to is this - what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way? We’re exploring some of those themes today by looking at the wave pilots of the Marshall Islands who read the patterns of swell in the ocean to orientate themselves in their unique archipelago.
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33 min
March 01, 2021 Sea Shanties and The Wellerman.
In response to the new global Social Media phenomenon of sea shanties sparked by the Scottish postman Nathan Evans' rendition of The Wellerman, Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Gerry Smyth, author of a new book published by the British Library: 'Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas'. They discuss how shanties were collected and annotated, how they were inspired by changing commercial conditions at sea in the nineteenth century and how each shanty has a fascinating history of its own. In particular they look at John Kanaka, South Australia, Roll Alabama Roll and the Drunken Sailor - which, did you know, came from an ancient Irish clan march...
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37 min
February 24, 2021 Steamboat Excursions on the Hudson for Chinese Americans, 1883.
This week we tackle the important history of race relations in America – through the lense of riverboat excursions for the Chinese community of New York in the 19th century. Dr Sam Willis speaks with Dr Marika Plater, who studies what low-income New Yorkers did for fun, outdoors, during the nineteenth century. Her work has shown how the most vulnerable New Yorkers used their limited free time to escape to environments that contrasted with their daily conditions. She follows the city's workers as they walked to public parks in their neighbourhoods, took ferries and streetcars to beer gardens and pleasure grounds, and boarded steamboats headed to waterfront excursion groves. This episode focusses on steamboat excursions: what happened and how it was reported in the hostile political atmosphere of the era of Chinese exclusion in America.
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30 min
February 14, 2021 Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 3 - The Spanish View
This third episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers a Spanish perspective on this most extraordinary battle. We hear from Dr. Agustín Guimerá and Dr. Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro, both from the Spanish National Research Centre in Madrid. Dr Guimerá offers an analysis of the battle from the Spanish perspective and Dr Ortega-del-Cerro reads out an extract from the logbook of the Principe de Asturias, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Moreno, and certainly the best Spanish accounts of the battle. Both contributions are presented in English and then repeated in Spanish.

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24 min
February 14, 2021 Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 2 - The Analysis
This second episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers an analysis of the battle from two of the world's leading Nelson scholars: John Sugden and Marianne Czisnik. Dr Sam Willis speaks to them both and explores the realities of battle at sea in the age of sail. This battle is famous because of the extraordinary event that occurred when Horatio Nelson boarded one Spanish ship from another he had already captured. But how should we see this event as historians? To what extent was Nelson acting independently? Was he breaking his orders and if so was he right to do so? How did the battle affect the war? This episode gets to the very foundations of the nature of seapower in the Age of Sail.
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40 min
February 13, 2021 Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 1 - The Events
This episode published on the anniversary of the Battle of St Vincent in 1797 launches the second of our Great Sea Fights series. Dr Sam Willis explores the events of Valentines Day 1797 when Admiral John Jervis daringly cut through a much larger Spanish fleet escorting a mercury convoy home from South America. This was the second major action of the Revolutionary War against France and the first against Spain, then France's allies. The events of the battle remain unique in naval history. The Spanish lost four ships of the line, two of them personally boarded and captured by Horatio Nelson. The events were the first stage in nelson becoming the most famous Englishman on earth and a naval hero like no other.
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28 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…