The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

Dr Sam Willis visits the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London to explore their new photography exhibition. Exposure: Lives at Sea was brought together during the UK’s COVID-19 lockdown. It is the first exhibition curated by Laura Boon, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Public Curator for Contemporary Maritime. The importance of seafarers has been brought into sharp focus during the Covid pandemic. Seafarers are keyworkers have helped keep our supermarkets stocked, and yet hundreds of thousands of them have been stranded at sea. This exhibition is designed to bring recognition to the important role seafarers play in the modern world and explores many themes with both contemporary and historical relevance. In this socially distanced, visually-led exhibition, the experience of work and play at sea is displayed through the lens of six seafarers and researchers - from the large-scale panoramic to the intensely intimate - bringing together photography taken around the world, from the reefs of Mexico to the isolation of Antarctica, to document the myriad ways life can be spent at sea. We rely on our oceans for food, ecosystem services, energy and transportation, yet it is a world rarely seen - making this exhibition both striking and important.

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On the 900th anniversary of the shipwreck, Dr Sam Willis talks with Charles, Earl Spencer, about the White Ship disaster of 25 November 1120. The loss of the ship was one of the greatest disasters that England ever suffered and its repercussions changed English and European history forever. Henry I was sailing for England in triumph after years of fighting the French as the most formidable ruler in Europe. He landed home safely but the boat which followed a little later, upon which travelled some 300 passengers of the highest rank, including Henry's only legitimate son, the cream of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy including eighteen women of the rank of countess, famous knights and courtiers, did not...

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Ten hand-drawn maps of the Spanish Armada have surfaced in London and been brought by a private collector. An export ban has been imposed by the British Government in the hopes that £600,000 can be raised to keep these maps in a British institution. The maps are the only contemporary depiction of the battle. Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Dominic Tweddle, Director General of the National Museum of the Royal Navy about why these maps are so important to British history and the forging of a British national identity.

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Sam speaks to Sarah Wassberg Johnson, Director of Exhibitions and Outreach at the excellent Hudson River Maritime Museum. In the conversation we discover just how important the Hudson River is to the development of American history. Topics include ice-harvesting, the great fire of New York of 1835, the American Revolution, the appreciation of the wilderness, the launch of the environmental movement, the suing of EXXON in the 1980s for polluting the Hudson, oral history, fishing, trade, power plants, and the extraordinary and unique ecology of the Hudson.

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Dr Sam Willis heads to the new JMW Turner exhibition at the Tate Britain: 'Turner's Modern World'. Turner is one of the best known of all British artists and one of history's greatest maritime artists. His painting The Fighting Temeraire is a national treasure and now appears on the new £20 note. Sam meets the curator of the Turner bequest, David Blayney Brown, and focuses on three of Turner's paintings: 'A Maritime Disaster' a magnificent depiction of the wreck of the Amphitrite, a convict ship carrying female convicts to Australia that ran aground in France in 1833; 'Snowstorm: Steam-boat off a harbour's mouth' one of Turner's most famous paintings of a catastrophic storm in the North Sea in 1842; and 'The Fighting Temeraire'. - the dreamlike canvas showing HMS Temeraire, veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames in the setting sun to the breaker's yard.

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Sam Willis explores the remarkable conservation project underway in Portsmouth to preserve Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, HMS Victory, for future generations. Her hull - obviously designed to float - has started to suffer from a century in dry dock and her immensely complex rigging has been dismantled. Her masts are about to be removed. Sam talks with Nick Ball who works with Victory at the National Museum of the Royal Navy and also with David Davies, historian novelist and Chairman of the Society for Nautical Research.

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Dr Sam Willis talks with David Davies, naval and maritime historian and author of naval fiction and Chairman of the Society for Nautical Research, about the importance of maritime history. The plans for the podcast are laid out: this will be a podcast that brings our listeners the most important global stories in maritime history; gives behind the scenes and special access to maritime museums and archives around the world; and transports our listeners to the maritime past with original and previously unpublished historical sources and accounts.

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