- 5/26/2025
Shipwrecks episode 3: Britain's Sunken History
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:001800, the start of the century that would see the might of Britain's industrial revolution
00:20reverberate around the globe.
00:23The sea and her mastery of it would help Britain become the greatest economic powerhouse the
00:28world had ever known.
00:31Ships were a vital part of the engine that was driving Britain's economic success.
00:35But the soaring profits that the sea provided led to greed and a struggle that pitted the
00:41power of money against the safety of sailors.
00:44The terrible human cost of shipwrecks came to shock the Victorian public.
00:50Keeping tally of this soaring humanitarian disaster was Lloyds of London.
00:57Ensuring against shipwreck is a time-honoured trade.
01:02The historic lutein bell would be rung to announce that a ship had perished at sea.
01:08This grim reaper's toll meant a fresh entry into Lloyds' loss book, a frozen moment in
01:15time like the room that now holds it.
01:19This is the loss book from 1799 and if you open it on any day you're confronted with
01:24wreck after wreck after wreck.
01:27It gives you a real sense of the scale of the problem that they faced.
01:32Imagine if each of these were a plane.
01:37Something just had to be done.
01:41The relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of sailors collided with another great Victorian
01:47force, the zealous social reformer.
01:50Furious parliamentary battles were fought by campaigners like Samuel Plimsoll to prevent
01:57ship owners risking lives by overloading ships.
02:04And as emigration put more women and children aboard, the search for greater safety inspired
02:09key innovations like lifeboat provision, ingenious inventors and our greatest shipwrights.
02:17With the might of industry behind them, engineers entered a race to build bigger and ever stronger
02:23ships in the belief that they would be unsinkable.
02:28It was a race that ended with the most famous shipwreck of all time.
02:45Throughout history, the most dangerous time to be on a ship has always been the beginning
02:50or the end of a voyage.
02:52Even today, most wrecks happen close to shore rather than far out in the deep ocean.
02:58And back in the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of men worked at sea, the terrible
03:04human cost of shipwreck was something that, at times, played out in front of thousands
03:10of horrified onlookers.
03:13A shipwreck could be a very public tragedy.
03:18Often the horrors left only mental scars for the watchers.
03:22But on this coastline, in the early 19th century, the shock turned into something else.
03:29In February 1807, the naval Gunnbrigg HMS Snipe was anchored here at Great Yarmouth.
03:36She had her full complement of crew aboard, as well as a few prisoners from the Napoleonic
03:40Wars and some women and children.
03:44When a storm blew up, a damaged merchantman drove into her anchor cable, and the Snipe's
03:49crew had no choice but to cut themselves loose.
03:54She ran aground less than 60 yards from shore, and the people of this town could clearly
04:00see the men and the women on the Snipe struggling against the wind and the waves.
04:06And when she began to break up, they could hear their screams and cries, and yet they
04:11were powerless to help.
04:1460 yards, barely two lengths of a swimming pool, had meant the difference between life
04:23and death.
04:26Among those who stood helpless on the shore at Great Yarmouth, watching the wrecking of
04:30HMS Snipe, was George Manby, a former ship's captain.
04:37What was desperately needed was a way to link the ship to potential helpers on the shore.
04:42But how?
04:43Manby's research led him to a surprising conclusion.
04:47He would fire a cannon at the wreck.
04:53The result of all of his research and experimentation was the Manby mortar.
05:00The idea was to fire a heavy shot out of this mortar, and it was attached to a light
05:05line that was fired directly over the rigging of the stricking vessel.
05:11The crew would then haul on that light line, pulling a heavy rope onto their boat, and
05:18it was along that rope that the survivors could be winched to safety.
05:23It was both ingenious and incredibly effective.
05:28George Manby was fiercely proud of his invention when he had this portrait commissioned.
05:33He was careful to have the various parts of the Manby mortar depicted alongside him.
05:39Here you've got a stricken ship floundering in heavy seas.
05:44His right hand is resting on a shot, and you can see the rope to which it is attached,
05:49and also a grappling hook, which helped it catch in the rigging of the ship.
05:55He was also careful to add a note.
05:58The year that the portrait was painted, 1818, by then 137 lives had already been preserved
06:07by the Manby mortar.
06:10These three wonderful paintings are just some of the many images that Manby had commissioned
06:15to show his invention in action.
06:17This was a man who understood the power of art for swaying public opinion.
06:23He wanted the world to know about this new invention.
06:27Mortars were one of the first steps to cutting the carnage of shipwreck.
06:32Around the coast, Manby mortars became a frequent sight and gave some reassurance to mariners.
06:40Over the years, Manby's concept of firing a rope to a stricken vessel went through many
06:45adaptations.
06:47First, the cannon became the more mobile rocket.
06:53Then the simple rope became what is called a breacher's buoy, essentially a lifebuoy
06:59with a giant pair of shorts attached.
07:05Manby's invention offered some help, but Britain was facing shipwrecks on an epic scale.
07:13Emigration was rising, with thousands leaving our shores.
07:17But to have a new life in the colonies risked a premature death at the bottom of the sea.
07:24In this era, many people would have known a victim of shipwreck.
07:30Shipwreck is the nightmare that we have forgotten.
07:33When you get on a plane today, you know rationally that your chances of being killed are very
07:38low.
07:39Most planes do not crash.
07:41As far as getting on a ship in, shall we say, 1820 was concerned, and let's say going
07:47to India via the Cape, it's actually a much more hazardous business.
07:56Across the whole world in 2012, there were less than 30 plane crashes.
08:01But just in the North Sea, and only during the winter of 1820, there were more than 2,000
08:07shipwrecks that led to the loss of more than 20,000 lives.
08:12That's 50 entire jumbo jets downed in just a single winter.
08:18In the 19th century, the sheer escalation of British shipping due to the sort of growth
08:21of empire and global trade meant that shipwrecks, the number of shipwrecks, also escalated greatly.
08:28And this gave rise to some serious sort of inquiries about how to reduce the number of
08:36shipwrecks, how to make ships safer.
08:39So there's a growing awareness that the shipwrecks must be dealt with as a problem across the
08:4519th century.
08:46At the same time, because of the sheer escalation of just the volume of sea travelling in the
08:5219th century, the rate of shipwrecks continues to go up.
08:57Though angered at the toll taken by shipwrecks, the public felt powerless to help.
09:03There were a few early lifeboats in the country's worst shipwreck hotspots, manned by local
09:08men rarely trained and rarely able to swim.
09:12But the organisation was haphazard and sparse, and the men rowing these ungainly boats were
09:19putting themselves at enormous risk.
09:23It's the early 1820s, virtually all ships rely on sail and lifeboats barely exist.
09:30So when your ship hits the rocks and begins to break up, and you realise that you're
09:35too far away from shore for a man-be-mortar to reach you, you realise that your only hope
09:42lies with men on shore.
09:45But they're men who've never been taught how to swim, and they're men whose families
09:50will starve if they die.
09:53Do these men have the courage to launch a boat to rescue you?
09:59Unlike today's lifeboats, like this one heading out of Pool Harbour, early lifeboats were
10:04very rudimentary.
10:07Then this situation came to the attention of a man full of practical zeal, Sir William
10:13Hillary.
10:15His motto was, with courage nothing is impossible, a motto he aimed to live by.
10:26Sir William Hillary had witnessed plenty of storms living on the Isle of Man, a notoriously
10:31treacherous sea for mariners.
10:34One night in 1822 he raced around raising men to rescue the sailors from HMS Vigilant,
10:40which was stricken on the rocks.
10:42And then the 51-year-old Hillary, who couldn't swim, rowed out to the wreck, and his brave
10:49crew was successful.
10:53Just two months later, another ship, the racehorse, ran aground close to William Hillary's home.
11:00But it was a very different story.
11:03A lifeboat rescued the crew from the racehorse, but on its way back to shore, that lifeboat
11:08capsized, killing three of the lifeboatmen.
11:11These were men with young families, and Hillary was disturbed that the widows and children
11:17of these men would then be forced to live in poverty.
11:21It seemed a terrible price to pay for such bravery, but to Hillary it seemed morally
11:26wrong.
11:29Like other reformers of the period, he believed he had a duty to change the situation.
11:35His rallying call was a pamphlet calling for a national organisation for the preservation
11:40of lives from shipwreck.
11:42It was a stirring and inspirational document, and I think that it shows Britain and the
11:47British at their philanthropic best.
11:52The pamphlet proclaimed that the experience, talent and genius of the most distinguished
11:58commanders and men of science should be united in the formation of one great institution,
12:05which would in itself embrace every possible means for the preservation of life from the
12:10hazards of shipwreck.
12:151,700 copies were sent out, and after a slow start, the organisation was formed.
12:21But then, after less than nine months, it managed to raise £10,000.
12:26That's half a million pounds in today's money, and then the organisation took off.
12:34This was the forerunner of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
12:39On the coast, new boats were bought, crews trained, gallantry medals awarded, and, answering
12:45the call that began the campaign, money was given to the families of lost lifeboatmen.
12:52Pamphlets, pensions and rowing boats were not exactly a high-tech answer to shipwreck.
13:03In the 1830s, as Britain entered the Victorian age, a new revolution in shipbuilding was
13:09taking over.
13:11Iron.
13:12Ships forged of iron were not as naturally buoyant as wood, and they were harder to repair
13:18at sea, but their tremendous strength would prevent a ship breaching on the rocks, and
13:24it held another attraction for shipping magnets.
13:28The incredible strength of iron meant that suddenly ships could be built that were larger
13:34than any wooden ship ever constructed.
13:37When the SS Great Britain left this dry dock in Bristol in 1843, she was, by a full thousand
13:44tonnes, the largest ship the world had ever seen.
13:51Greater size meant more fee-paying passengers per voyage.
13:56This offered a big business opportunity, with more ships being built to take millions of
14:01Britons to the colonies.
14:07This ship represents the coming together of Britain's maritime revolution of the 18th
14:13century with her industrial revolution of the 19th century.
14:17She's constructed out of iron, driven by a propeller, powered by coal and steam, and
14:22her designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was a civil engineer rather than a traditional
14:28shipwright.
14:29In every way, this ship was a revolution.
14:38Brunel's radical design featured watertight bulkheads to seal off flooded parts of the
14:43hull.
14:44Once, a rock piercing the hull was a fatal blow, but the SS Great Britain could isolate
14:50off such breaches.
14:53Sailing ships had few options in a storm.
14:56Either they would heave to, taking all the speed out of the sails, or, with passengers'
15:02hearts racing, they would run with the storm, praying rocks didn't get in the way.
15:09A steamship had the power to resist being driven onto the rocks.
15:13However, this vast size meant catastrophic losses if the new ocean giants went there.
15:21Ocean sinks quickly and survivors had less broken wood from the wreckage to clutch onto.
15:29Clinging to one of these giant cogs would save no one.
15:34But engines and iron also brought a more subtle change.
15:38People came on board who knew little about sailing.
15:42So as the technology associated with ships was changing, you had a changing profile of
15:47men.
15:48So, for example, instead of having just a crew of sailors, you might have engineers,
15:54you might have stokers, you might have people who are regarded really as just ordinary working
15:58class men.
15:59They're not sailors, they're not jactars, they're just people who will undertake tasks
16:04aboard a ship.
16:06And these weren't the only people changing the dynamic of the ship.
16:11These steerage class cabins seemed to us incredibly cramped and uncomfortable, but for the first
16:16time in history, ordinary working people could afford international travel.
16:22They could choose to go abroad, they could seek their fortunes, they could emigrate.
16:28Once you needed wealth to be a passenger.
16:31But as emigration rocketed, this elitism was fading.
16:37We've become fascinated by this upstairs-downstairs relationship between the poor in the steerage
16:42class and the rich up here in their private cabins.
16:47But life at sea has always been coloured by class.
16:50And what was really new and revolutionary about the SS Great Britain and about life
16:55at sea in the 19th century was not that it brought the classes together, but for the
17:01very first time, women and children were now travelling at sea in large numbers.
17:08It had been something of a stag party at sea, an all-male event with hard drinking
17:14and macho attitudes not unknown.
17:17So what happened to this behaviour when the ship hit the rocks?
17:22It's hard for us to know exactly what happens aboard shipwrecks, but certainly you get lots
17:27of descriptions of quite savage, quite violent, quite panicked behaviour by men.
17:33So you get these wonderful metaphors of being animals, that the men are stampeding buffalos,
17:39that they're tigers, that they're hornets.
17:43There's lots of descriptions of men that really don't correspond to the idea of a sort of
17:46chivalrous women and children first.
17:50The pages of a novel had been the closest most Victorian ladies had been to this shipwreck
17:56savagery.
17:57And now, for women travellers, it was a stark reality to be faced.
18:03For millions of people and their families, the shipwreck changed from being an abstract
18:08concept to becoming a very real and personal nightmare.
18:18How would Victorian society cope with ever more women and children on board?
18:27In early 1852, a troop ship, HMS Birkenhead, sailed south from Britain, with soldiers bound
18:34for the new frontier wars in South Africa.
18:37Yet these were not her only passengers.
18:40The Birkenhead was carrying the wives and children of officers serving in the Cape,
18:45and their fate was to change the history of seafaring and inspire one of the greatest
18:51legends of the Victorian age.
18:54HMS Birkenhead was an iron-hulled paddle steamer.
18:58For the troops on board, she was one of the fastest and most comfortable of her day.
19:03They were racing to South Africa to reinforce the troops fighting tribes in the Cape frontier
19:08wars.
19:10Throughout 1852, the Birkenhead steamed down the western coast of Africa.
19:15Her final destination was here, Cape Town.
19:19Her captain, Robert Salmon, was under real pressure to get the troops to South Africa
19:24as quickly as possible.
19:25So to speed up the journey, he plotted a course that hugged the coastline very closely.
19:32Too closely, in fact.
19:34The captain was confident of the accuracy of his charts.
19:37They showed a safe passage.
19:39The 600 men, women and children slept soundly as the ship steamed on through calm waters.
19:47During the night of the 26th of February, three miles offshore and in just 12 fathoms
19:52of water, the Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock lying just below the surface.
19:58Her hull was ripped wide open and water poured in, drowning hundreds of the soldiers and
20:03sailors in their bunks.
20:05The survivors rushed to the upper deck.
20:08There were only three working lifeboats for the 600 aboard.
20:13Could the women and children be overrun in the stampede?
20:17The soldiers' next actions became legendary.
20:21They let the women and children go first to the lifeboats.
20:25As the ship began to collapse, the captain, Robert Salmon, had called out,
20:30''Make for the boats!''
20:32The women feared the lifeboats would be swamped by hundreds of troops and all would perish.
20:39Seeing this, the commanding army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Seaton, his sword drawn,
20:45ordered his soldiers to stand back.
20:47They held ranks, stunned by fear and, if accounts are to be believed, meekly awaited their fate.
20:55One survivor later wrote,
20:57''The order and regularity that prevailed on board from the moment the ship struck till
21:03she totally disappeared far exceeded anything that I had thought could be affected by the
21:08best discipline, and it is more to be wondered at seeing that most of the soldiers were but
21:14a short time in the service.''
21:20So began the legend of women and children first.
21:25The custom known ever after as the Birkenhead Drill.
21:30The Birkenhead was exceptionally unlucky.
21:33She struck a rock that was uncharted.
21:36Worse, she struck at night, and worst of all was the place she went down.
21:40Today it is famous, famous for some of the highest density of great white sharks in Africa.
21:49Nearly all those that took to the water without their clothes on were taken by sharks.
21:55Hundreds of them were all around us, and I saw men taken by them close to me, but as
22:00I was dressed, having on a flannel shirt and trousers, they preferred the others.
22:10South Africans know great whites as Tommy Sharks, based on that brutal night.
22:19The newspapers made out there was something innate within the British character, an inner
22:24bulldog that made them face death with calm courage.
22:30But Victorian Britain was desperate to believe this was true.
22:35Shipwreck becomes a fundamental challenge to the psychology of that society, its sense
22:42of self-confidence that it is producing people who can act appropriately in an emergency,
22:49and in acting appropriately can vindicate their sense of civilizational progress and
22:54superiority.
22:57Before the actions on the Birkenhead could be vindicated, the Navy held an inquiry into
23:02what had happened.
23:04Both Lieutenant Colonel Seaton, the commanding army officer, and the ship's captain, who
23:09might have been held responsible for the disaster, were dead.
23:12But had they behaved honourably?
23:15The court-martial took place here, on board HMS Victory, Nelson's great flagship in Portsmouth.
23:24In May 1853, the surviving soldiers and sailors of the Birkenhead were summoned to HMS Victory.
23:31Each of them was thoroughly cross-examined, and in each case they told the same story.
23:37That the captain had remained calm throughout, that the women and children had been ushered
23:41to the lifeboats, and that, when all hope had been lost, the soldiers remained calm,
23:48accepting their fate.
23:50There was evidence for self-sacrifice.
23:52It was not just newspaper hype.
23:55Perhaps unsurprisingly, the military court gave a full exoneration.
23:59And that judgment, made here on HMS Victory, gave the official stamp of approval to the
24:04legend of the Birkenhead, a legend that was tapping into how Victorian Britain had already
24:10come to view itself.
24:21Because so many of the men who died on the Birkenhead were soldiers rather than sailors,
24:27when Queen Victoria ordered this memorial to be built in their honour, it was placed
24:31here, at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, home of the Chelsea pensioners.
24:36This plaque records the names of all of the officers and the non-commissioned officers
24:41of the Birkenhead.
24:42And these plaques record the names of all of the private soldiers on board the Birkenhead,
24:47together with their regiments.
24:49But this plaque is much more than just a memorial to the dead.
24:53It's a very public acknowledgement of what it describes here as the heroic constancy
24:59and unbroken discipline shown by Lieutenant Colonel Seaton, the hero of the Birkenhead.
25:07The Birkenhead was used as a shining example to Victorian society.
25:12Now, shipwreck was not just a matter of survival, but of surviving with manners, dignity and honour.
25:22And Rudyard Kipling would commemorate it all in verse.
25:27Their work was done when it hadn't begun.
25:30They was younger, nor me and you.
25:32Their choice it was plain, between drowning in eeps and being mocked by the screw.
25:38So they stood and was still to the Birkenhead drill.
25:42Soldier and sailor too.
25:47Holding fast to high moral standards would not save you from drowning.
25:51Instead, the Victorians turned to practical ingenuity with the cork life jacket.
25:57Prototype models were little more than buoyant cork fixed to a canvas vest.
26:02One of the pioneers in the 1850s was RNLI Captain John Ross Ward.
26:08At first he battled some resistance to wearing life jackets.
26:11And you can kind of see why.
26:13It's really heavy and really cumbersome.
26:16And these men weren't just standing around on motorboats.
26:19They were rowing. They had to do something as well.
26:22And I think rowing while wearing one of these would be really quite awkward.
26:26But then one event demonstrated just how vital they were.
26:32In February 1861, the people of Whitby awoke to a fear scale.
26:40At 8.30 in the morning, lifeboatmen were called to rescue the crew of the John and Anne in distress.
26:46They launched again at 10 o'clock.
26:48And then at 11.30, as more and more people were coming in,
26:52They launched again at 10 o'clock.
26:54And then at 11.30, as more ships beached.
26:58Exhausted, the lifeboatmen carried on until, during their fifth rescue, a large wave overturned the boat.
27:12One lifeboatman, Henry Freeman, reached the shore.
27:16Henry Freeman survived, and he'd been wearing a sample of the newfangled lifejacket.
27:22All 12 other men perished.
27:26Lifeboatmen needed no more persuading.
27:29Lifejackets became compulsory.
27:36It doesn't look like much, but this symbolises the survival of literally thousands of victims of shipwreck.
27:46Whilst lifejackets could save you in a shipwreck, a new innovation would stop ships even being in a storm.
27:56In 1859, most thought storms were God's work and impossible to predict.
28:03Admiral Robert Fitzroy was sure it was within science's grasp to predict weather.
28:10He claimed that, given funding, he could not only foresee weather,
28:14but with the newly developed telegraph he could send out storm warnings to ports around the country.
28:21Few listened until one of the century's most dramatic shipwrecks energised politicians to act.
28:29The Royal Charter was a steam clipper packed with gold miners returning from Australia.
28:35After two months at sea, they were hours from home, ready to enjoy their new wealth.
28:42As the ship neared Anglesey, with the barometer plummeting, the captain was advised to put into Holyhead.
28:50Instead, he decided to battle onto Liverpool, without realising a staggering storm was brewing.
28:57It rose from Stormforce 10 to Hurricane Force 12.
29:02The Royal Charter's engines were no match for the storm, and she was relentlessly driven onto the Welsh coast.
29:10Just 39 of the 470 people on board survived.
29:15Many victims had refused to abandon their gold on board, and its weight dragged them under the waves.
29:23In the annals of weather, it was the worst storm of the century.
29:27In the press furore that followed, Robert Fitzroy spoke up.
29:32In the Met Office archives, I met with Catherine Ross to find out Fitzroy's next move.
29:38What was Robert Fitzroy's reaction to this big gale?
29:42Fitzroy felt very strongly that it could have been predicted, and that there should have been a warning system in operation
29:48which could have prevented the loss of the Royal Charter, and indeed the other 132 ships which were lost on the same night.
29:54And he produced this report, which was designed to reflect the weather throughout the period of the storm, before and after.
30:02Over how long?
30:03Two weeks of weather, this report.
30:05And here you can see angle C, and basically the length of the line indicates the strength of the wind.
30:11So here we have hurricane force winds.
30:13Through this report, and reports of other similar storms, lesser in extent, but other storms,
30:19he was able to convince Parliament that he could predict storms, and to bring in a storm warning system.
30:27And would the 1861 storm warning have looked like this?
30:30No. The information was collected from the coastal stations by electric telegraph, sent to London,
30:36and if they felt a storm warning should be issued, it was sent back to the location where the poor weather would hit, again by electric telegraph.
30:43That got the information to the port, but it didn't get it to the ships, either in harbour, or sailing along the coast.
30:48So, as a result, they had an additional system.
30:51Next to each telegraph station was a staff, on which they hoisted a system of cones and drums, which were lit at night.
31:00You've got gale probably from the northward, gale probably from the southward, gales successively where you're in trouble if that hits,
31:08and then these show winds that are going to change, but they're guessing which direction they're coming from.
31:14Robert Fitzroy won approval for his system. In the war against shipwreck, weather forecasting was a major victory.
31:22This map led directly to modern weather forecasting as we know it.
31:28In essence, it led to the very first forecast.
31:31Amazing.
31:33Fitzroy's passion had energised Parliament to act, and MPs had also responded to passenger concerns.
31:41The need to improve passenger safety led to a series of new regulations and laws in the 19th century.
31:48Ships were inspected in dock to check that they were seaworthy, they were fitted with lifeboats, and captains and crew were given better training.
31:58And yet none of these new regulations and laws applied to merchant ships.
32:03There was one set of rules and standards for passenger ships, and another for those that carried cargo.
32:12Of almost 2,500 shipwreck fatalities in 1867, just one death in 20 were passengers.
32:21Few cared about this massacre of merchant seamen until one man was driven to change things.
32:30In the war against the shipwreck, one campaigner stands out as commander-in-chief.
32:36Samuel Plimsoll.
32:38In his battle to make ships safer, he became a national hero.
32:43Today, his fight for social justice has been forgotten.
32:47But before Plimsoll, the seaworthiness of ships was a lottery.
32:54Despite advances like iron hulls and steam engines, much of Britain's merchant fleet was still made out of wood.
33:03Many ships were death traps.
33:05A frail, leaky skeleton of a ship would be bought and disguised as a new craft.
33:10A fresh lick of paint would be put over rotten timbers like these, and the ship would be given a new name, a nameplate.
33:17But whatever the plate said, sailors had just one term for these vessels, coffin ships.
33:24Elderly ships would be disposed of, and what would happen, it was a terrible practice,
33:29by which people would buy up old ships, repaint them, rename them, and send them out to sea again, often heavily insured.
33:39The only danger to the owner was that the sailors would lose their lives.
33:45But if they were recompensed financially, it was alleged to be worth the risk.
33:58It was a vast insurance scam.
34:01Ship owners could heavily insure their vessels for far more than they were really worth.
34:06Successfully reaching port was becoming less profitable than a shipwreck.
34:12Shipwrecks were soaring.
34:14Plimsoll reported that in 1869, 177 ships were wrecked in sea conditions officially logged as no stronger than a gentle breeze.
34:25According to Samuel Plimsoll, one ship owner had lost a dozen ships in three years, and 105 men.
34:32They were regarded as coffin ships because men knew that if they sailed on them, there was a very good chance they were going to die.
34:38And the law was against even the men there.
34:40You could not refuse to go aboard a ship.
34:42Once you'd signed the papers, if you refused to go aboard the ship that you'd signed to,
34:46once you took a look at it and realised how overloaded or unseaworthy it was, you would be arrested and thrown in jail.
34:52The only way you could go was to sail on the ship.
34:55Many men registered their protest and then sailed, and many men sailed to their deaths as a result.
34:59In one three-year period, over 1,500 sailors were jailed for refusing to cruise ships they believed unseaworthy.
35:08And jail often brought poverty and destitution to their families.
35:14Ever more sailors were lured onto these coffin ships.
35:18Plimsoll had two main demands.
35:21Firstly, no unseaworthy ship should be allowed to leave port until it had been decommissioned.
35:26Secondly, no unseaworthy ship should be allowed to leave port.
35:30And that all freight ships must display a line marking the maximum safe loading limit,
35:36with harbourmasters being allowed to impound ships not showing a visible line above the water.
35:42Plimsoll was pitting himself against huge vested interests.
35:49When Samuel Plimsoll began his campaign against the overloading of ships which had led to so many deaths,
35:54he cited a statistic that in the 20 previous years not a single English ship, not a single British ship, had ever been scrapped.
36:02They'd all been patched up and sent back to sea because it was in the ship owners' interests to keep them afloat.
36:08At the height of Plimsoll's fervent campaign,
36:12an event at sea would lead to a surge of public support for the load line and greater maritime safety.
36:22This is Bridlington Bay on the Yorkshire coast.
36:26Newcastle's a hundred miles from here.
36:30And back in the 1870s it was Newcastle and north-east coalfields that supplied the coal that fuelled industrial Britain.
36:37That coal was transported by colliers up and down this coast, to London, to the south, even to France.
36:44Coal was a notoriously dangerous cargo.
36:48It was loaded open on deck, and as soon as it was loaded, it was thrown into the sea.
36:53Coal was a notoriously dangerous cargo.
36:57It was loaded open on deck, and as ships rode the waves, it could shift and fatally unbalance them.
37:05Whenever a storm brewed in the North Sea, they needed to find shelter on this coast,
37:11and Bridlington Bay was their favourite sanctuary.
37:15On 9 February 1871, 400 ships, many of them colliers, sought refuge here in Bridlington from a passing storm.
37:25That afternoon the skies began to clear, and one by one the ships made sail.
37:31A huge crowd of onlookers came down to see the sight of such a large fleet sailing off to the horizon.
37:37That night the wind suddenly rose to a hurricane.
37:41It began to snow, and the winds whipped that snow up into a blizzard.
37:46As dawn broke the next morning, a crowd of onlookers came down, and they were greeted with an appalling sight.
37:55Ships were foundering in heavy seas, being pushed towards the coastline.
38:00Some collier ships tried to steer for the sanctuary of the harbour,
38:03only to be dashed against the breakwaters.
38:06The cries of drowning crew could be heard over the winds.
38:10A rocket was repeatedly fired to get ropes to stricken ships,
38:14and the whole town, men and women, came down to the waterfront to help haul sailors to safety and tend to the survivors.
38:23Again and again the exhausted lifeboatmen set out through the blizzard to reach the desperate sailors,
38:28but they'd been set an impossible task.
38:32When the sea's fury calmed, wreckage, cargo and drowned bodies filled the seafront.
38:40Twenty-eight ships were lost on the coast that night.
38:44Many sailors and six of the lifeboatmen perished.
38:49This is the burial register for the parish of Bridlington,
38:53and it records all the names of the men who died during the Great Gale.
39:00The burials of the 14th of February take up two full pages of this register.
39:06On this page they run all the way down.
39:08To the bottom, where there's this entry that reads,
39:1211 sailors, names unknown, drowned in Bridlington Bay.
39:17The deaths infuriated Samuel Plimsel, who felt most could have been avoided.
39:23What happened with a lot of the ships was that as soon as they sank,
39:27they were taken out of the water.
39:30They were taken out of the water and buried.
39:33What happened with a lot of the ships was that as soon as they got as close in to shore as the sandy bottom,
39:41they fell apart.
39:44And...it was argued that this would not have happened if the ships had been in proper repair.
39:54There was a great deal of coverage in the newspapers afterwards about the way the ships were loaded
39:58the way the ships were loaded and the condition that the ships were in.
40:01So it provided ammunition for Plimsoll's campaign.
40:05Plimsoll now produced a book.
40:07Half a million copies were sold,
40:10bringing him new supporters from surprising places with no maritime links.
40:15He even had music hall sketches written about him.
40:21Plimsoll's campaign was heralded in town halls,
40:24in the pulpit and in music halls.
40:27He was christened the Sailor's Friend and songs were composed in his honour.
40:31But then the backlash began.
40:33Ship owners issued libel writs against Plimsoll's book
40:37and there were personal attacks.
40:39One letter in the Shipping Gazette declared,
40:41Plimsollism is another word for terrorism.
40:45This was war.
40:49The front line moved to Westminster.
40:52The records of Plimsoll's struggle can be found stored in the Parliamentary Archives.
40:57By the 1870s, public pressure for a new law
41:01to force ship owners to mark a safe load line on their vessels
41:05had grown into a national campaign.
41:08But the men who actually drafted Britain's laws
41:11repeatedly stood in the way of any new legislation.
41:14And there's a reason for that.
41:16Many of those men were themselves ship owners.
41:21Plimsoll was no orator, nor was he a genius,
41:24yet his integrity was faultless and he was unrelenting.
41:29When one bill was knocked back, he launched another, and then another.
41:34Plimsoll knew the public was on his side
41:37and not that of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli.
41:40In 1875, in July, at the end of a term,
41:43after Plimsoll had introduced, unsuccessfully, several merchant shipping bills,
41:48Disraeli deferred the latest one once too often.
41:52Plimsoll lost his temper.
41:54By this point, he'd had 13 libel cases against him from unhappy ship owners.
41:59He'd sold his own stately home to pay his legal bills.
42:03With all of this behind him, to find that he was thwarted yet again was too much.
42:09He called the MPs in the House villains
42:14who colluded with the murderers outside it.
42:18Plimsoll's outburst shocked both Parliament and the press,
42:22but it was Disraeli's government that was losing its grip.
42:26American magazine Harper's Weekly showed Disraeli being menaced
42:30by the lion of public opinion.
42:32It had the bold caption,
42:34Now put your head in if you dare.
42:38Disraeli teetered on the brink.
42:41Would he risk the nation's wrath?
42:44The Prime Minister trimmed his sails.
42:47He needed a law, and soon.
42:50But other MPs were not giving in yet.
42:53This is the House Bill of the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act.
42:58A draft of the new legislation,
43:00it records all of the amendments proposed, accepted and rejected
43:05as it made its way through Parliament,
43:07and it's absolutely full of them.
43:10You can see them scribbled in black ink, in pencil, in red ink.
43:15Some are cut and pasted in.
43:17There's even one pinned to the bottom of the page.
43:21You can see that it was a deeply contested
43:24and controversial piece of legislation.
43:28This is a record of a great parliamentary battle.
43:35Eventually, after years of struggle, Samuel Plimsoll triumphed,
43:39and every freight ship in the world bears the mark of that victory.
43:44You can even see it clearly on a vast ship like this.
43:48This load line, or Plimsoll line, marks the safe loading limit of a ship.
43:54Plimsoll's success meant a rest for any ship owner
43:58guilty of risking life at sea.
44:00It saved thousands of sailors' lives, and coffin ships were no more.
44:17Samuel Plimsoll had educated the Victorian public
44:21about the existence of a dark side to seafaring,
44:25but more horrors were to come.
44:29In the summer of 1884, an English sea yacht, the Minionette,
44:33passed through these waters off the coast of West Africa.
44:37She continued her voyage southwards,
44:39crossed the equator, into the South Atlantic.
44:42The Minionette was a racing yacht
44:44that was being delivered to a new owner in Sydney by Tom Dudley,
44:48and he took with him three crewmen.
44:50Edwin Stevens as first mate and navigator,
44:53Ned Brooks as cook and able seaman,
44:56and a cabin boy called Richard Parker,
44:58a 17-year-old boy who, like Tom Dudley, had grown up as an orphan
45:02and was illiterate, and one of Dudley's promises to the boy
45:05was that he'd teach him to read and write on the voyage.
45:08It was a voyage full of promise for new lives in Australia.
45:13Because the Minionette was a relatively small yacht,
45:16Tom Dudley probably wisely decided to stay closer to the African coast
45:19and to take a more northerly course from Africa to Australia.
45:22But the danger in that was that if anything went wrong,
45:25they were far from the shipping lanes
45:27and their chances of rescue were remote.
45:29Just how remote was something fate would reveal to them.
45:33Six weeks into her journey, she was struck by a freak wave
45:37and she quickly sank.
45:40The crew escaped to the lifeboat.
45:43The captain, Tom Dudley, knew that their situation was all but hopeless.
45:48In their swift escape, they'd managed to save some navigational equipment,
45:52but all they had to eat were two tins of turnips
45:56and, worst of all, they had no water.
46:00On the very first night, they had to fight off sharks with their oars.
46:04Their predicament could hardly have been worse.
46:06They're hundreds of miles from land, they're far from the shipping lanes,
46:10they're in a tiny little dinghy, no shelter from the burning tropical sun
46:14and no means of making a sail other than the shirts they wore,
46:18which Tom Dudley, the captain, eventually persuaded his men
46:21to give up to make a makeshift sail.
46:24Dudley decided their only option was to drift with the wind
46:28towards the South American coast, an ocean away.
46:32In fact, he calculated they were 700 miles from land.
46:36They feared they would become forgotten victims of the sea,
46:40but instead, because of what happened next,
46:43they would be infamous across British society.
46:46Dudley had no radio, no GPS, no helicopter to rescue them.
46:51They were days from death.
46:53Experienced sailors knew that if all else failed,
46:57they could turn to the custom of the sea.
47:00Lots would be drawn and the loser would lose his life.
47:04One life lost instead of all, one life to provide sustenance for the rest.
47:10Dudley suggested this, but Ned Brooks refused point blank.
47:16The cabin boy Richard Parker had drunk seawater and slipped into a coma.
47:23As dawn broke on the 19th day, Dudley could take no more.
47:28Dudley scanned the horizon, searching for any sign of a ship, but there was none.
47:34He signalled to Stevens to grab the boy.
47:38And then Dudley slit his throat.
47:43Richard Parker was now consumed.
47:46Thirst being more urgent than hunger,
47:48the men knew they had to quickly drink Parker's blood before it would congeal.
47:54Dudley said,
47:56I shall never forget the sight of my two unfortunate companions over that ghastly meal.
48:01We was like mad wolves who could get the most.
48:05And for fathers of children to commit such a deed, we could not have our right reason.
48:1224 days after their shipwreck, a passing German boat rescued them.
48:17Arriving in Cornwall, the three men told how they had been forced into a ship
48:23and how they had been forced to turn to the custom of the sea.
48:27As sailors, they expected a sympathetic arm.
48:30Instead, they got the heavy hand of the law.
48:34They came back to Falmouth and the harbour master said,
48:37Goodness me, you look at a terrible state. How on earth did you survive?
48:40Well, we hit the cabin boy, of course, was more or less what their response was.
48:44And then they were completely amused by the fact that they were then charged with murder.
48:50This event happened almost in the middle of nowhere.
48:53Why did Dudley and Stevens admit to killing Parker?
48:56Because they didn't think they'd done anything wrong.
48:59It was the established custom of the sea, at least amongst the maritime community,
49:03that in times of necessity, such as when you are stranded in the middle of nowhere
49:09with nothing to eat and nothing to drink,
49:11that a recourse would be made to eating one of the people who had survived.
49:17But normally, after the drawing of lots,
49:20which could be rigged because there was a tendency for the youngest crewman
49:25or for the passenger, rather than the crew, or for the black, rather than the white,
49:30to have the lot fall upon him.
49:32But that was considered to be the custom of the sea.
49:35You don't have recourse to getting food or calling for help.
49:39You may never get help at all. You're stranded in the middle of an ocean.
49:43Well, you'll be lucky if somebody comes and picks you up.
49:46I mean, the case of Dudley and Stevens, they waited almost three weeks.
49:50They didn't kill Parker the first day.
49:53They waited three weeks until things were dire and no hope was on the horizon.
50:00What was the public reaction to this case?
50:03Even Richard Parker's own brother, who was a mariner himself,
50:07came up to them and shook their hands in public.
50:10So could sailors legally kill each other for food?
50:15Anecdotes of nautical cannibalism were widespread,
50:19but this custom of the sea had yet to reach court.
50:23A test case was needed.
50:26Whilst Dudley and Stevens had public support,
50:29was any English judge really going to legalise cannibalism?
50:33A legal balancing act was called for.
50:37The tribunal of five judges determined
50:40that necessity was not a defence to murder.
50:44Consequently, Dudley and Stevens were guilty of murder
50:48and, as a result of that, were found guilty by the judges, not by the jury,
50:53and were condemned to death.
50:56But, surprise, surprise, their sentence was very shortly commuted
51:01to what many people thought was an excessive crime.
51:05It was an excessive period of time, six months.
51:09How does the Dudley-Stevens case relate to what happened on the Birkenhead?
51:13Well, it was specifically contrasted by Lord Chief Justice Coleridge
51:18in his judgment on Dudley and Stevens,
51:21and he said the British way is exemplified by the Birkenhead,
51:26not by what happened on the Mignonette.
51:29In other words, better to die than to kill.
51:33The British Christian way is self-sacrifice,
51:36not the sacrifice of others.
51:41Thankfully, fewer and fewer Victorians
51:44faced Dudley and Stevens' horrible dilemma
51:47because shipping was becoming ever safer.
51:50Back in the early 18th century,
51:52to cross 3,000 miles over the Atlantic
51:55meant, at the very least, a fortnight's endurance.
51:59Cramped quarters, no bath and a risk of dying in a shipwreck.
52:04But Victorian engineers made extraordinary leaps forward,
52:08smashing records in speed and size.
52:11By 1880, the journey to New York was cut to nine days
52:16and barely a decade later to only five.
52:19Faster also meant bigger and more luxurious.
52:22Yet the giants were also safer for passengers
52:25who could be reassured by plentiful lifeboats.
52:28From 1894, the Merchant Shipping Bill
52:31laid down a legal requirement for lifeboats based on the ship's size.
52:36The MPs set the maximum at what seemed a vast weight, 10,000 tonnes.
52:43It seemed that Britain's war against the shipwreck had been won.
52:47Progress meant that soon ships were double and even quadruple this size.
52:53With fewer shipwrecks, politicians saw little need
52:56to hinder ships with extra regulations
52:59and lifeboat numbers did not rise.
53:03As the 20th century dawned, few were concerned.
53:09One ship shattered this illusion.
53:12Her name synonymous with broken pride.
53:15Titanic.
53:23This is the Harland and Wolff shipyard
53:26from where the Titanic was launched in front of 100,000 spectators.
53:30It was a proud moment for Belfast,
53:33but it was also the crowning glory of a century of progress.
53:39Titanic was not only the largest man-made moving object in the world,
53:44she was as ultra-modern as it was possible to be.
53:49Titanic's first-class passengers were treated like rock stars.
53:54A one-way first-class ticket would have cost
53:57tens of thousands of pounds at today's prices.
54:04Even in third-class steerage,
54:07Titanic's passengers had electric light, baths and meals.
54:11Wherever you were, it was the height of modernity.
54:18Progress had overtaken safety.
54:21Titanic, quite legally, only had lifeboats for a third of its passengers.
54:38Titanic's myth continues in part
54:41because it was the Birkenhead drill writ large.
54:44As the lifeboats were mustered,
54:46the women and children famously went first.
54:49The men seemingly did the right thing
54:52and, on the captain's orders, bravely held back.
54:55But Titanic had two versions of the Birkenhead drill.
55:00On the starboard side,
55:02the drill was the standard women and children first.
55:06But on the port side,
55:08Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean women and children only.
55:13He even left empty seats if no women and children were near.
55:17I happened to meet the captain and I asked him,
55:21shall I get the women and children away, sir?
55:24He just nodded.
55:26There weren't enough boats to take half the people
55:30and the chances of the other half in that icy cold water
55:34were absolutely nil.
55:36Yet there was never the slightest attempt
55:40to get into a boat out of turn.
55:43In fact, with the last couple of boats,
55:46it was even difficult to find women to fill them,
55:49though of course there were still a good many on board.
55:52The Birkenhead drill had apparently taught everyone how to act.
55:57Titanic's captain, Edward Smith's last reported order,
56:01was be British.
56:04There were nearly 500 unused spaces on Titanic's lifeboats,
56:09testament perhaps to the moral revolution
56:12that had taken place in British attitudes to shipwreck
56:15over the previous 100 years.
56:17Those in the lifeboats were only later saved
56:21thanks to a huge technological advance.
56:24Radio.
56:26Before radio, a sinking ship had to rely on telephones.
56:30Before radio, a sinking ship had to rely on distress flares
56:34to visually signal for help.
56:36Titanic too used these, but they were mistaken for party fireworks
56:41and it was the liner's radioed SOS call
56:44that brought the Carpathia to her aid from over 50 miles away.
56:49When she reached Titanic's last recorded position,
56:53the giant ship was gone, but survivors were in lifeboats.
57:00Without radio, it's quite possible all Titanic survivors
57:04would have died of hypothermia long before they were rescued.
57:08Titanic might be just one more forgotten name
57:12on the list of ships that never reached port.
57:20More than a century after the wreck of the Titanic
57:23and generation after generation of technological innovation
57:27has cosseted us from its horrors.
57:30Ships now use radar to steer clear of icebergs
57:34and GPS can pinpoint their global position to within metres.
57:38Yet ships still sink,
57:41and the gigantic scale of modern cruise liners
57:44seems as hubristic as Titanic ever was.
57:48But while deaths at sea still occur,
57:51the shipwreck as an event has lost that chilling potency
57:55that it once had.
57:57So as popular fascination has shifted across the 20th century
58:01from the ship to the plane to the spaceship, if you like,
58:05that leaves the Titanic, I think, as the last great shipwreck.
58:09I think it's unlikely that its place in the popular consciousness
58:13will be challenged, because we just don't think about ships
58:16and shipwrecks in the same way as we once did.
58:19And so the Titanic stands there as a sort of colossal memorial
58:23to how powerful and how important the maritime sphere
58:26once was in British society.
58:28My journey in this series began back in the 16th century,
58:32when Britain could only dream of ruling the waves.
58:35It's carried me through centuries of destructive chaos at sea
58:39on a shocking scale.
58:41Yet despite the huge loss of lives,
58:44the shipwreck helped shape Britain's modern identity,
58:47its national character, and change the course of its history.
58:51Without the shipwreck, we simply wouldn't be the nation that we are today.
59:21© BF-WATCH TV 2021
Recommended
54:20
|
Up next
59:00
58:35
58:35
35:52
48:58
29:15
29:00
29:41
58:10
58:13
59:01
43:52
59:08