Shipwrecks episode 2: Britain's Sunken History
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00If you had to choose just one image that explained how deep and visceral the fear of shipwreck
00:24was for our ancestors, then it would have to be this giant canvas.
00:32Because it explains that the fear of shipwreck was not just the fear of the sea, the fear
00:37of drowning, it was the terror of the forces of brutality that would be unleashed when
00:43the ordered world of a ship was turned on its head by disaster.
00:52This painting by Jericho captures the chaos, murder and cannibalism that followed a real
00:58shipwreck.
01:00It came to encapsulate all the anxieties that had built up in Georgian Britain about
01:06wreckings at sea.
01:11In the 18th century, maritime trade was central to Britain's economic advance and helped
01:17shape a sense of national identity.
01:21Out on the high seas, a ship flying the British flag was a microcosm of the Georgian state
01:27itself.
01:28Ordered, hierarchical and, by modern standards, cruel, everyone on board was drilled to know
01:35their place.
01:37But this was a world that could be turned on its head in an instant if shipwrecks struck.
01:47It was a time of not just terror, but the anarchy of bloody mutiny, the violence of
01:53slave rebellion and the fear of gangs of murderous scavengers.
02:01The shipwreck jeopardised the vast fortunes accumulated by the merchant class and its
02:07high drama became deeply rooted in our culture, creating heroes and villains who inspired
02:15a powerful art and literature all of its own.
02:21This is the story of how the shipwreck threatened not only life at sea, but the Georgian state
02:27itself.
02:41The Isles of Scilly.
02:44A mass shipwreck here as the 18th century began would show just how vital the great
02:50ocean-going ship was to Britain's ambitions for wealth and conquest.
02:58In October 1707, a British naval fleet was returning from fighting the Spanish at the
03:03siege of Toulon.
03:05They reached home waters off the Scilly Islands after a perfectly routine voyage.
03:11What happened next changed the history of navigation and sent shockwaves through British
03:17society.
03:23Twenty-one ships, led by the highly regarded Admiral Sir Clownsley Shovel, were plotting
03:28a course for Portsmouth when, in the dead of night, they unexpectedly hit the rocky
03:34waters that surround the Isles of Scilly.
03:44Although only 28 miles off the British coast, the Scilly Isles were inaccurately charted
03:51and notoriously treacherous.
03:57I'm getting a boat out to trace the route followed by Admiral Shovel's fleet.
04:03On the 22nd of October 1707, Admiral Shovel thought he was safely out to sea to the south-west
04:09of the Isles of Scilly.
04:11In fact, he was here, thick amongst the rocks at the mouth of the Broad Sound Passage.
04:18It's like being in a sailor's nightmare.
04:21There are jagged rocks, tides swirl around them.
04:27In the total darkness of night, the fleet mistakenly believed they were safely out to
04:32sea in the English Channel, and they would have been oblivious to the perils of these
04:37rocks.
04:39On the right flank of the fleet, Admiral Shovel's flagship, HMS Association, was the first to
04:44get into trouble, and she founded here on the gillstone ledges.
04:54She fired two guns as a warning, but it was too late, and two other ships, the Romney
04:59and the Eagle, founded over there on the rocks in the distance.
05:07In a period thought to be no more than 20 minutes, these three ships went under, taking
05:13with them over 1,000 men.
05:20A fourth ship, the Firebrand, also struck these ledges, but her captain, Francis Piercy,
05:26guided her to the island of St Agnes, just over those rocks, where she sank with all
05:31but 12 of her crew.
05:36Had Admiral Shovel's convoy been just a few miles south, they would have missed these
05:42rocks entirely.
05:45Almost 1,500 men died that night, just in this small stretch of water.
05:52One of the reasons that the death toll was so high is that the rest of the fleet just
05:57carried on sailing, oblivious to the disaster that was unfolding on these rocks.
06:02It has an eerie feel to it here.
06:06This is a mass maritime graveyard.
06:13What did for Shovel and his captains was their inability to accurately calculate longitude,
06:20their east-west position at sea.
06:23The disaster highlighted a problem facing all British ships at the time.
06:29It was this potentially lethal challenge to lucrative global trading which terrified Britain,
06:36as much as the loss of over 1,000 sailors.
06:41The following morning, the islanders woke up to a grotesque scene.
06:45All that remained of the ships was flotsam and jetsam floating on the waves.
06:49But literally hundreds of bodies, battered and bruised by the sea, were washed up on
06:54the three main islands, Tresco, St Agnes, and here on St Mary's.
07:03What was one of the largest maritime losses in British history quickly became part of
07:09the folklore of these islands.
07:13This is Port Helic Beach on St Mary's, and it was here that Admiral Shovel's body was
07:18found.
07:19But a colourful local legend tells a different story.
07:23According to that version of events, Shovel actually survived the wreck of the association
07:28and made it here together with two of his step-sons and his favourite dog, a greyhound.
07:35But once he got here, he was murdered by a local woman who cut off his finger to steal
07:40his precious emerald ring.
07:47The Isles of Silly Disaster exposed not only Britain's rudimentary grasp of maritime navigation,
07:54but also just how disposable sailors' lives were on the great sailing ships.
08:00Even in death, the rigid class divisions of 18th century society were enforced.
08:07The navy did not recover the bodies of the hundreds of drowned sailors, but at great
08:12cost, they retrieved Admiral Shovel's remains from Port Helic Beach.
08:19An aristocrat and a member of the ruling class, Admiral Shovel was given a lavish burial ceremony
08:25in Westminster Abbey, and they've even erected a monument to him here on Port Helic Beach.
08:31But hundreds of other sailors died alongside him, and their bodies were also washed ashore
08:37here.
08:39Members of the Georgian underclass, those men were simply thrown into mass graves.
08:44There's no monument to them.
08:51A brutal logic was at work.
08:53Britain's elite was prepared to sacrifice the lives of ordinary sailors if that's what
08:58it took to secure new international trade routes.
09:02Yet the loss of four ships here showed how this global expansion could be threatened.
09:09When news of the disaster finally reached the Admiralty in London, there was mourning
09:13for the loss of their favourite admiral, but there was also panic.
09:16This disaster threatened their ambitions for an empire based on maritime supremacy.
09:22And until they solved the problems of longitude, those ambitions lay in ruins.
09:30The response was swift.
09:31The country's merchants and seamen presented a petition to Parliament, demanding a solution.
09:37And in 1714, the Longitude Act was passed as a direct result of the tragedy on the Isles
09:44of Scilly.
09:46It offered a monetary prize to whoever could solve the mystery of longitude.
09:53And the answer came in the form of the marine chronometer.
09:59This is a marine chronometer, invented by an Englishman, John Harrison.
10:04A chronometer is essentially a clock that is not disturbed by the motion of the sea.
10:09By setting its time to that of Greenwich in London, a sailor can calculate his east-west
10:14position anywhere in the world.
10:17It revolutionised maritime navigation and gave Britain the ability to safely expand
10:22its empire overseas.
10:29Armed with this confidence, Britain would start to aggressively expand its empire.
10:36And at the forefront of this endeavour was the great sailing ship, which became central
10:42to British identity in the Georgian period.
10:46The Georgian world is built on trade, global trade, and the ships are the great vehicles
10:50that go out and gather that trade.
10:53This is a period where actually ships aren't just sort of emblems of the nation, they really
10:57are, if you like, the engines of Georgian wealth, of Georgian power, of Georgian empire.
11:09Britain's wealth and ambition relied on its powerful naval fleet.
11:14And these ships, like the famous HMS Victory, were a microcosm of Georgian society.
11:24With physical divisions on board, replicating its highly ordered and hierarchical structure.
11:34Imagine being at sea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away from Britain.
11:39A long way from home shores, yes, but if you go below these decks, you get a real sense
11:44that you were never far from the Georgian state, where every man knew his duty and where
11:49every man knew his place.
11:56This is the Admiral's cabin, it could be in the grandest of Georgian mansions.
12:00Just look at the fixtures and fittings, candlesticks, curtain tassels, and these magnificent windows.
12:12And this is the Captain's cabin, slightly less regal, but still impressive.
12:19So if the Admiral and Captain went to sea living the life of lords of the manor, where
12:24did the sailors live?
12:30Below the grand surroundings of the Admiral and Captain, these gun decks were the quarters
12:36for the sailors and marines.
12:39This is incredible, at least 250 sailors and marines would have lived, eaten and fought
12:46on a deck like this.
12:48And their only access to fresh air and light, if they were lucky enough to live on a deck
12:52above the waterline, was through a port like this.
12:56Dark, stuffy, rank, this place would have been really grim.
13:04You could have left the tiny village Hamlet or in the city slum you called home, but in
13:08a way you never really left Britain, it's all so ordered and organised.
13:13And what really worried the Georgians was that if a ship like this was wrecked, this
13:18whole world was turned upside down.
13:28And in 1741 these fears were realised when the wrecking of one British ship sparked its
13:35crew to launch a violent mutiny.
13:38This shipwreck would bring about a change in British maritime law.
13:44HMS Wager was part of a naval fleet that was sailing round the tip of South America.
13:51She became cut off from the rest of the convoy.
13:54And the extraordinary events that followed were documented by a sailor, John Bulkley,
14:00who would lead the uprising.
14:05Separated from the rest of the squadron and surrounded by nothing but ocean, the Wager
14:10was in serious trouble.
14:13Morale under Captain Cheap had plummeted and her crew was ravaged by disease.
14:19In fact so many sailors were ill that they were barely able to man the yards.
14:24And then in the early hours of the morning disaster struck.
14:28The Wager hit rocks off the coast of Chile and immediately began taking on water.
14:38Three thousand miles from home and with no backup, Captain Cheap and his officers had
14:44no way of maintaining order.
14:46John Bulkley recorded that as soon as the Wager hit rocks, anarchy broke out.
14:54They fell into the most violent outrage and disorder.
14:58They began with broaching the wine in the lazaretto, then breaking open cabins and chests,
15:04arming themselves with swords and pistols, threatening to murder those who should oppose
15:09or question them.
15:11They clothed themselves in the richest apparel they could find and imagined themselves Lords
15:16Paramount.
15:21Eventually all the crew managed to make it ashore and they began salvaging parts to build
15:26a makeshift boat to take them home.
15:30The captain directed his officers to make a camp on the beach, but outnumbered by the
15:35men they now feared for their own lives.
15:40Sat on the beach, huddled around a campfire, Captain Cheap and his officers knew that they
15:45now faced different rules.
15:47Admiralty law stated that when a ship was wrecked, the sailors stopped getting paid,
15:54which meant that inevitably discipline broke down.
16:01I heard Mr Cousins, his very unbecoming language to the captain, telling him, by God, you are
16:07a rogue and a fool.
16:11The Admiralty still expected the men to follow the captain's orders, even after a ship was
16:16wrecked, but the crew of the wager interpreted things differently.
16:23Without pay, they believed they were no longer subject to naval authority and discipline.
16:30Drunken scuffles and fights broke out.
16:32Captain Cheap tried to stop one sailor stealing from the rum rations.
16:37The man resisted.
16:38So at point blank range, the captain shot him dead.
16:45Everyone was armed, everyone was hungry and they were thousands of miles away from home.
16:51Bulkley presented a letter to Captain Cheap, asking for permission for the men to sail
16:56their makeshift boat via the Straits of Magellan to the British Caribbean.
17:03Bulkley and the majority of the men left in their improvised boat, leaving the captain
17:08and officers to find an alternative passage home.
17:12As they departed the beach, Bulkley assumed that he would never see Captain Cheap again.
17:21It took Bulkley's contingent over a year to reach home, and over half of the men died
17:27on the journey.
17:29Within weeks of arriving in London, Bulkley published his account of the mutiny and won
17:33the support of the public for leading the rebellion against a murderous captain.
17:40That, however, was not the end of the story.
17:43A year later, something unexpected happened.
17:47Captain Cheap arrived home with his own version of events.
17:52When Captain Cheap finally returned home and recounted his version of the mutiny, John
17:58Bulkley was arrested and a court-martial was convened, but the Admiralty were aware of
18:03public opinion, so they cut a deal.
18:06Neither Bulkley nor any of the men were charged, and Captain Cheap, whose poor leadership had
18:12sparked off the mutiny in the first place and who, in full view of his crew, had shot
18:17one of his men in the face, was promoted.
18:25Fearful of such chaos happening again, Parliament stepped in.
18:29A new law was devised, and it agreed with the mutineers about what had been the real
18:35issue in the case of the wager.
18:39This is an Act of Parliament passed in 1747, held here in the Parliamentary Archives.
18:48After this legislation was passed, if a British naval vessel was wrecked anywhere in the world,
18:54its crew would continue to get paid, and that meant that the men would remain subject to
18:59military discipline.
19:02The Georgians' strategy for a rich trading empire demanded that order and discipline
19:07at sea be maintained.
19:10Within five years of the passing of this Act, Britain's ships were embroiled in the first
19:15ever truly global conflict.
19:24The Seven Years' War saw the country fight France and other European rivals for control
19:29of vital shipping routes and key colonies.
19:39By the early 1760s, Britain had emerged as the undisputed master of the seas, and was
19:46exploiting this to huge financial gain.
19:58The economic value of maritime trade was also beginning to shape attitudes to shipwrecks.
20:05There was one particularly profitable enterprise which made ports like Bristol amongst the
20:10most wealthy and influential cities in Georgian Britain, but one that also posed a unique
20:18challenge if its ships were wrecked.
20:25Ports like this were the starting point of a triangular trade in which slaves were bought
20:30in West Africa, they were sold to British plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas,
20:36and then the ships returned here, carrying sugar.
20:39A key part of that trade notoriously became known as the Middle Passage, a dangerous transatlantic
20:46voyage when the ships were packed with a human cargo.
20:51These slave ships would carry up to 500 men, women and children, shackled and manacled
20:58in the hold, with little food, water or even enough air to breathe.
21:05This was a gruesome trade, with the slavers placing only a monetary value on their human
21:11cargo.
21:12They were prepared to accept an average of 10% of their slaves dying on the transatlantic
21:18journey.
21:21But what would be the reaction if one of these ships were wrecked?
21:26Dozens of slave ships were wrecked in this period, but we hardly know anything about
21:31them at all, and yet here in Bristol one eyewitness account does survive and it gives a chilling
21:38insight into what the Georgians thought about their slaves and into what it would have been
21:43like to have been wrecked on a slaver.
21:48It concerns a slave ship called the Phoenix and is held within walking distance of the
21:54Bristol harbour where many of these ships departed.
21:59This is Felix Farley's journal, a Bristol newspaper that was published on the 8th January
22:041763.
22:06It records how one ship, the Phoenix, bound from Africa to sugar plantations in Virginia,
22:12got into trouble and began to take on water.
22:16They took on so much water that the white crew were forced to release the slaves from
22:21their irons to get them to help at the pumps.
22:26The Phoenix, from Africa to Virginia, with 332 slaves, founded on the 30th October.
22:35They were under a necessity of letting all their slaves out of irons to assist in pumping
22:39and baling, who, having no sustenance of any kind for 48 hours except a dram, made
22:46them very sullen and unruly, upon which they put half of the strongest of the slaves in
22:52irons, some of whom got their irons off and attempted to break the gratings.
22:58The seamen, not daring to go down the hole to clear their pumps, were obliged, for the
23:03preservation of their own lives, to kill 50 of the stoutest of them.
23:13It is impossible to describe the misery the poor slaves underwent, having had no fresh
23:18water for five days.
23:20Four of them died and one drowned herself in the hold.
23:24The seamen were quite worn out, many of them in despair, three having dropped down dead
23:30at the pump, with fatigue and thirst.
23:34They were ten days in this terrible situation, expecting the ship hourly to sink, the water
23:39in the hold continually increasing, when they met with the King George.
23:45The captain, who with much difficulty saved the lives of the white people, the boat being
23:51scarce able to live in the sea.
23:5536 of the crew were taken up by the King George of Londonderry.
24:00The slaves were all drowned.
24:13What's so striking about this account is the utter lack of compassion displayed towards
24:20the lives of the slaves.
24:22When they realised they were in trouble, the white crew released some of the slaves to
24:26get them to help with the pumping and with the bailing, but then when there's no hope,
24:32they either kill them or put them back in their chains, back down in the hold, where
24:38the water is constantly rising.
24:41It's absolutely terrifying.
24:45To the Georgian merchant elite, the African men, women and children on board were shockingly
24:51dispensable.
24:53They would see the loss of a slave ship as a terrible financial catastrophe for them,
24:58and it depends how many other ships that they owned, how seriously they would take it.
25:02But it was risky, and when your ship comes in, you're okay, but if it doesn't and you
25:06can't pay your debts, your credit can be ruined, and credit is all important.
25:10So they'd see it primarily in terms of a credit transaction, and you just don't get any sense
25:15of the humanity of the slaves.
25:18You get the sense of that they are worth certain amounts, they're listed as commodities.
25:23It's that progressive dehumanisation that's marginalised, it makes it seem almost irrelevant
25:28or indulgent to talk about them as people when you have that kind of focus.
25:33Twenty years after the Phoenix was wrecked, the crew of another slave ship, the Zong,
25:39threw more than 100 slaves overboard to make an insurance claim.
25:45This infamous incident was a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement that challenged
25:50the slave trade, and the artist Turner painted this bleak event.
25:57For the 17th and most of the 18th century, the British were completely unselfconscious
26:03and unrelenting about the exploitation of African labour.
26:06They just saw it as a means to this unprecedented access to wealth.
26:11The casual disregard for life that seemed to characterise the Georgian pursuit of wealth
26:17went hand-in-hand with a hard-nosed strategy of colonial expansion.
26:22British interests took control of the Caribbean island of Jamaica, which would prove to be
26:27an economic powerhouse, and the East India Company, which had begun the colonial scramble
26:34in the age of Elizabeth, was at the forefront of running other key outposts, such as Madras
26:41and Calcutta.
26:44The building blocks of what would become the British Empire.
26:51These colonies were exciting, bustling places where fortunes could be made.
26:59And by the second half of the 18th century, the officers and gentlemen running them were
27:04relocating their families there too.
27:13But there was disquiet in some quarters of Georgian society about upper-class women and
27:18children mixing with other races.
27:23And in August 1782, the sinking of one East India ship, the Grosvenor, off the coast of
27:30South Africa, would be the most powerful example yet of how a shipwreck could turn the world
27:36of order and privilege upside down.
27:43This wonderful painting captures all of the elements which made the wreck of the Grosvenor
27:48such a compelling story, one that played on the insecurities of late Georgian society.
27:56Carefully placed at the front of the painting are women and children, finely dressed to
28:00depict their high social standing, but they're clinging to the uncharted rocks of a foreign
28:06and hostile shore.
28:09It underlined the unease that people were feeling about women and children travelling
28:13to Britain's new colonies.
28:16Now the shipwreck was threatening not only soldiers and sailors, but the family itself.
28:24Returning to London from Madras, the Grosvenor was carrying 105 crew and 35 wealthy passengers,
28:32including women and children.
28:36In the middle of the night, the Grosvenor blindly hit rocks.
28:40In the darkness and confusion, the crew believed they had hit a reef in the middle of the ocean.
28:48And yet, when the sun rose the next morning, the crew of the Grosvenor discovered that
28:53they weren't on a reef 300 miles away from land.
28:56They'd collided with rocks off the very coast of Africa itself.
29:00Their captain's navigation had been hopelessly inaccurate, and they were just a few hundred
29:04yards from shore.
29:06But with these rough seas, it still seemed very unlikely that many of the crew would
29:11even be able to make it to land.
29:20With the swell crashing against the rocks, two of the men managed to swim ashore with
29:24some rope, and they made a makeshift winch.
29:28A number of men were lost in the scramble, but miraculously, the majority made it to
29:34safety.
29:35Of a total complement of 140, 125 had survived the shipwreck, 91 crewmen along with all of
29:44the passengers.
29:45But cast away on a little-known and poorly-charted shore, they had no real idea of exactly where
29:51they were, and the only supplies that they could get were those that they could salvage
29:56from the beach.
29:58The story that unfolded would both fascinate and shock Georgian Britain.
30:12Marooned on an African shore, the survivors of the Grosvenor had three options.
30:18Their first was to stay on the beach, make a camp, barter with the local Africans and
30:22send a party of the fittest men to get help.
30:25Their second option was to salvage timber from the wreck itself, build a makeshift raft
30:30and sail it to the nearest port.
30:32The third option was for the men, the women, the children, the sick, the lame, those who
30:37had been injured in the wreck itself, to gather together en masse and to set off on a great
30:42trek to the Dutch settlement at the Cape.
30:48They chose to leave the beach and walk through some 400 miles of the most difficult and uncharted
30:55terrain in southern Africa.
30:59What hurried their decision to leave was the presence on the beach of the Pondo, the local
31:04tribe who had gathered to watch events unfold with great curiosity.
31:11The Pondo were clearly seeing the wreck as a great resource.
31:14This was a treasure trove.
31:15It had brought metal in all sorts of forms ashore, and once there has been a movement
31:20by the castaways to move away, the Pondo sees this as an opportunity to seize further
31:26resources from those as they're departing.
31:29They come amongst them, they plunder them, they take their possessions, and what had
31:33supposedly started as an orderly march down the coast very quickly disintegrates into
31:39a sort of panicked flight.
31:44Faced with an arduous march to safety, the officers and wealthy passengers knew that
31:51their privilege and position on board the East India Ship mattered little now that the
31:55Grosvenor lay in ruins.
31:59The hardships of the march of the Grosvenor survivors inverted the traditional hierarchies
32:04of Georgian society.
32:07The wealth of the rich gentleman passengers suddenly counted for nothing, and they and
32:12the women and children found themselves reliant upon the sailors, young fit men in their teens
32:18and twenties who, under normal circumstances, they would hardly have deigned to speak to.
32:24Youth and fitness suddenly mattered more than wealth, class or status.
32:41The survivors, who had set off together, confident that the Cape was within reach, now began
32:46to lose heart and to fragment into smaller and smaller groups.
32:51The young and the strong abandoned the sick and the weak, and those who were unable to
32:55carry on simply left where they fell.
33:08Of the 140 men, women and children who had boarded the Grosvenor in India, only 18 survived.
33:18The uncertain fate of white, upper-class women in an unforgiving and remote corner of Africa
33:25was bound to hit a nerve back in Britain.
33:31For years, the Georgians had justified the slave trade on the grounds that those trafficked
33:37were little more than savages.
33:42Now rumours began circulating that some of these well-born ladies from the Grosvenor
33:48may have fallen into the hands of these so-called savages.
33:52One of the elements of the story that makes it so fascinating for the contemporary population
33:56is the sort of myths that circulate around it of white women being sort of dragged into
34:01slavery, dragged into marriage or concubinage in local black tribes, and this clearly titillates
34:08the late 18th century imagination, but it also appalls that sort of late 18th century
34:11imperial sensibility.
34:13This is not the way it's supposed to be.
34:15It's supposed to be white people ordering black natives, not the other way around.
34:20In response to continuing stories that a number of the women had indeed survived, an expedition
34:26was launched from the settlement at the Cape.
34:29Well, the expedition proceeds and they get to a point where they find themselves amongst
34:36a tribe amongst who it's quite noticeable they're children of mixed race, and they also
34:42find amongst this tribal group three white women, and as they come, a cry goes up,
34:50our fathers are coming.
34:52I would say that one of the three women did stay, did survive, did assimilate with the
34:59Pondo, and that that was Lydia Logie, the youngest of the ladies of Gentry.
35:07I think also there were two children, two girls, who likewise had been eight or nine
35:13at the time of the shipwreck.
35:16Helena Dennis was one of them, who too was taken in by the local people and who in effect
35:24assimilated themselves amongst the people as well, became Africans.
35:32At a time when the country was confidently striking out into new territories, the wreck
35:37of the Grosvenor exposed the anxieties that Georgian Britain had about the indigenous
35:42peoples they sought to conquer.
35:49Only two years earlier, Captain Cook, a hero of maritime conquest and exploration, had
35:56been killed in Hawaii.
36:08And the shipwreck was also a threat nearer to home.
36:16The powerfully influential merchant classes were alarmed to hear that off the West Country
36:22coastline, ships which had been wrecked were then being plundered for goods by local gangs.
36:31This practice became known as wrecking.
36:50I've come to the north coast of Cornwall.
36:53In the 18th century, small rural communities like this village of Morwenstow had their
36:59own maritime traditions, which embraced the custom of stealing from shipwrecks.
37:07It was a different world in these isolated and rural communities, where there was a culture
37:12of living off the sea as much as there was one of living off the land.
37:17Salvaging from shipwrecks was very much a part of that, an activity that was affectionately
37:22known as harvesting the sea.
37:25In fact, locals would ask the question, what do you do if you find someone washed up on
37:30a beach apparently dead?
37:32And their answer would be, you rifle his pockets for money.
37:38The shipping magnates complained that even Cornwall's religious and moral leaders seemed
37:43to condone wrecking, and the most famous of these served here in the parish of Morwenstow.
37:52The Reverend R.S. Hawker certainly chronicled the local practice of wrecking.
37:57He recorded the activities of his flock in their harvesting of the sea.
38:04And his writings have added to the folklore about the people who became known as wreckers.
38:15So stern and pitiless is this iron-bound coast that within the memory of one man, upwards
38:21of 80 wrecks have been counted within a reach of 15 miles, with only here and there the
38:28rescue of a living man.
38:31My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hue.
38:39Hawker was a very sensitive individual, and apparently he had a history of trying to find
38:45huts or places to kind of hide away to contemplate his religion, contemplate his life.
38:51And that's what he did when he finally came to Morwenstow, he had built actually a series
38:55of huts.
38:57This is known as Hawker's Hut.
38:59It was built by the Reverend himself, originally from the remains of ships wrecked off the
39:05coast.
39:07Hawker used to come here and smoke opium while surveying these stunning views and writing
39:12poetry and prose about the wrecking culture of his parish.
39:18Hawker gives us a unique insight into the prevalence of wrecking and the experiences
39:24of those involved.
39:27We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts, his limbs had been wrenched off and
39:32his body rent.
39:34During our search for his remains, a man came up to me with something in his hand, inquiring
39:39Can you tell me, sir, what is this?
39:42Is it the part of a man?
39:44It was the mangled seaman's heart, and we restored it reverently to its place where
39:49it had once beat high with life and courage, with thrilling hope and sickening fear.
39:57It haunted him.
39:58He had written at one point that he thought that he heard the cries of a seaman, you know,
40:04with the sound of the wind.
40:08The other part of being in Morwenstowe, yeah, it's great wreck or tear to get stuff coming
40:12ashore, but it's also a horrible place to be when you're dealing with the shipwreck
40:17victims, particularly because it's very gruesome.
40:22Shipwreck victims are very rarely whole.
40:24There are always body parts coming ashore or unidentified bits of human flesh that would
40:30come ashore that they would have to collect.
40:34On a ridge of rock just left bare by the falling tide stood a man, my own servant.
40:40He had come out to see my flock of ewes and had found the awful wreck.
40:45There he stood with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water,
40:50stiff and stark.
40:51And ever and anon there came up out of the water as though stretched out with life a
40:56human hand and arm.
40:58It was the corpse of another sailor, drifting out to sea.
41:14Wreckers induced fear and paranoia in ship owners and merchants, worried that they might
41:20lose precious cargoes.
41:23With great fortunes at stake, those with shipping interests eventually flexed their political
41:28muscle.
41:29They successfully pressurised a government into passing a new law that would swiftly
41:35and ruthlessly prosecute any wrecker who dared to steal from a shipwreck.
41:42In 1753, Parliament bent to the will of the merchant elite and passed this Act with a
41:48rather wonderful title, an Act for Enforcing the Laws Against Persons Who Shall Steal or
41:54Detain Shipwrecked Goods and for the Relief of Persons Suffering Losses Thereby.
42:00It's otherwise known as the Wreckers' Act.
42:03This was an era of brutal state justice and this Act threatened anyone who had stolen
42:09so much as a piece of rope or a plank of wood from a wrecked ship with the death penalty.
42:19In 1769, a cornishman, William Pearce, was hanged in Launceston for stealing some rope
42:26from a wrecked ship.
42:28This was a very visible and public warning.
42:33The Wreckers' Act was part of a wider political move to protect the property and rights of
42:39the merchants and aristocrats who ruled Georgian Britain.
42:44A series of punitive laws were passed that allowed the state to publicly execute its
42:50citizens for a host of petty crimes, including the theft of goods worth as little as 12 pence.
42:59In the 18th century, there was an increasing idea of property being sacred.
43:04A lot of the legislation that was passed was to protect property and to bring in the death
43:10penalty for it.
43:11And there was something like 200 statutes that were actually passed during this period
43:15and crime historians called them the Bloody Code because they required death by hanging
43:20and the Wreck Act was one of those.
43:28A clause in the 1753 Act contained a highly contentious provision,
43:34provoked by allegations that cornishmen, not satisfied with stealing from shipwrecks,
43:40were employing nefarious methods to deliberately lure ships onto the rocks to be wrecked and then plundered.
43:50But what was the evidence for this?
43:54Nobody has ever been convicted of wrecking using false lights.
44:00So that particular clause has never been actually used in a court of law.
44:07The rumours of wreckers employing false lights was an indication of just how panicked the
44:12merchants were about losing ships and their valuable cargoes.
44:19Coming here to Morwenstow, I get a real sense of two worlds colliding over the shipwreck
44:25as an event.
44:27I think that the merchants' fear about wrecking had nothing to do with accusations of locals
44:32murdering sailors, but everything to do with losing goods and property.
44:38In this era of expanding global trade, the story of wreckers simply added to the fear
44:44that already surrounded shipwrecks.
44:46And as the last decades of the 18th century approached, this agonising over the fate of
44:52stricken vessels because of the financial value of the goods they carried showed no
44:58sign of easing off.
45:01But then, in 1786, the most extraordinary shipwreck story of the era forced the wealthy
45:08elite to reconsider their prejudices about isolated coasts.
45:14I've come to Worthmatravers on the Jurassic coast in Dorset.
45:18It's a picture postcard place now, but 200 years ago it was just another remote village
45:24where people scraped a living farming or working in the local quarries.
45:31But one night, the people of this place took part in the most remarkable rescue ever.
45:38Just after midnight on the 6th of January, 1786, a full-rigged ship, the Hallswell, was
45:44caught in a snowstorm that engulfed this coast.
45:47The waves were breaking on these rock ledges with such ferocity that the spray reached
45:52the tops of the cliffs.
45:57And the Hallswell was gone.
45:59With such ferocity that the spray reached the tops of the cliffs.
46:06And the Hallswell was blown onto the rocks behind me.
46:14The Hallswell was owned by the East India Company and only a week before had left Portsmouth
46:20bound for Madras.
46:22The experienced skipper, Captain Pearce, was accompanied by his two daughters who were
46:28due to be married in India.
46:31The ship's mast smashed against those cliffs and the Hallswell began to break up.
46:39As the captain and his daughters retreated to the supposed safety of his cabin, the soldiers
46:45and sailors on board attempted to get onto the rocks on the shore and the storm raged around them.
46:52While dozens of sailors tried to cling to the rocks, a few made it into a small cavern
46:58to seek what shelter they could from the storm, but listening as many of their comrades slipped
47:05and fell to their deaths.
47:12With the sailors desperately holding onto the rocks, the wreck of the Hallswell sank
47:18quickly, taking with her the captain, his daughters and all the other passengers.
47:32Incredibly, two men, the ship's cook and the quartermaster, made it to the top of these
47:37cliffs and they ran over there to Eastington Farm to raise the alarm.
47:42By lucky chance, the farmer, a Mr Garland, was also the owner of the nearby Purbeck Quarry
47:48so he and his workmen gathered ropes and ladders from the quarry and rushed to the cliffs
47:53to help the sailors up.
47:55Back at the farm, Mr Garland's wife, Betty, gave the rescued sailors hot soup and dry clothes.
48:02Eventually, 74 sailors were hauled to safety up these terrifying cliffs.
48:08The people of Worthmatrabbers had rejected the fears of the merchant elite about wreckers
48:14stealing cargo and murdering sailors.
48:17Instead, the shipwreck became a celebrated part of local folklore.
48:22Charlie Newman runs the Square and Compass pub in Worthmatrabbers.
48:26A keen local historian, his family has lived in the village for generations.
48:33What did the East India Company make of the people of Worthmatrabbers
48:37who'd helped out the shipwrecked sailors?
48:40Well, there was a reward that... I've got a couple of coins here.
48:44It was a reward for the people of Worthmatrabbers.
48:47What did the East India Company make of the people of Worthmatrabbers?
48:51Well, there was a reward that... I've got a couple of coins here.
48:55They were given to my father by one of the local quarrymen.
48:59And it was a 100 guinea reward to the local quarrymen
49:02for assisting in the rescue of the survivors from the Horswell.
49:07Also, the owner of the farm also received a tea set, I think, from the East India Company,
49:13for, you know, the rescue and looking after the survivors.
49:17What else have we got here?
49:19The boat had a lot of furniture on board,
49:22so we've got various furniture fittings, sort of drawer handles.
49:27There's a nice caster here. The leather is still surviving.
49:31This is a pewter spoon, which has just about survived, but it's very corroded.
49:37Obviously, the salt tends to attack these things.
49:40It's interesting that a lot of the sailors survived.
49:42Well, exactly. I mean, they were, you know, strong and fit, able sort of men,
49:46and the weather conditions were just so atrocious.
49:49Anybody that was of a lesser strength, you know, I think they were the ones that perished.
49:55The sinking of the Horswell, with the loss of her captain
49:59and the miraculous escape of some of her crew,
50:02was a story that gripped the imagination of George III's Britain.
50:08The king himself visited the site of the wreck,
50:12and later Turner painted the scene,
50:15and Charles Dickens would write about the Horswell in his story The Long Voyage.
50:22Here, at last, was something good to come out of a shipwreck,
50:26a stirring tale of heroic rescue and survival.
50:30It encouraged the British to feel that they could draw on unique reserves
50:35of courage and fortitude in adversity.
50:39This, it began to be said, was in stark contrast
50:43to the brutish conduct of Britain's mortal enemies, the French.
50:58What Georgians had in mind was the scene depicted
51:02in the most famous of all shipwreck paintings,
51:05by artist Theodore Jericho, which is now held at the Louvre in Paris.
51:12The Raft of the Medusa documents the real-life experiences
51:16of the survivors of a shipwreck.
51:19It captures the violence, murder and worse that followed.
51:25I thought I knew this painting,
51:27but when you see it in the flesh for the first time,
51:30you notice details that you hadn't noticed before.
51:36The canvas is so large, it's seven metres by five metres.
51:40You don't really know where to look first.
51:42It's quite bewildering, it's quite disorientating.
51:45There's a bloodied axe here,
51:48and then just over here there's what looks like a piece of flesh,
51:53just floating in the water.
51:57Now, Jericho has painted the exact moment that they've sighted
52:01the ship that's going to come and rescue them.
52:03Now, that's up here on the right-hand corner,
52:06and it means that all of the survivors have rushed
52:09to one end of the raft,
52:11and they didn't know at the beginning
52:14whether it was sailing towards them or sailing away.
52:17And this went on for two hours.
52:20You get a real sense of the instability of their situation,
52:25and also the angle of the raft is leaning backwards,
52:28which means they're at the crest of a wave,
52:30a wave's just passing beneath them.
52:32Now, the trough of the next wave's on the right-hand side,
52:35with its crest rising up to the right-hand side.
52:38So what's going to happen is that the whole raft is going to tip down
52:43and it's going to vanish from the horizon,
52:46and everyone is rushing over,
52:49apart from this one man here who's looking the other way.
52:53And so while some of these people were desperate to get saved,
52:56they were desperate to get off the raft,
52:58some of them were so far gone that they'd lost any hope,
53:02any desire to survive.
53:09The painting was inspired by the fate of the Medusa,
53:12a French frigate which sank off the coast of Senegal.
53:16The ship was evacuated,
53:18but there were not enough spaces in the rowing boats,
53:21and so 147 crew boarded a makeshift raft.
53:26This raft, with no means of navigating and few supplies,
53:31was then abandoned by the rowing boats,
53:34who quickly made for land only 30 miles away.
53:39Jericho would base this painting on the accounts of two of the survivors,
53:43and these are his initial drawings of the scenes on board the raft.
53:48We were so crowded that it was impossible to move a step,
53:52and the raft itself was weighed down a metre under the surface of the water.
53:57We had barrels of wine and drinking water,
54:00but the little food we saved was distributed and eaten entirely on the first night,
54:04a night of such horrible blackness.
54:12Abandoned by the captain and senior officers,
54:15out of this chaos erupted murderous anarchy,
54:19and surrounded by the dead and dying,
54:22the survivors resorted to breaking one of the great taboos of civilised society.
54:30Several of us fell upon the dead bodies which covered the raft
54:34and cut off pieces of flesh and consumed them.
54:37I ask you not to condemn those who are dying of hunger on that pitiless sea.
54:42TO BE CONTINUED
55:13Today, this painting is considered Jericho's masterpiece
55:17and one of the greatest works of French art.
55:20But its current status is at odds with the dismissal it first received
55:25when exhibited in France.
55:27What made the painting the legend that it is today
55:31is the sensation that it caused when, just a year later,
55:35it was exhibited in London.
55:43The huge impact made by the raft of the Medusa on the British public
55:49was down to timing.
55:51It was exhibited only a few years after the triumphal destruction
55:56of Napoleon's army at Waterloo.
55:59Its picture of disorder and despair
56:03was seen as indisputable evidence
56:06that Britain's traditional foes were morally inferior.
56:13The significance of the wreck of the Medusa and of Jericho's painting
56:17greatly increased for the British because of a British shipwreck.
56:21HMS Alceste, a Royal Naval frigate, had hit a reef off Java in February 1817.
56:27Like the Medusa, she had run aground,
56:30and, like the Medusa, a decision had been taken to build a raft.
56:34But that's where the similarities ended.
56:38After the Alceste was wrecked,
56:41the captain organised the safe passage of all the crew to a nearby island.
56:46In the face of great odds, discipline was maintained.
56:53Despite being starved and dehydrated,
56:56they even repelled attacks by Malay pirates.
57:02Captain Maxwell was praised for his calm leadership.
57:06And implicit in that praise, of course,
57:09was the contrast with the every-man-for-himself cannibalism
57:13that had engulfed the French on the Medusa.
57:27For the Georgians, the great sailing ship was an emblem of the state itself.
57:32It had been central to Britain's economic advance
57:35and it had helped to shape a sense of national identity.
57:39But as the Georgian era drew to a close
57:42and hundreds of ships continued to be wrecked every year,
57:46the question had to be asked.
57:49Just how many more lives was Britain prepared to lose
57:53out there on the world's oceans?
57:57Next time, the shipwreck in the Victorian age.
58:02How the great engineers and fervent campaigners of the 19th century joined forces
58:09to save lives,
58:12make ships safer
58:15and dream of building the unsinkable ship.
58:30Copyright © 2020 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
58:34No part of this recording may be reproduced
58:37without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.
58:56© 2020 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
58:59No part of this recording may be reproduced
59:02without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.