The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

Part two of our special episode looking at the remarkable life of Hannah Davison, wife of Captain Davison of the steel barque Alice A. Leigh/Rewa and mother to six children. The Davison family were something of a maritime Von Trapp family, and wherever they arrived in port they appeared in the local newspapers. Hannah carefully kept any newspaper cuttings that mentioned her family and her exploits...

Join us for the fantastic story of Hannah Davison who gave birth to six children on board the barque Alice A. Leigh (renamed Rewa in 1921), a steel barque which sailed the world between 1889-1930. The largest vessel ever built at Whitehaven in Cumbria, this four masted barque plied the world's sailing routes with a variety of cargo before joining a New Zealand wool merchant's fleet in 1921. Her st...

What did people wear in naval battles and why? The adoption, style and development of naval uniform is a hugely significant subject - one which helps us understand not only the development of the navy as a fighting body but also the forging of national identities, gendered identities and notions of social hierarchy. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Amy Miller, Curator of Decorative Art...

On 29 May 1914, the magnificent passenger liner Empress of Ireland sank in the St Lawrence River with the loss of over a thousand people. A full two years after the Titanic disaster, this was a vessel with adequate lifeboats and watertight compartments, and yet she foundered in just fourteen minutes after a collision with a Norwegian collier - ss Storstad - which punched an enormous hole into her...

Our Great Sea Fights series continues on the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Solebay, fought between the Dutch and the allied English and French off the eat coast of England, and one of the hardest-fought battles of the Age of Sail. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr David Davies , historian and author of the Journals of Matthew Quinton, a series of historical novels set in the sevent...

On 24 May 1945 the Supreme Commander of the German Navy, Admiral Karl Dönitz recorded the following words in his War Diary: ‘Wolf Pack operations against convoys in the North Atlantic, the main theatre of operations and at the same time the theatre in which air cover was strongest, were no longer possible. They could only be resumed if we succeeded in radically increasing the fighting power of the...

In this episode we continue looking at folklore, myths and legends relating to the sea by investigating the story of the Feejee Mermaid, an extraordinary tale of a 'real' mermaid that was discovered in Japan in 1822, purchased by a collector and displayed in London to the grotesque fascination of thousands of people. Dr Sam Willis speaks with Béatrice Laurent, Professor of Victorian Studies at the...

Folklore, myths and legends relating to the sea have existed for as long as humans have been travelling by sea. The alien nature of the marine environment, the almost inconceivable scale of the oceans, the power of the sea, and the extraordinary richness in the ocean’s biodiversity has led to the creation and development of the most fabulous legends. And one of the most important of those legends...

Part 4 of our special min-series on the Lusitania disaster. Dr Sam Willis meets Lusitania historian Peter Kelly and together they explore some of their favourite items in the Lusitania exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. They discuss two different ships linked with the Lusitania story - the Falaba , a passenger ship of Liverpool's Elder Dempster line sunk by a German U-Boat off the south...

Part 3 of our mini-series on the Lusitania tragedy when, in May 1915 the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed 16 miles off the coast of Ireland, leading the deaths of over 1100 men, women and children. This episode looks at the general history of the ship, the reasons behind her construction, and the reasons behind her destruction. The episode puts the Lusitania sinking in the context of...

This is the second episode in our Lusitania Disaster Special in which we explore the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boat in May 1915, which ended in the death of over 1900 people. In this episode we hear three fascinating eyewitness accounts: The 18 year-old lookout Leslie Morton describes how he lost his brother when the torpedo struck, scrambled for his life and ended up trawling the mor...

This episode forms part of our mini series on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 - that terrible event when the enormous Cunard passenger liner was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-Boat killing 1193 people. To find out more Dr Sam Willis speaks with Anthony Richards from London's Imperial War Museum. Anthony is an expert on eyewitness testimony and on the sinking of the Lusitania. The...

The second of a new mini-series on ship models. Dr Sam Willis explores the extraordinary model of the SS Great Eastern held in the collections of the National Maritime Museum in London. The Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was one of the most remarkable ships ever built. She was the largest ship ever built – by an enormous margin. measuring 692 feet(211m) and 17,274 tons gross s...

We explore the astonishing intertwined tales of both Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk, two men marooned on a desert island, one in fiction, one in real life. Robinson Crusoe was a novel published in 1719 by Daniel Defoe – that supposedly came from the pen of Crusoe himself – and told the story of how he was marooned and spent 28 years on a deserted island in the Caribbean. The book was e...

Carpathia is the vessel that earned her historical fame by coming to the rescue of the stricken Titanic in April 1912. She is often glossed over in the history books but Carpathia herself was a remarkable ship with a fascinating history, and one that also ends in disaster with the vessel at the bottom of the Atlantic. Carpathia was a Cunard Line transatlantic passenger ship, launched in 1908. Her...

In April 1912, the Titanic - the largest vessel in the world, and the largest man-made moving object that had by then been created - struck an iceberg, split in half and sank in the middle of the Atlantic, taking with her around 1500 souls. Her early demise meant that one of her most important pieces of safety equipment - her anchors - were never used as intended. In this fascinating episode Dr Sa...

In the Arctic there is a sea route which passes from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It passes up the west coast of Greenland into baffin bay before taking a sharp left turn through a maze of islands that lie off the northern coast of Canada. Once through these islands the route passes to the north of Alaska and then through the narrow straits between Russia and Alaska into the Bering Sea and from th...

Those of you who have spent any time at sea will know how the unique conditions of being afloat can fundamentally change the way that you think and how you experience the world. It will come as no surprise that there have been occasions in history when humans have been pushed to their absolute limits and their minds have cracked; when a firm grasp on reality has catastrophically failed in a sudden...

The first of a new mini-series on ship models. Dr Sam Willis explores the extraordinary model of HMS Royal George held in the collections of the National Maritime Museum in London. The Royal George is widely considered to be one of the finest eighteenth-century ship models ever made. It was made for the King in the 1770s, as a means of encouraging George III to take an interest in the Royal Navy a...

The San Juan was a basque whaling ship that sank in Labrador in 1565, and was rediscovered in 1978. In the autumn of 1565 several Basque whaling ships were anchored in a remote bay of Labrador, opposite the island of Newfoundland. It was the end of the whaling season, and hundreds of sailors were hurrying up to complete their ships’ cargo of oil barrels. Some were flensing the blubber off the...

The battle of the Egadi Islands - or the Aegates - is one of the most significant naval battles of the ancient world. On 10 March 241 BC the mighty naval powers of Rome and Carthage met off the coast of Sicily. The Carthaginian fleet was ambushed by the Romans in a well-planned and brilliantly executed trap leading to a decisive Roman victory. This was the battle that ended the mighty First Punic...

One of the most fascinating periods in all of maritime history is the Viking Age. From around 700 CE and for the next 700 years, Vikings spread out from Scandinavia, reshaped Europe and influenced lands far beyond. It's a story of ingenious maritime engineering, astonishing navigation, fierce battles, culture clashes, trade, language and the rise and fall of a complex society. To find out more Dr...

In this episode Dr Sam Willis and the multi winning historian William Dalrymple discuss the extraordinary story of the East India Company's dominance of India. It is still too easily assumed that the British conquered India through imperial conquest but the reality is even more shocking and relevant to the present day - because India was subdued not by a government, but by a private enterprise wit...

In one of the most remarkable maritime history stories of recent years, a team of scientists and explorers are getting closer than ever before to finding the Endurance, the ship that Ernest Shackleton took on his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. An expedition is currently in the Weddell Sea, less than two miles from the last known position of the Endurance and have released an underwater...

The naval battle of Guadalcanal was one of the most intense and dramatic naval battles of the war, and with with far-reaching strategic consequences. It is the winter of 1942, a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour which brought America into the war. Guadalcanal is the largest of the Solomons Islands, found to the north west of Australia.   In the months after the attack on Pearl H...