The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

On this day in 1940, the British Expeditionary Force and other Allied troops were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, to save them from the rapidly approaching German forces who had just launched their lightning invasion of northern Europe. It was one of the most challenging and significant amphibious operations and evacuations in history. The planners of Operation Dynamo first estimated that 4...

A very special episode in our new Iconic Ships series, published on the anniversary of the loss of HMS Hood in 1941. HMS Hood is without doubt one of the Royal Navy’s most famous ships. A battle-cruiser, laid down in 1916 and launched in 1918, she was the largest battle cruiser ever built and the largest warship of any type in the world for twenty years. She enjoyed a correspondingly hig...

This week Dr Sam Willis speaks with Timothy Heck, the Deputy Directing Editor at the Modern War Institute at the United States Military Academy in West Point. They discuss the changing nature of amphibious operations in history and its relevance to the present day. What can the US Marine Corps today learn from amphibious operations in the past? Like DDay in WW2 or Gallipoli in WW1? How are other l...

This week Dr Sam Willis explores the heart-warming story of maritime pets by speaking with Pat Sullivan from the excellent Museum of Maritime Pets . There is a centuries-old tradition of animals living on or near water, and collaborating with man (and woman) in both peace and war. Pat has spent a great deal of time documenting these animals' contributions and promoting the safe and humane treatmen...

This episode has been inspired by the tragedy of the Nanggala, a submarine of the Indonesian navy that disappeared earlier this month with 53 crew members on board and only 72 hours of oxygen to keep them alive. After 5 days of searching Nangala was found at a depth of more than 800 meters, split into three sections. This has led to a great deal of discussion in the press about submarine design. I...

Estuaries and creeks around the coast of England are littered with the remains of watercraft which have been deliberately abandoned when they are no longer deemed useful. The extent of this is astonishing. In 2013 a survey identified at least 199 assemblages of hulked vessels all around the English coastline and this is by no means the complete record.  In recent years many have been ide...

Regular listeners will know that over the past few months we have been reading extracts from the logbook of the whaler Swan of Hull at the start of each episode (with the exception of the Iconic Ships and Great Sea Fights special series). The Swan became trapped in the ice off the west coast of Greenland in the autumn of 1836. These readings come from a transcription of the logbook held in the arc...

Dr Sam Willis presents episode 2 of our new Iconic Ships series, looking today at the history of the Mayflower . This new Iconic Ships series has been conceived as an opportunity for curators of famous historic vessels to make a case for their surviving vessel and also for historians to make a case for a historic vessel that no longer survives. In this episode we hear from Kathryn Gray from the Un...

This is the first of a new sub-series of podcast episodes: ‘Iconic Ships’. The series has been conceived as an opportunity for curators of famous historic vessels to make a case as to why their ship is iconic, but it is also open to historians to make a case for a historic vessel that no longer survives. Once we have sufficient entries we will open this up to the public and run a poll. We start wi...

Inspired by the recent BBC series 'The Terror', a chilling tale based on one of polar exploration’s deepest mysteries, Dr Sam Willis explores the history HMS Terror . The TV series is set on the Terror’s last and fateful voyage when, in 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin and alongside another ship, HMS E rebus , Terror sailed into the ice off the west coast of Greenland in search of the...

Dr Sam Willis speaks with historian Dr Paul Brown about the extraordinary events surrounding the Falklands War in 1982, a pivotal event in British history. When Argentinian forces invaded the Falklands in April 1982 the British Government responded by sending a task force to the south Atlantic to seize back the islands. In the subsequent conflict cruise missiles, nuclear submarines and vertical/sh...

This week Dr Sam Willis talks with bestselling writer and award winning broadcaster Charlie Connelly about the fascinating history of the English Channel. Is it a bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange, a challenge to be conquered? It is all those and so much more: The Channel is many different things to many different people, and in our new age of Brexit it remains as important as...

Dr Sam Willis explores the fascinating problems posed by Britain's complex imperial history by thinking in particular about Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century British explorer and navigator famous for his three voyages to Australia and the Pacific (1768-1779). Sam talks with with Kevin Sumption – the Director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum. They range widely over issues...

Dr Sam Willis speaks with Graham Mackenzie, chief engineer of SS Shieldhall , one of the most fascinating ships in the UK's historic fleet. The Shieldhall is unique as a time capsule providing a working example of steamship machinery that operated ships in the oceans of the world from the 1870s for a century. In particular her triple-expansion steam engines, scotch boilers and steam-assisted steer...

Dr Sam Willis speaks with John Huth, the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard who works mainly in the field of experimental particle physics. He is in fact a member of the international team that discovered the Higgs Boson particle. He has also, however, written a rather wonderful book on navigation – The Lost Art of Finding Our Way – in which he contends that even the most confused of...

In response to the new global Social Media phenomenon of sea shanties sparked by the Scottish postman Nathan Evans' rendition of The Wellerman, Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Gerry Smyth, author of a new book published by the British Library: 'Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas'. They discuss how shanties were collected and annotated, how they were inspired by changing comme...

This week we tackle the important history of race relations in America – through the lense of riverboat excursions for the Chinese community of New York in the 19th century. Dr Sam Willis speaks with Dr Marika Plater, who studies what low-income New Yorkers did for fun, outdoors, during the nineteenth century. Her work has shown how the most vulnerable New Yorkers used their limited free time to e...

This third episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers a Spanish perspective on this most extraordinary battle. We hear from Dr. Agustín Guimerá and Dr. Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro, both from the Spanish National Research Centre in Madrid. Dr Guimerá offers an analysis of the battle from the Spanish perspective and Dr Ortega-del-Cerro reads out an extract from the lo...

This second episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers an analysis of the battle from two of the world's leading Nelson scholars: John Sugden and Marianne Czisnik. Dr Sam Willis speaks to them both and explores the realities of battle at sea in the age of sail. This battle is famous because of the extraordinary event that occurred when Horatio Nelson boarded one Spanish...

This episode published on the anniversary of the Battle of St Vincent in 1797 launches the second of our Great Sea Fights series. Dr Sam Willis explores the events of Valentines Day 1797 when Admiral John Jervis daringly cut through a much larger Spanish fleet escorting a mercury convoy home from South America. This was the second major action of the Revolutionary War against France and the first...

Dr Sam Willis speaks with Charlotte Ward to explore the remarkable history of Lloyd's Register, perhaps the most influential book for the maritime world ever to be published. It all begins in a coffee house run by Edward Lloyd, and a book, called the Register of Ships, first published in 1764, to give underwriters and merchants an idea of the condition of the vessels they insured and chartere...

In this special episode Dr Sam Willis explores the life of William Beatty, the surgeon on HMS Victory who tended Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Beatty's life prior to Trafalgar is examined and his work put into context with primary sources that illustrate the life and work of naval surgeons in the age of sail, in their own words. This episode is designed to provide historic context for our pre...

An early nineteenth century medicine chest with a brass plaque engraved ‘William Beatty Warranted Surgeon RN 1803’ has come into the possession of a Hampshire antiques dealer from a private collector near Bristol. Members of the Royal Navy Medical Service are aiming to crowdfund to buy it to retain a part of the RNMS history and to donate it to the Haslar Heritage Group   (http://ww...

Dr Sam Willis discusses the infamous Hermione mutiny of 1797 with the naval historian Angus Konstam. In 1797 the British frigate HMS Hermione was serving on the Jamaica Station during the French Revolutionary war. Under the sadistic and mercurial Captain Hugh Pigot the ship became a floating hell as he flogged his men and ruled his ship through terror. When the men finally mutinied it became the b...

Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto, one of the world's leading authorities on global history. A British historian with Spanish roots who writes on world history, Fernández-Armesto offers a unique and comparative perspective on the importance of the sea in national histories. They discuss the challenges and rewards of studying maritime history from an international perspecti...