Heroes and Legends Documentary Channel Podcast

Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy is one of the forgotten heroes of the mid eighteenth century. An aristocrat of the old school, he became an outstanding naval officer, rapidly rising through the ranks. He became most famous, as the taciturn and melancholy captain of the Beagle - taking the young and inexperienced Charles Darwin, as a mere companion, on the journey that would inspire his evolutionary th...

Albert Facey, born at the desperate tail end of the Australian gold rush, suffered incredible hardship, poverty and even child slavery, only to escape and survive like so many other Huckleberry Finns of his time, purely by his wits and determination, in a harsh, unforgiving land. Illiterate, he taught himself to read and write, and was soon swept up in the fervour of the Great War. Ending up in th...

Captain James Cook, a British Navigator, Cartographer and explorer was one of the pre-eminent sailors and innovators of his age. Now a controversial figure for indigenous cultures who see him as the instigator and symbol of European colonial expansion and genocide; the real James Cook was actually quite a different man to what has been imagined. Coming from abject poverty in rural Yorkshire Englan...

This episode explores the geopolitical situation of the late medieval period wherein an enabled papacy, thanks to its projection of spiritual authority onto temporal powers, became increasingly political and corrupt. With the advent of climate change that caused the little ice age in the early 1300's, there followed the great famine of 1315 that killed a quarter of Europe's population, a...

May 2021 marks the bicentenary of the death of French Emperor and ethnic Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte. A military and political genius and champion of the French Revolution, he has been much maligned by history as a dictator, and precursor for Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and other modern despots by victorious British, Bourbon and other European monarchies.  Napoleon's achievements both on and o...

La guerra de la independencia : Arriving in Buenos Aires, capital of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata; San Martin and his companions were faced with a colonial government in disarray. Not quite revolutionary, and not quite loyalist; attempting to form a new United Provinces; factional infighting so preoccupied them that they proved ineffective not only in subjugating outlying provinces, but bare...

Jose de San Martin , champion of the " guerra de la independencia" , was an Argentine General, provincial governor and innovative commander who played a key role in the liberation of the viceroyalties and colonies of Latin America from the Spanish Crown in their post-Napoleonic struggle for independence. His youth was spent training as a professional soldier and his early career saw him...

Herakles (Hercules) was a demigod (half human, half god) within the mythological pantheon of ancient Greece (and later, Rome) and illegitimate son of Zeus. Off to a bad start, he was the target of assassination attempts by Zeus's wife Hera, who was appalled at her husband's insatiable lusting after mortal women. But Heracles' sheer strength and naïve determination saw him evade thes...

The siege of Malta, defended by the knights of St John, otherwise known as the Knights Hospitaller, or Knights of Malta, is one of the great military actions in history. They were a religious military order established prior to the crusades, in order to assist pilgrims on their journey to Christian holy sites across the levant. As the crusades began in earnest, they soon transformed into a militar...