The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

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...

Dr Sam Willis meets with Dr Miranda Kauffman to discuss the research that led to her prizewinning book Black Tudors – The Untold Story, and in particular to her discovery of the lives of numerous Africans living in England and Scotland's port towns during the 16th and 17th centuries. She explains how they arrived in Britain, what occupations and relationships they found in the ports and how they w...

This episode finishes the first story in our new ‘Great Sea Fights’ series, exploring the fascinating story of the Battle of the River Plate, one of the most iconic battles of the Second World War. In this episode Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Eric Grove, author of The Price of Disobedience: The Battle of the River Plate Reconsidered  who offers an analysis of the battle. Why was the...

This episode continues our first story in our new 'Great Sea Fights' series, exploring the fascinating story of the battle of the River Plate, one of the most iconic battles of the Second World War. The immensely powerful and fast German pocket battleship Graf Spee was hunted by a squadron of far smaller British cruisers and found off the River Plate in South America. She never returned...

This episode, published on the anniversary of the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December 1939, launches our Great Sea Fights series. Dr Sam Willis begins with a brief overview of seapower at the start of the Second World War before introducing the battle. An account is then read, first gathered together by the Admiralty from the official dispatches of the Royal Naval squadron in the immediate af...

One of the key aspects of maritime historical research that is helping us understand our modern world is the use of ships logbooks to understand and map climate change in various regions across the world. Today Dr Sam Willis Dr Matthew Ayre, a Climate Detective (or more officially a Historical Climatologist) at the Arctic Institute of North America. Matt uses 200 year old documents surviving from...

Dr Sam Willis visits the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London to explore their new photography exhibition. Exposure: Lives at Sea was brought together during the UK’s COVID-19 lockdown. It is the first exhibition curated by Laura Boon, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Public Curator for Contemporary Maritime. The importance of seafarers has been brought into sharp focus during the Covid pa...

On the 900th anniversary of the shipwreck, Dr Sam Willis talks with Charles, Earl Spencer, about the White Ship disaster of 25 November 1120. The loss of the ship was one of the greatest disasters that England ever suffered and its repercussions changed English and European history forever. Henry I was sailing for England in triumph after years of fighting the French as the most formidable ruler i...

Ten hand-drawn maps of the Spanish Armada have surfaced in London and been brought by a private collector. An export ban has been imposed by the British Government in the hopes that £600,000 can be raised to keep these maps in a British institution. The maps are the only contemporary depiction of the battle. Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Dominic Tweddle, Director General of the National Museum...

Sam speaks to Sarah Wassberg Johnson, Director of Exhibitions and Outreach at the excellent Hudson River Maritime Museum. In the conversation we discover just how important the Hudson River is to the development of American history. Topics include ice-harvesting, the great fire of New York of 1835, the American Revolution, the appreciation of the wilderness, the launch of the environmental movemen...

Dr Sam Willis heads to the new JMW Turner exhibition at the Tate Britain: 'Turner's Modern World'. Turner is one of the best known of all British artists and one of history's greatest maritime artists. His painting The Fighting Temeraire is a national treasure and now appears on the new £20 note. Sam meets the curator of the Turner bequest, David Blayney Brown, and focuses on three of Turner's pai...