The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

The British submarine HMS Poseidon sank off the Chinese coast during normal exercises in 1931 having struck a freighter. Just over half of her crew made it out of the hatches as she sank. Twenty-six remained trapped. Eight of those attempted to surface using an early form of diving equipment specifically designed for submarine escapes. Five of those survived and became national heroes. And then, a...

Of the 2,240 passengers and crew on board RMS Titanic on her fateful last journey, eight were Chinese, all travelling Third Class. Six of those eight survived, an exceptionally high survival rate for any given nationality. Remarkably, four escaped on the same lifeboat as the Titanic’ s owner J. Bruce Ismay, while another was the last person rescued alive from the water. Those six men were forgotte...

In the stores of the London Science Museum is a highly significant collection of ship models of Chinese junks. They were commissioned by Sir Frederick Maze who worked as the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1929-1943. Maze was a true Sinohpile and was particularly fascinated by Chinese maritime history. He lived in China at a time of rapid modernis...

This episode continues our mini series on maritime China with an episode on Chinese shipwrecks found in Southeast Asia and what they tell us about the development of Chinese shipping and trade from the ninth century onwards. The wrecks include the ninth century Belitung wreck, twelfth century Flying Fish, thirteenth century Java Sea, fifteenth century Bakau wreck, and from the seventeenth century...

A Ming Dynasty court eunuch, a diplomat, an explorer, a mariner, a Muslim…Zeng He lived from the 1370s to around 1433 and achieved what many have since considered to be impossible. Between 1405 and 1433 Zeng He commanded seven expeditionary voyages. He explored the East China Sea, South China Sea, up through the Straits of Malacca to the Bay of Bengal, around India and Sri Lanka to the Arabia...

The story of HMS Captain is one of the most shocking in naval history. Laid down in 1867 and, unusually, partly funded by the public, she was one of the most innovative warships ever constructed. She had a very low freeboard and two enormous rotating armoured gun turrets situated very close to the waterline in between the upper and lower decks. Turret ships were not a new invention but, hitherto,...

The Uluburun ship sank somewhere around 3,400 years ago near what is now Kas in Turkey and was discovered in 1982. The subsequent excavation was carried out at a time when underwater excavation was a new discipline and it had a profound change on the way both that we investigate underwater heritage and understand the ancient world. It still remains one of the oldest shipwrecks ever discovered and...

An episode that revels in the extraordinary mix of adventure, horror, myth and fact that makes maritime history the BEST type of history! – We’re finding out about the history of castaways: of people set adrift on open boats, marooned by accident or even on purpose on isolated islands. This is the history of being abandoned; of being adrift; of being alone. Many never came back and are lost to his...

Indigenous perspectives are a crucial and immensely valuable part of the broad narrative of Australian maritime history. Aboriginal people witnessed the arrival of Macassan, Dutch, French, English and American vessels as these people explored, sought out trepang and harvested whales. Some of their vessels were wrecked and their survivors arrived as ‘strangers on the shore’, interacting in a variet...

In 1861 the engineering maritime marvel ss Great Britain was chosen to take the first ever English cricket team to Australia. The tour was the brainchild of Melbourne-based businessmen, the caterers and wine merchants Felix William Spiers and Christopher Pond who had failed to persuade Charles Dickens to conduct a lecture tour of Australia. With cricket’s popularity growing in Australia they invit...

The pearling industry was one of northern Australia’s major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The historic vessel Penguin was built in 1907 for for a pearling company based on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. She is one of the few surviving pearling luggers to retain much of its original construction and layout, and the only Queensland-built lugger in a...

Our mini-series on Maritime Asutralia continues with an episode dedicated to Brisbane's fabulous dry dock. The dock now sits in the grounds of the Queensland Maritime Museum on a bend on the south side of the Brisbane River and contains the magnificent historical vessel HMAS  Diamantina , a river class frigate built in the 1940s, and the Carpentaria , a lightship built in 1917 which provided...

Our mini-series on the maritime history of Australia continues with a tour of the Queensland Maritime Museum in Brisbane. Dr Sam Willis explores the museum with volunteers and local historical experts Kasper Kuiper and Keith Boulton. We explore the museum's extraordinary collection of ship models including the Orion (1934) , Otranto (1925 ), Orcades (1947) all of the Orient Steam Navigation Compan...

The pursuit of Germany's most famous battleship is one of the most dramatic stories of the Second World War and one of the best tit-for-tat / an eye for an eye stories in history. It began with Bismarck sinking HMS Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, in May 1941 and ended three days later with Bismarck being hunted by sea and air by a huge British squadron until she was trapped and destroyed. To find o...

  The passing of the Queen in September has encouraged historians to shine a light on the era of her reign - the 70 years between 1952 and 2022 - an extraordinary period in which the world fundamentally changed several times over. One particularly revealing way to look at this period is through the experiences of the Royal Navy.   It’s quite a story. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign the Roya...

This episode explores the wonderful Essex coastline – for those of you not familiar with the geography of England, this is the beautiful area a little to the north and east of London. We find out about boats built in Essex and the history of the boatbuilding infrastructure that created them, and in particular about 130 surviving vessels all built in Essex before 1965 that have somehow survive...

The historic ship Edwin Fox has a remarkable history. Built in Calcutta in 1853, she is the only surviving ship that transported convicts to Australia; one of the world's oldest surviving merchant ships; she served as a troop ship in the Crimean War; carried indentured servants to the Caribbean from China and immigrants to New Zealand. She is now preserved in Picton, New Zealand. To find...

With frequent headlines in the news highlighting the plight of refugees suffering shipwreck in the Mediterranean, death at sea is an important contemporary issue. This episode explores the historical context of death sea. The age of sail was a period of expedition and conflict where seafarers were increasingly important to the fortunes of the nation. Their work at sea was complicated with many uni...

This episode looks at one of the greatest of all maritime mysteries – the extraordinary tale of the Mary Celeste . On 4 December 1872, in the middle of the Atlantic near the Azores, the brigantine  Dei Gratia  chanced upon another brigantine. She was under sail but entirely silent, and it soon becomes clear that she was entirely deserted. She was called  Mary Celeste . Ever since -...

We continue our mini-series on the maritime history of Africa with an exploration of the extraordinarily colourful history of Mozambique Island - a UNESCO World Heritage site complete with fortified city and historical links that take us back to the era of the Portuguese exploration of Africa in the fifteenth century. Vasco da Gama was the first European to arrive here in 1498 and returned in 1502...

The fourth episode on our mini-series on the maritime history of Australia takes us to Perth and the workshop of Gerry Westenberg. Gerry has been hand-crafting scale model ships for well over 50 years and has built more than 130 in that time. He started this lifelong job by trying to modify a 1/600 scale Airfix kit of HMS Ajax to be HMAS Perth... with mixed success. Over time he has improved...

This is the third episode in our mini series on the maritime history of Australia. In episode one we learned about the arrival of the Dutch in Australia; in episode twp we learned about the Dutch ship Duyfken, the first European ship to land men on the Australian mainland; and today we’re moving on in time to hear about William Dampier and his ship HMS Roebuck . Dampier is an extraordinary charact...

In this the second episode in our mini-series exploring the maritime history of Australia we hear all about the Duyfken - the small dutch ship which, in 1606, is credited as being the first vessel on board of which a European crew first sighted the Australian mainland. To find out more about this ship and this crucial moment in time in global history, and also about the replica of the Duyfken that...

This is the first episode of a new mini-series on the maritime history of Australia. We begin in the port of Fremantle, Western Australia, at the Western Australian Shipwrecks Museum to learn about the long and fascinating history of the Dutch in Australia. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Elly Spillekom, who worked as the coordinator of the Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation, is a volunteer...

This is the second episode of a two-part mini-series on the history of maritime special forces. In this episode we explore the history of combat divers - an elite within an elite. Combat divers must pass selection twice – firstly into their chosen elite military unit before passing a specialist combat diving qualification. Units are extremely small; they use specialist kit and vehicles; their...