The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

This is the first episode of a two-part mini-series on the history of maritime special forces. In this episode we hear about the Second World War origins, development and early history of the SBS - the 'Special Boat Service'. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Saul David, a military historian given unprecedented access to the archives of the SBS for his book - SBS - Silent Warriors: The Aut...

The subject of navigation in the Middle Ages is fundamental to maritime history as it lays the foundation for the exploration, migration, global trade and international wars that followed. It is also a fascinating and multi-faceted topic; one which takes us out into the deep oceans where issues of wind, current, tide and depth are all influential, but also up into the sky where the sun, moon,...

The history of time and how it relates to the maritime world is one of the most significant chapters in global history. The question of time is nothing less than the question of civilisation; the question of us. Time itself has been harnessed, politicised and weaponised; clocks have been used to wield power, make money, govern and control; to exchange knowledge and even beliefs. For the maritime w...

Hitler's relationship with his navy is one of the most intriguing topics of the naval history of the Second World War. Hitler was the Commander-in-Chief of all German armed forces - including the  Kriegsmarine - and yet he was a man with no experience or understanding of seapower. The result was a strange and fractious relationship with his navy which was ill equipped, poorly manned and, more...

We continue our mini series on maritime disasters with HMS Gloucester a British warship lost in the spring of 1682 off the Norfolk coast. It’s quite a story: here is a ship with an impressive career that takes us from her end on that sandbar in Norfolk all the way to the British presence in the Caribbean during the Cromwellian Commonwealth – a key moment in global history. Her later career was int...

During the First and Second World Wars British fishing trawlers were turned into the Royal Naval Patrol Reserve to help clear the seas of mines and even take on the deadly U-Boats. They became known as 'Harry Tate’s Navy' - a nod towards the celebrity comedian known for his bungling of everyday tasks and slipshod approach to life. Taking this wry criticism on the chin the fishermen-turned naval pe...

This episode was recorded at the fabulous Dockyard Museum in Barrow-in-Furness during the filming of their magnificent collection of ship models for the Lloyds Register Foundation's project ' Maritime Innovation In Miniature '. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Barrow experienced one of the fastest and most extraordinary transformations in history when it changed from a small farm to o...

Our series on Iconic Ships continues with one of the most battle-honoured ships of Nelson's Navy: HMS Agamemnon . Today we got back to those days of the wooden walls to hear about this 64-gun Third Rate that saw service in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic War. She fought in many of the major naval battles of those conflicts and had a reputation as bei...

We continue our mini-series on maritime Africa with an episode on Songo Mnara and Kilwa, two significant maritime settlements on the Swahili Coast. In the previous episode we heard how the Swahili coast of east Africa is particularly rich in its maritime cultural heritage and trading past, where African and Arabic cultures have mixed for centuries across the Indian Ocean. In this episode we invest...

We continue our mini-series on maritime Africa with an episode on the Swahili coast – a fascinating part of east Africa particularly rich in its maritime cultural heritage and trading past. The Swahili coast is distinctive for its mixture of African and Arabic cultures and the way that the two have been bound together by maritime trade across the Indian Ocean. There is also clear Chinese influence...

In this episode Dr Sam Willis speaks with Professor Paul Kennedy about the fundamental change in the balance of naval power and the strategic landscape that occurred in the Second World War. By the end of the war, the Italian, German, Japanese and French navies had been all but eliminated; the era of the big-gunned surface vessel ended; and America had risen as an economic and military power large...

Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, re...

On 7 December 1872 the Challenger expedition set sail from Sheerness. It’s purpose was conceived just two years earlier, in 1870, by Charles Wyville Thomson Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University. Thomson had managed to persuade the Royal Society of London to ask the British Government to furnish one of Her Majesty's ships for a prolonged voyage of exploration across the oceans of th...

Freak Ships of the Nineteenth Century is the title of a pamphlet written in 1966 by J. Guthrie, then an employee of the maritime classification society Lloyds Register. It was written for private circulation amongst the staff. Guthrie realised that, as the premier classification society Lloyds Register were able to produce a very good technical description of vessels, often directly from plans, re...

Our third episode dedicated to the maritime history of Africa. We find out about indigenous African whaling; European and American exploitation of African waters; the numerous uses to which whale products were put both in Africa and abroad; the written and the archaeological evidence available for the study of whaling in Africa. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoked with Dr. Lynn Harris who has wo...

The skeleton coast of Namibia is one of the most iconic maritime locations on earth. Here the fearsome Namib desert runs right to the sea. Over the centuries the sand dunes have grown and the shoreline has moved further away as the desert reclaims the sea. The coastline itself is formidably dangerous. Plagued by shallow sandbars, fog and treacherous currents, thousands of ships are known to have w...

Preussen was a marvel of a ship. A steel-hulled, five-masted, ship-rigged sailing ship built in 1902 and named after the German kingdom of Prussia. Until the launch of Royal Clipper in 2000, a sail cruise liner, Preussen was the only five-masted full-rigged ship ever built and carried six square sails on each mast. Not only did she have a fascinating career at a time when the sun was setting on th...

This begins a handful of episodes that will explore the maritime history of Africa. We begin with the fascinating story of African canoemen.   African indigenous seafaring canoemen operated as middlemen between European traders and the coastal estuaries, rivers and land of West Africa. The topography of the coast often necessitated their involvement in trade because it was variably...

This is Part 3 of a three-part special audio tour of HMS Victory, Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and a First Rate ship of the line which, by 1805, had already acquired a significant history. This, the final episode, looks at everything open to the elements – the weather deck, quarter deck, poop deck and forecastle and includes a look through HMS Victory's remarkable v...

This is Part 2 of a three-part special audio tour of HMS Victory, Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and a First Rate ship of the line which, by 1805, had already acquired a significant history. This, the second episode, looks at the gun decks where the sailors lived and fought Victory’s 104 guns; the first episode looked at the lowest two decks, the hold and the orlop de...

This is Part 1 of a three-part special audio tour of HMS Victory, Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and a First Rate ship of the line which, by 1805, had already acquired a significant history. This, the first episode, looks at the lowest two decks, the hold and the orlop deck, both below waterline; the second episode will look at the gun decks where the sailors lived an...

Fishwives were a remarkable group of women who were involved with the British fishing trade and made a name or themselves for being particularly loud and outspoken, and became a byword for hardiness and industry. Dr Sam Willis spoke to the historian and journalist Rose George who is currently working on a big research project looking at fishing communities around the world and has become fascinate...

The SS Waratah was a passenger and cargo steamship built in 1908 for the Blue Anchor Line, a British shipping company operating between the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia between 1870 and 1910. On only her second voyage, on a leg of the journey from Durban to Cape Town in the summer of 1909, this enormous ship of 9,339 tons, with the capacity to carry over 1000 passengers, simply vanis...

On 26 September 480 BC one of the most historically significant naval battles in history was fought between an alliance of Greek city states and the mighty Persian empire: the battle of Salamis. Prior to the battle the second Persian invasion of Greece had seen convincing wins for the Persians at the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium. The Greek victory at Salamis became a turning point as the...

On 20 September 1519 the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan left Spain and headed westwards on a voyage that would subsequently echo through the centuries as the first circumnavigation of the earth. The riches of Asia were first tasted by the Portuguese in the late 1490s but the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas reserved for Portugal the eastern-bound maritime routes to Asia. It thus became comm...