- 8 months ago
Documentary, BBC Shipwrecks Britain's Sunken History S01E02
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00If you had to choose just one image that explained how deep and visceral the fear of shipwreck was for our ancestors,
00:26then it would have to be this giant canvas.
00:30Because it explains that the fear of shipwreck was not just the fear of the sea, the fear of drowning.
00:38It was the terror of the forces of brutality that would be unleashed when the ordered world of a ship was turned on its head by disaster.
00:51This painting by Jericho captures the chaos, murder and cannibalism that followed a real shipwreck.
00:59It came to encapsulate all the anxieties that had built up in Georgian Britain about wreckings at sea.
01:07In the 18th century, maritime trade was central to Britain's economic advance and helped shape a sense of national identity.
01:19Out on the high seas, a ship flying the British flag was a microcosm of the Georgian state itself.
01:27Ordered, hierarchical and by modern standards cruel, everyone on board was drilled to know their place.
01:35But this was a world that could be turned on its head in an instant if shipwreck struck.
01:41Unleashing not just terror, but the anarchy of bloody mutiny, the violence of slave rebellion and the fear of gangs of murderous scavengers.
01:59The shipwreck jeopardised the vast fortunes accumulated by the merchant class.
02:06And its high drama became deeply rooted in our culture.
02:10Creating heroes and villains who inspired a powerful art and literature all of its own.
02:18This is the story of how the shipwreck threatens not only life at sea, but the Georgian state itself.
02:41In the 18th century, the 18th century began would show just how vital the great ocean-going ship was to Britain's ambitions for wealth and conquest.
02:57In October 1707, a British naval fleet was returning from fighting the Spanish at the Siege of Toulon.
03:04They reached home waters off the Silly Islands after a perfectly routine voyage.
03:11What happened next changed the history of navigation and sent shockwaves through British society.
03:2221 ships, led by the highly regarded Admiral Sir Clownsley Shovel, were plotting a course for Portsmouth,
03:29when, in the dead of night, they unexpectedly hit the rocky waters that surround the Isles of Silly.
03:44Although only 28 miles off the British coast, the Silly Isles were inaccurately charted and notoriously treacherous.
03:52I'm getting a boat out to trace the route followed by Admiral Shovel's fleet.
03:59On the 22nd of October 1707, Admiral Shovel thought he was safely out to sea to the south-west of the Isles of Silly.
04:10In fact, he was here, thick amongst the rocks at the mouth of the Broad Sound Passage.
04:15It's like being in a sailor's nightmare. There are jagged rocks, tides swirl around them.
04:26In the total darkness of night, the fleet mistakenly believed they were safely out to sea in the English Channel,
04:34and they would have been oblivious to the perils of these rocks.
04:37On the right flank of the fleet, Admiral Shovel's flagship, HMS Association, was the first to get into trouble,
04:44and she found it here, on the Gillstone Ledges.
04:53She fired two guns as a warning, but it was too late,
04:56and two other ships, the Romney and the Eagle, founded over there, on the rocks in the distance.
05:02In a period thought to be no more than 20 minutes, these three ships went under, taking with them over a thousand men.
05:19A fourth ship, the Firebrand, also struck these ledges,
05:23but her captain, Francis Piercy, guided her to the island of St Agnes, just over those rocks,
05:29when she sank with all but 12 of her crew.
05:36Had Admiral Shovel's convoy been just a few miles south, they would have missed these rocks entirely.
05:45Almost 1,500 men died that night, just in this small stretch of water.
05:50One of the reasons that the death toll was so high is that the rest of the fleet just carried on sailing,
05:57oblivious to the disaster that was unfolding on these rocks.
06:02It has an eerie feel to it here.
06:05This is a mass maritime graveyard.
06:07What did for Shovel and his captains was their inability to accurately calculate longitude,
06:20their east-west position at sea.
06:22The disaster highlighted a problem facing all British ships at the time.
06:27It was this potentially lethal challenge to lucrative global trading which terrified Britain,
06:36as much as the loss of over a thousand sailors.
06:41The following morning, the islanders woke up to a grotesque scene.
06:45All that remained of the ships was flotsam and jetsam floating on the waves.
06:48But literally hundreds of bodies, battered and bruised by the sea,
06:53were washed up on the three main islands, Tresco, St Agnes and here on St Mary's.
07:03What was one of the largest maritime losses in British history,
07:07quickly became part of the folklore of these islands.
07:12This is Port Helic Beach on St Mary's.
07:15And it was here that Admiral Shovel's body was found.
07:19But a colourful local legend tells a different story.
07:23According to that version of events,
07:25Shovel actually survived the wreck of the association
07:28and made it here together with two of his stepsons and his favourite dog, a greyhound.
07:34But once he got here, he was murdered by a local woman
07:38who cut off his finger to steal his precious emerald ring.
07:45The Isles of Scilly Disaster exposed not only Britain's rudimentary grasp of maritime navigation,
07:54but also just how disposable sailors' lives were on the great sailing ships.
08:00Even in death, the rigid class divisions of 18th century society were enforced.
08:05The Navy did not recover the bodies of the hundreds of drowned sailors,
08:11but at great cost, they retrieved Admiral Shovel's remains from Port Helic Beach.
08:17An aristocrat and a member of the ruling class,
08:22Admiral Shovel was given a lavish burial ceremony in Westminster Abbey
08:25and they've even erected a monument to him here on Port Helic Beach.
08:31But hundreds of other sailors died alongside him
08:34and their bodies were also washed ashore here.
08:38Members of the Georgian underclass, those men were simply thrown into mass graves.
08:43There's no monument to them.
08:44A brutal logic was at work. Britain's elite was prepared to sacrifice the lives of ordinary sailors,
08:57if that's what it took to secure new international trade routes.
09:02Yet, the loss of four ships here showed how this global expansion could be threatened.
09:07When news of the disaster finally reached the Admiralty in London,
09:12there was mourning for the loss of their favourite Admiral,
09:15but there was also panic.
09:16This disaster threatened their ambitions for an empire based on maritime supremacy.
09:22And until they solved the problems of longitude, those ambitions lay in ruins.
09:29The response was swift.
09:32The country's merchants and seamen presented a petition to Parliament demanding a solution.
09:37And in 1714, the Longitude Act was passed as a direct result of the tragedy on the Isles of Scilly.
09:45It offered a monetary prize to whoever could solve the mystery of longitude.
09:52And the answer came in the form of the marine chronometer.
09:58This is a marine chronometer, invented by an Englishman, John Harrison.
10:03A chronometer is essentially a clock that is not disturbed by the motion of the sea.
10:09By setting its time to that of Greenwich in London,
10:12a sailor can calculate his east-west position anywhere in the world.
10:16It revolutionised maritime navigation,
10:19and gave Britain the ability to safely expand its empire overseas.
10:23Armed with this confidence, Britain would start to aggressively expand its empire.
10:33And at the forefront of this endeavour was the Great Sailing Ship,
10:40which became central to British identity in the Georgian period.
10:43The Georgian world is built on trade, global trade, and the ships are the great vehicles that go out and gather that trade.
10:52This is a period where actually ships aren't just sort of emblems of the nation.
10:57They really are, if you like, the engines of Georgian wealth, of Georgian power, of Georgian empire.
11:01Britain's wealth and ambition relied on its powerful naval fleet.
11:13And these ships, like the famous HMS Victory, were a microcosm of Georgian society.
11:19The physical divisions on board, replicating its highly ordered and hierarchical structure.
11:34Imagine being at sea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away from Britain.
11:39A long way from home shores, yes.
11:42But if you go below these decks, you get a real sense that you were never far from the Georgian state,
11:46where every man knew his duty, and where every man knew his place.
11:55This is the admiral's cabin.
11:57It could be in the grandest of Georgian mansions.
12:00Just look at the fixtures and fittings.
12:02Candlesticks, curtain tassels, and these magnificent windows.
12:11And this is the captain's cabin.
12:13Slightly less regal, but still impressive.
12:19So if the admiral and captain went to sea living the life of lords of the manor,
12:24where did the sailors live?
12:30Below the grand surroundings of the admiral and captain,
12:34these gun decks were the quarters for the sailors and marines.
12:37This is incredible.
12:38At least 250 sailors and marines would have lived, eaten and fought on a deck like this.
12:47And their only access to fresh air and light, if they were lucky enough to live on a deck above the waterline,
12:53was through a port like this.
12:54Dark, stuffy rank.
12:59This place would have been really grim.
13:02You could have left the tiny village hamlet, or in the city slum you called home.
13:08But in a way, you never really left Britain.
13:10It's all so ordered and organised.
13:12And what really worried the Georgians was that if a ship like this was wrecked,
13:18this whole world was turned upside down.
13:21And in 1741, these fears were realised when the wrecking of one British ship sparked its crew to launch a violent mutiny.
13:38This shipwreck would bring about a change in British maritime law.
13:42HMS Wager was part of a naval fleet that was sailing round the tip of South America.
13:50She became cut off from the rest of the convoy.
13:54And the extraordinary events that followed were documented by a sailor.
13:59John Bolkley, who would lead the uprising.
14:04Separated from the rest of the squadron and surrounded by nothing but ocean,
14:09the wager was in serious trouble.
14:12Morale under Captain Cheep had plummeted and her crew was ravaged by disease.
14:18In fact, so many sailors were ill that they were barely able to man the yards.
14:23And then, in the early hours of the morning, disaster struck.
14:27The wager hit rocks off the coast of Chile and immediately began taking on water.
14:323,000 miles from home and with no backup, Captain Cheep and his officers had no way of maintaining order.
14:46John Bolkley recorded that as soon as the wager hit rocks, anarchy broke out.
14:51They fell into the most violent outrage and disorder.
14:57They began with broaching the wine in the Lazzaretto, then breaking open cabins and chests.
15:03Arming themselves with swords and pistols, threatening to murder those who should oppose or question them.
15:10They clothed themselves in the richest apparel they could find and imagined themselves Lord's Paramount.
15:16Eventually, all the crew managed to make it ashore and they began salvaging parts to build a makeshift boat to take them home.
15:29The captain directed his officers to make a camp on the beach, but outnumbered by the men, they now feared for their own lives.
15:37Sat on the beach, huddled around a campfire, Captain Cheep and his officers knew that they now face different rules.
15:47Admiralty Law stated that when a ship was wrecked, the sailors stopped getting paid, which meant that, inevitably, discipline broke down.
15:56I heard Mr. Cousins used very unbecoming language to the captain, telling him,
16:06By God, you are a rogue and a fool.
16:09The Admiralty still expected the men to follow the captain's orders, even after a ship was wrecked.
16:16But the crew of the wager interpreted things differently.
16:22Without pay, they believed they were no longer subject to naval authority and discipline.
16:29Drunken scuffles and fights broke out.
16:32Captain Cheep tried to stop one sailor stealing from the rum rations.
16:36The man resisted.
16:37So, at point-blank range, the captain shot him dead.
16:44Everyone was armed, everyone was hungry, and they were thousands of miles away from home.
16:50Bulkley presented a letter to Captain Cheep, asking for permission for the men to sail their makeshift boat via the Straits of Magellan to the British Caribbean.
17:01Bulkley and the majority of the men left in their improvised boat, leaving the captain and officers to find an alternative passage home.
17:12As they departed the beach, Bulkley assumed that he would never see Captain Cheep again.
17:20It took Bulkley's contingent over a year to reach home, and over half of the men died on the journey.
17:27Within weeks of arriving in London, Bulkley published his account of the mutiny, and won the support of the public for leading the rebellion against a murderous captain.
17:38That, however, was not the end of the story.
17:43A year later, something unexpected happened.
17:46Captain Cheep arrived home, with his own version of events.
17:50When Captain Cheep finally returned home, and recounted his version of the mutiny, John Bulkley was arrested and a court-martial was convened.
18:01But the Admiralty were aware of public opinion, so they cut a deal.
18:05Neither Bulkley nor any of the men were charged, and Captain Cheep, whose poor leadership had sparked off the mutiny in the first place, and who, in full view of his crew, had shocked one of his men in the face, was promoted.
18:19Fearful of such chaos happening again, Parliament stepped in.
18:29A new law was devised, and it agreed with the mutineers about what had been the real issue in the case of the wager.
18:36This is an Act of Parliament, passed in 1747, held here in the Parliamentary Archives.
18:46After this legislation was passed, if a British naval vessel was wrecked anywhere in the world, its crew would continue to get paid.
18:56And that meant that the men would remain subject to military discipline.
19:00The Georgians' strategy for a rich trading empire demanded that order and discipline at sea be maintained.
19:09Within five years of the passing of this Act, Britain's ships were embroiled in the first ever truly global conflict.
19:17The Seven Years' War saw the country fight France and other European rivals for control of vital shipping routes and key colonies.
19:39By the early 1760s, Britain had emerged as the undisputed master of the seas,
19:45and was exploiting this to huge financial gain.
19:58The economic value of maritime trade was also beginning to shape attitudes to shipwrecks.
20:04There was one particularly profitable enterprise, which made ports like Bristol amongst the most wealthy and influential cities in Georgian Britain.
20:13But one that also posed a unique challenge if its ships were wrecked.
20:24Ports like this were the starting point of a triangular trade in which slaves were bought in West Africa.
20:30They were sold to British plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, and then the ships returned here carrying sugar.
20:39A key part of that trade notoriously became known as the Middle Passage, a dangerous transatlantic voyage when the ships were packed with a human cargo.
20:48These slave ships would carry up to 500 men, women and children, shackled and manacled in the hold, with little food, water or even enough air to breathe.
21:02This was a gruesome trade, with the slavers placing only a monetary value on their human cargo.
21:12They were prepared to accept an average of 10% of their slaves dying on the transatlantic journey.
21:18But what would be the reaction if one of these ships were wrecked?
21:26Dozens of slave ships were wrecked in this period, but we hardly know anything about them at all.
21:32And yet, here in Bristol, one eyewitness account does survive, and it gives a chilling insight into what the Georgians thought about their slaves,
21:40and into what it would have been like to have been wrecked on a slaver.
21:47It concerns a slave ship called the Phoenix, and is held within walking distance of the Bristol harbour where many of these ships departed.
21:58This is Felix Farley's Journal, a Bristol newspaper that was published on the 8th of January 1763.
22:05It records how one ship, the Phoenix, bound from Africa to sugar plantations in Virginia, got into trouble and began to take on water.
22:15They took on so much water that the white crew were forced to release the slaves from their irons to get them to help at the pumps.
22:26The Phoenix, from Africa to Virginia, with 332 slaves, founded on the 30th of October.
22:33They were under a necessity of letting all their slaves out of irons to assist in pumping and baling,
22:40who, having no sustenance of any kind for 48 hours except a dram, made them very sullen and unruly,
22:48upon which they put half of the strongest of the slaves in irons,
22:53some of whom got their irons off and attempted to break the gratings.
22:57The seamen, not daring to go down the hold to clear their pumps, were obliged for the preservation of their own lives,
23:05to kill 50 of the stoutest of them.
23:07It is impossible to describe the misery the poor slaves underwent, having had no fresh water for five days.
23:20Four of them died and one drowned herself in the hold.
23:23The seamen were quite worn out, many of them in despair, three having dropped down dead at the pump, with fatigue and thirst.
23:33There were ten days in this terrible situation, expecting the ship hourly to sink,
23:39the water in the hold continually increasing, when they met with the King George.
23:44The captain, who with much difficulty saved the lives of the white people,
23:49the boat being scarce able to live in the sea.
23:53Thirty-six of the crew were taken up by the King George of Londonderry.
23:59The slaves were all drowned.
24:02What's so striking about this account is the utter lack of compassion displayed towards the lives of the slaves.
24:22When they realise they're in trouble, the white crew release some of the slaves to get them to help with the pumping and with the bailing.
24:29But then, when there's no hope, they either kill them or put them back in their chains,
24:36back down in the hold, where the water is constantly rising.
24:41It's absolutely terrifying.
24:45To the Georgian merchant elite, the African men, women and children on board were shockingly dispensable.
24:53They would see the loss of a slave ship as a terrible financial catastrophe for them
24:57and it depends how many other ships that they owned, how seriously they would take it.
25:02But it was risky and, you know, when your ship comes in, you're okay.
25:06But if it doesn't and you can't pay your debts, your credit can be ruined and credit is all-important.
25:10So they'd see it primarily in terms of a credit transaction.
25:14And you just don't get any sense of the humanity of the slaves.
25:16You get the sense of that they are worth certain amounts, they're listed as commodities.
25:22And it's that progressive dehumanisation that's marginalised.
25:26It makes it seem almost irrelevant or indulgent to talk about them as people when you have that kind of focus.
25:3120 years after the Phoenix was wrecked, the crew of another slave ship, the Zong, threw more than 100 slaves overboard to make an insurance claim.
25:45This infamous incident was a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement that challenged the slave trade.
25:51And the artist Turner painted this bleak event.
25:57For the 17th and most of the 18th century, the British were completely unselfconscious and unrelenting about the exploitation of African labour.
26:06They just saw it as a means to this unprecedented access to wealth.
26:09The casual disregard for life that seemed to characterise the Georgian pursuit of wealth went hand-in-hand with a hard-nosed strategy of colonial expansion.
26:22British interests took control of the Caribbean island of Jamaica, which would prove to be an economic powerhouse.
26:30And the East India Company, which had begun the colonial scramble in the age of Elizabeth,
26:35who was at the forefront of running other key outposts, such as Madras and Calcutta,
26:43the building blocks of what would become the British Empire.
26:50These colonies were exciting, bustling places where fortunes could be made.
26:55And by the second half of the 18th century, the officers and gentlemen running them were relocating their families there too.
27:12But there was disquiet in some quarters of Georgian society about upper-class women and children mixing with other races.
27:20And in August 1782, the sinking of one East India ship, the Grosvenor, off the coast of South Africa, would be the most powerful example yet of how a shipwreck could turn the world of order and privilege upside down.
27:40This wonderful painting captures all of the elements which made the wreck of the Grosvenor such a compelling story,
27:50one that played on the insecurities of late Georgian society.
27:55Carefully placed at the front of the painting are women and children finely dressed to depict their high social standing,
28:02but they're clinging to the uncharted rocks of a foreign and hostile shore.
28:08It underlined the unease that people were feeling about women and children travelling to Britain's new colonies.
28:15Now, the shipwreck was threatening not only soldiers and sailors, but the family itself.
28:21Returning to London from Madras, the Grosvenor was carrying 105 crew and 35 wealthy passengers, including women and children.
28:34In the middle of the night, the Grosvenor blindly hit rocks.
28:40In the darkness and confusion, the crew believed they had hit a reef in the middle of the ocean.
28:45And yet, when the sun rose the next morning, the crew of the Grosvenor discovered that they weren't on a reef 300 miles away from land.
28:56They'd collided with rocks off the very coast of Africa itself.
29:00Their captain's navigation had been hopelessly inaccurate and they were just a few hundred yards from shore.
29:06But with these rough seas, it still seemed very unlikely that many of the crew would even be able to make it to land.
29:12With the swell crashing against the rocks, two of the men managed to swim ashore with some rope and they made a makeshift winch.
29:28A number of men were lost in the scramble, but miraculously, the majority made it to safety.
29:34Of a total complement of 140, 125 had survived the shipwreck.
29:4191 crewmen along with all of the passengers.
29:45But cast away on a little known and poorly charted shore, they had no real idea exactly where they were.
29:52And the only supplies that they could get were those that they could salvage from the beach.
29:56The story that unfolded would both fascinate and shock Georgian Britain.
30:12Marooned on an African shore, the survivors of the Grosvenor had three options.
30:16Their first was to stay on the beach, make a camp, barter with the local Africans and send a party of the fittest men to get help.
30:25Their second option was to salvage timber from the wreck itself, build a makeshift raft and sail it to the nearest port.
30:31The third option was for the men, the women, the children, the sick, the lame, those who had been injured in the wreck itself,
30:38to gather together en masse and to set off on a great trek to the Dutch settlement at the Cape.
30:47They chose to leave the beach and walk through some 400 miles of the most difficult and uncharted terrain in southern Africa.
30:57What hurried their decision to leave was the presence on the beach of the Pondo,
31:03the local tribe who had gathered to watch events unfold with great curiosity.
31:10The Pondo were clearly seeing the wreck as a great resource.
31:14This was a treasure trove. It had brought metal in all sorts of forms ashore.
31:18And once there has been a movement by the castaways to move away,
31:21the Pondo sees this as an opportunity to seize further resources from those as they're departing.
31:29They come amongst them, they plunder them, they take their possessions,
31:32and what had supposedly started as an orderly march down the coast
31:37very quickly disintegrates into a sort of panicked flight.
31:40Faced with an arduous march to safety, the officers and wealthy passengers knew that their privilege and position on board the East India ship
31:53mattered little now that the Grosvenor lay in ruins.
31:56The hardships of the march of the Grosvenor survivors inverted the traditional hierarchies of Georgian society.
32:06The wealth of the rich gentleman passengers suddenly counted for nothing,
32:11and they and the women and children found themselves reliant upon the sailors,
32:16young, fit men in their teens and twenties,
32:18who, under normal circumstances, they would hardly have deigned to speak to.
32:23Youth and fitness suddenly mattered more than wealth, class or status.
32:28The survivors who had set off together, confident that the Cape was within reach,
32:45now began to lose heart and to fragment into smaller and smaller groups.
32:50The young and the strong abandoned the sick and the weak,
32:53and those who were unable to carry on simply left where they fell.
32:58Of the 140 men, women and children who had boarded the Grosvenor in India, only 18 survived.
33:18The uncertain fate of white, upper-class women in an unforgiving and remote corner of Africa
33:25was bound to hit a nerve back in Britain.
33:31For years, the Georgians had justified the slave trade on the grounds that those trafficked were little more than savages.
33:38Now, rumours began circulating that some of these well-born ladies from the Grosvenor may have fallen into the hands of these so-called savages.
33:52One of the elements of the story that makes it so fascinating for the contemporary population is the sort of myths that circulate around it,
33:58of white women being sort of dragged into slavery, dragged into sort of marriage or concubinage in local black tribes.
34:06And this clearly sort of titillates the late 18th century imagination, but it also appalls that sort of late 18th century imperial sensibility.
34:12This is not the way it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be sort of white people ordering black natives, not the other way around.
34:20In response to continuing stories that a number of the women had indeed survived, an expedition was launched from the settlement at the Cape.
34:29Well, the expedition proceeds and they get to a point where they find themselves amongst a tribe amongst who it's quite noticeable,
34:39they're children of mixed race. And they also find amongst this tribal group, three white women.
34:47And as they come, a cry goes up, our fathers are coming.
34:51I would say that one of the three women did stay, did survive, did assimilate with the Pondo,
35:00and that that was Lydia Logie, the youngest of the ladies of gentry.
35:06I think also there were two children, two girls, who likewise had been eight or nine at the time of the shipwreck.
35:15Eleanor Dennis, who was one of them, who too was taken in by the local people,
35:21and who in effect assimilated themselves amongst the people as well, became Africans.
35:31At a time when the country was confidently striking out into new territories,
35:36the wreck of the Grosvenor exposed the anxieties that Georgian Britain had
35:40about the indigenous peoples they sought to conquer.
35:44And the shipwreck was also a threat nearer to home.
35:49Only two years earlier, Captain Cook, a hero of maritime conquest and exploration,
35:56had been killed in Hawaii.
35:59The powerfully influential merchant classes were alarmed to hear that off the west country coastline,
36:01ships which had been wrecked were then being plundered for goods by local gangs.
36:04This practice became known as wrecking.
36:09This practice became known as wrecking.
36:14This practice became known as wrecking.
36:19This practice became known as wrecking.
36:22This practice became known as wrecking.
36:26I've come to the north coast of Cornwall.
36:33In the 18th century, small rural communities like this village of Morwenstow had their own maritime traditions,
36:48which embraced the custom of stealing from shipwrecks.
37:06It was a different world in these isolated and rural communities,
37:11where there was a culture of living off the sea as much as there was one of living off the land.
37:16Salvaging from shipwrecks was very much a part of that,
37:20an activity that was affectionately known as harvesting the sea.
37:24In fact, locals would ask the question,
37:27what do you do if you find someone washed up on a beach, apparently dead?
37:32And their answer would be, you rifle his pockets for money.
37:38The shipping magnets complained that even Cornwall's religious and moral leaders seemed to condone wrecking.
37:45And the most famous of these served here in the parish of Morwenstow.
37:51The Reverend R. S. Hawker certainly chronicled the local practice of wrecking.
37:56He recorded the activities of his flock in their harvesting of the sea.
38:04And his writings have added to the folklore about the people who became known as wreckers.
38:14So stern and pitiless is this iron-bound coast
38:18that within the memory of one man,
38:21upwards of 80 wrecks have been counted within a reach of 15 miles,
38:27with only here and there the rescue of a living man.
38:31My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hue.
38:36Hawker was a very sensitive individual and apparently he had a history of trying to find huts or places to hide away,
38:47to contemplate his religion, contemplate his life.
38:50And that's what he did when he finally came to Morwenstow.
38:53He had built actually a series of huts.
38:55This is known as Hawker's Hut.
38:58It was built by the Reverend himself,
39:00originally from the remains of ships wrecked off the coast.
39:04Hawker used to come here and smoke opium while surveying these stunning views
39:10and writing poetry and prose about the wrecking culture of his parish.
39:15Hawker gives us a unique insight into the prevalence of wrecking and the experiences of those involved.
39:24We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts.
39:30His limbs had been wrenched off and his body rent.
39:33During our search for his remains a man came up to me with something in his hand, inquiring,
39:39Can you tell me, sir, what is this?
39:41Is it the part of a man?
39:44It was the mangled seaman's heart and we restored it reverently to its place
39:48where it had once beat high with life and courage, with thrilling hope and sickening fear.
39:54It haunted him.
39:58He had written at one point that he thought that he heard the cries of seaman with the sound of the wind.
40:07The other part of being in Morwenstow, yeah, it's great wrecker terror to get stuff coming ashore,
40:13but it's also a horrible place to be when you're dealing with the shipwreck victims, particularly because it's very gruesome.
40:20Your shipwreck victims are very rarely whole.
40:23There were always body parts coming ashore or unidentified bits of human flesh that would come ashore that they would have to collect.
40:31On a ridge of rock just left bare by the falling tide stood a man, my own servant.
40:39He had come out to see my flock of ewes and had found the awful wreck.
40:43There he stood with two dead sailors at his feet whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark.
40:50And ever and anon there came up out of the water as though stretched out with life a human hand and arm.
40:57It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to sea.
41:13Wreckers induced fear and paranoia in ship owners and merchants, worried that they might lose precious cargoes.
41:25With great fortunes at stake, those with shipping interests eventually flexed their political muscle.
41:31They successfully pressurised the government into passing a new law that would swiftly and ruthlessly prosecute any wrecker who dared to steal from a shipwreck.
41:44In 1753 Parliament bent to the will of the merchant elite and passed this act with a rather wonderful title.
41:52An act for enforcing the laws against persons who shall steal or detain shipwrecked goods and for the relief of persons suffering losses thereby.
42:02It's otherwise known as the Wreckers Act.
42:05This was an era of brutal state justice.
42:08And this act threatened anyone who had stolen so much as a piece of rope or a plank of wood from a wrecked ship with the death penalty.
42:19In 1769 a Cornishman, William Pearce, was hanged in Launceston for stealing some rope from a wrecked ship.
42:27This was a very visible and public warning.
42:32The Wreckers Act was part of a wider political move to protect the property and rights of the merchants and aristocrats who ruled Georgian Britain.
42:42A series of punitive laws were passed that allowed the state to publicly execute its citizens for a host of petty crimes, including the theft of goods worth as little as 12 pence.
42:59In the 18th century there was an increasing idea of property being sacred.
43:04A lot of legislation that was passed was to protect property and to bring in the death penalty for it.
43:11And there was something like 200 statutes that were actually passed during this period and crime historians call them the bloody code because they required death by hanging.
43:20And the Wreck Act was one of those.
43:23A clause in the 1753 Act contained a highly contentious provision provoked by allegations that Cornishmen, not satisfied with stealing from shipwrecks,
43:40were employing nefarious methods to deliberately lure ships onto the rocks to be wrecked and then plundered.
43:48But what was the evidence for this?
43:53Nobody has ever been convicted of wrecking using false lights.
44:00So that particular clause has never been actually used in a court of law.
44:05The rumours of Wreckers employing false lights was an indication of just how panicked the merchants were about losing ships and their valuable cargoes.
44:17Coming here to Morwenstow, I get a real sense of two worlds colliding over the shipwreck as an event.
44:26I think that the merchants' fear about wrecking had nothing to do with accusations of locals murdering sailors,
44:33but everything to do with losing goods and property.
44:37In this era of expanding global trade, the story of wreckers simply added to the fear that already surrounded shipwrecks.
44:46And as the last decades of the 18th century approached, this agonising over the fate of stricken vessels because of the financial value of the goods they carried showed no sign of easing off.
45:02But then, in 1786, the most extraordinary shipwreck story of the era forced the wealthy elite to reconsider their prejudices about isolated coastal communities.
45:19I've come to Werthma Travers on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset.
45:24It's a picture postcard place now, but 200 years ago, it was just another remote village where people scraped a living, farming or working in the local quarries.
45:36But one night, the people of this place took part in the most remarkable rescue of survivors from a shipwreck.
45:46Just after midnight on the 6th of January, 1786, a full-rigged ship, the Hallswell, was caught in a snowstorm that engulfed this coast.
45:55The waves were breaking on these rock ledges with such ferocity that the spray reached the tops of the cliffs.
46:05And the Hallswell was blown onto the rocks behind me.
46:08The Hallswell was owned by the East India Company and only a week before had left Portsmouth bound for Madras.
46:21The experienced skipper, Captain Pearce, was accompanied by his two daughters who were due to be married in India.
46:29The ship's masts smashed against those cliffs and the Hallswell began to break up.
46:38As the captain and his daughters retreated to the supposed safety of his cabin, the soldiers and sailors on board attempted to get onto the rocks on the shore and the storm raged around them.
46:50While dozens of sailors tried to cling to the rocks, a few made it into a small cavern to see what shelter they could from the storm.
47:04But listening, as many of their comrades slipped and fell to their deaths.
47:08With the sailors desperately holding onto the rocks, the wreck of the Hallswell sank quickly, taking with her the captain, his daughters and all the other passengers.
47:25Incredibly, two men, the ship's cook and the quartermaster, made it to the top of these cliffs and they ran over there to Eastington Farm to raise the alarm.
47:42By lucky chance, the farmer, a Mr Garland, was also the owner of the nearby Purbeck Quarry.
47:48So he and his workmen gathered ropes and ladders from the quarry and rushed to the cliffs to help the sailors up.
47:55Back at the farm, Mr Garland's wife, Betty, gave the rescued sailors hot soup and dry clothes.
48:07Eventually, 74 sailors were hauled to safety up these terrifying cliffs.
48:12The people of Worth Matravers had rejected the fears of the merchant elite about wreckers stealing cargo and murdering sailors.
48:21Instead, the shipwreck became a celebrated part of local folklore.
48:29Charlie Newman runs the Square and Compass pub in Worth Matravers.
48:34A keen local historian, his family has lived in the village for generations.
48:38What did the East India Company make of the people of Worth Matravers who'd helped out the shipwrecked sailors?
48:47Well, there was a reward that, I've got a couple of coins here, that were given to my father by one of the local quarrymen.
48:55And it was a hundred guinea reward to the local quarrymen for assisting in the rescue of the survivors from the Horswell.
49:04Also, the owner of the farm also received a tea set, I think, from the East India Company as, again, as a thank you for the rescue and looking after the survivors.
49:15What else have we got here?
49:18The boat had a lot of furniture on board, so we've got various furniture fittings, sort of draw handles.
49:26There's a nice caster here when the leather is still surviving.
49:31This is a pewter spoon, which is just about survived, but it's very corroded. Obviously, the salt tends to attack these things.
49:39It's interesting that a lot of the sailors survived.
49:42Well, exactly. I mean, they were, you know, strong and fit, able sort of men, and the weather conditions were just so atrocious.
49:49Anybody that was of a lesser strength, you know, I think they were the ones that perished.
49:54The sinking of the Horswell, with the loss of her captain and the miraculous escape of some of her crew, was a story that gripped the imagination of George III's Britain.
50:06The King himself visited the site of the wreck, and later Turner painted the scene, and Charles Dickens would write about the Horswell in his story, The Long Voyage.
50:20Here, at last, was something good to come out of a shipwreck, a stirring tale of heroic rescue and survival.
50:30It encouraged the British to feel that they could draw on unique reserves of courage and fortitude in adversity.
50:37This, it began to be said, was in stark contrast to the brutish conduct of Britain's mortal enemies, the French.
50:49What Georgians had in mind was the scene depicted in the most famous of all shipwreck paintings, by artist Theodore Jericho, which is now held at the Louvre in Paris.
51:09The Raft of the Medusa documents the real-life experiences of the survivors of the survivors of a shipwreck.
51:18It captures the violence, murder and worse that followed.
51:23I thought I knew this painting, but when you see it in the flesh for the first time, you notice details that you hadn't noticed before.
51:36The canvas is so large, it's seven metres by five metres, you don't really know where to look first.
51:42It's quite bewildering, it's quite disorientating.
51:45There's a bloodied axe here, and then just over here, there's what looks like a piece of flesh just floating in the water.
51:56Now, Jericho has painted the exact moment that they've sighted the ship that's going to come and rescue them.
52:01Now, that's up here on the right-hand corner, and it means that all of the survivors have rushed to one end of the raft,
52:10and they didn't know at the beginning whether it was sailing towards them or sailing away.
52:16And this went on for two hours.
52:19You get a real sense of the instability of their situation.
52:25And also, the angle of the raft is leaning backwards, which means they're at the crest of a wave.
52:29A wave's just passing beneath them.
52:32Now, the trough of the next wave's on the right-hand side, with its crest rising up to the right-hand side.
52:37So what's going to happen is that the mark, the whole raft, is going to, it's going to tip down, and it's going to vanish from the horizon.
52:45And everyone is rushing over, apart from this one man here, who's looking the other way.
52:51And so while some of these people were desperate to get saved, they were desperate to get off the raft,
52:56some of them were so far gone that they'd lost any hope, any desire to survive.
53:03The painting was inspired by the fate of the Medusa, a French frigate which sank off the coast of Senegal.
53:15The ship was evacuated, but there were not enough spaces in the rowing boats.
53:20So 147 crew boarded a makeshift raft.
53:25This raft, with no means of navigating and few supplies, was then abandoned by the rowing boats,
53:33who quickly made for land only 30 miles away.
53:37Jericho would base this painting on the accounts of two of the survivors,
53:42and these are his initial drawings of the scenes on board the raft.
53:50We were so crowded that it was impossible to move a step,
53:53and the raft itself was weighed down a metre under the surface of the water.
53:58We had barrels of wine and drinking water,
54:00but the little food we saved was distributed and eaten entirely on the first night,
54:05a night of such horrible blackness.
54:13Abandoned by the captain and senior officers,
54:16out of this chaos erupted murderous anarchy.
54:21And surrounded by the dead and dying,
54:23the survivors resorted to breaking one of the great taboos of civilised society.
54:28Several of us fell upon the dead bodies which covered the raft,
54:31and cut off pieces of flesh and consumed them.
54:35I ask you not to condemn those who are dying of hunger on that pitiless sea.
54:41I ask you not to condemn those who are dying of hunger on that pitiless sea.
54:44one of us
54:52lonely
55:00and
55:04this
55:06of
55:07Today, this painting is considered Jericho's masterpiece
55:16and one of the greatest works of French art.
55:19But its current status is at odds with the dismissal
55:23it first received when exhibited in France.
55:26What made the painting the legend that it is today
55:29is the sensation that it caused when, just a year later,
55:34it was exhibited in London.
55:37The huge impact made by the Raft of the Medusa on the British public
55:49was down to timing.
55:52It was exhibited only a few years after the triumphal destruction
55:56of Napoleon's army at Waterloo.
55:59Its picture of disorder and despair was seen as indisputable evidence
56:05that Britain's traditional foes were morally inferior.
56:12The significance of the wreck of the Medusa and of Jericho's painting
56:16greatly increased for the British because of a British shipwreck.
56:21HMS Alceste, a Royal Naval Frigate, had hit a reef off Java in February 1817.
56:27Like the Medusa, she had run aground,
56:29and, like the Medusa, a decision had been taken to build a raft.
56:34But that's where the similarities ended.
56:39After the Alceste was wrecked,
56:41the captain organised the safe passage of all the crew to a nearby island.
56:46In the face of great odds, discipline was maintained.
56:50Despite being starved and dehydrated,
56:56they even repelled attacks by Malay pirates.
57:01Captain Maxwell was praised for his calm leadership.
57:06And implicit in that praise, of course,
57:08was the contrast with the every-man-for-himself cannibalism
57:13that had engulfed the French on the Medusa.
57:16For the Georgians, the great sailing ship was an emblem of the state itself.
57:31It had been central to Britain's economic advance,
57:34and it had helped to shape a sense of national identity.
57:38But as the Georgian era drew to a close,
57:41and hundreds of ships continued to be wrecked every year,
57:46the question had to be asked.
57:48Just how many more lives was Britain prepared to lose
57:52out there on the world's oceans?
57:59Next time, the shipwreck in the Victorian age.
58:04How the great engineers and fervent campaigners
58:08of the 19th century joined forces.
58:10To save lives,
58:13make ships safer,
58:16and dream of building the unsinkable ship.
58:20And the shipwreck in the
Comments