- 3 months ago
Documentary, BBC Empire of the Seas S01E03 How the Navy Forged the Modern World
Navy Forged Modern World
The third episode of the first season of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World," titled "High Tide," explores the evolution of Nelson's navy and the national enterprise that supported it.
This episode delves into how the Royal Navy became the most powerful maritime fighting force in the world, with highly trained crews and ambitious officers.
It also examines the role of the navy in shaping Britain's global influence and its impact on the country's development.
The series, presented by Dan Snow, provides a comprehensive look at the history of the Royal Navy and its significant contributions to the modern world.
Navy Forged Modern World
The third episode of the first season of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World," titled "High Tide," explores the evolution of Nelson's navy and the national enterprise that supported it.
This episode delves into how the Royal Navy became the most powerful maritime fighting force in the world, with highly trained crews and ambitious officers.
It also examines the role of the navy in shaping Britain's global influence and its impact on the country's development.
The series, presented by Dan Snow, provides a comprehensive look at the history of the Royal Navy and its significant contributions to the modern world.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00One April morning in 1771, a 12-year-old boy was rowed along the River Medway in Chatham,
00:12Kent, to begin a new life as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.
00:16In the waters all around him, the great warships of the Navy lay at anchor.
00:25Having won a long and vicious global conflict with France, the Seven Years' War, Britain
00:33was at peace and much of her mighty fleet was now mothballed, tied up in port.
00:41As the boy passed the mighty HMS victory, he would have looked up and seen that her decks
00:46were covered and her gun ports were tightly shut.
00:49Little can he ever have imagined that their fates would one day collide.
00:53Thirty-four years later, he would stand on the quarter-deck of the victory, commanding
00:58the fleet in the most epic naval battle in British history, Trafalgar.
01:09The boy's name was Horatio Nelson, and within his lifetime, Britain would construct the most
01:15powerful maritime fighting force in history.
01:23Far more than just a wooden fleet, the Navy was a national enterprise.
01:30Its voracious demand for ships fuelled the Industrial Revolution, while funding it drove
01:35to the war.
01:36At sea, its highly trained crews and ambitious officers laid claim to a burgeoning empire,
01:49and pushed back the horizons of the known world.
01:54But there would be a huge price to pay for this global sea power.
01:58Britain and her navy would soon be dragged into the greatest sequence of wars the nation
02:03had ever seen.
02:05They would be a fight for Britain's security, her way of life, her very identity, a colossal
02:11struggle against her old enemy, France.
02:15And the outcome would be decided out here, at sea.
02:44A year before the young Nelson began his career at sea, a Royal Navy ship was sailing deep
02:49in the South Pacific Ocean, 12,000 miles from home.
02:57The skies had cleared after heavy storms, and to the west, high cliffs emerged through
03:02the cloud.
03:08The ship's captain decided to name this uncharted piece of land, Cape Howe, in honour of one
03:14of the Navy's finest sailors.
03:17The captain made a precise note of Cape Howe's coordinates in his private journal, and then
03:22continued north along this unknown coastline.
03:30The date was the 20th of April, 1770.
03:33The ship was called the Endeavour.
03:35Her commander was James Cook.
03:40The son of a humble Scottish labourer, Cook had worked his way up through the Navy's ranks
03:45to become one of the service's most respected navigators and cartographers.
03:50His reward was command of a high-profile mission, not to fight, but to explore.
04:01Backed by the Royal Society, the Admiralty drew up plans for a scientific expedition to the
04:06Pacific.
04:07In 1768, Cook set off from Plymouth with a crew of 70, including artists, astronomers,
04:22and botanists.
04:23They sailed across the Atlantic, through the treacherous waters around Cape Horn, and then
04:28across the Pacific to begin observations in Tahiti.
04:33Then they turned south into uncharted seas.
04:43Cook obsessively logged the Endeavour's speed, course, and position, so that future naval
04:48crews could retrace his route precisely.
04:52Missions like this were equipped with the latest navigational technologies, including
04:58a new British invention to measure latitude, which is still in use today.
05:03With a sextant.
05:05Every day at noon, the ship's officers would line up here on the rail of the quartertec with
05:09their sextants to measure the angle between the sun and the horizon.
05:14Now this helped them to fix the distance that the ship was north or south of the equator.
05:19Very sophisticated piece of kit, very hard to use though, particularly because the deck
05:23was always rolling around.
05:24It was very difficult to fix the sun precisely.
05:33The Navy also led a grand experiment with cutting edge precision clocks, known as chronometers.
05:40Cook had gone to pioneer their use to measure a ship's longitude.
05:45The Navy was mastering the sea, not through cannon fire, but by harnessing innovative science
05:51and technology.
05:57As they journeyed further into the unknown, the Endeavour's civilian crew documented more
06:01than a thousand new animal and plant varieties.
06:06And they painted vivid pictures of local peoples and customs.
06:14But for the Admiralty, Cook's expedition was not simply to satisfy the Royal Society's thirst
06:19for knowledge.
06:20While the desire to collect scientific data was real enough, Cook also had a set of secret
06:26instructions.
06:27They told him to take possession of convenient situations in the name of the King of Great
06:32Britain.
06:34Cook was going to claim undiscovered lands for the British.
06:38This shows that the mission was as political as it was scientific.
06:41Cook was going to extend British influence to the very furthest corners of the globe.
06:46In the 18th century, land was power, a source of new markets with new products to exploit.
07:01And there was fierce competition for it.
07:05The French Foreign Minister condemned Britain's imperial project.
07:09Britain, he said, was a restless and greedy nation.
07:15As Cook crossed the Pacific, the French explorer Louis de Bougainville was also circumnavigating
07:21the globe.
07:23It was a perfect excuse to claim lands for his king.
07:28Bougainville wanted to stop what he described as Britain's project of universal monarchy.
07:35We must anticipate them, he cried.
07:37The race for global supremacy was on.
07:44Rougainville and Cook were searching for a mythical southern continent.
08:02Another new world of riches believed to exist deep in the southern ocean.
08:07So when Captain Cook's lookout spotted land at Cape Howe that April evening in 1770, the
08:13stakes couldn't have been higher.
08:17Cook followed the coastline until his lookouts spotted beautiful natural harbour.
08:25When they sailed into it, the sea was full of stingrays and he called it Stingray Cove.
08:30But later, after he'd been ashore and seen the bewildering variety of plants there, he renamed
08:37it Botany Bay.
08:38Little did he know it at the time, this wasn't just some insignificant South Pacific island,
08:45this was Australia.
08:51Cook claimed this new land for his king.
08:56The navy he sailed with had grown beyond its traditional role as a fighting force.
09:02It had become a vehicle of empire building, projecting British power, driving commerce and conquest
09:10to the far side of the world.
09:21Captain Cook drew up more than 40 maps and surveys as he sailed across the South Pacific.
09:27Today they're held at the British Library in London.
09:32This is a collection of sketches and charts actually made by James Cook as he led the crew
09:38of the Endeavour on that extraordinary voyage of discovery.
09:42This one shows the track of the Endeavour through the South Pacific, this dotted line here.
09:47And then it shows them arriving at the east coast of Australia here where he went on to chart
09:522,000 miles of that coastline, naming the key points and marking out navigational hazards.
09:58And he's written probably quite proudly here, discovered in 1770.
10:05Previous to his voyage, much of this space here just would have been blank.
10:09But now he's sailing through it, filling in the gaps.
10:12What I find so fascinating about the navy in this period is how these expeditions were unlocking the secrets of the globe.
10:20This age of naval exploration may not have involved spectacular battles, but its impact was every bit as significant,
10:33both on the navy's own prestige and Britain's international standing.
10:37As soon as Cook got home, the British government published these charts to prove that his discoveries were genuine.
10:47But it was about much more than geography, it was about politics.
10:51Both the British government and Cook were laying claim to this coast of Australia,
10:55which Cook even called New South Wales.
10:57And if you look at the other names he's choosing, they're ostentatiously patriotic.
11:02Particularly this one, Cape St George. I mean, you can't get more British than that.
11:06Australia would prove one of Britain's most valuable colonies.
11:22English speaking, cricket playing, British in institution and law.
11:28Yet, for the personalities and skills of the crews involved, it could all have been very different.
11:35One year before Cook sighted Australia, Louis de Bougainville had reached the Great Barrier Reef.
11:43But the French explorer was deterred by the dangerous shallow waters.
11:47By 1771, goods from her colonies were pouring into Britain.
12:00Dockside, merchant ships unloaded precious hardwoods from North America,
12:05salted fish from Canada, exotic silks and spices from India.
12:10The empire had never been so rich or so extensive, and it was the Navy's job to keep it that way.
12:21This was the inheritance of young sailors like Horatio Nelson.
12:25One of hundreds of midshipmen, trainee officers, being toughened up to do their duty at sea.
12:32When I was one, I served myself the day I went to sea.
12:37I jumped the board of Irish and they wrapped the tips of me.
12:40But now it's been that we're cool and I can't tell the Irish to see.
12:43This is, this is, stop asking, this is.
12:49Just as Nelson would have done more than 200 years ago,
12:52these cadets aboard the training ship Royalist
12:55are being taught the dangerous and demanding arts of tall ship sailing.
12:59What these guys are learning here is that in order to make this ship work safely and efficiently,
13:05you've got to work as a team and you've got to obey orders.
13:08Everything has a set procedure.
13:14The Royal Navy was a meritocracy.
13:17The sea was an unforgiving master,
13:20and to get promoted up through the ranks,
13:22you had to prove that you could sail and fight.
13:25Nelson initially showed little sign of such promise.
13:29The captain of his first warship asked,
13:32what had poor Horace done, who is so weak,
13:35that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea?
13:42Nelson was far from alone.
13:44Recruits as young as ten were sent to sea for months at a time,
13:48surrounded by the same faces, confined within the same wooden walls.
13:52It was as much a psychological test as a physical one.
13:57The Navy's solution to this was to insist on a strict routine,
14:02the same no matter what ship you're on,
14:04no matter where you were in the world.
14:06The young men would have learned self-reliance
14:08and to obey orders in order to overcome the terror and the tedium of being at sea.
14:13It was often a life of hard labour, of lifting, mending sails and rigging,
14:23carrying cannonballs and gunpowder.
14:25Yet it was also, for many young officers, a rare chance to get an education.
14:31The rigours of climbing aloft were interspersed with traditional school lessons,
14:36with emphasis on the complex mathematics and trigonometry required for navigation.
14:45Through this regime, the Navy turned children like Nelson
14:48from unpromising raw recruits into experienced fighting men.
14:53Nelson himself remembered,
14:55Thus, by degrees, I became a good pilot and confident of myself.
15:05By the age of just 19, when he became a lieutenant,
15:09Nelson had travelled over 45,000 miles around the world.
15:15Like thousands of other young boys,
15:18Nelson was seeing the sheer scale of Britain's global ambition at first hand
15:22and visiting her growing empire.
15:26He'd been down into the Southern Oceans,
15:28rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean.
15:31He almost died of malaria in Bombay,
15:33helping safeguard British trading interests in the East.
15:37And he'd even fought pirates in the Caribbean.
15:40Nelson had joined the ranks of a highly professional force,
15:53sailors filled, as he said, with ardent ambition.
15:58They were a band of brothers,
16:00dedicated to the projection of British power on a world stage.
16:10The Navy's increasing global reach changed how Britain saw the world,
16:19and their place within it.
16:22In 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts was established in central London.
16:29It was an opportunity seized upon by a canny admiralty.
16:33They put on display paintings of naval missions,
16:36some of which are held today at the National Maritime Museum.
16:41The Admiralty collection includes works by Captain Cook's onboard artist,
16:45William Hodges.
16:48His paintings depicted Britain's growing empire.
16:53Britain was naming and mapping the world.
16:56Now, by capturing it on canvas,
16:58in many ways she was claiming it as well.
17:01The people who saw these paintings were left with a very simple and immediate message,
17:06that Britain didn't just rule the world's oceans, but the world itself.
17:18Visitors to the exhibitions could furnish their own homes with copies of these images,
17:23as print shops opened up in the streets around the Royal Academy.
17:27Marine art had never been so popular.
17:32This is a view of Portsmouth Harbour, painted in 1770 by Dominic Sayers.
17:38It's dominated by this fantastic ship of the line,
17:41a battleship anchored here in the middle,
17:43with its two rows of camons run out, hatches open,
17:47and the captain on the stern perhaps talking to the first lieutenant.
17:50And there's some figures here in the foreground,
17:52an unfeasibly smart-looking seaman here,
17:55perhaps in his Sunday rig,
17:57talking to a naval officer and two marine officers here,
18:00lounging around on some cannon.
18:05This, then, is how the Admiralty wanted the British to see their navy,
18:09ordered, well-equipped, ready for any eventuality.
18:13But these images disguised an extraordinary truth,
18:18that a navy that wasn't fighting risked falling into neglect and disrepair.
18:25After a decade of peace,
18:27British naval expenditure was at less than a quarter of its wartime levels,
18:32and much of the fleet was mothballed or simply tied up in port.
18:35One admiral complained that out of 35 ships under his command,
18:40only six were seaworthy.
18:42To make matters worse, across the channel in France,
18:45the king wasn't just painting pretty pictures of his fleet,
18:48he was building an entirely new one.
18:54Louis XVI was determined to end the Royal Navy's preeminence at sea.
19:01He ordered the construction of new docks
19:03and oversaw the completion of 80 new warships.
19:08Ready to pounce,
19:09Louis now waited for the right moment
19:11to deploy his powerful new fleet and ruin Britain.
19:23His opportunity would come from 3,000 miles to the west,
19:27across the Atlantic Ocean,
19:29from within the British Empire.
19:33On the 9th of May, 1768, British customs officials in Boston Harbour
19:50boarded an American merchant ship, the Liberty.
19:53It was carrying a cargo of imported Madeira wine.
19:56The next morning, customs officials inspected the hold of the ship.
20:01They were a little bit suspicious when they discovered
20:04that it contained only a quarter of her total capacity.
20:08They thought that during the night people had been secretly unloading the cargo
20:12to avoid paying customs duties.
20:14They asked the Royal Navy to impound the Liberty.
20:21Working alongside customs officials,
20:23naval ships were enforcing stringent tariffs on American trade.
20:29The revenues raised helped pay for the Royal Navy and for colonial defence.
20:33But the very principle was anathema to the Americans.
20:41The Liberty's owner, John Hancock, was arrested for tax evasion.
20:46He sat in the dock for five months before the case collapsed.
20:50All across the eastern seaboard,
20:55American traders faced what they saw as harassment from an aggressive British fleet.
21:01The Navy, which for centuries had been held up by the British
21:05as the defender of their liberties from foreign tyranny,
21:08was now seen by many in America as a tyrant herself.
21:12It was a perception that was forcing them to reconsider their entire relationship with Britain.
21:22The tension would culminate on 4 July 1776
21:27with the Declaration of American Independence.
21:31Most prominent among the signatures was John Hancock, the owner of the Liberty.
21:38Britain was now at war with her own subjects.
21:42.
21:53Back home, the Navy board went into overdrive
21:55to supply over 100 ships, now fighting a transatlantic war.
22:01But after two years of conflict,
22:04as the new Navy board controller, Charles Middleton,
22:07made his way to work in London's Seething Lane,
22:10The navy was in deep crisis.
22:13What had begun as a local civil war between Britain and her rebellious colonists with a ragtag army
22:18had now turned into a truly global contest,
22:22because a few months before, France, sensing her opportunity for revenge,
22:27had declared war on Britain.
22:32In 1778, King Louis XVI ordered his new fleet across the Atlantic
22:38to support the American rebels.
22:41Within months, the French navy had forced British troops
22:45to abandon America's biggest city, Philadelphia.
22:49The situation was perilous.
22:51The enemy, Middleton warned, outnumber us at every station.
22:59The solution to the problem seems obvious, to build more ships.
23:04But it could take up to five years and 2,000 trees
23:07to construct a single warship.
23:14Middleton didn't have the time or resources to build a new fleet.
23:18The only option was to improve the ships he already had.
23:23Just a few weeks after he began work at the Navy Board,
23:26a letter from a Mr Fisher arrived on Middleton's desk.
23:31Fisher's original correspondence doesn't survive,
23:34but its content is referred to in records held at the National Maritime Museum.
23:39This is a letter written by the Navy Board to their colleagues at the Admiralty
23:45on the 27th of January, 1779, and it contains a vital clue.
23:50It mentions Mr Fisher, calls him a shipbuilder from Liverpool,
23:54whose ships did a brisk trade with West Africa.
23:57Now, in these warm, tropical waters, shipworm were a real problem.
24:02These little worm would burrow into the hull of the ship and weaken the fabric of the vessel.
24:07But also, long tentacles of seaweed would form,
24:09clinging on to the sides of the ship and really slow it down.
24:12Mr Fisher's solution was copper sheathing,
24:17coating the underside of the hull beneath the waterline with copper panels,
24:21thus protecting the integrity of the ship and, crucially,
24:25making it travel a lot faster through the water.
24:35Middleton saw in this experimental technology a possible solution to his problem.
24:41He would sheathe the bottoms of his wooden fleet in copper.
24:44It was, though, an expensive process and Middleton urgently needed money
24:53if he was to, as he put it, extricate us from present danger.
25:00Middleton petitioned a king, George III, for a personal meeting at Buckingham House.
25:06He said it was a matter of the greatest consequence.
25:09What better way to convince the king than to take along a beautiful scale model?
25:16And this is the actual one that Middleton brought to that meeting with George III.
25:21It's an HMS Bellona, which was a 74-gun battleship.
25:25The detail is wonderful.
25:26You can see the wood carvings up there and the paintings along the side there.
25:31But the really important detail is the copper plating below the waterline down here.
25:35There would have been about 3,000 plates of copper on a full-sized ship of this kind.
25:41But this detail is so intricate,
25:42you can see the nails that actually hold the copper plates to the hull.
25:47It must have really impressed the king
25:49because he threw his support behind the navy's bold project
25:53to spend huge amounts of money on a totally unproven technology.
25:57It was a great industrial challenge.
26:04Sheathing just one ship could require 15 tonnes of copper.
26:08But Middleton drove the project forward.
26:11At Portsmouth docks, he placed orders to copper bottom 51 navy ships within the year.
26:17It was a uniquely British triumph.
26:25Only British industry had the ability to produce copper on such a scale.
26:32Here at Paris Mountain in North Wales,
26:355,000 men worked the rich seams of an open-cast copper mine.
26:40During its lifetime, Paris produced over 130,000 tonnes of copper,
26:47much of it to supply the navy with this vital munition of war.
26:51The copper was sourced exclusively from British mines,
26:55and the smelting process required a vast quantity of coal,
26:58which itself needed mining,
27:01often using new steam engines,
27:03which drained water out of the deepest shafts.
27:06The finished product needed to be carried on new roads and in new merchant ships.
27:11All of this created new jobs
27:13and economic communities all over the country.
27:16The Royal Navy wasn't just benefiting from domestic industrialisation,
27:21it was also accelerating it.
27:27But as the naval dockyards rushed to complete the task of coppering the fleet
27:32across the Atlantic in America, the war effort was crumbling.
27:38In 1781, the French navy had blockaded the British army in Chesapeake Bay,
27:44cutting off their supply lines by sea and forcing them to surrender.
27:49In that moment, the American colonies were lost.
27:54One naval defeat and half a continent slipped out of Britain's grasp.
27:5920,000 stranded British troops had to be evacuated.
28:07The newly promoted Captain Nelson joined a naval force sent to bring them home.
28:12And Louis XVI looked to build upon his sudden maritime advantage.
28:17Flushed with victory, the French turned their attention and their fleets south.
28:22They were after an even greater prize,
28:24the very foundation of Britain's imperial economy,
28:27her colonies in the Caribbean and their most precious commodity, sugar.
28:39Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua and, most importantly of all, Jamaica
28:46were the jewels in Britain's imperial crown.
28:49These Caribbean islands were much more valuable than the 13 colonies
29:00clinging to the eastern seaboard of North America.
29:03Their lush soil and plenty of rainfall, they were home to the sugar plantations.
29:10The lucrative sugar trade powered the British economy.
29:13Slaves in the Caribbean harvested 80,000 tonnes of sugar each year.
29:21Customs duties on this contributed the equivalent of well over £250 million annually to the treasury.
29:28The British sweet tooth paid for the war effort.
29:31King George III himself warned that if we lose our sugar islands,
29:36it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.
29:39We must defend these islands, even at the risk of an invasion of Britain.
29:55This site at Kenilworth in north-west Jamaica was a great sugar estate.
30:00It stretched over 500 acres and was one of hundreds of plantations built along this coast
30:10so that their produce could easily be exported to Britain.
30:14But Kenilworth's proximity to the sea also made it vulnerable.
30:19Kenilworth wasn't just a sugar factory, it was also, by necessity, a fortress.
30:24And this is what remains of an 18th century gun battery.
30:30This cannon pointed out to sea to stave off the threat of attack by pirates and privateers,
30:39as well as the French and Spanish navies.
30:41But never was the risk to this island greater than in the spring of 1782.
30:46On 8th April, a French fleet of 36 warships, accompanied by over 15,000 troops, set sail from Martinique.
31:01Their commander, the Comte de Grasse, planned to invade Jamaica's northern coast
31:06and grabbed the spoils for France.
31:12De Grasse was so confident of victory that his fleet was accompanied by a convoy of merchant ships,
31:17their holds stuffed with trade goods to supply his new colony.
31:22But Jamaica was just the beginning, the first step.
31:24His plan was to drive the British entirely from the Caribbean and destroy the British economy.
31:30The future of Britain's transatlantic empire depended on defending this coast, this island, from those French forces.
31:38The task of protecting Jamaica fell to the Royal Navy's Caribbean fleet,
31:49and its recently upgraded, but as yet untested, copper-bottomed ships.
31:55Their commander, Admiral Sir George Rodney, seemed a bit of a liability.
32:00A gambler and a womaniser, he was deeply unpopular at the Admiralty.
32:04But Rodney did have what it took to be an outstanding leader.
32:10He'd joined the Navy at just 14. Since then, he'd served 50 years.
32:15And in that half-century, he'd become thoroughly imbued with the Royal Navy's aggressive ethos.
32:21In battle, he was violent and single-minded.
32:25If anyone could save Jamaica, Rodney could.
32:29On the 12th of April, at the Saints' Islands, Rodney attacked.
32:34Conditions were actually quite similar to those today.
32:43The wind was very changeable and kept moving direction.
32:46But this gave Rodney one key advantage.
32:48His fleet was copper-bottomed and much quicker and more manoeuvrable,
32:52particularly in these light-breeze conditions.
32:54The French general, Antoine de Bougainville, the man who'd raced Captain Cook across the Pacific,
33:03was now serving with de Grasse's fleet.
33:06He was stunned by the speed and agility of the British ships.
33:10Bougainville described the British advantage.
33:14He said the French ships were like tortoises chasing British stags.
33:18One British midshipman who fought at the Saints said that we knocked the French fleet to atoms.
33:34It was, he said, the best day Old England ever saw.
33:37After 11 hours of fighting, the French surrendered.
33:47Their admiral, Conde de Grasse, conceded that his navy was operating a full century behind the British.
33:54Rodney had saved Jamaica and her precious sugar trade, the keystone of the British economy.
34:07In the Jamaican capital, Kingston, a giant marble statue was erected in his honour.
34:13And here on the side, there's some fantastic detail.
34:16Britannia here in the middle, her Union flag on the shield.
34:19And at the very bottom, Britannia is trampling on the French flag.
34:24You can see here the fleur-de-lis, symbol of the French monarchy.
34:31It's fascinating to think what would have happened if de Grasse had won that battle.
34:35Perhaps his statue would be up there now looking down on me.
34:39Britain would almost certainly have lost her sugar islands
34:42and all the trade with them that was such a mainstay of her economy.
34:46But even more important than that, confidence, the great elixir of the capitalist system, would have dried up.
34:52The stock market would have collapsed and with it, the government.
34:56Britain would have been no better than a third-rate power.
34:59Rodney's aggression was widely credited as the reason for the preservation of Britain's Caribbean empire.
35:16But he had an even greater edge over his rivals,
35:19thanks to the efforts of a little-known bureaucrat
35:21working in a side street 3,000 miles away in the city of London.
35:25Charles Middleton, the Navy board controller.
35:31The man who had the foresight and resolve to launch a copper revolution.
35:40Global peace was restored in 1783.
35:45Britain gave up her 13 colonies in North America,
35:48but retained key possessions all across the globe,
35:52including her vital Caribbean colonies.
35:54Over the next 20 years,
35:59the revenues from imperial trade trebled in value,
36:02with much of the profits reinvested in a rejuvenated Royal Navy.
36:08The French king, Louis XVI,
36:10had failed in his attempt to dismember the British Empire,
36:14and he'd pay for it with his head.
36:18In chasing his dream of defeating the Royal Navy,
36:22Louis bankrupted his kingdom.
36:24France was torn apart by revolution,
36:27and on 21st January 1793,
36:31he was executed as a traitor.
36:35Within days, the new Republic of France
36:38had declared war on Britain for the sixth time in 100 years.
36:43But this time,
36:45their aim was to eradicate the British state.
36:48A year after war was declared,
37:03a vicar, James Hurdis,
37:06made his way to St Andrew's Church in Bishopston, Sussex,
37:10for a Sunday service.
37:11He was an Oxford professor and an ardent anti-Republican,
37:20who believed it was his patriotic duty to give political guidance to his flock.
37:25And he used a particular naval illusion to do it.
37:29Hurdis asked his congregation to imagine that Britain was a ship of war,
37:34and they, the British people,
37:36were her crew.
37:38The ship would operate effectively if they did as they were told by their senior officers
37:43and respected their superiors.
37:46But, he warned,
37:47if they should all conceive themselves to be equal and each to be guided by his own will,
37:54then the ship would change its course and they must be wrecked.
37:59He went on to say that if they deposed the captain in a mutiny,
38:03then they would instantly divide and fall asunder.
38:09To his audience, the symbolism was clear.
38:12Across the channel in France, the reign of terror was in full swing.
38:23Thousands of enemies of the state had followed Louis XVI to the guillotine.
38:31The congregation listening to Hurdis here would have been filled with a fear of French Republican terror.
38:37And his solution was that they unite behind traditional values,
38:42respect for church and king, parliament and law.
38:46It was a call to arms.
38:56Hurdis' sermon struck a chord with the people of Bishopston.
39:01Their parish was just a mile inland from the English Channel.
39:04And if the Royal Navy was defeated at sea,
39:07they'd be on the front line when the French invaded.
39:11Britain had faced invasion from France countless times before.
39:15But this time would be different.
39:17This wouldn't just be a physical conquest,
39:19a bit of regime change,
39:21a subtle exchange of one group of politicians for another.
39:25This time, it was ideological.
39:27At stake was nothing less than the entire British way of life.
39:31The fear of French invasion quickly spread across the country.
39:40And faced with utter destruction,
39:43Britons looked yet again to their navy for salvation.
39:46The British public were well used to paying for their navy.
39:59Now, if Britain was to preserve her national security,
40:02they'd have to man it too.
40:05The fleet had expanded to more than 1,000 ships,
40:09and the biggest required crews of up to 900 skilled men.
40:12Commodore Nelson explained the extent of the problem to his brother, William.
40:20I've only got a few men, and very hard indeed are they to be got, he said.
40:24The Admiralty embraced a solution that it's used so often in wars of the past,
40:32and that's legalised kidnapping.
40:34For centuries, the government had sanctioned the use of so-called press gangs.
40:38These groups of armed men now roamed the country,
40:42looking for sailors to send to sea without their own consent.
40:46This was a practice that didn't really sit well with Britain's reputation
40:50as the home of personal liberty,
40:52but it was the only sure way of manning the fleet.
40:58In the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
41:00the archive holds a collection of The Gentleman's Magazine,
41:04a monthly publication which often carried stories about press gang activity.
41:08I found one here that's a case heard by the old Bailey
41:12about a Mr William Godfrey,
41:15who's a citizen and cooper, or barrel maker, of London.
41:19It says that this particularly lawless body of sailors
41:21burst into his house in open defiance of the law,
41:25seized him, knocking him down,
41:26dragged him through the streets of London
41:28with only one of his slippers on.
41:31And then...
41:32The press gang clearly looms large
41:36in the popular imagination of the 18th century.
41:40But despite some of the scare stories,
41:42it wasn't total anarchy.
41:45Most press gangs operated only in ports.
41:49Their mission was to try and press merchant seamen,
41:52men who knew their way around the tall ship.
41:55It was in no-one's interest to fill ships up with a bunch of landsmen,
41:59people that had never been to sea before.
42:00They'd be a danger to themselves and the rest of the crew.
42:03And, in fact, most sailors were pressed when they were out at sea,
42:06when their ships were intercepted by the press gang in small boats.
42:10They were seized before they'd set foot on dry land.
42:17At the height of the war,
42:19almost 40% of crews were pressed into service.
42:24Although widely criticised,
42:26impressment did boost naval manpower to 140,000 sailors,
42:31seven times its peacetime level.
42:35This was just as well,
42:38because the Royal Navy was now outgunned at sea.
42:41In February 1797,
42:50a British force of 15 ships sailed south along Portugal's Atlantic coast,
42:56searching for a Spanish convoy.
43:00A few months earlier,
43:01Spain had joined forces with France to wage war against Britain.
43:05The commander of the British fleet was Admiral John Jarvis,
43:11and this ship, HMS Victory, was his flagship.
43:14For some time, he'd been waiting off the coast of Portugal,
43:17hoping to intercept the Spanish.
43:19But terrible storms had made it impossible for him to track them down.
43:24Then, on the 13th of February 1797,
43:27a new ship arrived to reinforce Jarvis.
43:30On board was a senior officer with some vital information.
43:36That officer was Horatio Nelson.
43:41In 25 years of service,
43:43he'd earned a reputation as an impulsive, aggressive leader.
43:48It is my disposition, he wrote,
43:50that dangers do but increase my idea of attempting them.
43:54Now Nelson would prove his words with action.
44:00The night before reaching HMS Victory,
44:05Nelson had, by chance,
44:07sailed right through the Spanish fleet
44:09at nearby Cape St. Vincent.
44:12Armed with this intelligence,
44:14the British had the advantage of surprise.
44:19Early the next morning,
44:21they attacked.
44:25Amid the smoke and chaos,
44:27Nelson spotted an opportunity.
44:29And he would never look back.
44:33Without waiting for orders,
44:35Nelson spun his ship round
44:36and tore into the heart of the enemy fleet.
44:40Once he was there,
44:41he drove it alongside a Spanish vessel.
44:44And roaring,
44:45Westminster Abbey,
44:46your glorious victory,
44:48he led his crew,
44:49armed with cutlasses and pistols,
44:52on to the enemy deck.
44:53He managed to capture that ship
44:57and the one next to it.
45:01Taking two enemy vessels like this
45:03was a unique achievement.
45:10Before the Battle of Cape St. Vincent,
45:13Nelson was considered just one of a gifted generation of sailors.
45:16But after,
45:18he'd marked himself out as someone exceptional,
45:21a daring leader,
45:22with confidence and abilities beyond his contemporaries.
45:27Now Nelson showed that he didn't just have a flair for combat,
45:30but also self-publicity.
45:32He immediately sought out an author
45:34called Colonel Drinkwater,
45:35who was travelling with the fleet
45:37to make a record of any fighting.
45:40He made sure that Drinkwater
45:41was well aware of his heroics.
45:44By the time he returned back to Britain,
45:46he decided to write a rather dramatic account of the battle,
45:49which he modestly called
45:51A Few Remarks Relative to Myself.
45:54A copy of this was hand-delivered to the king,
45:57and it appeared in two popular newspapers,
46:00True Britain and The Sun.
46:02Nelson was front-page news.
46:05For the Admiralty,
46:09Nelson's heroics were a godsend,
46:11some good PR to lift the morale of a war-weary nation.
46:21By the summer of 1798,
46:24Britain faced economic disaster.
46:27The war was being fought on a scale never before seen.
46:32Through its course,
46:33the government would spend a staggering £1,657 million on defence,
46:40a ten-fold increase on peacetime military expenditure,
46:44and the equivalent of over £100 billion today.
46:50Taxes had to be raised time and again.
46:53The political satirist James Gilray condemned the financial burden.
46:59In his cartoon,
47:01The Friend of the People,
47:02a tax collector is shown knocking on the door of a modest British home.
47:07Taxes, taxes, taxes,
47:09bemoans the owner.
47:10How am I to get money to pay them all?
47:13But it still wasn't enough.
47:15In the parliamentary archive in the House of Lords,
47:21there is a remarkable document revealing the government's radical response
47:25to the growing fiscal crisis.
47:27In 1799, Parliament passed an act designed to raise revenue.
47:34In typically flowery language,
47:36the preamble explains what they intended to do.
47:39It said,
47:40We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects,
47:43do voluntarily grant Your Majesty several rates and duties.
47:49It was a new tax,
47:51designed to be just a temporary measure
47:53to help pay for the war and fund the army and the navy.
47:56It was called income tax.
48:01From 1799,
48:03every British subject earning more than £60 a year
48:06was charged income tax at a rate of 10%.
48:10Here at the end of the act
48:13is the first example of a tax return,
48:16listing all the types of income to be taxed,
48:18from property, rent and employment.
48:24This document is such a fascinating reminder
48:27of the way in which this war of unprecedented cost and intensity
48:31was revolutionising British life,
48:33in industry, commerce and now here in finance.
48:37And of course, we're still living with the legacy of this act
48:40in the present day.
48:45In its first year,
48:46income tax raised £6 million towards the war effort,
48:51enough to build 100 warships.
48:57Income tax, like impressment,
48:58was highly contentious,
49:00but its impact was felt way beyond Westminster.
49:04At sea, the Royal Navy entered the most critical phase of the war
49:09in rude health, fully funded and well-manned.
49:15It was the high tide of British naval power.
49:21Dominant on the seas of Europe,
49:23the navy began a campaign of attrition
49:25designed to crush the enemy's trade and morale.
49:29From 1803, major French and Spanish ports were blockaded,
49:35encircled by the fleet's wooden walls.
49:41It was a highly effective strategy.
49:44While the British trained at sea,
49:46the enemy were trapped in harbour,
49:49impotent and immobile.
49:50Here in Cadiz, in autumn 1805,
49:59a Franco-Spanish force of 33 warships was tied up in port,
50:04its commanders desperate to break out of the navy's stranglehold.
50:11But a few miles out to sea,
50:13Admiral Nelson was waiting for them,
50:16with a fleet of 27 heavily armed warships.
50:18Aboard the flagship HMS Victory,
50:26Nelson summoned his senior officers to his cabin
50:28to discuss the battle plan,
50:31what he called the Nelson Touch.
50:35Nelson's plan was confident and aggressive,
50:38but it was also risky.
50:40He was going to divide his ships up
50:42and send them right at the heart of the enemy.
50:45This, he hoped, would break up their formation
50:47and provoke the kind of anarchic melee that he desired.
50:52He wanted his captains to use their initiative
50:54in selecting their targets,
50:56but he told them,
50:58no captain can do very wrong
50:59if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.
51:03One-on-one, he was certain that his ships would prevail.
51:10Nelson knew that he was outnumbered and outgunned,
51:12but he also knew that he commanded the finest naval weapon
51:16of the Age of Sail,
51:18a combination of men, ships, and cannon
51:21that had been honed to the point of perfection
51:24over more than 200 years.
51:27And this was the moment that Nelson was going to use that weapon
51:30to annihilate Britain's greatest enemies.
51:33On 19th October, the enemy attempted to break out of the blockade.
51:44Two days later, the British caught up with them
51:47near Cape Trafalgar.
51:50An able seaman, serving aboard HMS Victory,
51:54said the sight cheered the heart of every British sailor.
51:58He described the men around him
51:59as being like lions, anxious to be at it.
52:25The Battle of Trafalgar
52:27has seared itself into the national psyche.
52:31In the Royal Gallery at the House of Lords,
52:34a vast fresco commemorates the battle
52:36in the very heart of government.
52:40It measures almost 15 metres wide.
52:45This gigantic fresco shows the quarterdeck of HMS Victory,
52:50Nelson's flagship,
52:51at the very climax of the Battle of Trafalgar,
52:53and it's locked in single combat
52:55with the French warship, the Redutable,
52:58which you can just see in the background.
53:00The Victory and the French ship were so close together
53:02that their rigging became entangled.
53:05They couldn't part from each other.
53:06The Victory's gun crews
53:08couldn't even wheel out their cannon to their full extent.
53:10They were actually touching the hull of the French ship.
53:13Men here suffering from musket wounds
53:26and terrible jagged wounds from splinters
53:29that would have spiralled, cartwheeled through the air
53:32as cannonballs carved into the oak decks of the ship.
53:35In many ways, the first half of the Battle of Trafalgar,
53:46the forgotten half, is the blockade of Cadiz.
53:49The Spanish and French ships rotting at their moorings,
53:52their crews unable to train
53:54to go through their gunnery practice like the British.
53:57Yellow fever broke out.
53:59They had scurvy.
54:00And perhaps most of all, the depression,
54:02the malaise that came from being bottled up in port,
54:04knowing that you couldn't go out to sea
54:06because a far superior British fleet was waiting for you.
54:10In just four hours of fighting,
54:12highly drilled crews on HMS Victory
54:14fired more than 3,000 cannonballs.
54:18They fired so fast that one French sailor claimed
54:22the devil loaded their guns.
54:25The Royal Navy crews were tough veterans
54:28that had spent years sailing the Mediterranean, the Atlantic.
54:31They'd gone through these drills hundreds of times.
54:34They'd fired these guns thousands of times.
54:37They knew exactly what they were doing
54:38and they were able to keep doing their jobs
54:40in the most hideous, destructive environment imaginable.
54:46What you can see here are actually the rhythms,
54:49the discipline of the Royal Navy working
54:51despite coming under tremendous stress from enemy fire.
54:56At around 4.30pm, the cannons fell silent.
55:04Britain had secured an overwhelming victory.
55:09But as the Royal Navy celebrated,
55:12news began to spread of a terrible loss.
55:16In the very centre of the painting lies Admiral Nelson.
55:20He's just been fatally wounded by a shot fired by a sniper
55:24who was perched high in the rigging of the Redutabla.
55:27The shot had shattered his left shoulder,
55:30entered his body, cut his spinal column
55:32and is slowly filling his chest cavity with blood.
55:38The man who'd begun his naval career as a young midshipman,
55:42rowing past HMS Victory 34 years before in Chatham,
55:46was now lying mortally wounded on her oak deck.
55:50...
55:53...
55:59...
56:05...
56:11More positions where possible, set on Charlie Groove.
56:16Today, Nelson is remembered as the greatest commander in naval history.
56:21So would the consequences of his death be disastrous for Britain and her navy?
56:26Well, no.
56:28Nelson had inherited a fleet that was an unparalleled military machine,
56:33and his death had little impact on it.
56:36The powerful ships, the well-trained crews,
56:39the spirit of aggression and ambition all lived on.
56:43The commander of the Channel Fleet, Admiral Cornwallis,
56:49described the true foundations of Nelson's greatness.
56:55Everything seemed as if by enchantment to prosper under his direction, he said,
57:00but it was the effect of system, not of chance.
57:06At Trafalgar, the navy's band of brothers had paved the way
57:10for France's ultimate defeat in 1815,
57:14safeguarding Britain's independence and her identity.
57:21Thanks to the navy, Britain had decisively won the greatest war in her history
57:25and proved that no land empire, no matter how powerful or large,
57:31could ever defeat a nation that dominated the sea.
57:34The sea was the true source of wealth and power,
57:38and to control it was to control the world.
57:50And Empire of the Seas continues a week on Wednesday at 7 o'clock,
57:55next to nights, life before the World Wide Web existed, apparently,
57:59and only 20 years ago.
58:00.
58:02.
58:10.
58:11.
58:11.
58:17.
58:21.
58:22.
Recommended
57:26
|
Up next
1:26:15
27:15
20:20
42:46
47:09
1:25:53
44:00
26:06
25:43
23:08
59:00
55:05
58:04
23:10
25:12
24:41
46:21
46:04
25:36
59:02
Be the first to comment