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The Mariner’s Mirror Podcast — History
The Mariner’s Mirror Podcast

The world’s No.1 podcast dedicated to all of maritime and naval history. With one foot in the present and one in the past we bring you the most exciting and interesting current maritime projects worldwide: including excavations of shipwrecks, the restoration of historic ships, sailing classic yachts and tall ships, unprecedented behind the scenes access to exhibitions, museums and archives worldwide, primary sources and accounts that bring the maritime past alive as never before. From the Society for Nautical Research, and the Lloyds Register Foundation. Presented by Dr Sam Willis.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Copyright: © The Society for Nautical Research and the Lloyds Register Foundation

Latest Episodes:

The Channel with Charlie Connelly Mar 29, 2021

Show notes

This week Dr Sam Willis talks with bestselling writer and award winning broadcaster Charlie Connelly about the fascinating history of the English Channel. Is it a bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange, a challenge to be conquered? It is all those and so much more: The Channel is many different things to many different people, and in our new age of Brexit it remains as important as it ever has been. It is still the busiest shipping lane in the world and hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings each year. Charlie entertains us with an extraordinary mix of characters: geniuses, cheats, dreamers, charlatans, visionaries, eccentrics and naked balloonists, whose stories have all made the English Channel the cultural icon it is today.

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How to Remember Captain Cook Mar 23, 2021

Show notes

Dr Sam Willis explores the fascinating problems posed by Britain's complex imperial history by thinking in particular about Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century British explorer and navigator famous for his three voyages to Australia and the Pacific (1768-1779). Sam talks with with Kevin Sumption – the Director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum. They range widely over issues raised when planning for the 250th anniversary in April 2020 of Cook's arrival in Australia. Why are multiple perspectives important in a narrative like Cook's? And how did they go about including First People's narratives of Cook's arrival? Sam and Kevin also explore two intriguing items in the museum's collection: A bronze bust of Captain Cook with his head covered by a black balaklava made by the Australian artist Jason Wing, which challenges the colonial history of Australia from an Aboriginal perspective, and an eighteenth-century japanned tea tray by the artist Edward Bird depicting the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779.

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'Titanic in Miniature' - The Wonderful ss Shieldhall Mar 15, 2021

Show notes

Dr Sam Willis speaks with Graham Mackenzie, chief engineer of SS Shieldhall, one of the most fascinating ships in the UK's historic fleet. The Shieldhall is unique as a time capsule providing a working example of steamship machinery that operated ships in the oceans of the world from the 1870s for a century. In particular her triple-expansion steam engines, scotch boilers and steam-assisted steering gear is almost identical to that which was used in the Titanic - only in miniature. The episode is designed to give important (and entertaining) historical context to an animation we have created showing exactly how the boilers and steam engine of the Shieldhall work.

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Navigation Masterclass: Secrets of the South Pacific Wave Pilots Mar 09, 2021

Show notes

Dr Sam Willis speaks with John Huth, the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard who works mainly in the field of experimental particle physics. He is in fact a member of the international team that discovered the Higgs Boson particle. He has also, however, written a rather wonderful book on navigation – The Lost Art of Finding Our Way – in which he contends that even the most confused of us can improve our navigational understanding by paying closer attention to the world around us. Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. And the question John wants an answer to is this - what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way? We’re exploring some of those themes today by looking at the wave pilots of the Marshall Islands who read the patterns of swell in the ocean to orientate themselves in their unique archipelago.

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Sea Shanties and The Wellerman. Mar 01, 2021

Show notes

In response to the new global Social Media phenomenon of sea shanties sparked by the Scottish postman Nathan Evans' rendition of The Wellerman, Dr Sam Willis speaks to Professor Gerry Smyth, author of a new book published by the British Library: 'Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas'. They discuss how shanties were collected and annotated, how they were inspired by changing commercial conditions at sea in the nineteenth century and how each shanty has a fascinating history of its own. In particular they look at John Kanaka, South Australia, Roll Alabama Roll and the Drunken Sailor - which, did you know, came from an ancient Irish clan march...

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Steamboat Excursions on the Hudson for Chinese Americans, 1883. Feb 24, 2021

Show notes

This week we tackle the important history of race relations in America – through the lense of riverboat excursions for the Chinese community of New York in the 19th century. Dr Sam Willis speaks with Dr Marika Plater, who studies what low-income New Yorkers did for fun, outdoors, during the nineteenth century. Her work has shown how the most vulnerable New Yorkers used their limited free time to escape to environments that contrasted with their daily conditions. She follows the city's workers as they walked to public parks in their neighbourhoods, took ferries and streetcars to beer gardens and pleasure grounds, and boarded steamboats headed to waterfront excursion groves. This episode focusses on steamboat excursions: what happened and how it was reported in the hostile political atmosphere of the era of Chinese exclusion in America.

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Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 3 - The Spanish View Feb 14, 2021

Show notes

This third episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers a Spanish perspective on this most extraordinary battle. We hear from Dr. Agustín Guimerá and Dr. Pablo Ortega-del-Cerro, both from the Spanish National Research Centre in Madrid. Dr Guimerá offers an analysis of the battle from the Spanish perspective and Dr Ortega-del-Cerro reads out an extract from the logbook of the Principe de Asturias, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Moreno, and certainly the best Spanish accounts of the battle. Both contributions are presented in English and then repeated in Spanish.

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Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 2 - The Analysis Feb 14, 2021

Show notes

This second episode in our special series on the Battle of Cape St Vincent offers an analysis of the battle from two of the world's leading Nelson scholars: John Sugden and Marianne Czisnik. Dr Sam Willis speaks to them both and explores the realities of battle at sea in the age of sail. This battle is famous because of the extraordinary event that occurred when Horatio Nelson boarded one Spanish ship from another he had already captured. But how should we see this event as historians? To what extent was Nelson acting independently? Was he breaking his orders and if so was he right to do so? How did the battle affect the war? This episode gets to the very foundations of the nature of seapower in the Age of Sail.

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Great Sea Fights: Cape St Vincent (1797) Part 1 - The Events Feb 13, 2021

Show notes

This episode published on the anniversary of the Battle of St Vincent in 1797 launches the second of our Great Sea Fights series. Dr Sam Willis explores the events of Valentines Day 1797 when Admiral John Jervis daringly cut through a much larger Spanish fleet escorting a mercury convoy home from South America. This was the second major action of the Revolutionary War against France and the first against Spain, then France's allies. The events of the battle remain unique in naval history. The Spanish lost four ships of the line, two of them personally boarded and captured by Horatio Nelson. The events were the first stage in nelson becoming the most famous Englishman on earth and a naval hero like no other.

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The Most Important Book in Maritime History? Lloyd's Register Feb 08, 2021

Show notes

Dr Sam Willis speaks with Charlotte Ward to explore the remarkable history of Lloyd's Register, perhaps the most influential book for the maritime world ever to be published. It all begins in a coffee house run by Edward Lloyd, and a book, called the Register of Ships, first published in 1764, to give underwriters and merchants an idea of the condition of the vessels they insured and chartered. Maritime history from that moment on was fundamentally changed, particularly in relation to safety at sea. The Lloyd's Register Foundation now curates an immense archive of material relating to global maritime history.

But we begin this episode as ever by catching up on our sailors on the whaleship swan of Hull, trapped in the ice off the west coast of Greenland in the new year of 1837. Each week we have been reading a little from their logbook – which is now kept in the archives of the national maritime Museum in London. They have been trapped now for almost four months. Life has been terrifying and they are entering a period of intense cold. Even the most minor of events is a major occurrence for these men perched on the cliff edge of their existence.

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