Nelson's Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered

This is Antigua, one of the most beautiful islands in the Caribbean,

and a place that we think of today as a kind of paradise.

It's a place where people come on honeymoon,

a playground of the super rich.

It's famous for its beautiful beaches, exotic waters and tropical fruit.

But when the young naval captain Horatio Nelson came here in 1784

to serve at what was then a hugely important naval base,

he wrote to a friend, "I detest this country."

And he described that stunning harbour as an infernal hole.

'It's hard to imagine what Nelson could've found

'that was so extraordinarily unpleasant here.

'But remarkable new research now underway in Antigua

'is uncovering graphic evidence of what it was

'that turned this island, in the age of Nelson, into a kind of hell.

'As a historian studying and writing about the era of the great sailing ships,

'I've come here to find out for myself

'what a voyage to Antigua at the end of the 18th century

'would've meant for British sailors.

'August 2010 and the island of Antigua is battered by storms

'in the wake of Hurricane Earl.

'Massive rainfall sent torrents coursing down into the sea,

'splitting open channels and ravines in the hillsides and beaches.

'When the rain subsided, after several days,

'locals who went out to survey the damage

'down here on the south of the island,

'in the bay known as English Harbour,

'were confronted with an unexpected sight.'

The water backed up all in this area behind the berm here,

and when it found the path of least resistance out

it carved a channel and that channel exposed sidewalls

from which were sticking out femurs

and jaw bones, two skulls that we found, quite a lot of bones.

I think eventually we came up with 110 bones, 120 bones, something like that.

They weren't deposited straight out on the beach,

they were scattered all along the beach in both directions.

So you were just walking along, picking up pieces of human?

It was quite eerie. And looking about this high and seeing the cranium of a human being

and it's got this yellowish-brown glow to it,

you immediately know they're quite ancient.

That's the moment it hit me, and that's where the adrenaline rush comes.

"Holy cow! This is not my normal Saturday morning walk."

"What do I do with these things?"

But there were so many and there wasn't an option to rebury them here.

And the next best thing I could do was call Reg Murphy

at the Dockyard Museum and find out what do I need to do?

How do we take care of these things properly?

X marks the spot and we're going to start right here.

'Antiguan archaeologist Dr Reg Murphy

'is one of the leading historians in the Caribbean,

'and he is now preparing for an excavation of the beach.'

They'll be somewhere between two feet to five feet. So we can expect anything.

'The aim is to try and find out exactly who is buried here on the Antiguan coastline and why.

'It's part of a bigger project to reassess the colonial story of an island

'which turns out to be one of the most richly endowed

'and the least researched sites of British imperial history.'

Right along here, you can see it's a lighter sand,

then dark compost material, then beneath that, sandy again.

So we know these are the frequencies of hurricanes.

The beach is never the same. The sand is always moving.

So this is good news because it shows that there is good stratigraphy, good deposition,

which will hopefully mean intact burials deep down.

So it's in perfect condition, what I hope to see.

But now is the hard work.

'Antigua was one of a string of British possessions in the Caribbean,

'inconveniently interrupted by the occasional French island.

'Through much of the 18th century,

'the West Indies, highly valued for their lucrative commodities,

'were the scene of a sequence of colonial wars

'as the European powers of Spain, Holland, France and Britain

'jostled for ownership of the islands.

'But in the last decades of the century,

'Britain emerged as the dominant power in the region,

'thanks to the supremacy of her naval fleet.'

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,

this natural harbour was a safe haven for naval ships sheltering during the hurricane season.

The main business of the dockyard

happened just the other side of the headland over there.

For many of the naval vessels, the powerful ships of the line,

the fast frigates, the nimble cutters and sloops,

they anchored here at Galleon Beach.

Consequently, over the centuries, this stretch of sand was imprinted

with the footsteps of many thousands of sailors coming and going.

And for many, this was their first taste of the Caribbean.

But for some, it was their last.

'During the hurricane season,

'this harbour would have contained as many as 20 warships,

'vessels of the Royal Navy's Windward Island fleet.

'They sailed here from all over the empire

'and their role was to protect British trade.

'Some of them carried a grim cargo.

'Dead sailors, victims of virulent and little-understood tropical diseases.

'It seems likely that they rowed them ashore

'and buried them as quickly as they could here on the beach.

'At least, that's the theory Reg Murphy has been working on

'since the bones appeared after the hurricane.'

OK, we're looking for clues as to who the people on the beach could possibly be.

And how did they come to be on that beach?

And this is by William Brazen,

and this is the dockyard in 1754,

just when they're completing the expansion of the naval yard

to the west side, where we are now. But the interesting point is,

this is the beach where we are excavating, Freeman's Bay,

and here is Fort Charlotte, Fort Berkeley,

and here is a frigate moored right in the middle of the bay.

Just like we thought, stern to that very beach.

So if you were onboard that ship and something happened to you, you died overnight,

the closest place for burial would be that beach.

'To investigate what appears to be some kind of beach graveyard,

'Reg has put together an international team of archaeologists.'

We know a lot of this is fill,

we know a lot of it is going to be modern,

so we can move a little bit more quickly through the upper levels

and then once we hit historic deposits,

slow down and be a little more careful about what we're looking for.

'Dr Samantha Rebovich is an American historian

'working for the National Parks of Antigua.'

We're hoping that we come across some fairly intact human remains

that we can then do more testing on.

'If a burial site is located, bio-archaeologists on the team

'plan to undertake tests on skeletal remains

'to analyse diet, illnesses and physical condition of the dead.

'They also hope that the dig will help answer

'one of the more baffling questions about the sailors and soldiers on Antigua.'

And one of the historical mysteries

is why was the mortality rate so high in the West Indies?

'Unfortunately, the timeframe for this dig is very limited.'

In an ideal world, you would have as much time in the world to do archaeology,

but we're moving a bit quickly with this excavation, and for several reasons.

We are technically in hurricane season,

so there's always that idea in the back of our head

that we want to get in and get out.

You always want to move a little bit faster when you're dealing with human remains,

because you don't want to leave them exposed for very long.

So it is a bit of a trade-off

in terms of how meticulous we can be,

but at the same time, we are always very careful.

'So what were Britain and her navy doing in Antigua?'

This is what it was all about.

A fashionable and addictive stimulant at the very heart of the British and European economies,

sugar.

'The island was colonised by the English in 1632.

'And over the next 50 years, sugar was gradually established

'as the dominant and determining feature of the island's life,

'landscape, economy and culture.'

Antigua was an important part of the British Caribbean,

producing sugar for metropolitan consumption back in Britain.

That sugar was produced on large plantations

and those plantations employed the labour of enslaved people,

imported from Africa.

'Caribbean sugar was a major provider of revenue,

'both for the British and also the French exchequer.

'In fact, the largest French colony in the West Indies, Haiti,

'then known as Saint Domingue,

'produced more sugar than all the British islands put together.

'Sugar was a principal source of commercial and military rivalry between the two countries.

'And when France threatened the British West Indies

'during the American War of Independence,

'Britain immediately redeployed troops to the Caribbean,

'preferring to sacrifice America than lose control of her sugar islands.

'It's no surprise that only a few years after the end of that war,

'Nelson found himself patrolling the Caribbean with a fleet of warships.'

It's so easy to think of Nelson only in terms of his great naval battles,

the victories of the Napoleonic Wars at the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar.

But like so many of the sailors of his era, Nelson spent much of his life

and the formative years of his career in the Caribbean.

Nelson was very familiar with the West Indies and the Caribbean.

His first voyage at the age of 13

was on a merchant ship which went to the West Indies.

And he spent most of the War of American Independence

in the West Indies and on the North American station based basically in Jamaica.

He saw his first real fighting in the West Indies and Central America.

And he had his first commands in the West Indies,

he commanded two frigates and a brig during the American War of Independence in the West Indies.

So this was an area he knew very well.

'On 28th of July 1784, at the age of 28,

'Captain Nelson sailed the Boreas into English Harbour

'where he spent four long hurricane seasons.'

English Harbour in the age of Nelson

was far more than just a safe haven for passing ships.

It was the industrial epicentre of British naval power in the Caribbean.

Over there in the dockyards there were furnaces for smelting iron and boiling tar,

and the air would've been thick with burning sulphur,

brimstone, used to cleanse the inside of filthy ships.

The water would've been disgusting.

The waste from all of the industrial processes was just thrown into the sea.

And we know from archaeological excavation over where the ships were at anchor

that the seabed is literally feet thick with rubbish,

and the sailors simply threw overboard everything that they didn't need.

Think about the sewage.

When a fleet was here, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people were living on ships at anchor.

And their raw sewage went straight into the sea.

There's barely any tide here, there are no ocean currents that can come and cleanse this place.

So in the age of sail, this magnificent harbour was a cesspit.

And the ships themselves were desperately unhealthy places,

with so many people crammed into such a confined space.

And out here on the water, it's also incredibly hot.

It's a bit like being in the crater of a volcano.

And these hills stifle the wind.

Life on those ships must've been unbearable.

'But then, frankly, you were lucky to be alive.

'Tropical fevers, mostly diseases borne by mosquitoes,

'flourished across the Caribbean,

'largely as a result of the destruction of the natural ecology

'by plantation farmers.'

Malaria was a problem. Yellow fever in particular caused havoc.

Anybody serving in the British Army or in the British Navy

who discovered that they were being posted to the Caribbean

would certainly have been terrified by that prospect.

They would've been terrified

not really because of the sorts of military experiences that they might have in the Caribbean,

they would've been terrified because of the reputation the Caribbean had

as a charnel house, as a place where people died,

a place where people died of disease.

'Up above the harbour are the remnants of a large military compound,

'part of a vast defensive system of fortifications

'that surrounded the island as protection against the threat of French invasion.

'Towards the end of the first day of digging at the beach excavation site,

'Reg Murphy took me to visit the old military cemetery attached to the compound

'to look at the grave of the young wife of an officer who died

'while her husband was serving on the island.

'The inscription captures something of the fear and the misery

'of serving in this tropical outpost.'

It says, "Sacred to the memory of Harriott, the beloved wife

"of Sergeant Major TW Hipkin of HM 54th Regiment

"who fell a victim to the withering effects..."

Now, that's important. Withering effects.

"..of this climate and dysentery

"on 23rd June, 1851."

Now, that's just before this regiment left.

"Aged 33 years old. The last tribute of her sorrowing husband."

So he's buried his wife here.

He left her behind. And the funny thing is,

less than 100 officers or men were allowed to bring their wives, but she accompanied him out here.

And it's sad to see that she's still here and he moved on.

But what's important is, died of the withering effects of this climate.

When people are withering, I take it to mean they are sickly,

the heat, not just the heat, maybe the food, maybe the water.

What else is making you wither? Is it that you've been poisoned?

And then the dysentery. Well, we know that that's really efficient.

So you get a sense of her losing weight, becoming weaker, becoming sicker,

and they were certainly clear that it was the climate that was to blame.

So this is a monument, a megalith to the 54th Regiment.

They served all through the Caribbean islands.

But they lost more in Antigua than anywhere else, so the monument was erected here.

So Antigua was a more unhealthy place than other islands in the Caribbean?

It is known as the graveyard of the Englishman.

And that would've been for some serious reason.

Most other islands never acquired such an infamous label.

Diseases were killing all the troops that were sent out here.

The fact that we have got such order up here in the hills

really raises the question of why there was so much chaos down on the beach.

To me, it means one thing, epidemic.

If you have a lot of bodies you have to deal with very quickly,

suddenly the beach becomes a very fast disposable place.

'The aim of the archaeological investigation on Galleon Beach

'is to locate an intact grave that will help substantiate Reg's theory

'and provide a real identity for the bones uncovered by the hurricane.

'But as with any archaeological dig,

'you don't always get what you're looking for.

'The British were by no means the first sailors to use this harbour.

'There's evidence of human occupation on Antigua from 5,000 years ago.

'And this sheltered bay would have been a landing point

'for Caribbean tribes, known as Arawaks,

'who travelled and settled here long before the arrival of Columbus

'and European colonisation.

'Two days into the dig, Reg has yet to uncover any sailors' bones.

'But he has hit upon an Arawak midden, or rubbish dump.'

So, easy to collect, you've just come in, you're tired, you're hungry,

you grab the closest resource you can find, shellfish nearby,

you've got lunch, you've got fire pits, and we have what we think is a post hole for a building here.

So they had shelter, stay for a little while, refresh, and then they move on to another island.

What I have found is bits of a broken stone axe.

You can see it was used.

And this material, this type of rock comes from St Martin.

So they were definitely coming in, bringing materials.

The kind of thing they'd have used to crack open shells. Or would it have been sharper than that?

Cut up and repair your canoe. It would've been a lot sharper.

-OK, so more like an axe than a hammer?

-Yes, it's an axe.

-OK.

This is a scraper. It's a beautiful tool.

Re-pointing along here. It's still razor-sharp after all these years.

So a scraper is something that might have been used for butchering?

Yeah. Or for scraping meat, or for woodworking, the canoes were important to them.

What we have here is the lip of a conch shell.

As simple as it looks, you take this

and then you, it's the first phase, then you cut along here.

-It's the thinnest part. If you notice, the middle is thicker.

-Yes.

It gets really thin, you break along there,

and you sharpen this end and you have a beautiful axe.

But the interesting thing about this site, though, is in all of this we are finding...

..a European thimble. I don't think they used thimbles back then. This is a very old thimble.

It's a classic sailors' tool, they had a sailors' palm to drive big needles through canvas,

but also smaller ones to do smaller, more delicate work.

Repair the uniforms, sew up your buttons, and all sorts of things.

So this is an amazing artefact.

'It may seem like an innocuous clue,

'but for me, that thimble immediately takes you onboard

'one of those frigates lying out in the bay.'

A tiny thimble might seem like a strange object to associate with a sailor on a massive warship.

Yes, ships like these were built for war.

The hull is three feet thick to protect the sailors from enemy shot

and bristling with cannon.

But they were also the sailors' home.

The ship's weather deck would've been a hive of activity.

Men cleaning the deck, exercising at gun drill

and queuing to go aloft to trim the sails.

The very best of those men would've carried a thimble in their pocket.

And what a home it must've been.

Hundreds of men living together on a gun deck like this

with very little access to fresh air or light,

in a space that is shared with livestock.

And then you get sent to the Caribbean,

where the heat from the tropics turns the fresh food rancid

and the water green with slime.

The further forward you come in a ship,

the more cramped and dark it becomes.

But it's up here, beyond the hammocks, underneath the forecastle,

where a sailor might find a little space for himself

in a gap between watches to write a letter home

or to mend his tattered clothes,

perhaps with a tiny copper thimble.

After months of living in these conditions,

you can just imagine how desperate people would have been

to get off their ship and feel dry land beneath their feet.

'However, shore leave was a rare commodity.

'Desertion was extremely common,

'so most sailors who arrived in English Harbour

'would hardly ever have left their ship, except under strict controls.

'Unless, of course, they were sick, or dead.

'At the dig site, there's an air of disappointment.

'Reg's excavation, although full of interesting prehistoric artefacts,

'failed to unearth any of the hoped-for sailors' remains.

'However, right at the end of the day,

'there have been some significant developments in the second trench.

'Fragments of a body are beginning to emerge.

'Professor Tamara Varney from Lakehead University, Ontario,

'is one of the senior archaeologists on the dig.'

We're just packing up for the day,

and so we back-filled a little bit of the site, of the unit,

so that there's not bones going to be unprotected overnight.

So what we found in this corner is we found a foot

and it's in very bad shape so we've put a very light cover over it.

-And what's under the mysterious yellow tray?

-This?

Well, this is a very scientific hiding device,

which hides this very poorly-preserved skull.

-Wow!

-And this is probably not related to that leg bone there.

-Because it's on a different layer, is that how you worked that out?

-Yeah.

And what we have removed from there, though,

because we don't want them to go missing because they're so exciting,

are some buttons that Paula found.

These two buttons, the first one that we found

was found in the screening of some of the sand we removed from the site.

And the second one we found up against the shinbone.

And they are very exciting, they're lovely buttons.

The back is brass and the front has some mother-of-pearl inlay.

So that suggests quite a high status burial?

It could suggest that this individual that they were found with

was of higher rank than some of the other sailors.

What's really exciting with these buttons is that they are a little more ornate than the buttons

we've typically found at military sites in the past.

And with this mother-of-pearl inlay,

it's just a lot more elaborate than a plain, home-made bone button or a shell button,

which were typically found on undergarments or pants and shirts,

and so that leads us to believe that there's somebody of higher rank

than the other sailors that we've uncovered at this site

and at a nearby Royal Navy hospital cemetery.

'So who did these buttons belong to?

'They're not from a naval uniform.

'Perhaps they belonged to a gentleman passenger,

'perhaps a planter off to visit his estate.

'What's remarkable is that so much of the landscape and buildings

'that their owner would have seen if he had made it on shore alive

'are still being used today, just as they would have been 250 years ago.

'One extraordinary relic from the 18th century that's still beautifully preserved

'is this enormous water-collecting tank.'

There are no rivers or lakes on Antigua.

All of the fresh water they used to drink, to cook, to clean, had to come from the sky.

Water pours down this slope into vast collection chambers underneath.

The sailors would then roll their barrels up here and fill them up

and take them back to the ships.

'But what's really remarkable is the graffiti that survives on the surrounding walls.'

It's a magnificent resource because handwriting is so personal,

you get a real sense of the people who were here.

Here we've got John Webb, who's chosen to carve his name deep, using very straight lines,

and a very clear 'O' there.

Further up, we've got James Gates, who's used a much more cursive hand.

The ship Roebuck here,

another date, 1743 here.

EG, 1740.

Down here, IDWH and 1748.

It's almost like what you would do on the walls in a prison,

these men are putting their marks here, they're saying that they've been here,

they're saying that they've endured.

They're saying that they've survived.

'After three days' work at the excavation unit,

'a miraculously complete figure has appeared in the sand.

'Matt Brown is a bio-archaeologist from City University, New York.'

We managed to uncover the skeleton that we identified earlier today, or yesterday.

Look at where the hands are, they're actually laid over the pelvis area.

-He looks very neat, doesn't he?

-Yes. Yes.

And from what I understand, sometimes they'd wrap them in their hammocks,

so that helped to keep that individual in line.

That makes sense. You could almost see the shape of him being squashed together by his hammock.

His head's slightly raised, hunched forwards.

Can you give me a rough idea of what period we're looking at?

As far as dating the individual skeleton,

you'd likely want to have some kind of artefacts, that kind of thing,

that would go along with the skeleton and give you some idea of a date.

But as of right now, we don't have any kind of evidence of any kind of artefacts here.

So the mother-of-pearl buttons that we found at the end of the day yesterday,

-they're actually from a different layer.

-From a different layer and from a different individual.

-So probably someone completely different.

-Yeah.

-So it emphasises the complexity of this site.

-Yeah. Definitely.

So, Cory, what's going on up this end?

What we're doing is we're starting to uncover

a part of the mandible here.

You can see it's just the teeth which are still intact in some areas right here.

It's incredibly vivid, isn't it? When the teeth emerge, it makes it so much more human almost.

Absolutely. And you can see right away that there's a bit of dental wear on it,

so you can see, from normal use.

It's really nice to see that we have something there that can be added to

all the other ways in which you can age, or at the least use different age composites to look at.

We've come to the end of three really hard days' digging.

And there still seems so much more that we need to do,

and as always with archaeology, there is a limited timeframe within which to do it.

We've pulled all of these skeletal remains from a trench no more than two metres square,

and it's only the second trench that we've dug.

There's more material coming up all the time.

We simply don't know what's going to come next.

And such a wealth of material from such a confined space

really makes you think about the complexity of the human story that played itself out here.

'Naval life in the tropics was undoubtedly arduous and dangerous.

'But what was the island itself like?

'30 minutes' drive inland, another archaeological dig is underway,

'excavating one of Antigua's first and largest sugar plantations.

'British sailors who came here in the 18th century

'were well aware that the island was wholly given over

'to the brutal business of industrial-scale sugar cultivation.

'The whole island was a sea of cane.

'And if anyone lived a hellish existence here,

'it was undoubtedly the hundreds of thousands of slaves

'who were sent here from West Africa.

'Betty's Hope plantation was founded in the mid-1600s

'by one of the island's earliest colonisers, Sir Christopher Codrington.

'The archaeological investigation of the Codrington plantation

'is headed by Californian professor Georgia Fox.

'Working with a team of students, she's currently excavating the main planter's house.'

The scale of the industry, the plantation at one time was about 700 acres,

and, of course, there was a whole cadre of people working here,

the managers, the overseers, the servants, and about 400 slaves.

So it was the huge operation, it was an industrial complex.

'We escaped from the dust and sun

'into one of the old sugar-crushing windmills.'

So what is the purpose of the excavation at the moment?

Well, this is the first plantation house to be excavated on Antigua.

So it's important for local island history,

but there are so few plantations that have been fully excavated in the Caribbean region,

there still is a lot of work to be done to understand how plantations functioned.

Historians write about plantations and plantation life,

but the archaeology fleshes out those details

through the excavation, the material culture, the buildings, the artefacts.

So they might tell a slightly different story, we don't know. The artefacts don't lie.

We have a whole complex of support buildings to the north of the great house

which included a servants' quarters, a doctor's office,

the overseer's office, and other buildings which we're looking for now,

and then we're also looking for the original slave housing,

the pre-emancipation slave housing.

And would that slave housing have been nearby,

or was that in a slightly separate location?

Yes, it would've been nearby, because the planters always wanted to keep an eye on their slaves.

But at the end of the day, we're also trying to look at

not just the plantation as a system,

but trying to understand the lives of the people who lived and worked here,

whether they were the owners or the slaves.

And so we want to have a more holistic picture of plantation life.

'Central to the work at Betty's Hope

'is a search for more detailed archaeological information about slave life.

'A few shards of rough slave pottery have been unearthed.

'But there is precious little solid evidence of their homes, culture or experiences.

'On an island where the majority of the population are descended from slaves,

'a more detailed and forensic understanding of slavery on the plantations is essential

'in helping future generations of Antiguans

'develop a proper understanding of the darkest part of their national story.'

We've had a phone call from the guys excavating down on the beach

and they started to uncover another skeleton in the same trench.

So we're heading back to English Harbour as quickly as we can.

It's a bit of a jumble, as you can tell.

We've got a lot of different bones popping up in places that are not anatomically correct.

So we've got some fibula here,

another fibula down here.

Bits of pelvis, pelvic bone over here.

And we are finding a lot of coffin nails, though, which is very interesting,

So I just found one here.

We've got one here, two over here.

One is actually in a jumble of pelvic bones,

and this is the individual that we're pretty confident

was associated with the buttons that we found the other day, those fancy buttons.

So in total, how many buttons have we found?

We found a total of five buttons, which is pretty exciting.

And they're kind of across the individual,

but as I said, the individual is pretty jumbled up

so we can't really infer too much about the placement of the buttons at the moment.

'Each bone from the site is carefully removed and wrapped

'to be taken for analysis by Tamara in the project workshop.'

Since I've been working in Antigua for the last 15 years,

I've been specifically interested in the British Navy in Antigua

and how they lived here and how they adapted to life in the Caribbean.

They're dealing with the heat, they're dealing with lack of water,

sometimes lack of rations, that sort of thing.

'Central to Tamara's analysis is a detailed examination of diet,

'as revealed by the mineral content in each individual set of bones.'

I also do what we call archaeological bone chemistry.

And so I investigate what they were eating over their lifetimes

and if that diet changed once they got to Antigua.

One, two, three.

Initially, my work was basically looking at elemental components of diet,

which are later transformed into body tissues.

And because you essentially are what you eat,

you can get a very generalised look at what people were eating.

People coming from Britain would've been eating a very different diet

than people living in the Caribbean or slaves being transported from Africa.

And in that way, I can separate the Europeans from the Africans.

'Working on bone samples taken during an earlier dig

'at the site of the cemetery of the naval hospital in English Harbour,

'Tamara was able to confirm that Europeans

and Africans were buried alongside one another,

'contradicting some of the notions of racial segregation

'in the 18th century Caribbean.'

One of the interesting things about the naval hospital cemetery

that I dug a few years back

is that there there are people of African and European ancestry,

and you can really see how when the Navy brought sailors and soldiers here

that they didn't live as long as the Africans.

It's astonishing how young many of the sailors and soldiers are,

when we estimate their age of death from their bones.

Seeing these bones being taken out of the ground with such delicacy and care really makes you wonder

whether the bodies were put into the ground in the first place with any ceremony and dignity.

These men were husbands, they were sons, there were fathers.

Were their families ever told what had become of them?

Were they ever told where they'd been buried?

The longer I spend at this dig, it's clear that this is far more than just a scientific exercise.

There's a human tragedy here that we need to understand.

'The first skeleton from the dig has now been laid out in Tamara's workshop for preliminary analysis.'

So, Tamara, what can you tell us about him?

Well, I can tell you that he was in his late 30s when he died,

and he's male,

and he was about four-11, five foot in stature.

So what are you actually specifically looking at when you're gauging the age of a skeleton?

We're looking to see how rugged it is and how much porosity is there

and how dense the surfaces are.

And on a much younger skeleton, what does it look like? Is it shiny?

It would be much more rugged and a little more coarse.

-So this is very much the first stage in the way you plan to go forward.

-Yes.

-What do you do next?

What I'll do next is examine each one of the bones a little more carefully

to see if there's any subtle traces that indicate something about health.

Can you get indication of disease being a cause of death?

You know, it's very rare to be able to find an indicator of the cause of death,

cos cause of death is usually from soft tissue cause.

What we might be able to deduce

is if he had a traumatic death

or if it was a disease which left a lot of indication on the bone,

which I can already say is probably not.

It's probably an acute cause of death.

'The main work on this skeleton will take place back in her lab in Canada

'where Tamara is keen to pursue a new line of research,

'looking at the phenomenon of lead poisoning amongst the Caribbean sailors.'

One of the historical questions has been what was the...

what led to the high mortality rate

of the Royal Navy and military in the West Indies?

And one of the historical, sort of, hypotheses

is a combination of alcoholism and lead poisoning,

with lead poisoning coming from the alcohol.

The most important by-product of sugar production is rum.

And rum, after sugar, is the most important export

of the sugar islands.

Rum is an extremely important part of local life on the islands,

and planters were renowned for their high living and their drunken antics and behaviour.

'Rum was also regularly doled out to the slaves.

'But the greatest consumers of rum on Antigua

'would have been the sailors and soldiers

'for whom it was the anaesthetic of choice.'

This is a very old bottle and would've likely held rum.

We know that every sailor got his traditional pint a day served in two batches, mixed with lime and water.

So the grog was a very traditional naval drink and they had to have it.

In fact, we find an old poster advertising for 200,000 gallons of rum in Antigua

to be purchased to supply the military forces in the eastern Caribbean islands.

Also, remember, they're surrounded by plantations.

It's cheap rum, new rum especially,

the first distillation was really cheap.

I think this rum was probably very poisonous.

All the piping, all the tubes, all the worms that the rum has been distilled in is made of lead.

We know from the records that they drank a lot of it in addition to their rations.

They're probably taking themselves to an early grave with lead poisoning,

and of course, once you get sick, you get sent to the hospital

to treat the dry bellyache, the flux that they all complained about,

probably caused by lead poisoning from the rum.

And again, they bleed you, the only treatment they had was bleeding, blistering and mercury.

That doesn't really help the lead in your body if that is the problem.

There's something a little more to it than the yellow fever, malaria.

I think rum was seriously poisonous.

'It's this lead content in the rum and its absorption into the sailors' bones

'that has been the subject of Tamara Varney's most recent research.'

I've been working with some new technology called a synchrotron,

which is basically a large atom accelerator that creates brilliant, brilliant light,

which allows us to take our analysis to levels

which was previously not possible.

And with that we can look at,

not just the amount of lead that has been accumulated into bone over a lifetime,

we can actually look at the distribution of that lead inside the bone,

and if it's been incorporated into the bone,

as opposed to just being a contaminant from the burial environment.

'Tamara's research indicates that, thanks to the rum,

'young British men were heavily poisoned with lead while they were in Antigua.

'This would have compromised their immune systems,

'making them especially vulnerable to whatever tropical diseases they encountered.

'It's another fragment of information

'that only adds to the grim picture of naval life

'that sailors, like those now appearing in increasing numbers

'in the excavation trenches, would have endured.'

So, Sam, we've got another extraordinary jumble of bones here. Can you tell me what's going on?

-Sure. Well, right now, you're looking at at least six individuals.

-Six?

-Yes.

-Crikey!

So that's six more from what we've already discovered?

-Yes.

-All in this one small area?

-Yes.

-So, right here we've got an individual, and you're seeing two lower leg bones coming out.

-Yep.

Down here further,

we've got two feet, and they are beautifully preserved.

They're just poking out of the sand, they'd just been chucked on top of each other.

Yeah, they're just, you know, someone was definitely lying down with their feet up in the air.

And with these, we've got another one of our fancy buttons and a coffin nail.

Here we've got what looks like a very well-preserved skeleton coming out.

We're very excited about this one. This is burial number four.

And you can see we've got two patellas here.

Oh, very neatly placed together.

Yes, absolutely, and you've got a bit of pelvis,

and the spine coming up, so this looks like it's going to be a really great find.

So we're going to work on this area next

and see where it goes from there.

'Amongst this collection of bones

'was an unexpected and disconcerting discovery.'

So what we're looking at with those individuals that you saw in the trench

is we're looking at adults and some sub-adults,

or people that are juveniles and children.

-So there were kids in there?

-Yes, there certainly were.

And on ship, there were children

and young boys that were apprenticed on the ships.

Do you get a sense of what age we're talking about here?

One is under 14, and one is definitely under 16,

and you can tell that from which growth plates are not fused.

But we haven't really had a good look at them as yet.

-So there's more to come, but we think there are children buried amongst fully-grown adults?

-Yes.

'We know that boys were commonly employed on ships as servants,

'as top men in the rigging,

'and as powder monkeys during battle.

'But these juvenile skeletons are still a poignant discovery

'and one that further contributes to the identification of the bodies as sailors.

'What's going to be much harder to pin down

'is the ship that they came from.

'Thanks to naval records, we know that one vessel,

'whose crew seems unlikely to have buried any of its number on Galleon Beach,

'was Horatio Nelson's HMS Boreas.'

Nelson did actually quite well

during this three or four years in the Boreas.

He suffered very few casualties through fevers.

And scurvy wasn't a problem for him

because one of the upsides of being in ports so often

was of course you did have ready access to fresh provisions,

water, fruit, vegetables, these sorts of things,

which became much more problematic when you were on deep sea journeys.

So the scurvy problem wasn't such a great one,

and he managed to avoid the fevers.

It was a difficult command

and Nelson did try to bring to it

elements that would make it more tolerable.

One of the things he used to persuade sailors to do

was to involve themselves in amateur dramatics.

They used to devise plays.

They used to dress up and perform these plays

and Nelson and the officers would go and watch them.

And it was interesting to see men capering about in women's dresses

and going through this type of performance.

He also encouraged dancing and juggling and various other activities.

'The main reason for the health of Nelson's crew

'was probably not the dancing

'but the relative peace in the Caribbean in the mid 1780s.

'The worst outbreaks of disease occurred during times of war

'and it was during the years immediately after Nelson was in Antigua,

'in the 1790s, that the island witnessed the most intense period of militarisation.

'Thanks to Britain's war with revolutionary France,

'Antigua became the most heavily fortified island in the region

'and a garrison for up to 5,000 troops.'

The arrival of large numbers of Europeans

into Caribbean port towns,

which is exactly what happens when you get battalions of troops arriving from Europe,

Europeans without any previous exposure to yellow fever

who've built up no immunity to tropical fevers,

all arriving at one time in one place,

create the perfect conditions for fever to tear through their ranks.

'And this is exactly what happened in the early 1790s.

'The revolution in France created turmoil in her colonies in the Caribbean

'and France's and most lucrative possession,

'Saint Domingue, witnessed a violent and successful slave-led revolution.

'French and British troops poured into the Caribbean as the conflict spread,

'although many of them never made it into battle.

'By far the majority of the ensuing casualties

'were caused by tropical fever.'

English Harbour was notorious for disease

and became known as one of the most unhealthy spots in the Caribbean.

But it's likely that many of the sailors buried on Galleon Beach

were dead before they even arrived in Antigua.

An extraordinary account survives of one ship that arrived in May 1793,

HMS Experiment.

'HMS Experiment was a war ship that had recently visited the port of St George in Grenada.

'During her stay there, she appears to have been infected

'by a ship newly arrived from West Africa

'with a virulent strain of yellow fever

'known as Bulam fever.

'Shortly after contagion, the Experiment was instructed by the admiralty

'to assume duties patrolling the waters around St Kitts and Antigua.

'I managed to track down the naval documents

'relating to HMS Experiment.'

The journal of the proceedings of His Majesty's ship Experiment,

kept by her captain, Simon Miller.

She was sailing off Dominique, she'd left Grenada,

and she's 42 miles to the north of Dominique when things start to go wrong.

He notes here, "Company very sickly."

The next day, after some entries about the day-to-day life of the ship,

again he's put, "Ship's company very sickly."

You can tell he's a man who's starting to get really worried about what's happening.

The day after that, "Departed this life, Richard Ellis, at 11. Committed his body to the deep."

These entries continue for a number of days.

"Ship's company sickly" again, that was just a day after they buried Richard Ellis at sea.

Then something really interesting happens.

Discipline starts to break down on board.

The captain has to punish Daniel Denton with 12 lashes for contempt.

And the next day,

he's punished another sailor called Jonathan Monroe,

this time with 36 lashes for theft.

They're still sailing from Dominique towards Antigua.

And then once again, on the same day, "11, departed this life,

"Thomas Woollingly, at midnight committed his body to the deep."

And the very next day, he has to punish Henry Wood

with 12 lashes for neglect.

By the time the Experiment arrived at the mouth of English Harbour,

she was like a ghost ship,

the few surviving men on board her incapable of bringing her in.

One of the defensive strengths of this harbour

is the narrowness of the inlet,

but it made the whole process of actually getting in incredibly difficult

for these massive and cumbersome sailing warships.

To help them, they'd run lines ashore

and wrap them around strong points like this, it's a cannon sunk into the stone.

Now, this was far beyond anything that the crew of the Experiment could cope with,

so they made the signal for assistance

and a crew from the frigate Sole Bay rowed out to help.

It was an act of suicide.

Every single member of that rescue party was infected and died.

'The muster books of the Experiment and the Sole Bay, 'the lists of men on board,

'paint a vivid picture of the rapid demise of the ships' crews.'

Richard Warren, discharged, dead.

Charles Norbrun, discharged, dead.

Thomas Rouston,

Robert Tozer,

Francis Juno,

William Sutherland,

Jonathan Leach,

George Cook,

William Tiller,

Sam Dyer,

Robert Giles, all dead.

Here, too, we have the boatswain, who was Thomas Carrington,

he's recorded as having two servants,

so these would've been two boys learning the trade of the boatswain.

Jonathan Burnett, discharged, dead on 21st October.

And another boatswain servant, David Richards,

he died on exactly the same day.

It just makes you wonder if these are the boys

that are buried on Galleon Beach.

'We'll never know exactly who the bones now being excavated belonged to,

'but over 200 sailors from the Experiment,

'the Sole Bay and other infected ships

'died in the Bulam fever epidemic in English Harbour

'towards the end of 1793.

'And it's more than likely that the bodies of Francis Juno,

'Robert Tozer, Richard Warren,

'Jonathan Burnett and all the others

'were hurriedly disposed of here on the sand dunes.

'The full extent of this beach burial site, however, is unclear.

'And for now, it will have to remain a subject for speculation

'as this dig is now beginning to wind up.'

Yesterday we found those two perfect feet just sticking out of the sand. What happened to them?

We decided, based on the amount of time we have left for this dig,

that it's better to leave this individual in place,

cos we actually found that this individual extended further

and we'd actually have to cut this all the way back

to remove or to expose it, at least.

So when we leave this trench, there's still going to be more archaeological material left.

Yeah, there'll still be individuals here, and it's better that way.

You don't want to take individuals out if you don't have the space or the time to do the analysis.

Do you think we've recovered sufficient material

to be able to tell the story adequately well?

I think, depending on the analyses that are going to be run,

as far as sailors, you have a large span,

a large range of individuals on these boats coming in.

If they are dying of disease, it's not just affecting older individuals,

it's affecting all age groups.

'Time has run out for the archaeologists.

'They're leaving at least two unexcavated skeletons in the ground

'and they are now pretty confident that there are many more,

'perhaps hundreds of bodies buried in this sand dune.

'For the benefit of future archaeologists returning to this fascinating site,

'the team are leaving a message behind,

'a simple clue that this small patch has already been dug.

'We know that some of the sailors that came to Antigua

'in the 18th century did enjoy the warm seas,

'the fresh fish, the Caribbean colours, the fruit, the rum.

'But the brutality of naval life,

'the overwhelming heat and the constant fear of disease

'on this polluted, heavily-militarised,

'factory-farmed slave island

'undoubtedly turned Antigua into a kind of hell

'for most of the men and women who ended up here.

'But what about Nelson?

'He had no qualms about the business of the island.

'As a senior officer, his comforts and living conditions

'were far easier than they were for his crew.

'He didn't suffer from sickness until the end of his Caribbean posting.

'So what made him quite so miserable in English Harbour?

'The answer was boredom, frustration and a girl called Mary Moutray.

'English Harbour was a tiny settlement,

'but the resident British Commodore, Sir John Moutray,

'had an attractive wife 30 years his junior.'

Moutray's house, wishfully known as Windsor,

was up here on the hill behind the dockyard

where you can feel the breeze coming in from the open sea.

And it was at Windsor where Nelson and his good friend, Cuthbert Collingwood,

found a measure of respite from their naval duties

in the company of Moutray's beguiling young wife.

'Unfortunately, it was a short-lived friendship.'

Mary left Antigua with her husband

in the late spring of '85.

So Nelson only knew her for, really, between August and May.

But it actually almost destroyed him.

He talks in his letters about her being the most amiable person

that he had ever known.

He was absolutely lost.

And the first time he went back to English Harbour after she left,

he walked up the hill to the house

and he was so distraught at the sight of this place

where, as he said, "I've spent more happy hours here than anywhere else."

'He wrote to his brother, "This country appears now intolerable,

"my dear friend being absent.

"It is barren indeed.

"English Harbour, I hate the sight of."

'Given Nelson's feelings about this place,

'it's ironic that the dockyard at English Harbour

'is now universally known as Nelson's Dockyard.

'But I think it's an important reminder of the historical significance of this site.'

So, if you think about the bigger picture, how important is the work

that you guys are doing for Antigua?

I think it was, for example, at one point in time, on the frontier of the empire.

This is where... They had to protect the resources here.

It was valuable because of the sugar.

Once the sugar was gone and they had no value, they were forgotten.

Emancipation, slaves were freed, and we are a small little marginal country of the Eastern Caribbean.

For us, we are still trying to learn about our past.

What's written, the history is his story, the tale told by the winner.

What do we know about our history, really, from an Antiguan perspective?

If you go back to the history books, who wrote our history?

There are no official historians here.

So we pick up all these accounts written all over the world.

And archaeology, to me, is like, we shake the old historical tree and see what drops out of it,

and in a lot of cases, we find it's not exactly quite right.

For example, look at that building across the hill up here.

That was apparently built for King William IV when he was here in 1787.

It wasn't built until 1805.

Thanks to archaeology, we figured that out.

So archaeology tests these things

and we are now looking at it from our perspective as Antiguans

and from what's actually physically there.

'The archaeological work of Reg and his colleagues is important

'not just for Antigua but also for Britain.

'It's helping piece together the far from complete history

'of the relationship between our two Atlantic islands.

'In particular, the excavation of Galleon Beach

'brings into focus a dark and forgotten chapter of that story

'and provides a poignant moment of commemoration

'for the hundreds, probably thousands of young sailors

'of the British Navy who died in Antigua

'not in battle but in their hammocks,

'hastily disposed of at the time

'and forgotten ever since.'

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