The Golden Ocean Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World

On a summer's day in 1690,

a Sussex merchant called Samuel Jeake

looked out towards the Channel from his home in Rye.

What he saw filled him with dread.

English warships fleeing pell-mell across the horizon.

The country had been at war with France for two years and people in this town

knew that just a few days before the Royal Navy had been badly defeated

25 miles up the coast off Beachy Head.

So the sight of those English ships on the run could mean just one thing.

The French were coming.

With the Navy beaten, the English could do nothing to prevent a French invasion.

The result was inevitable.

Church bells rang out in panic.

Jeake wrote about what happened next in his diary.

"A terrible alarm in the town of Rye, the French is coming to land.

"Their intentions were to fire and plunder the town."

In desperation, people seized hold of their valuables and attempted to flee the town.

This gate was the only way in and out of Rye

and soon this narrow street was clogged with people clinging to their possessions.

Their panic increased by the terrible sight

that was now smouldering down on the beach below the town.

If ever there was a vision to terrify the people of Rye

it must have been that of England's first line of defence in flames.

Lying here on the beach within sight of Rye Harbour was the Anne, a 70-gun Royal Naval warship

which had been terribly damaged in the fighting at Beachy Head.

100 of her crew have been killed or wounded.

Unable to sail on any further, her captain ran her aground on this very spot.

And then fearing that the French would capture her, he set her alight.

Her remains are under my feet now.

Sometimes when these sands shift

she re-emerges like a ghostly reminder of a forgotten moment in our history.

A moment of terror, chaos and defeat.

Rule, Britannia? I don't think so.

In 1690, there could have been no doubt in anyone's mind -

France ruled the waves and England was at her mercy.

For the English, this disaster was a turning point.

They had no choice.

If they were to survive they would have to build

a navy capable of resisting the greatest power in Europe.

But to do that would require a national effort unlike anything that had been seen before.

It would transform the country, revolutionise agriculture,

lay the foundations of industry and, most of all, unleash the power of money.

15 sail, we're on midships.

The battle of Beachy Head in 1690

still ranks as one of the Royal Navy's most humiliating defeats.

But then, in 1693, came an even more terrible loss.

England was a nation of traders utterly dependent on the wealth

generated by her huge merchant fleet.

A fleet which, unless it was properly protected, was terribly vulnerable to enemy attack.

On the 30th May 1693, 400 merchant ships gathered in a huge fleet

and set out from England to the town of Smyrna in the Eastern Mediterranean.

This giant trade flotilla was described as the richest that ever went for Turkey.

On board was a year's worth of trade - wool, tin, spices and silver -

the lifeblood of the economy, which had been accumulating in port

for fear of being captured or destroyed at sea.

The convoy was such a vital national interest that it was given an escort of 102 warships.

The convoy moved down the Channel and out into the Atlantic.

But this route took them past Brest, home of the French Navy,

which is where the accompanying English admirals were expecting trouble.

So as they passed without incident and entered the Bay of Biscay,

the English escort ships

turned round and headed home, thinking the convoy would be safe.

This was a disastrous decision.

The French had found out about the convoy and the time of its departure

and they were preparing ships further down here to intercept it.

As the convey reached Lagos Bay on the southern tip of Portugal,

they found 93 French warships waiting for them.

Almost 100 merchant vessels, carrying a year's worth of trade,

were captured or destroyed.

When news of the disaster reached England,

it sent the business community into a paroxysm of despair.

From his house in Rye, the merchant Samuel Jeake wrote in his diary,

"News of the miscarriage of the Turkey fleet has put a great stop to trade."

And this was an understatement.

The losses suffered by the Smyrna convey were as bad as those in the Great Fire of London of 1666.

And there followed a wave of bankruptcies among insurers and merchants.

The secretary to King William III said

that he had never seen His Majesty so sensibly affected with any accident as this.

This commercial disaster, coming just three year's after

one of the Navy's worst military disasters served as a brutal reminder.

For England, a powerful navy was not a luxury, it was a central pillar of state.

Without it the country was doomed.

William desperately needed more ships and to build them, money.

But the Treasury was empty.

Then in 1694, a completely new kind of financial institution was created in London.

One offering a unique investment opportunity.

Anyone willing to put in at least £25 would receive a guaranteed return of 8%.

The savvy merchant from Rye, Samuel Jeake, thought this sounded like a chance

that was too good to miss and he instructed his agent in London to invest £200.

But then he decided to gather together all his spare cash and head into London himself.

He wrote in his diary, "I made myself ready for my journey

"carrying the £100 with me, and at 7pm I took horse for London."

That was a 15-hour ride, so it's fair to suggest that by the time he met up with his agent

the following afternoon in the city, Mr Jeake would have been quite saddle sore.

So keen was Jeake to take advantage of the 8% interest being offered

that he even scraped together a further £200 while he was here in London,

to take his total stake up to £500.

£500 was a lot of money for anyone, even Jeake,

but it turns out it was a pretty good investment.

That exciting new financial institution

that launched in 1694 still exists.

It's called the Bank of England.

The funds required to build a new navy were vast,

but the Bank of England delivered.

In just 12 days it raised £1.2 million.

And on August 1st 1694, it made its first loan to the government.

The national debt was born and the Royal Navy was saved.

England would build now and pay later.

This is a list of all the original investors in the Bank of England,

known as subscribers at the time.

At the top of each page here is the date and their names

neatly written out here with their occupations next to them.

Right here at the bottom of this page is Samuel Jeake

of Rye in Sussex, a merchant.

This is a remarkable document

because it allows us to get a kind of investor profile of this extraordinary new venture.

At the very top of the list, appropriately enough,

are their majesties.

The King and Queen, who invested £10,000.

But there are lots of other people from the very pinnacle of society as well.

Men like Edward Russell, the First Lord of the Admiralty, invested £2,000.

But it wasn't just the bigwigs that subscribed.

There are nine people listed here as being in domestic service.

And here I found Thomas Day of London,

who's a blacksmith and he's invested £100.

While over the page, Joseph Cake is a bricklayer.

The National Debt created a virtuous circle of funding.

The government borrowed money from the people which it spent on the Navy,

which protected trade, which brought in taxes, which allowed the government to pay the people back.

It was a financial revolution which, uniquely, would allow England to spend its way to greatness.

More than half of that first loan, over £600,000, went on building up the Navy.

And that huge injection of cash, the first of many,

had a transforming affect on whole areas of the economy all over the country.

The Northeast of England soon had Europe's largest ironworks,

thanks to the Navy's spending spree and one enterprising industrialist called Ambrose Crowley.

Iron ran in Ambrose Crowley's blood.

His father and grandfather had both had a steady business in the Midlands in the iron trade.

But young Ambrose Crowley the third wanted more.

He wanted to expand and he realised that to do so he'd have to up sticks

and move closer to his most precious raw material - not iron but coal.

And that's why he ended up here on the south bank of the Tyne.

He set up a series of blacksmith's shops up there about a mile away

and brought the goods down here to the river where they could be shipped south.

South was where England's shipyards were embarked on a massive building programme.

And it was this that made Ambrose Crowley's ironworks so successful because wooden ships

need lots of iron nails and in those days, every single one had to be made by hand.

Blacksmith Mark Fearn still uses exactly the same techniques.

This is the traditional set-up, is it?

It is. The double-acting bellows,

and every time you press that down, it's feeding air into the fire.

-And how hot is that, do you reckon?

-About 1,300 C.

1,300 degrees Centigrade.

It's hard to believe that a packet of nails that we buy

in the shop were actually made individually like this.

Well, isn't it remarkable?

Right, so here we go.

And then we're gonna be ready to put it in the heading tool.

-Then you see that.

-Wow!

And then beat a head onto it.

Into the quench bucket and that should...

That's not a bad nail. Well, do you reckon I could have a go?

I reckon you could.

There you go, a piece of iron, Dan.

-Thanks, a piece of iron.

-Yes. OK.

-Get ready for one nail.

-Yes, indeed.

-So first of all I'll give it some of this.

-OK, how about that?

-That's looking good.

'By 1700, the industrialist Ambrose Crowley was providing 40% of all the Navy's iron orders.

'He created a factory system, with hundreds of workshops like this one,

'and built iron mills and steel furnaces alongside.

'It turned what had been a cottage industry into mass production.'

-Into the heading tool.

-Right.

'After the financial revolution,

'here were the first shoots of the industrial revolution, and driving it all was the Navy.'

In only a decade, English dockyards built over a 150 new naval ships,

but since England was at war many of these ships were, of course, destroyed or captured by the enemy.

Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, the English Navy numbered 176 warships.

'And each of them contained over five tonnes of iron nails.'

-My first nail.

-And you should be able to knock that out.

Look at that. In fact, it's just sliding out.

-Hey.

-How good is that?

-Look at that!

Congratulations. Your first nail.

That's fantastic.

I can imagine that going through a piece of planking

onto the hull of a ship.

Of course, the Navy didn't just need nails.

Each new ship typically contained the wood of more than 2,000 trees.

Over 7,000 square yards of canvas and 10 miles of rope, weighing 19 tonnes.

The sailing ship was the most complex man-made machine on earth,

a glorious piece of wooden architecture driven entirely by the wind.

But it relied most of all on manpower.

In ten years, the number of men serving in the Royal Navy quadrupled to over 44,000.

That's more people than lived in any city outside London,

and feeding them all transformed England's agriculture.

The Navy was the single largest consumer of produce in the country

and it awarded huge contracts to a handful of suppliers

who bought up vast quantities of food from small farmers all over the country.

Agricultural output went up by a third,

but because this was a competitive market, prices stayed low.

Once again, the Navy's insatiable demand was driving the economy forward.

It had become the engine of English commerce, a national enterprise.

It took the work of thousands on land to build the ships of the Royal Navy and keep them supplied.

But once at sea, survival depended most of all on the skill,

fortitude and raw strength of the crew.

And to fuel all those men required by the Navy was actually quite a generous allocation of food.

The central part of the diet was, of course, meat, salted so it survived for long ocean voyages.

This is the weekly ration.

Six pounds of meat - four pounds of beef, two pounds of pork.

Now the beef was typically eaten in some kind of stew with suet, apparently.

HE COUGHS

Very salty.

If you think salty boot leather, that's about right.

Perhaps the most famous part of the sailing Navy's diet

was the key staple, standing in for bread,

the ship's biscuit. A subtle combination, flour, water and salt

baked for hours until it was rock hard.

It's like a particularly disgusting and tasteless version of rye bread.

An added complication was that this became a home of little weevils,

almost like tiny worms that used to live in them and feed off them.

Now, some people like to bang them until the weevils fell out and you could get rid of them.

Others used to go into a dark corner and simply eat the biscuit, weevils and all.

What this diet does show is that the Navy's high command understood

just how much physical effort was required to sail a ship effectively.

Sailors were constantly climbing up and down masts and adjusting sails,

with no protection from the elements,

and in battle there were cannons weighing three tonnes each to manoeuvre.

Little wonder, then, that the Navy's rations provided sailors with 5,000 calories a day.

That's twice the recommended intake for an active man today.

Oh, this feels a little bit precarious up here.

It takes a special kind of head for heights

to spend your time as a top man, up in the, er, up in the mastheads.

And from up here you also get a much better view, so they are the ones with the sharpest eyesight.

They could spot enemy sails when they saw them on the horizon.

One bad thing about being up here, though, is that the movement on deck is magnified quite a lot.

Up here we go through quite a big angle when you rock around.

'Sailors in this period were a breed apart.

'The average age would have been about 27,

'but they'd have looked much older, their faces lined and weathered from a lifetime at sea.

'Their hands would have been callused and scarred

'and their vocabulary was almost indecipherable to landlubbers,

'a mixture of swearing and nautical terms.'

Line down.

'Most noticeable of all was their peculiar rolling gait,

'more suitable for the pitching deck of a ship than walking on dry land.

'And all of this made them very recognisable to the naval press gangs who patrolled the ports,

'looking for experienced recruits.'

That was quite tiring and the amazing part

about that process is that every time the wind changes in strength

you've gotta go back up there and alter the sails.

There are some written accounts that tell us what life was like for ordinary sailors.

One of the most remarkable is by Edward Barlow.

He first went to sea at the age of 13.

He came ashore for the last time in 1703, at the age of 61,

a total of 48 years at sea, which was an amazing feat of survival.

Throughout that time he kept an incredible illustrated diary, and I've got it here

and it paints his like at sea in the most vivid terms and leaves you in no doubt as to how tough it was.

He says, "Often we were called up before we had slept half an hour

"and forced to go into the maintop or foretop to take in our top source half awake and half asleep.

"There we must haul and pull to make fast the sail, seeing nothing but air above us

"and the water beneath us and that's so raging as though every wave would make a grave for us."

The Royal Navy, rebuilt and renewed with borrowed money,

was able to avenge the defeats of the early 1690s.

It even captured Gibraltar and Minorca,

two important bases in the Mediterranean.

The English Navy was now a global weapon,

its ships opening up the wealth of the world to the merchant fleet thousands of miles across the ocean.

And no part of the world was more important

than the one that had first fired the dreams of England's mariners.

The island of Jamaica was the largest English colony in the Caribbean,

the most hotly contested and dangerous region in the world.

In the autumn of 1708, a 23-year-old naval captain called Edward Vernon

arrived here in Port Royal, the nerve centre of the Navy's operations.

Vernon's father was an MP and he disapproved of his son's career choice,

but such was the draw of the sea on the minds of young men in that period

that Edward had always had his heart set on joining the Royal Navy.

He was just the kind of aggressive, bold commander that would thrive in an environment like this,

where courage and initiative were key requirements.

Vernon served in the Caribbean for four years,

during which time the country was at war with France and Spain.

It was the job of men like him to defend the merchant fleet on which England's prosperity depended.

The Caribbean was the centre of world trade because of what was grown here.

So this is raw sugar cane juice, made from pressing the sugar cane.

I'm going to have a bit of a taste.

Well, that's disgusting. That just tastes of mud, grass and sugar,

which is not wholly surprising because that's basically what it is.

But when this is boiled down and crystallised you get sugar,

imported into Europe in vast quantities to liven up the rather dull European diet.

Added to things like pastries and also other imports like tea and coffee.

Over here we have another drink made from sugar cane, and that, of course, is rum.

Much more recognisable. Becomes synonymous with the Navy in this period.

Favoured drink of sailors.

That's much more drinkable, but it's still a bit rough.

This became synonymous with Edward Vernon

because Vernon returns out here to the Caribbean as a senior commander.

And he discovers that rum has become a staple among the Royal Navy ships' companies out here.

They drink half a pint per man per day, so they're in danger of getting quite drunk

and falling out the masts and rigging when they go aloft.

So he insists that the rum ration is mixed with water.

Now because his nickname is "Old Grogam",

thanks to a coat he used to wear made out of material called Grogam,

this new mixture of rum and water that's introduced on his watch is known as "grog".

Sugar cane was cultivated by slaves, as was the tobacco which was grown in the American colonies.

The slave trade was a lucrative sideline.

But the English did not have a monopoly on all these commodities.

The Caribbean was a pressure cooker of competing nations, all jostling over a few small islands.

The Dutch, the French and the Spanish were all here,

each of them greedily protecting their own interests,

but also looking for opportunities to conquer new territories.

And then there were the pirates.

It's not hard to see what attracted those men to the Caribbean.

It was the job of officers like Edward Vernon to hunt them down and provide a violent deterrent.

Many of those pirates were of course state-sponsored, known as privateers,

because they carried licences issued to them by the French and Spanish governments

to prey on British shipping.

Not that the British government was above using the profit motive either.

In 1708, the year that Vernon arrived out here in the Caribbean, Parliament passed the Prize Act.

This gave the Captain, offices and ship's company of any Royal Navy ship

a portion of the value of any enemy vessel they captured.

At a time when a Royal Navy captain typically earned about £20 a month

and an ordinary seaman less than a pound a month,

these prizes represented a significant salary bonus.

While he was out here, Vernon took full advantage.

He captured several prizes.

One was a Spanish ship laden with tobacco, another was French with 400 slaves on board.

He brought them back in here to Port Royal to have them valued,

then, as captain, he was entitled to a quarter share.

It was the most brutal form of incentive.

Patriotism was now bolstered by prize money.

Vernon embodied the naval revolution, rich, confident and supremely professional.

He was the product of a navy and a country that had come a long way

since those dark early years of King William's reign in the 1690s.

After 25 years of almost continual warfare,

the strategy laid down by William III finally paid off.

France and Spain couldn't match the vast resources being poured into

the Royal Navy, and after a series of defeats in 1713 they made peace.

On this side of the Channel, it felt like time to celebrate.

This is the painted hall of the Old Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich.

And the magnificent ceiling tells you everything you need to know

about how the British saw themselves at the start of the 18th century.

And I use the world British deliberately, because after 1707

England and Scotland were joined together by Act of Union to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.

And this is the image of that new nation -

rich, confident, and filled with a sense of destiny.

The central character is William, sitting in all his majesty,

bringing peace and harmony to Europe.

And if you notice, he's sitting on the defeated figure

of the King of France, the terrible Louis 14th.

The overwhelming theme is of course naval, and at the end of the painting here

you see this vast British man-of-war towering out of the water

with its cannons run out ready for battle.

The decks of the ship are crowded with

the spoils of victory - stuff, booty stolen off the French and Spanish.

But fascinatingly, the ship is resting on the shoulders

of a figure representing the City of London,

all that financial wealth that she generated.

And she in turn is above figures representing the great rivers of England.

Isis and a man representing the Thames,

and even the Tyne bringing an offering of coal.

The message couldn't be clearer.

This vast, awesome military machine

is totally dependent on the wealth created by the City of London.

In 1726, just as the finishing touches were being put to this hall, the French philosopher Voltaire

visited Britain and was very struck by what he described as the grandeur of state.

He wrote, "Trade raised by insensible degrees

"the naval power, which gives the English a superiority over the seas.

"And they are now masters of very near 200 ships of war.

"Posterity will very probably be surprised to hear

"that an island whose only produce is a little lead,

"tin, fuller's earth and coarse wool

"should become so powerful by its commerce."

Voltaire saw instantly that commerce and naval power were linked.

It was a formula for success that was tied up with the creation of

"the Bank of England, and now Britain was reaping the rewards."

Britain in the 1720s was a changed country.

Thanks to the Navy, she had resisted the combined might

of the French and Spanish alliance.

But the coming of peace brought an end to 25 years of naval expansion.

With no enemies to engage at sea, a generation of aggressive naval commanders took their fight

to Westminster, where they argued the British ship of state

should stick to its natural course...war.

In 1722, the country held a general election

and former commodore Edward Vernon became MP for Penryn in Cornwall.

Vernon was a fiery patriot

and what really got him going was the Caribbean.

During his 21 years in the Royal Navy,

he'd served out there twice, the second time as Commander in Chief of his Majesty's ships in Jamaica.

And while there he'd seen ports stuffed with ships

carrying the produce of Spain's American empire

and he'd seen how the Spanish Navy were all too keen to run away from a fight.

Vernon was convinced that this was the soft underbelly

of the Spanish empire.

"Attack their settlements in America," he wrote,

"and Spain will fall."

And if Spain fell that would have dire consequences

for her close ally, France,

who, of course, was Britain's greatest rival.

So actually Britain would get two victories for the price of one.

It all sounds like a great idea.

But there was a problem.

During the 1720s and '30s, the government's policy was to avoid war.

But at the same time, British traders in the Caribbean

were aggressively encroaching into the Spanish empire,

and they had the backing of merchants and former naval officers at home.

Then in 1738 something extraordinary happened.

A merchant captain called Robert Jenkins appeared here before Parliament.

He brought with him a bundle of cotton wool.

Opening it, he produced his own severed ear.

The story that Jenkins told Parliament that day

was political dynamite.

He said the ear has been chopped off by a Spanish naval officer

while he'd been minding his own business peaceably off the coast of Cuba.

It unleashed a wave of xenophobia through Parliament and the public,

and no-one's voice was louder than Edward Vernon.

Jenkins' mutilation was Vernon's gain.

He strode into the Admiralty and demanded to be given command

in the Caribbean, and Vernon got his wish.

30 years after he first sailed to Jamaica, Edward Vernon returned, this time as a vice admiral.

He arrived in Port Royal on 12th October 1739 and began his preparations.

A week later, the British Government finally made up its mind and declared war against Spain.

Vernon was now given official license "to commit all hostilities

"against the Spaniards in such manner as you shall judge most proper."

Britain's belligerent naval officers and her merchant class had got their war,

the War of Jenkins' Ear.

And it began when Vernon launched an attack

on the Spanish colonial base at Porto Bello.

On November 21st, Vernon sailed into Porto Bello

with six Royal Navy warships.

They opened up a massive bombardment against the Spanish defenders.

The lead ship fired 400 shots in just 25 minutes.

The Spanish were powerless to resist, partly because much of their gunpowder was damp.

When Vernon's men stormed ashore,

only 40 of the original 300 Spaniards were able to resist.

They surrendered within 24 hours.

Britain rejoiced.

The Navy had delivered on its promise, projecting British force

thousands of miles away from home, and Admiral Vernon,

the scourge of Spain, was a hero, heir to Drake and the embodiment of a new imperial mission.

A Scottish poet, James Thomson, really caught the national mood of celebration

by penning a poem that became wildly popular.

It contained the lines, "To thee belongs the rural reign

"and thy cities shall with commerce shine."

Now, in case you haven't guessed what it is yet, a few lines later comes,

"Rule, Britannia! Rule the waves, Britons never will be slaves."

These words have become part of our cultural DNA -

liberty, commerce and mastery of the seas all rolled inextricably together.

It was a defining moment in the creation of Britishness.

Buoyed by his success, Vernon decided to attack Cartagena,

the largest and richest city in Spanish America.

He took a massive force of 8,500 troops and 124 ships.

The public at home anticipated another easy victory,

but Vernon had over-reached himself.

The attack was an uncoordinated disaster and soon stalled.

Exposed to the extremes of the Caribbean climate

and running low on water, the British were killed in horrifying numbers.

Not by the Spanish, but by disease.

Worse still, Vernon was out of range of reinforcements,

so after almost six weeks of fighting he was forced to withdraw.

Cartagena was a wake-up call to a nation drunk on patriotism.

There were limits, after all, to what the Navy could achieve.

The problem wasn't so much ships and men, it was organisation.

If Britain wants to realise her dream of global domination,

then the Navy's internal structures - running things like logistics and strategic thinking -

had to be of the same quality as her awesomely powerful ships and her tough sailors.

The man who would take on that challenge was another veteran of the Caribbean, Captain George Anson.

Following Vernon's victory at Porto Bello,

Anson had been ordered to take a squadron of six warships to attack the Spanish in the Pacific.

But his mission quickly turned into a nightmare.

Anson's route may look like the trail of a drunken spider,

but as he attempted to round Cape Horn,

his squadron was so battered by storms, that he lost half his ships

and after so long at sea a third of his men had succumbed to scurvy,

typhus and dysentery.

Yet by the time he arrived back here in Britain in 1744, he'd become a national hero.

Why? Because on his way home, as he passed the Philippines,

he'd managed to capture a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Senora de Covadonga.

And in her hold was over 1,000 kilos of virgin silver

and more than one million pieces of eight, solid silver coins.

She was one of the most valuable prizes ever captured by a British ship.

The public had a new hero to cheer and the treasure was paraded

in 32 wagons through the streets of London.

To cap it all off, just six months later, at the age of 47,

Anson was appointed to the Board of the Admiralty.

George Anson arrived here just after Christmas 1744 with a reputation as a man of action.

And he was shocked by the bureaucratic lethargy he found.

The organisation needed a shake-up from top to bottom.

So this is it - the Admiralty boardroom.

The beating heart of Anson's Navy.

I tell you what, it feels like a long way

from the pitching quarterdeck of a man-of-war going round Cape Horn.

In a way, of course, Anson's experiences on that epic circumnavigation

had prepared him well for one of these seats at this table.

On that voyage he hadn't just been commander of a naval squadron, he'd had to become a shipwright,

a teacher, a judge, even a diplomat.

And of course he'd seen the terrible effects of diseases like scurvy at first hand.

Anson was the most experienced sailor in the Navy.

He was the perfect man to lead a complete overhaul of the service.

Incredible as it may sound,

at the time the Navy had no formal system of rank. It didn't even have a uniform.

Anson introduced both.

This is him in full dress.

He also made the Navy more of a meritocracy.

Officers were to be promoted on the basis of ability instead of time served.

Anson literally re-wrote the rule book of the Royal Navy, so-called Articles of War.

This was partly in response to a manpower shortage.

Increasing numbers of inexperienced men were being recruited as sailors.

But he also wanted to stiffen the resolve of his officer corp.

From now on the penalty for negligence, disaffection or cowardice would be death.

Iron discipline and organisation would be the keys to success in Anson's Navy.

Anson was not prepared to rely on the natural talent of a few good men.

He wanted to ensure that the correct mindset and skills were perpetuated throughout the Navy.

He was institutionalising the qualities needed to guarantee victory

and he was doing it with a clear enemy in mind.

Over the previous three decades, France had been re-building her Navy and massively expanding her trade

and her empire in places like North America and India.

By the middle of the century, the two great rivals, Britain and France, were evenly matched.

They're relationship was a powder keg of competing interests.

It was only a matter of time before someone lit the fuse.

On the 8th June 1755, a French squadron was heading for Canada when,

through the murk of a North Atlantic morning, they caught sight of Royal Naval ships.

As the two fleets converged, a French captain shouted across to his opposite number on the British ship.

"Are we at peace or at war?"

The words came back, "At peace, at peace."

But it was followed seconds later by a crashing broadside.

The British Admiral Edward Boscawen had loaded all his cannon with two cannonballs

and the French ships were pulverised.

After this naked act of aggression, a formal declaration of war was an inevitability.

The Seven Years War, as it became known, was also the first world war.

Wherever British or French flags flew, from North America to the Caribbean, West Africa to India,

the two sides launched themselves at each other.

But perhaps surprisingly, the first real test for the Navy

came in defending their own base in the Mediterranean.

In the spring of 1756, Admiral John Byng set sail from England.

He was to take a squadron of 13 warships

to protect the island of Minorca.

But by the time he arrived, he found he French had already landed

and had the British garrison under siege from land and sea.

Despite enjoying a small advantage in terms of the number of ships,

Byng decided to risk a full scale battle and retreated to Gibraltar.

This meant the French captured Minorca.

Back in Britain, the news of the loss of such an important naval base

in the Mediterranean was greeted with outrage.

Byng was ordered back to England to meet his fate.

He was court marshalled, according to the new Articles of War,

and found guilty of failing to do his utmost to take or destroy the enemy's ships.

The sentence was death.

On the 14th March 1757, Admiral John Byng was executed

on the quarterdeck of his own ship.

He'd been allowed to direct his own firing squad.

When he was ready for them to fire, he dropped a handkerchief.

Once again, the great French philosopher Voltaire put it most succinctly.

"In this country," he wrote, "it is wise to kill an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others."

Well, it worked.

From then on, Royal Naval officers were aggressive to a fault.

Relentless aggression became a hallmark of the Royal Navy,

a psychological weapon just as important as the quality of its ships and guns.

But victory in this war would require more than just aggression.

The Navy needed a strategy.

Back at the Admiralty, the First Lord, Anson,

was wrestling with the challenges of fighting war on this global scale.

Even though British naval expenditure was twice that of France,

there still weren't enough ships to send in sufficient numbers to all the different theatres of war.

And so instead Anson seized on a very simple idea.

It had first been conceived by Admiral Edward Vernon in a previous war.

Now, Vernon's idea was keeping a fleet of battle ships here to

the south-west of the British Isles.

Here they could keep an eye on the French naval base at Brest,

blockading the French ships in there. But also protect the trade coming back in here

from North America and the Caribbean, and up here from the Mediterranean.

But there was one key problem.

Any fleet of ships being kept at sea for that long

would inevitably come up against the two deadliest enemies of the sailor,

malnutrition and disease.

18th-century naval rations were based around salted meat and sea biscuits.

Any food that couldn't be dried or salted would quickly rot.

So a balanced diet was almost impossible, and that's where the problems began.

'Even on the Navy's most modern warship, maintaining food supplies,

'vittling, as it's known, is still a prime consideration.

'On HMS Daring, it's the responsibility of Petty Officer Neil Mogridge.'

Come through this way.

What's in here?

This is the main freezer compartment.

Right. Ooh, it's freezing.

This gets to about minus 22 in here, so quite cold.

I can see some frozen chips down there. Is everything chips?

No, no, we keep your basic meats on board.

Chicken, minced beef you can see down here,

stuff like gammon, bacon, sausages.

It's literally everything you go down the supermarket for you can pretty much find down here.

So if we just steamed off into the horizon now, how many days can we last for with a full hold of food?

What we call endurance on this ship is a maximum of 90 days.

So the ship can actually stay at sea and sustain itself for 90 days

on a balanced diet for the ship's company.

But that must represent quite a lot of money, so what's a full hold cost?

You're probably looking on a maximum endurance probably between £150,000 to £200,000 worth of food on board.

So how much is that per sailor per day?

At the moment we get a massive £2.31 to feed per man per day.

Keeping the crews well fed was the greatest challenge Admiral Anson faced

back in the 1750s as he tried maintain his western squadron at sea.

If this has been an 18th-century ship, within a few weeks of leaving harbour

these sailors would be reduced to eating

rock-hard stale biscuits crawling with weevils, and water polluted with algae and bacteria.

Within about six weeks typically, diseases like dysentery, typhus and scurvy would spread.

No-one knew what caused these diseases,

but Anson did know that fresh produce seemed to prevent them.

Therefore in order for the western squadron to become an effective weapon

they had to work out a proper way of re-vittling it.

This was the challenge that Anson set to the man he placed in command

of the western squadron, the appropriately named Admiral Edward Hawke.

Hawke had over 20 years of command experience in the Navy and had earned a reputation

for great tactical skill and single-minded aggression.

He was the personification of the new Navy.

He was given 30 ships and 14,000 men.

His orders were to position his squadron

just outside the French naval base at Brest and to stay there.

Realising the implications of this, Hawke set up a supply chain from Plymouth to deliver

fresh fruit and vegetables and even live cattle directly to his squadron, ship to ship.

This beat scurvy for the first time, allowing Hawke to stay at sea almost indefinitely.

It was a feat unimaginable 80 years before.

With the threat of disease eliminated, Hawke could concentrate on his mission

and that was maintaining such a strong presence outside the French Naval base

that their fleet would not dare to leave.

It was called close blockade and it was the first time in history

it had ever been tried successfully on this scale.

From May to November 1759, Hawke bottled up the French fleet in its harbour.

It was a massive achievement and it had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war

and all of it was done without Hawke's big battleships firing a shot in anger.

Not only was the French navy rendered utterly powerless,

their land forces in America and India were cut off from vital supplies and reinforcements.

And as French forces around the world began to capitulate,

in Britain the church bells rang in celebration.

It became known as the annus mirabilis, the year of wonders.

First to fall was Guadaloupe, the jewel in France's Caribbean crown.

Then Quebec, capital of her vast North American empire, was captured by the British.

At sea, the Gibraltar Squadron attacked and destroyed

the French Mediterranean fleet off the coast of Portugal.

While in the east, the Royal Navy chased the French

out of the Indian Ocean, allowing the British Army to achieve victory on land.

It was the greatest year in British military history and, being Brits,

they turned it into a year of wild rejoicing.

One author, Horace Walpole,

wrote that the church bells were "threadbare with the ringing of victories".

But, across the Channel, the French has one card left to play.

King Louis XV, with his empire in ruins, his trade destroyed and his Treasury empty,

ordered his Brest fleet to collect an army and head to sea to invade Britain.

His Admiral, Conflans, hoped to avoid the Royal Navy,

but if they did meet he promised, "I will fight them with all possible glory."

The French navy's opportunity came in November,

when autumn gales scattered the British ships that were blockading Brest.

Immediately, the French admiral, Conflans, took to sea.

He headed south to pick up a fleet of ships with soldiers embarked and ready to launch an invasion.

Admiral Hawke wasted no time in pursuing him,

sensing an opportunity for the decisive clash he craved.

He caught up with the French here in Quiberon Bay.

That reef there, with the rollers crashing onto it

and all the white water around it, is the reason the French thought they'd be safe

because they were coming into this dangerous bay between two reefs.

As you can see from the chart, there was almost an impenetrable barrier of rocks, islands, and reefs.

I've never seen Quiberon Bay before and it's absolutely fascinating.

These incredibly jagged reefs here are absolutely terrifying, terrifying for me,

but terrifying for the British ships who had no charts of this area.

The British ships were charging into an unknown bay with the wind blowing on shore on a November twilight.

I've only got about half my sails up today because it's so windy,

and if you put any more up it risks ripping fittings out the deck and doing huge damage to the ship.

Only that incredible aggression of the kind that had been bred in the Royal Navy over the past decade

and reinforced by the execution of Byng,

only that incredible aggression would have driven those men in here.

And on that November night there was a full gale blowing from that direction.

Hawke himself was so keen to get to grips with the French,

particularly the French Admiral, the French flagship, his opposite number.

His captain warned him, he said it's too dangerous, it's too dark and we can't go in after those Frenchmen.

Hawke said, "Your duty was to tell me that it's not safe,

"but your duty is also to obey my orders and lay me alongside that French flagship."

Hawke was not gonna make the same mistake that Byng had made

and he was not gonna let these French get away.

After six months of tedious blockading,

he now had his chance to destroy the flower of the French fleet.

He came alongside and he waited so close that his men could reach out and touch the French ship

with their hands and he fired a giant broadside into them.

Tonnes of lead pounding into a French ship at point blank range.

The wood shattered, sending splinters a yard long cartwheeling through the air,

scything people down, and soon the sea was covered in wreckage, masts,

survivors clinging to the masts, dead bodies, a scene of total anarchy.

The French lost five ships and 2,500 men.

The British only lost two ships.

The battle fought in these waters is one of the most decisive in British history.

It annihilated French naval power and it removed any chance France had of getting back her colonies.

The Royal Navy, in this storm-tossed bay,

fought and won a battle for global supremacy.

The story of Britain's transformation inside 80 years is a remarkable one.

In 1690, England had been the sick man of Europe, broke and completely at the mercy of the French Navy.

Now in 1759, the situation was completely reversed.

Now, for the first time in history, one nation dominated the world's oceans.

Britannia really did rule the waves.

Behind the vanguard of its now formidable naval forces,

Britain had become a commercial powerhouse, boosted by an explosion in credit and overseas trade.

General salute.

Present...arms!

At the same time, mastery of the sea had helped secure

the first footholds of empire around the globe.

The Navy had delivered victory and Britain was prosperous, afloat on a golden ocean.

THEY CHEER

But away from all the celebrations something else was going on, unnoticed by most.

In 1690, England had been part of an alliance of smaller nations.

Together they had resisted the continental ambitions of the French King Louis XIV and they'd survived.

But by 1759, what the British couldn't understand

was that the rest of Europe now regarded them as as great a threat to liberty

as Louis had been 80 years before.

Britannia was triumphant but alone.

Next time, how the Navy forged an empire that became the envy

of the age, fuelling a ferocious conflict with her old enemy, France,

and transforming one British commander into a national icon.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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