Home Waters to High Seas Shipwrecks: Britain's Sunken History

We're all familiar with the story of how Britain conquered the sea...

CANNONS BOOM

..a story that rings with glorious naval victory

and acts of heroism which helped build a huge empire.

But there's a less well known maritime phenomenon

that has shaped our history, our destiny and our national character -

the shipwreck, the sailor's ultimate nightmare,

so terrifying, but so much a part of the price paid

for ruling the high seas,

and once so common an occurrence

that it's always been lodged deep in our psychological make-up.

As an historian, this has always fascinated me.

'I grew up with dramatic tales of ships dashed on the rocks

'and their crews lost at sea.'

As a child, I saw these as just wonderful yarns

to stir the imagination,

yet shipwrecks changed the course of our history,

and without them, it's unlikely we'd be the same nation we are today.

'In this series, I will uncover stories of wrecks

'in far-flung, exotic seas,

'that reveal Britain's rise as an imperial power.

'But my journey starts on our own coastline.'

These charts are simply littered with thousands of shipwrecks.

Yes, we built the biggest maritime empire

the world had ever seen, but we did so from an island

which is surrounded by some of the most dangerous waters in the world.

The combination of geography and global outreach

would make Britain more prone to shipwrecks

than practically anywhere else,

something that first became apparent 500 years ago,

when the Tudor navy began to flex its muscles

at a time when King Henry VIII

could only dream of ruling a maritime empire.

Starting in the 16th century,

I'll show how one of the largest mass shipwrecks in history

propelled us on our global adventure,

and how remote disasters at sea

would inspire some of the most memorable literature and art.

Join me for the story of the shipwreck

and the extraordinary role it has played

in the shaping of Britain's history.

Outlook for the following 24 hours, westerly...

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency in Dover

keeps watch over the English Channel,

one of the most congested and potentially deadly shipping routes in the world.

North Foreland to Selsey Bill, 24-hour forecast,

westerly or southwesterly, veering northerly for a time,

three or four, occasionally five in the east...

'I'm going to one infamous spot off the south coast,

'where the remains lie of over 2,000 ships.'

Over there, off the coast of Kent, are the Goodwin Sands,

and it seems like the most innocuous stretch of coastline you can imagine.

But this place is a graveyard.

Under these waters lies the largest concentration of shipwrecks

anywhere in the world.

'The Goodwin Sands has terrified sailors since the 16th century.

'It's even mentioned in Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice

'as a place where the carcasses of many a sunken ship lie buried.

'Full of navigational hazards,

'the treacherous Goodwin Sands is the final resting place

'of a host of wrecked vessels,

'from Elizabethan galleons to U-boats.'

Many of these old historic wrecks have been located by the Alert,

a rapid-intervention vessel which pinpoints the precise location

of shipwrecks in the English Channel.

We're tracking up the eastern edge of the Goodwin Sands,

trying to find the wrecks that are marked up on these screens here.

And there are one, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,

in just a small area of sea.

But we're hoping one of these wrecks is going to appear over there.

-What have we got over here?

-This is a multibeam echosounder.

A standard echosounder would look straight beneath the ship.

You'd just know what was underneath your keel. This is looking out

at 75 degrees either side of the vessel,

so we got a 360-degree view of the sea bed,

so we'll get a picture of what's happening down there

to determine whether the wreck is a danger.

'The Alert continues to patrol these waters

'because historic wrecks are liable to break up

'amidst the shifting sea bed and tides,

'becoming a danger to shipping in this very busy trade route.'

If we cross a wreck, what's that going to look like on that screen?

You're going to see some disturbances on the screen.

Imagine if you're in a room, and you shine a torch on a box.

You get a shadow behind the box in a dark room.

So we're looking for the shadow.

-Oh, something's coming up now.

-The wreck.

We're going over the wreck now.

There's a really, really big disturbance in this picture here.

It's unmistakeably something just lying on the sea bed.

This is an old wreck, so we don't know what it is.

The shape of the shadows reveals a wreck

that has begun to break up on the sea bed,

with its keel lying in two parts.

'We don't know the name of this vessel,

'but it could be part of one of the largest mass shipwrecks

'ever recorded.'

In November 1703,

a massive storm tore across the south coast,

destroying everything in its wake in a maelstrom of chaos...

..which spawned wind speeds of over 140 miles per hour.

The only bona fide hurricane to ever hit our shores

inspired writer Daniel Defoe to pen a famous journalistic account.

"No storm was like this, either in its violence or its duration -

the greatest, the longest in duration,

the widest in extent...

..of all the tempests and storms that history gives any account of

since the beginning of time."

"Confusion seized upon all, whether on shore or at sea."

For the many ships sailing the Channel that night,

there was no shelter from this hurling gale.

Sailing vessels built from wood and barely 100 feet long

were no match for the fury

of what became known as the Great Storm.

The bulk of the ships lost that night sank here

on the Goodwin Sands.

13 warships and 40 merchantmen were driven onto the Goodwin Sands

by the Great Storm.

Men from the port of Deal struggled out in open boats

to try and save who they could,

but 2,000 men lost their lives here.

The remains of those ships, sunk that night in the Great Storm,

are still here beneath these waters.

This mass shipwreck became the most obvious testament

to the destruction wrought on the whole county.

'A day of fasting was called,

'and church pulpits hosted sermons

'describing the disaster as a punishment from God

'for the sins of the whole nation.'

Across the coast of Britain, so many ships were sunk

that one in five sailors from the Royal Navy were lost,

and with them thousands of men from merchant ships.

One of the ships which was caught in the Great Storm was HMS Mary,

which now lies 100 metres west of the Goodwin Sands.

Commanded by Rear Admiral Basil Beaumont,

it suffered the single largest loss of life on that terrifying night.

268 men were killed,

with only one solitary survivor.

'The loss of the Mary, and Admiral Beaumont along with it,

'was recorded in a remarkable painting

'now held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.'

In this painting, Rear Admiral Beaumont stands

with a hand on his anchor, while in the background,

the Mary, the ship that he actually went down on,

struggles to stay afloat during the Great Storm.

It's a haunting image - part portrait,

part visual document of his death,

and it's a powerful reminder

that the Great Storm left deep psychological scars

on our island nation.

Yet, while the wrecking of so many British ships was unprecedented,

the remains of these vessels are only a small contingent

of the thousands of wrecks

which litter almost every mile of our coastline...

..from the Isles of Scilly to the north of Scotland.

'But they lie out of reach, hidden from us

'in the murky depths of the seas that surround our island,

'and over centuries,

'the majority of historic wrecks disintegrate on the sea bed.'

But 30 years ago, something remarkable happened.

An event that entranced the nation

gave me my first-ever glimpse of a real shipwreck...

..a stricken flagship of Henry VIII's Tudor navy.

I remember seeing a longbow,

and, even more remarkably,

what seemed to be the bones of the bowman it belonged to.

And then one of 39 cannons being lifted from the sea bed.

I watched, captivated, along with the rest of Britain

as the Mary Rose returned to the surface

after over 400 years.

There is the wreck of the Mary Rose. It has come to the surface.

There is the first sight of this flagship of Henry VIII.

It's the first time we have seen this in 437 years.

'Today, the wreck is held

'in a specially built dehumidifying chamber

'where conditions are controlled to maintain the right air temperature

'to preserve the timbers.'

From the moment that she was raised in the 1980s,

the Mary Rose became one of our greatest national treasures.

But the harsh truth is that, by the time that she sank,

she was a badly designed and dangerous ship.

And the men that we really need to thank

for giving us this time capsule of Tudor life

were the shipwrights and designers of Henry VIII's navy.

Their construction plans miscalculated

the ship's sea-handling capability.

The Mary Rose may have embodied the very character

and physical stature of Henry VIII himself -

powerful, imperious and swaggering.

But there were fatal flaws in her design

which meant her sinking was almost inevitable.

Weighing over 700 tons,

and decked out with dozens of cannons,

colourful flags and high turrets...

..to her enemies,

the Mary Rose would have been a magnificent maritime fortress.

On the 19th of July 1545,

the French fleet entered the Solent,

and the Mary Rose was prepared for battle.

Men, arms and guns were readied for action.

From the moment that the last of these cannon were loaded on board,

the Mary Rose was dangerously top-heavy,

and her gun ports were too close to the waterline.

She was doomed.

Attempting a simple manoeuvre,

the Mary Rose listed sharply to her starboard side and suddenly sank,

taking almost 400 men to their deaths.

She had been fitted with a new gun deck that had destabilised her.

It was an alteration that proved costly.

This ship is the product of a nation,

the England of Henry VIII, that was not yet a true maritime power.

Henry's was a navy built for flag-waving and prestige

more than it ever was for fighting.

Henry's maritime ambitions took a knock that day in the Solent.

'The recovered wreck of the Mary Rose continues to fascinate us,

'though its actual sinking is far more significant.'

'It tells us that Britain was not yet ready to sail the seven seas

'and conquer the world.

'In fact, it would take a highly fortuitous act,

'40 years later and just up the coast,

'to change our destiny.'

This is Plymouth Hoe,

where Sir Francis Drake famously finished his game of bowls

before sailing off to defeat the Spanish Armada.

It's become part of our traditional story of the Armada,

a story that tells of how nimble English ships sailed out

and defeated the cumbersome Spanish, saving England from invasion.

But there's another way of thinking of the events of 1588,

and that's to see it not as an English naval victory

but as one of the greatest mass shipwrecks in history,

caused by the terrible dangers of the British coastline

and by the awesome power of the weather.

THUNDER RUMBLES

In July 1588,

a huge amphibious invasion force appeared

off the southwest coast of England.

The Spanish Empire had sent over 120 ships

to land, invade and conquer the country.

It was Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII,

who had to stand up to the massed ranks of Spanish power

in a war fought over empire and religion...

..a small, Protestant island nation

versus a colossal Catholic superpower.

The propaganda machine cranked up.

The Spanish were coming to hang everybody over the age of seven.

They were going to kill every man, woman and children.

There was a shipload of hangman's nooses.

They had special whips to deal with flogging women.

The powerful Spanish fleet swept confidently from the Bay of Biscay

along the southwest coast.

If Elizabeth hoped they would founder

on one of the many navigational hazards

that lay in these offshore waters, she was to be disappointed.

The Armada steered clear of the Scilly Isles,

narrowly avoided running aground on the Isle of Wight,

and evaded the notorious Goodwin Sands.

They were now on course to land troops off the east coast

and march on London.

And the only thing standing in their way

was the Tudor navy.

But although Elizabeth could call on the services of Sir Francis Drake,

her navy was not yet the world-famous fighting force

we would come to know.

People often make the mistake of assuming that the English navy then

was like the navy in Nelson's time. It wasn't at all.

I'm sure Francis Drake and John Hawkins and the others

were all patriotic Englishmen,

but their prime motivation for all the voyages they made,

and indeed for joining the battle against the Armada,

was not patriotism. It was the profit motive.

They were there to try and capture Spanish ships

and take them as prizes and claim the value of all the ordinance,

all the treasure and everything else on board.

A Spanish ship at the bottom of the ocean was a disaster

not just for the Spaniards but for the English too,

because a ship at the bottom of the ocean couldn't be looted.

The two fleets finally engaged off the Flanders coast at Gravelines.

And, during an eight-hour confrontation,

the English succeeded in scattering the Spanish fleet.

But this was not a killer blow.

The Spanish had only lost three ships,

and were still a potent fighting force.

The Spanish commander then took a fateful decision -

to retreat from the English navy

and head up the North Sea towards Scotland.

As the Spanish fleet edged northwards,

the weather began to close in.

A natural defence of gale-force winds,

huge breaking waves and a deluge of freezing rain

dashed any last hopes the Spanish had to land their forces.

The moment when they lose the status of a fighting force

and become frightened men fleeing for home comes off Newcastle,

when they throw the horses and the artillery wheels over the side

because they haven't got enough water.

And that's saying, "We aren't ever going to land."

The Spanish admiral, the Duke of Medina Sidonia,

then issued his final orders -

to flee for home around the west coast of Ireland.

He added what would turn out to be a prophetic warning...

..to avoid the perils of the jagged Irish coast.

Whereupon he ordered, "Full sail,"

and the slower ships, he coldly and calculatedly said,

"You're on your own."

'This Mediterranean invasion force

'sailed blind along the coast of Scotland,

'trying to avoid the northwest of Ireland.

'Lost in foreign waters,

'with no local pilots to guide them safely,

'the fleet began to be split up, blown off-course.'

By September 1588,

the Armada was a broken, battered and motley collection of ships,

and they began to appear here in ones and twos

off the coast of Northern Ireland.

This entire scenario was completely unexpected.

The Duke of Medina Sidonia had specifically ordered his captains

to avoid the coast of Ireland,

and the Spanish chart actually ended at the Moray Firth

on the northeast coast of Scotland.

And so the Spanish captains had no detailed knowledge

of this terrible coastline,

and they were entirely unprepared for the tempestuous weather

of the North Atlantic.

The retreating Armada ran into a month-long wall of stormy weather,

which drove the ships and their crews to their deaths.

In one day alone, six of them were wrecked.

The magnificent El Gran Grin, a 1,200 ton behemoth,

was smashed to pieces off the coast of County Mayo.

Within a 200 mile stretch of the west coast of Ireland,

over 20 Spanish ships were lost.

In the aftermath, there were horrific scenes

all along the shoreline.

'On one beach, the bodies of 1,500 drowned sailors were found,

'and any survivors faced an equally heartless fate.'

Those who had survived the wrecks of their ships,

and who were lucky enough to have made it ashore,

now faced a new set of dangers.

English soldiers were garrisoned all along this coast,

and the Spanish didn't know how the Irish, their brother Catholics,

would react. It often hinged on the question of money.

The rich Spaniards were held captive and ransomed,

while many of the ordinary soldiers and sailors,

the men who had survived fleet battle, storm and now shipwreck,

were either murdered by the Irish or executed by English soldiers.

History has taken a harsh judgment on the Irish population

for what had happened. I think that's unfair.

I believe, at that time in the 16th century,

in the, er, in the west of Ireland,

there was a very prevalent superstition

that the sea always claims its own.

And if you allowed someone to be saved,

then, the sea would later wreak vengeance either on you

or on one of your own kin.

And that's what drove them. That's what made them seem to be so cruel.

It was this fear of retribution by the sea.

But hundreds of Spanish sailors WERE rescued from the sea

by the Girona, one of their own ships.

As it made its way along the coast towards the Giant's Causeway,

it arrived here at Lacada Point,

a notorious headland full of jagged rocks

hidden just beneath the surface.

On the night of October the 28th, the Spanish galleass Girona

smashed with incredible force into the rocks behind me.

SOUNDS OF SHATTERING WOOD

She was fatally overloaded, with more than a thousand men on board,

and her rudder had already been broken by the storm.

She split into two, sank immediately,

killing nearly all of the men on board.

'The Girona was wrecked within a few miles of Dunluce Castle,

'home to the wonderfully named Sorley Boy MacDonnell,

'a firebrand Irish chief

'who was himself entangled in his own bloody territorial conflict

'with the English army.

'MacDonnell retrieved over 200 bodies from the wreck,

'and ensured they received a Catholic burial.'

Local tradition claims that the victims of the Girona

were buried here at St Cuthbert's churchyard.

We don't know exactly where. It's one of those details

that's been lost to history. But it's just one of several traditions

and folk stories that are linked with the wreck of the Girona.

One claims that some of the survivors were actually taken in

by the MacDonnells of Dunluce Castle,

and another that some of the Spanish soldiers and sailors

actually stayed, married local women,

and merged into the local population.

The most tangible trace of the Armada that remains today

is a treasure trove of gold recovered from the Girona

in the 1960s.

The divers who discovered the Girona found a huge haul of treasure

that had lain untouched for almost 400 years,

and you can see it today here in the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

Now, this little guy's fantastic. It's a gold salamander brooch.

The salamander is a reptile that's native to Mexico.

We know that the gold came from South America,

and that the rubies, of which there are three,

and there are spaces for six more,

actually came from Burma.

It's a wonderful piece of jewellery

that says so much about the wealth

and also the outreach of the Spanish Empire

in the middle of the 16th century.

And just look at these gold coins!

There are 20 or so here,

but they recovered hundreds of gold and silver coins

from the wreck of just one ship alone.

'These Spaniards were carrying the wealth of the Empire with them.'

But my favourite piece is this amazing gold chain.

It weighs about the same as a bag of sugar,

and it's six feet long.

It would have gone round someone's neck three or four times.

These guys were going to war,

but they were going to look good while they were doing it.

This coastline shattered the Spanish Armada.

A third of the fleet was wrecked here,

and more ships were scuttled or lost in the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea.

Eventually, five months after they had first set out from Spain,

63 ships limped back home -

half of the original contingent.

Over 20,000 Spanish soldiers and sailors had lost their lives.

As soon as the shadow of the Armada departed our shores,

the story of this mass shipwreck was retold as a stirring victory

for Elizabeth's Protestant island.

It was proof that the nation could rely on divine intervention

to save them from Catholic invaders.

Tudor propagandists even coined a new term

that summed up this righteous victory.

They said that England had been saved by a Protestant wind.

This was only the beginning of the myth-making

that has shaped our understanding of the Armada.

What we now know today as Elizabeth's most famous speech,

made to her troops at Tilbury,

where she is said to have declared,

"I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman,

but I have the heart and stomach of a king,"

was in fact part of this strategy to repackage the Armada,

not as a lucky escape but as a glorious victory

led by a monarch backed by God.

We think that Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair invented spin doctoring

and image control, and it's absolutely not true.

Queen Elizabeth was a past master at it.

The famous speech she made at Tilbury,

when she inspired her troops allegedly to defeat the Armada,

was only made when she knew the Armada had already been defeated

and was being driven away up the North Sea,

and the proof of that is that, when the Armada was off the coast,

Queen Elizabeth was actually at Hampton Court,

surrounded by a 10,000 man bodyguard.

The speech she gave at Tilbury which has come down to us through history

isn't actually the one she gave. The only witness to record it

recorded a very different one,

but it was then taken back to Whitehall Palace,

worked on to give it a much more Shakespearean tone,

and it was then disseminated through the only mass media there was -

church pulpits.

So the great myth of Queen Elizabeth as the inspiration of her troops

and the Protestant wind came down to us that way.

A heavily mythologised version of the sinking of the Armada

was commemorated in art too,

as in this allegorical painting of Elizabeth

presiding over the victory.

And it shows Elizabeth in imperial splendour.

Behind her on one side are the English fireships

destroying the Spanish fleet.

On the other side there is a portrayal of the Spanish Armada

being dashed to pieces on the rocks.

But on the chair there's a mermaid.

That's all about feminine wiles,

luring unwary sailors to their deaths,

and that's what she felt she wanted to portray.

She may have had the body of a weak and feeble woman,

but she could defeat the Spanish Armada

just by snapping her fingers.

'Fortuitous or not,

'the wrecking of the Armada was a turning point,

'giving an island nation the confidence

'to expand its maritime operations.'

This was the beginning of a new, exciting global era.

Just a decade after the Armada had smashed itself to pieces,

Queen Elizabeth granted a charter

to a group of ambitious London merchants

to pursue trade around the world.

This group would become known as the East India Company,

and they were in the vanguard of an ambitious scramble

to beat our European rivals, conquer the New World

and bring exotic goods like tea and sugar back home.

And where the East India Company went,

the British Empire would follow.

Our ships subsequently went south and east

to Africa, India and China,

and west to North America and the Caribbean.

The rewards were high, but so were the risks.

Venturing into remote and unexplored waters,

one in five ships never returned,

wrecked in far-flung seas.

It's not surprising that so many ships are shipwrecked.

Wood itself is a vulnerable material,

but also, and more profoundly,

there is no reliable charting of most of the waters of the world,

so nobody knows where there are large rocks

just underneath the water's surface,

and a wooden ship goes on that, and it rips the bottom out.

Most people in those days couldn't swim,

so a ship would go to the bottom and most of the crew would drown.

'Shipwrecks were costing the wealthy merchants and aristocrats

'who backed the East India Company serious money.'

They needed to be able to guarantee a safe passage beyond home waters.

'But what kind of navigational aids were available

'to seafarers at the time?

'I'm going to test out some of the tools they used

'to sail through uncharted waters.

'To help me out, I'm meeting Tristan Gooley,

'a navigator and maritime adventurer.'

One of the first things that mariners need to understand

is how fast they're going. What is this?

This is called the chip log, and in the 16th century,

this was the most accurate method of working out

how fast the boat was going.

-How?

-Well, it's very simple.

It's a board. We've got the lead weight here,

which means this end is going to stay at the bottom.

It's going to be weighed down. Think of it like a parachute.

It sits there, and it breaks in the water,

and then the line runs out, and we have knots marked at intervals.

Yeah, that's one. And the number of knots that pass through our hand

in 14 seconds is going to tell us how fast this boat is going.

-Are you ready to give it a go?

-Let's do it.

Right. Here we go.

I'm now timing 14 seconds.

That's five.

SPOOL CREAKS

Ten.

And that's 14. Stop the line there.

-OK. We've got a knot just there.

-Absolutely right.

-OK. So that knot you've got there...

-Yeah?

We're going to count the knots back from there.

And that's our lot. We're into the stray line, as it's called, now,

the bit that goes out to keep it clear of the boat,

so we reckon the boat's going three knots, I think.

Three and a bit, because there was that extra bit of rope left

-before it came back to the reel.

-Yes, three and a bit.

Let's check with Bob. Bob, what are we actually doing?

-By the log, 3.2 knots.

-Hey!

-The bit that...

-The bit on the end, 0.2 of a knot.

-That's amazingly accurate.

-It is, yeah!

What a fantastic bit of kit!

'When land is sighted, a basic navigation trick is needed

'to stop the ship running aground.

'This is known as depth-sounding.'

We've got one of the oldest, lowest- tech bits of navigation equipment

in the world, the lead line. Drop it over the side.

When it hits the bottom, the line goes slack.

We know how deep the water is by how much line there is.

-OK.

-There we go.

-That's tense there.

So this knot, you can see, is dry on one side of it,

wet on the other.

And if we work our way all the way back to this red one...

-What does that red one mean?

-That means seven fathoms,

and that knot there will be one more fathom,

so we're in eight fathoms of water.

But that's not all this not-very- hi tech bit of kit will tell us,

hopefully.

-There we go. What have we got?

-There we go.

Let me just pass that over.

Ah! Looks like we've pulled up some mud and sand to me.

-Is that what it looks like to you?

-Let me have a look. Taste it.

Best way of doing it.

Oh, disgusting. But it's definitely sandy.

It's not just mud, and that's the key bit of information.

Sailors of the past would use that to understand where they are,

what the land they were approaching is like,

and, very importantly, whether they could drop the anchor there.

Cos if the sea bed isn't right for an anchor,

there's no point dropping it, and this saves a lot of time and effort.

'Simple but effective.

'However, when it came to more difficult calculations

'like accurately measuring the altitude of the sun,

'which was needed to work out an exact position at sea,

'a more complex and innovative solution was needed.

'And it was provided by an Englishman named John Davis

'in 1594.'

I'd say the vast majority of all navigational instruments

anybody ever thinks of are concerned with measuring angles,

and in particular the angle of the sun, the moon and the stars

-above the horizon.

-And this is a very early tool

which they used to do that, and it's a particularly clever one.

It is very clever. This is the backstaff.

-How does it work?

-OK.

What we do is, we create a shadow using what's called a shadow vane,

on this little window here,

and then looking through this sighting vane here,

we look at the horizon. And that just forms a nice simple triangle

from there to there, back to here, up to the sun,

-and that measures the angle for us.

-Right. Let's have a go.

-See how this works.

-There you go.

-I'm going to look through this to find the horizon...

-Yeah.

..and then adjust this...

..until the shadow... There we go. There we go.

OK, great. So now we take it down,

and some very, very simple calculations.

You've just got to add the number here to the number here,

and you've got the angle of the sun above the horizon.

Five. Ten here and then 25 there, so we're looking at 35 degrees.

35 degrees. We're not quite at the midday point now,

but we have just taken an altitude of the sun.

We have just worked out how high it is.

And that simple measurement could tell a sailor

-how far north or south they are.

-There are no mirrors.

There are no magnifying glasses, no moving bits. It's just a stick.

Absolutely. And it wasn't perfect,

otherwise we wouldn't have had the octant and sextant coming later

and displacing it, but for approximately 130 years,

from about 1600 to about 1730, this was cutting-edge.

'Armed with this navigational equipment,

'a fleet of seven ships left Plymouth harbour

'on the 2nd of June 1609.'

They were bound for Jamestown, Virginia,

a settlement colonised only 20 years after the defeat of the Armada.

Led by its flagship, the Sea Venture,

the flotilla consisted of boats typical of the period.

Made from wood, powered by sail, and barely 70 feet long,

they would have to brave the weather of the Americas...

..the sort of tropical hurricanes

that no Englishman had ever witnessed off his own coast.

Six weeks after leaving the Devon shoreline,

the boats sailed into the eye of a ferocious storm.

Separated from the rest of the group,

the Sea Venture was at the mercy of this tropical onslaught,

unable to master the elements

and unable to maintain her course.

Of course a wooden ship is far more vulnerable,

so it can literally be blown on a rocky shore,

where it can be shipwrecked

even if it realises it's in terrible danger.

You can have scenarios where you can see the danger,

the rocky shore. You know you want to keep off that shore,

but the wind and the current is driving you on it,

and you cannot stop it.

The Sea Venture was smashed onto the rocky reefs

of what proved to be the island of Bermuda.

'Remarkably, all 150 people on board survived this crash landing,

'and now they found themselves shipwrecked

'on a beautiful but deserted island.'

To us today, the beach is paradise.

It's where we dream of going on holiday.

But that idea would have seemed like utter madness

to anyone in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Back then, the beaches of the New World weren't paradise.

They were hell on earth, and if you found yourself on one,

you wouldn't break out the sun lotion.

You'd sink to your knees in despair,

because the odds were that you were a shipwrecked sailor,

and you were almost certainly doomed.

Many of those marooned by the Sea Venture

on the Caribbean island of Bermuda did die from starvation or disease.

But the remaining crew built two improvised craft

after salvaging parts from the wreck.

They named them Deliverance and Patience,

and eventually some did make it back home,

finding a passage from their original destination of Virginia.

And two of the crew published a gripping tale

of their battle for survival.

"For four-and-twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult

had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations

any possibility of greater violence."

"Fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second

more outrageous than the former."

"Nothing heard that could give comfort,

nothing seen that could give hope."

These testimonies were the first-ever accounts

of surviving a shipwreck in the New World.

Silvester Jourdain and William Strachey published their narratives

in 1610, just months after returning to London.

And what they described captured the public imagination.

They detailed swimming in crystal-clear waters,

foraging for exotic fruit, and hunting brightly coloured fish.

"They bear a kind of berry, black and round,

as big as a damson, which about December were ripe and luscious."

"Other kinds of high and sweet-smelling woods

there would be, and colours black, yellow and red,

and one which bears a round blue berry

much eaten by our own people."

"We have taken five thousand small and great fish at one hale."

"I think that no island in the world may have greater store

or better fish."

For many readers, this was their first taste

of global travel and adventure.

These books were widely read,

and you can just imagine people talking excitedly

about Jourdain and Strachey's encounters

with this strange environment.

The possibilities of exploring the exotic and otherworldly nature

of these far-flung islands

also fascinated the most famous playwright

of the Elizabethan age.

The travails of the Sea Venture inspired one William Shakespeare

to write a story that began with a shipwreck in a foreign sea.

Fall to't, yarely, or we run ourselves aground!

-Bestir, bestir!

-Heigh, my hearts!

The Tempest opens with a ship battling to stay afloat

amidst the uproar of a tropical storm.

Shakespeare uses the shipwreck as a dramatic device

to create a gateway to propel us into a fantastical world.

Through the shipwreck and subsequent marooning,

Shakespeare introduces us to the weird and wonderful characters

who inhabit a strange island.

There is the spirit Ariel,

who uses magic to conjure up the tempest

which wrecks the ship at the start of the play.

And then there is Caliban,

half demon, half man,

a wild savage who fascinates and terrifies us.

Shakespeare revels in disaster at sea

as a means to take us away from civilisation.

So, what the shipwreck in that context enables you to do

is to think outside the imaginative chains

of your own society. You can imagine a world without religion

of the form that you might have in Europe.

You can imagine a world which isn't dominated by human beings.

One can imagine, in short, the opportunity

to put yourself in a context

in which you and your imagination

are interacting with anything that you can take

and derive from this new environment,

and that was really potent.

Shakespeare stretched our imaginations

through his shipwreck in The Tempest,

and he did so in an age when Britons were taking

their first tentative steps in a new era of travel and adventure.

The Tempest was more science fiction than reality.

But throughout the 17th century,

as the British Empire expanded into uncharted waters,

more and more real-life accounts of shipwrecked sailors

began to emerge,

and they sparked an appetite for maritime stories

that were so believable that few people could tell the difference

between what was fact and what was fiction.

Fact and fiction collided here at this pub,

the Llandoger Trow in Bristol.

Two men sat at the bar, deep in conversation.

One of those men was a Scottish sailor,

and he was telling his story of how he had been marooned

on a tropical island for four and a half years.

The other man hung on his every word,

scribbling down details of the tale in his notebook.

That man was a journalist named Daniel Defoe,

and this barroom conversation

went on to inspire one of the greatest of all English novels,

The Life And Strange Surprising Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe.

The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe was presented as a real account,

told in the first person,

with Defoe's name redacted from the earliest edition.

The novel detailed the daily battles Crusoe faced

such as the search for fresh water,

and it revealed the psychological effect

of being shipwrecked alone.

When he is shipwrecked on the desert island,

he's initially, of course, absolutely shocked,

and he spends time looking for water and getting himself sorted out

in terms of basic survival. So he's a very pragmatic figure,

and it's only subsequently that he starts to break down psychologically

and we hear about his traumatic breakdown

as the reality of his loneliness and isolation dawn upon him.

Through the process of writing a journal,

notching up the days - in other words,

bringing European time onto a timeless island -

he recovers a sense of self-possession.

Interestingly, that translates into a possession of the island,

so he literally takes possession of the island that he finds himself on.

It was rare that any fictional writings

had presented a human predicament

with that kind of psychological intensity

and that attention to detail.

The man Defoe was talking to in this pub that night

was a sailor named Alexander Selkirk.

He had been travelling on a ship, the Cinque Ports,

and had expressed grave reservations about the vessel's seaworthiness.

After a dispute with the captain, Selkirk was abandoned

on a Pacific island 400 miles from the coast of Chile,

and this inspired Robinson Crusoe's epic survival tale.

Selkirk was set ashore with his sea chest,

with powder and shot for his musket, and just two days' worth of food.

And just as the captain was preparing to leave,

Selkirk apparently changed his mind.

But the captain, now completely fed up with Selkirk's behaviour,

refused to take him back on board, leaving him marooned on that island.

The strangest thing about the whole story

is not that Selkirk survived four years of hardship and solitude,

but that he was right about one critical detail.

The Cinque Ports, the ship that he had said was unseaworthy,

the ship which had sailed away, abandoning him, did sink,

taking with how much of her crew.

Selkirk's four years and four months on the island ended

when he was picked up by an English ship.

He sailed with her for a further two years

before finally arriving home in October 1711.

Soon after, Selkirk would have his famous meeting

with Daniel Defoe in the Llandoger Trow,

and a literary legend was born.

But Defoe didn't just detail Crusoe's skill at survival.

The novel also works as a powerful metaphor

for Britain's rise as a colonial power.

Crusoe is depicted as the enlightened man,

importing Western civilisation to the barbarous and exotic island.

He builds a home, rears animals, and cultivates the land.

'As the self-styled governor of the island,

'Crusoe is the arch-colonist,

'a symbol of Britain's outreach in this era.

'This is most evident in his relationship with Man Friday,

'the native he rescues from cannibals

'and who becomes his faithful servant.'

This isn't an equal relationship between two men.

Crusoe is very much the master of Man Friday.

Pious, enlightened, a natural leader,

Crusoe is the symbol not only of colonial conquest

but of the racial politics

that justified Britain's increasing involvement

in the Atlantic slave trade.

It's no coincidence that Crusoe was wrecked on the way to collect slaves

for his own plantation.

And so, through this fictional shipwreck,

we catch a glimpse of the course that Britain was plotting

through the 18th century.

Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719,

at the very beginning of the Georgian period,

an era that would transform an island nation

once terrified of its own treacherous coastline

into the world's most powerful trading empire,

policed by the increasingly dominant Royal Navy.

But with more British ships at sea

and greater fortunes at stake,

the shipwreck would loom even larger in the national consciousness.

The Georgians' global adventure came at great human cost.

More than ever, the shipwreck was Britain's Achilles heel,

threatening to ruin its now grand ambitions.

'Next time, mutiny,

'slave rebellions,

'and murderous wreckers -

'how the shipwreck turns the order and hierarchy

'of Georgian Britain upside down.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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