A World Turned Upside Down Shipwrecks: Britain's Sunken History

If you had to choose just one image

that explained how deep and visceral the fear of shipwreck was

for our ancestors,

then it would have to be this giant canvas.

Because it explains that the fear of shipwreck

was not just the fear of the sea, the fear of drowning,

it was the terror of the forces of brutality that would be unleashed

when the ordered world of a ship was turned on its head by disaster.

This painting by Gericault

captures the chaos, murder

and cannibalism that followed a real shipwreck.

It came to encapsulate all the anxieties

that had built up in Georgian Britain

about wreckings at sea.

In the 18th century,

maritime trade was central to Britain's economic advance

and helped shape a sense of national identity.

Out on the high seas, a ship flying the British flag

was a microcosm of the Georgian state itself.

Ordered, hierarchical and, by modern standards, cruel.

Everyone on board was drilled to know their place.

But this was a world that could be turned on its head in an instant

if shipwreck struck.

Unleashing not just terror,

but the anarchy of bloody mutiny,

the violence of slave rebellion.

And the fear of gangs of murderous scavengers.

The shipwreck jeopardised the vast fortunes

accumulated by the merchant class.

And its high drama became deeply rooted in our culture,

creating heroes and villains

who inspired a powerful art and literature

all of its own.

This is the story of how the shipwreck threatened not only life at sea,

but the Georgian state itself.

The Isles of Scilly.

A mass shipwreck here as the 18th century began

would show just how vital the great ocean-going ship was

to Britain's ambitions of wealth and conquest.

In October 1707,

a British naval fleet was returning from fighting the Spanish at the siege of Toulon.

They reached home waters off the Scilly Islands

after a perfectly routine voyage.

What happened next changed the history of navigation

and sent shockwaves through British society.

21 ships, led by the highly-regarded Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell

were plotting a course for Portsmouth,

when, in the dead of night,

they unexpectedly hit the rocky waters that surround the Isles of Scilly.

Although only 28 miles off the British coast,

the Scilly Isles were inaccurately charted

and notoriously treacherous.

I'm getting a boat out to trace the route followed by Admiral Shovell's fleet.

On 22 October 1707,

Admiral Shovell thought he was safely out to sea

to the south-west of the Isles of Scilly.

In fact, he was here,

thick amongst the rocks at the mouth of the Broad Sound passage.

It's like being in a sailor's nightmare.

There are jagged rocks. Tides swirl around them.

In the total darkness of night,

the fleet mistakenly believed they were safely out to sea in the English Channel.

They would have been oblivious to the perils of these rocks.

On the right flank of the fleet,

Admiral Shovell's flagship, HMS Association

was the first to get into trouble.

She foundered here on the Gilstone Ledges.

She fired two guns as a warning, but it was too late,

and two other ships, The Romney and The Eagle,

foundered over there on the rocks in the distance.

In a period thought to be no more than 20 minutes,

these three ships went under,

taking with them over 1,000 men.

A fourth ship, The Firebrand, also struck these ledges.

But her captain, Francis Percy, guided her to the island of St Agnes,

just over those rocks.

But she sank, with all but 12 of her crew.

Had Admiral Shovell's convoy been just a few miles south,

they would have missed these rocks entirely.

Almost 1,500 men died that night,

just in this small stretch of water.

One of the reasons that the death toll was so high,

was that the rest of the fleet just carried on sailing,

oblivious to the disaster that was unfolding on these rocks.

It has an eerie feel to it here.

This is a mass maritime graveyard.

What did for Shovell and his captains

was their inability to accurately calculate longitude,

their east/west position at sea.

The disaster highlighted a problem facing all British ships at the time.

It was this potentially lethal challenge to lucrative global trading

which terrified Britain, as much as the loss of over 1,000 sailors.

The following morning, the islanders woke up to a grotesque scene.

All that remained of the ships was flotsam and jetsam floating on the waves.

But literally hundreds of bodies, battered and bruised by the sea,

were washed up on the three main islands - Tresco, St Agnes, and here on St Mary's.

What was one of the largest maritime losses in British history

quickly became part of the folklore of these islands.

This is Porth Hellick beach, on St Mary's.

It was here that Admiral Shovell's body was found.

But a colourful local legend tells a different story.

According to that version of events,

Shovell actually survived the wreck of The Association

and made it here together with two of his stepsons and his favourite dog, a greyhound.

But once he got here, he was murdered by a local woman

who cut off his finger to steal his precious emerald ring.

The Isles of Scilly disaster exposed not only Britain's rudimentary grasp of maritime navigation,

but also just how disposable sailors' lives were on the great sailing ships.

Even in death, the rigid class divisions of 18th-century society were enforced.

The navy did not recover the bodies of the hundreds of drowned sailors

but at great cost, they retrieved Admiral Shovell's remains

from Porth Hellick beach.

An aristocrat and member of the ruling class,

Admiral Shovell was given a lavish burial ceremony in Westminster Abbey.

They've even erected a monument to him here on Porth Hellick beach.

But hundreds of other sailors died alongside him and their bodies were also washed ashore here.

Members of the Georgian underclass, those men were simply thrown into mass graves.

There's no monument to them.

A brutal logic was at work.

Britain's elite was prepared to sacrifice the lives of ordinary sailors

if that's what it took to secure new international trade routes.

Yet the loss of four ships here

showed how this global expansion could be threatened.

When news of the disaster finally reached the Admiralty in London,

there was mourning for the loss of their favourite admiral,

but there was also panic.

This disaster threatened their ambitions for an empire

based on maritime supremacy.

And until they solved the problems of longitude,

those ambitions lay in ruins.

The response was swift.

The country's merchants and seamen presented a petition to Parliament

demanding a solution.

And in 1714, the Longitude Act was passed

as a direct result of the tragedy on the Isles of Scilly.

It offered a monetary prize to whoever could solve

the mystery of longitude.

And the answer came in the form of the marine chronometer.

This is a marine chronometer, invented by an Englishman, John Harrison.

A chronometer is essentially a clock that is not disturbed by the motion of the sea.

By setting its time to that of Greenwich in London,

a sailor can calculate his east/west position anywhere in the world.

It revolutionised maritime navigation

and gave Britain the ability to safely expand its empire overseas.

Armed with this confidence,

Britain would start to aggressively expand its empire.

And at the forefront of this endeavour

was the great sailing ship

which became central to British identity in the Georgian period.

The Georgian world is built on trade, global trade,

and the ships are the great vehicles that go out and gather that trade.

This is a period where ships aren't just emblems of the nation,

they really are the engines

of Georgian wealth, of Georgian power, of Georgian empire.

Britain's wealth and ambition relied on its powerful naval fleet.

And these ships, like the famous HMS Victory,

were a microcosm of Georgian society.

The physical divisions on board

replicating its highly ordered and hierarchical structure.

Imagine being at sea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away from Britain.

A long way from home shores, yes.

But if you go below these decks,

you get a real sense that you were never far from the Georgian state,

where every man knew his duty, and every man knew his place.

This is the Admiral's cabin.

He could be in the grandest of Georgian mansions.

Just look at the fixtures and fittings.

Candlesticks, curtain tassels,

and these magnificent windows.

And this is the captain's cabin.

Slightly less regal, but still impressive.

So if the admiral and captain went to sea living the life of lords of the manor,

where did the sailors live?

Below the grand surroundings of the admiral and captain,

these gun decks were the quarters for the sailors and marines.

This is incredible. At least 250 sailors and marines

would have lived, eaten and fought on a deck like this.

And their only access to fresh air and light,

if they were lucky enough to live on a deck above the water line,

was through a port like this.

Dark, stuffy, rank.

This place would have been really grim.

You could have left the tiny village hamlet, or inner-city slum you called home,

but in a way, you never really left Britain.

It's all so ordered and organised.

And what really worried the Georgians was that if a ship like this was wrecked,

this whole world was turned upside-down.

And in 1741, these fears were realised

when the wrecking of one British ship

sparked its crew to launch a violent mutiny.

This shipwreck would bring about a change in British maritime law.

HMS Wager was part of a naval fleet

that was sailing round the tip of South America.

She became cut off from the rest of the convoy.

And the extraordinary events that followed

were documented by a sailor,

John Bulkley,

who would lead the uprising.

Separated from the rest of the squadron and surrounded by nothing but ocean,

The Wager was in serious trouble.

Moral under Captain Cheap had plummeted

and her crew was ravaged by disease.

In fact, so many sailors were ill

that they were barely able to man the yards.

And then, in the early hours of the morning, disaster struck.

The Wager hit rocks off the coast of Chile

and immediately began taking on water.

Three thousand miles from home,

and with no back up,

Captain Cheap and his officers had no way of maintaining order.

John Bulkley recorded that as soon as The Wager hit rocks,

anarchy broke out.

"They fell into the most violent outrage and disorder.

"They began with broaching the wine in the lazaretto

"and breaking open cabins and chests,

"arming themselves with swords and pistols,

"threatening to murder those who should oppose or question them.

"They clothed themselves in the richest apparel they could find

"and imagined themselves lords paramount."

Eventually, all the crew managed to make it ashore

and they began salvaging parts to build a makeshift boat

to take them home.

The captain directed his officers to make a camp on the beach.

But outnumbered by the men, they now feared for their own lives.

Sat on the beach, huddled around a camp fire,

Captain Cheap and his officers knew that they now faced different rules.

Admiralty law stated that when a ship was wrecked,

the sailors stopped getting paid.

Which meant that inevitably, discipline broke down.

"I heard Mr Couzens use very unbecoming language to the captain,

"telling him, 'By God, you are a rogue and a fool.'"

The Admiralty still expected the men to follow the captain's orders

even after a ship was wrecked.

But the crew of The Wager interpreted things differently.

Without pay, they believed they were no longer subject to naval authority and discipline.

Drunken scuffles and fights broke out.

Captain Cheap tried to stop one sailor stealing from the rum rations.

The man resisted.

So at point blank range, the captain shot him dead.

Everyone was armed, everyone was hungry.

And they were thousands of miles away from home.

Bulkley presented a letter to Captain Cheap,

asking for permission for the men to sail their makeshift boat

via the Straits of Magellan to the British Caribbean.

Bulkley and the majority of the men left in their improvised boat,

leaving the captain and officers to find an alternative passage home.

As they departed the beach,

Bulkley assumed that he would never see Captain Cheap again.

It took Bulkley's contingent over a year to reach home

and over half of the men died on the journey.

Within weeks of arriving in London,

Bulkley published his account of the mutiny

and won the support of the public for leading the rebellion

against a murderous captain.

That, however, was not the end of the story.

A year later, something unexpected happened.

Captain Cheap arrived home with his own version of events.

When Captain Cheap finally returned home and recounted his version of the mutiny,

John Bulkley was arrested and a court martial was convened.

But the Admiralty were aware of public opinion,

so they cut a deal.

Neither Bulkley nor any of the men were charged.

And Captain Cheap, whose poor leadership had sparked off the mutiny in the first place

and who, in full view of his crew,

had shot one of his men in the face,

was promoted.

Fearful of such chaos happening again,

Parliament stepped in.

A new law was devised and it agreed with the mutineers

about what had been the real issue in the case of The Wager.

This is an Act of Parliament passed in 1747

held here in the Parliamentary archives.

After this legislation was passed,.

if a British naval vessel was wrecked anywhere in the world,

its crew would continue to get paid.

And that meant that the men would remain subject to military discipline.

The Georgians' strategy for a rich trading empire

demanded that order and discipline at sea be maintained.

Within five years of the passing of this act,

Britain's ships were embroiled in the first ever truly global conflict.

The Seven Years War saw the country fight France and other European rivals

for control of vital shipping routes and key colonies.

By the early 1760s,

Britain had emerged as the undisputed master of the seas

and was exploiting this to huge financial gain.

The economic value of maritime trade

was also beginning to shape attitudes to shipwrecks.

There was one particularly profitable enterprise

which made ports like Bristol

amongst the most wealthy and influential cities in Georgian Britain.

But one that also posed a unique challenge if its ships were wrecked.

Ports like this were the starting point of a triangular trade

in which slaves were bought in west Africa,

they were sold to British plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas

and then the ships returned here carrying sugar.

A key part of that trade notoriously became known as "the middle passage",

a dangerous transatlantic voyage, when the ships were packed with a human cargo.

These slave ships would carry up to 500 men, women and children,

shackled and manacled in the hold

with little food, water, or even enough air to breathe.

This was a gruesome trade,

with the slavers placing only a monetary value on their human cargo.

They were prepared to accept an average of 10% of their slaves dying

on the transatlantic journey.

But what would be the reaction if one of these ships were wrecked?

Dozens of slave ships were wrecked in this period,

but we hardly know anything about them at all.

And yet, here in Bristol,

one eye-witness account does survive.

And it gives a chilling insight into what the Georgians thought about their slaves

and into what it would have been like to have been wrecked on a slaver.

It concerns a slave ship called The Phoenix

and is held within walking distance

of the Bristol harbour where many of these ships departed.

This is Felix Farley's Journal,

a Bristol newspaper published on 8 January 1763.

It records how one ship, The Phoenix,

bound from Africa to sugar plantations in Virginia,

got into trouble and began to take on water.

They took on so much water

that the white crew were forced to release the slaves from their irons

to get them to help at the pumps.

"The Phoenix, from Africa to Virginia,

"with 332 slaves,

"foundered on 30 October.

"They were under a necessity of letting all their slaves out of irons

"to assist in pumping and baling.

"Who, having no sustenance of any kind for 48 hours except a dram,

"made them very sullen and unruly.

"Upon which, they put half of the strongest of the slaves in irons,

"some of whom got their irons off

"and attempted to break the gratings.

'The seamen, not daring to go down the hold to clear their pumps,

"were obliged, for the preservation of their own lives,

"to kill 50 of the stoutest of them.

"It is impossible to describe the misery the poor slaves underwent,

"having had no fresh water for five days.

"Four of them died and one drowned herself in the hold.

"The seamen were quite worn out.

"Many of them in despair,

"three having dropped down dead at the pump

"with fatigue and thirst.

"They were ten days in this terrible situation

"expecting the ship hourly to sink.

"The water in the hold continually increasing

"when they met with the King George.

"The captain, who with much difficulty saved the lives of the white people,

"the boat being scarce able to live in the sea.

"36 of the crew were taken up by the King George of Londonderry.

"The slaves were all drowned."

What's so striking about this account

is the utter lack of compassion displayed

towards the lives of the slaves.

When they realise they're in trouble, the white crew release some of the slaves

to get them to help with the pumping and the baling.

But then, when there's no hope,

they either kill them or put them back in their chains

back down in the hold

where the water is constantly rising.

It's absolutely terrifying.

To the Georgian merchant elite,

the African men, women and children on board

were shockingly dispensable.

They would see the loss of a slave ship as a terrible financial catastrophe for them.

It depends how many other ships they owned how seriously they took it.

But it was risky. When your ship comes in you're OK,

but if it doesn't and you can't pay your debts, your credit can be ruined and that's all important.

So they'd see it primarily in terms of a credit transaction.

You don't get any sense of the humanity of the slaves.

You get the sense that they are worth a certain amount.

They're listed as commodities.

It's that progressive dehumanisation

that's marginal, it makes it seem almost irrelevant or indulgent to talk about them as people

when you have that kind of focus.

20 years after The Phoenix was wrecked,

the crew of another slave ship, The Zong,

threw more than 100 slaves overboard

to make an insurance claim.

This infamous incident

was a cause celebre for the abolitionist movement

that challenged the slave trade.

And the artist Turner painted this bleak event.

For the 17th and most of the 18th century,

the British were completely un-selfconscious

and unrelenting about the exploitation of African labour.

They just saw it as a means to this unprecedented access to wealth.

The casual disregard for life

that seemed to characterise the Georgian pursuit of wealth

went hand in hand with the hard-nosed strategy

of colonial expansion.

British interests took control of the Caribbean island of Jamaica

which would prove to be an economic power house.

And the East India Company,

which had begun the colonial scramble in the age of Elizabeth

was at the forefront of running other key outposts

such as Madras and Calcutta.

The building blocks of what would become the British Empire.

These colonies were exciting, bustling places

where fortunes could be made.

And by the second half of the 18th century,

the officers and gentlemen running them

were relocating their families there, too.

But there was disquiet in some quarters of Georgian society

about upper class women and children mixing with other races.

And in August 1782,

the sinking of one East India ship,

the Grosvenor, off the coast of South Africa,

would be the most powerful example yet

of how a shipwreck could turn the world of order and privilege

upside-down.

This wonderful painting captures all of the elements

which made the wreck of the Grosvenor such a compelling story,

one that played on the insecurities of late Georgian society.

Carefully placed at the front of the painting,

are women and children finely dressed to depict their high social standing.

But they're clinging to the uncharted rocks of a foreign and hostile shore.

It underlined the unease that people were feeling

about women and children travelling to Britain's new colonies.

Now the shipwreck was threatening not only soldiers and sailors

but the family itself.

Returning to London from Madras,

the Grosvenor was carrying 105 crew and 35 wealthy passengers,

including women and children.

In the middle of the night, the Grosvenor blindly hit rocks.

In the darkness and confusion,

the crew believed they had hit a reef in the middle of the ocean.

And yet, when the sun rose the next morning,

the crew of the Grosvenor discovered that they weren't on a reef,

300 miles away from land.

They'd collided with rocks off the very coast of Africa itself.

Their captain's navigation had been hopelessly inaccurate

and they were just a few hundred yards from shore.

But with these rough seas, it still seemed very unlikely

that many of the crew would even be able to make it to land.

With the swell crashing against the rocks,

two of the men managed to swim ashore with some rope

and they made a makeshift winch.

A number of men were lost in the scramble

but miraculously, the majority made it to safety.

Of a total complement of 140,

125 had survived the shipwreck -

91 crewmen, along with all of the passengers.

But cast away on a little known and poorly charted shore,

they had no real idea exactly where they were.

And the only supplies that they could get

were those that they could salvage from the beach.

The story that unfolded would both fascinate and shock Georgian Britain.

Marooned on an African shore,

the survivors of the Grosvenor had three options.

Their first was to stay on the beach,

make a camp, barter with the local Africans

and send a party of the fittest men to get help.

Their second option was to salvage timber from the wreck itself,

build a makeshift raft

and sail it the nearest port.

The third option was for the men, the women, the children, the sick, the lame,

those who had been injured in the wreck itself

to gather together en-masse and to set off on a great trek to the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

They chose to leave the beach

and walk through some 400 miles

of the most difficult and uncharted terrain

in Southern Africa.

What hurried their decision to leave

was the presence on the beach of the Pondo,

the local tribe who had gathered to watch events unfold

with great curiosity.

The Pondo were clearly seeing the wreck as a great resource.

This was a treasure trove.

It had brought metal in all sorts of forms ashore.

And once there has been a movement by the castaways to move away,

the Pondo see this as an opportunity

to seize further resources from those as they're departing.

They come amongst them, they plunder them, take their possessions,

and what had supposedly started as an orderly march down the coast

very quickly disintegrates into a panicked flight.

Faced with an arduous march to safety,

the officers and wealthy passengers knew that their privilege and position on the East India ship

mattered little now that the Grosvenor lay in ruins.

The hardships of the march of the Grosvenor survivors

inverted the traditional hierarchies of Georgian society.

The wealth of the rich gentlemen passengers suddenly counted for nothing

and they and the women and children

found themselves reliant upon the sailors,

young, fit men in their teens and twenties,

who, under normal circumstances, they would hardly have deigned to speak to.

Youth and fitness suddenly mattered more than wealth, class or status.

The survivors who had set off together, confident that The Cape was within reach

now began to lose heart and fragment into smaller and smaller groups.

The young and the strong abandoned the sick and the weak

and those who were unable to carry on

simply left where they fell.

Of the 140 men, women and children who had boarded the Grosvenor in India,

only 18 survived.

The uncertain fate of white, upper-class women

in an unforgiving and remote corner of Africa,

was bound to hit a nerve back in Britain.

For years, the Georgians had justified the slave trade

on the grounds that those trafficked were little more than savages.

Now rumours began circulating

that some of these well-born ladies from the Grosvenor

may have fallen into the hands of these so-called "savages".

One of the elements of the story that makes it so fascinating for the contemporary population

is the sort of myths that circulate around it

of white women being dragged into slavery,

dragged into marriage or concubinage

in local black tribes.

This clearly titillates the late 18th-century imagination

but it also appals that late 18th-century imperial sensibility:

"This is not the way it's supposed to be.

"It's supposed to be white people ordering black natives, not the other way round."

In response to continuing stories

that a number of the women had, indeed, survived,

an expedition was launched from the settlement at The Cape.

The expedition proceeds and they get to a point

where they find themselves amongst a tribe

amongst who it's quite noticeable there are children of mixed race.

And they also find amongst this tribal group

three white women.

And as they come, a cry goes up,

"Our fathers are come!"

I would say that one of the three women

did stay, did survive, did assimilate with the Pondo

and that that was Lydia Logie,

the youngest of the ladies of gentry.

I think also there were two children, two girls,

who likewise had been eight or nine at the time of the shipwreck,

Eleanor Dennis was one of them,

who, too, was taken in by the local people

and who, in effect, assimilated themselves amongst the people as well.

Became Africans.

At a time when the country was confidently striking out into new territories,

the wreck of the Grosvenor exposed the anxieties that Georgian Britain had

about the indigenous peoples they sought to conquer.

Only two years earlier,

Captain Cook, a hero of maritime conquest and exploration

had been killed in Hawaii.

And the shipwreck was also a threat nearer to home.

The powerfully influential merchant classes

were alarmed to hear that off the West Country coastline,

ships which had been wrecked were then being plundered for goods

by local gangs.

This practice became known as "wrecking".

I've come to the north coast of Cornwall.

In the 18th century, small rural communities like this village of Morwenstow

had their own maritime traditions

which embraced the custom of stealing from shipwrecks.

It was a different world in these isolated and rural communities,

where there was a culture of living off the sea as much as there was one of living off the land.

Salvaging from shipwrecks was very much a part of that.

An activity that was affectionately known as "harvesting the sea".

In fact, locals would ask the question,

"What do you do if you find someone washed up on a beach, apparently dead?"

And their answer would be, "You rifle his pockets for money."

The shipping magnates complained that even Cornwall's religious and moral leaders

seemed to condone wrecking.

And the most famous of these served here in the parish of Morwenstow.

The Reverend R.S.Hawker certainly chronicled the local practice of wrecking.

He recorded the activities of his flock in their harvesting of the sea.

And his writings have added to the folklore about the people who became known as wreckers.

"So stern and pitiless is this iron-bound coast

"that within the memory of one man

"upwards of 80 wrecks have been counted within a reach of 15 miles.

"With only here and there the rescue of a living man.

"My people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers,

"and dissenters of various hue."

Hawker was a very sensitive individual.

Apparently, he had a history of trying to find

huts or places to hide away to contemplate his religion

and contemplate his life.

That's what he did when he came to Morwenstow.

He had built a series of huts.

This is known as Hawker's hut.

It was built by the Reverend himself

originally from the remains of ships wrecked off the coast.

Hawker used to come here and smoke opium

whilst surveying these stunning views and writing poetry and prose

about the wrecking culture of his parish.

Hawker gives us a unique insight into the prevalence of wrecking

and the experiences of those involved.

"We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts.

"His limbs had been wrenched off and his body rent.

"During our search for his remains,

"a man came up to me with something in his hand, enquiring,

"'Can you tell me, sir, what is this?

"'Is it the part of a man?'

"It was the mangled seaman's heart

"and we restored it reverently to its place

"where it had once beat high with life and courage,

"with thrilling hope and sickening fear."

It haunted him. He had written at one point

that he thought he heard the cries of seamen with the sound of the wind.

The other part of being in Morwenstow,

yeah, it's great wrecker territory to get stuff coming ashore,

but it's also a horrible place to be when you're dealing with shipwreck victims,

particularly because it's very gruesome.

Your shipwreck victims are very rarely whole.

There are always body parts coming ashore

or unidentified bits of human flesh that would come ashore

that they would have to collect.

"On a ridge of rock just left bare by the falling tide

"stood a man, my own servant.

"He had come out to see my flock of ewes and had found the awful wreck.

There he stood with two dead sailors at his feet

"whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark.

"And ever and anon there came up out of the water

"as though stretched out with life,

"a human hand and arm. It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to sea."

Wreckers induced fear and paranoia in ship-owners and merchants,

worried that they might lose precious cargos.

With great fortunes at stake, those with shipping interests

eventually flexed their political muscle.

They successfully pressurised the government

into passing a new law

that would swiftly and ruthlessly prosecute any wrecker

who dared to steal from a shipwreck.

In 1753,

Parliament bent to the will of the merchant elite

and passed this Act with a rather wonderful title.

"An Act for enforcing the laws against persons who shall steal

"or detain shipwrecked goods

"and for the relief of persons suffering losses thereby."

It's otherwise known as The Wreckers Act.

This was an era of brutal state justice.

And this Act threatened anyone who had stolen so much as a piece of rope

or a plank of wood from a wrecked ship with the death penalty.

In 1769,

a Cornishman, William Pearce,

was hanged in Launceston for stealing some rope from a wrecked ship.

This was a very visible and public warning.

The Wreckers Act was part of a wider political move

to protect the property and rights of the merchants and aristocrats

who ruled Georgian Britain.

A series of punitive laws were passed

that allowed the state to publicly execute its citizens

for a host of petty crimes

including the theft of goods worth as little as 12 pence.

In the 18th century, there was an increasing idea of property

being sacred.

A lot of legislation that was passed

was to protect property and bring in the death penalty for it.

There were something like 200 statutes that were passed during this period.

And crime historians called them the Bloody Code

because they required death by hanging.

And the Wreck Act was one of those.

A clause in the 1753 Act

contained a highly contentious provision.

Provoked by allegations that Cornishmen,

not satisfied with stealing from shipwrecks,

were employing nefarious methods

to deliberately lure ships onto the rocks

to be wrecked and then plundered.

But what was the evidence for this?

Nobody has ever been convicted of wrecking using false lights.

So that particular clause has never actually been used in a court of law.

The rumours of wreckers employing false lights

was an indication of just how panicked the merchants were

about losing ships and their valuable cargos.

Coming here to Morwenstow, I get a real sense of two worlds colliding

over the shipwreckers and events.

I think that the merchants' fear about wrecking

had nothing to do with accusations of locals murdering sailors,

but everything to do with losing goods and property.

In this era of expanding global trade,

the story of wreckers simply added to the fear

that already surrounded shipwrecks.

And as the last decades of the 18th century approached,

this agonising over the fate of stricken vessels

because of the financial value of the goods they carried,

showed no sign of easing off.

But then in 1786,

the most extraordinary shipwreck story of the era

forced the wealthy elite to reconsider their prejudices

about isolated coastal communities.

I've come to Worth Matravers on the Jurassic coast in Dorset.

It's a picture postcard place now

but 200 years ago, it was just another remote village

where people scraped a living farming or working in the local quarries.

But one night, the people of this place

took part in the most remarkable rescue

of survivors from a shipwreck.

Just after midnight on 6 January 1786,

a full-rig ship, the Halsewell,

was caught in a snow storm that engulfed this coast.

The waves were breaking on these rock ledges with such ferocity

that spray reached the tops of the cliffs.

And the Halsewell was blown onto the rocks behind me.

The Halsewell was owned by the East India Company

and only a week before had left Portsmouth bound for Madras.

The experienced skipper, Captain Pearce,

was accompanied by his two daughters who were due to be married in India.

The ship's masts smashed against those cliffs

and the Halsewell began to break up.

As the Captain and his daughters retreated to the supposed safety of his cabin,

the soldiers and sailors onboard

attempted to get onto the rocks on the shore

and the storm raged around them.

While dozens of sailors tried to cling to the rocks,

a few made it into a small cavern

to seek what shelter they could from the storm.

But listening as many of their comrades slipped and fell to their deaths.

With the sailors desperately holding onto the rocks,

the wreck of the Halsewell sank quickly,

taking with her the captain, his daughters and all the other passengers.

Incredibly, two men - the ship's cook and the quartermaster -

made it to the top of these cliffs.

They ran over there to Eastington Farm to raise the alarm.

By lucky chance, the farmer, Mr Garland,

was also the owner of the nearby Purbeck Quarry.

So he and his workmen gathered ropes and ladders from the quarry

and rushed to the cliffs to help the sailors up.

Back at the farm, Mr Garland's wife, Betty,

gave the rescued sailors hot soup and dry clothes.

Eventually, 74 sailors were hauled to safety up these terrifying cliffs.

The people of Worth Matravers had rejected the fears of the merchant elite

about wreckers stealing cargo and murdering sailors.

Instead, the shipwreck became a celebrated part of local folklore.

Charlie Newman runs the Square and Compass pub in Worth Matravers.

A keen local historian, his family has lived in the village for generations.

What did the East India Company make of the people of Worth Matravers

who'd helped out the shipwrecked sailors?

Well, there was a reward. I've got a couple of coins here.

They were given to my father by one of the local quarrymen.

It was a 100-guinea reward to the local quarrymen

for assisting in the rescue of the survivors from the Halsewell.

The owner of the farm also received a tea set from the East India Company,

again as a thank you for the rescue

and looking after the survivors.

What else have we got here?

The boat had a lot of furniture on board,

so we've got various furniture fittings.

Drawer handles, and a nice castor here, the leather still surviving.

This is a pewter spoon which has just about survived,

but it's very corroded. Obviously the salt tends to attack these things.

It's interesting that a lot of the sailors survived.

Exactly. They were strong and fit and able men.

The weather conditions were so atrocious,

anybody that was of a lesser strength,

they were the ones that perished.

The sinking of the Halsewell with the loss of her captain

and the miraculous escape of some of her crew

was a story that gripped the imagination of George III's Britain.

The king himself visited the site of the wreck

and later, Turner painted the scene.

And Charles Dickens would write about the Halsewell

in his story The Long Voyage.

Here, at last, was something good to come out of a shipwreck.

A stirring tale of heroic rescue and survival.

It encouraged the British

to feel that they could draw on unique reserves of courage and fortitude in adversity.

This, it began to be said,

was in stark contrast to the brutish conduct of Britain's mortal enemies,

the French.

What Georgians had in mind

was the scene depicted in the most famous of all shipwreck paintings,

by artist Theodore Gericault,

which is now held at the Louvre in Paris.

The Raft of the Medusa documents the real-life experiences

of the survivors of a shipwreck.

It captures the violence, murder and worse that followed.

I thought I knew this painting, but when you see it in the flesh for the first time,

you notice details that you hadn't noticed before.

The canvas is so large. It's seven metres by five metres.

You don't really know where to look first.

It's quite bewildering, quite disorientating.

There's a bloodied axe here.

And then just over here,

there's what looks like a piece of flesh...

..just floating in the water.

Now, Gericault has painted the exact moment

that they've sighted the ship that's going to come and rescue them.

That's up here on the right-hand corner.

And it means that all the survivors have rushed to one end of the raft

and they didn't know at the beginning whether it was sailing towards them or sailing away.

And this went on for two hours.

You get a real sense of the instability of their situation.

And also the angle of the raft is leaning backwards,

which means they're at the crest of wave.

The wave is just passing beneath them.

Now, the trough of the next wave is on the right-hand side,

with its crest rising up to the right-hand side.

So what's going to happen is that the whole raft

is going to tip down and vanish from the horizon.

And everyone is rushing over, apart from this one man here,

who's looking the other way.

And so while some of these people were desperate to get saved,

desperate to get off the raft, some of them were so far gone

that they'd lost any hope, any desire to survive.

The painting was inspired by the fate of The Medusa,

a French frigate which sank off the coast of Senegal.

The ship was evacuated, but there were not enough spaces in the rowing boats

so 147 crew boarded a makeshift raft.

This raft, with no means of navigating and few supplies

was then abandoned by the rowing boats,

who quickly made for land only 30 miles away.

Gericault would base this painting on the accounts of two of the survivors

and these are his initial drawings of the scenes on board the raft.

"We were so crowded that it was impossible to move a step

"and the raft itself was weighed down a metre under the surface of the water.

"We had barrels of wine and drinking water,

"but the little food we saved was distributed and eaten entirely on the first night.

"A night of such horrible blackness."

Abandoned by the captain and senior officers,

out of this chaos erupted murderous anarchy.

And surrounded by the dead and dying,

the survivors resorted to breaking one of the great taboos of civilised society.

"Several of us fell upon the dead bodies which covered the raft

"and cut off pieces of flesh and consumed them.

"I ask you not to condemn those that were dying of hunger

"on that pitiless sea."

Today, this painting is considered Gericault's masterpiece,

and one of the greatest works of French art.

But its current status is at odds with the dismissal it first received when exhibited in France.

What made the painting the legend that it is today

is the sensation that it caused when, just a year later,

it was exhibited in London.

The huge impact made by The Raft of the Medusa

on the British public

was down to timing.

It was exhibited only a few years after the triumphal destruction

of Napoleon's army at Waterloo.

Its picture of disorder and despair

were seen as indisputable evidence

that Britain's traditional foes were morally inferior.

The significance of the wreck of the Medusa

and of Gericault's painting,

greatly increased for the British because of a British shipwreck.

HMS Alceste, the Royal Naval frigate,

had hit a reef off Java in February 1817.

Like the Medusa, she had run aground

and, like the Medusa, a decision had been taken to fill the raft.

But that's where the similarities ended.

After the Alceste was wrecked,

the captain organised the safe passage of all the crew to a nearby island.

In the face of great odds, discipline was maintained.

Despite being starved and dehydrated,

they even repelled attacks by Malay pirates.

Captain Maxwell was praised for his calm leadership.

And implicit in that praise, of course,

was the contrast with the "every man for himself" cannibalism

that had engulfed the French on the Medusa.

For the Georgians, the great sailing ship was an emblem of the state itself.

It had been central to Britain's economic advance,

and it had helped to shape a sense of national identity.

But as the Georgian era drew to a close,

and hundreds of ships continued to be wrecked every year,

the question had to be asked.

Just how many more lives was Britain prepared to lose

out there on the world's oceans?

Next time, the shipwreck in the Victorian age.

How the great engineers

and fervent campaigners of the 19th century joined forces.

To save lives,

make ships safer...

..and dream of building the unsinkable ship.

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