Civilising the Sea Shipwrecks: Britain's Sunken History

1800, the start of the century that would see the might

of Britain's Industrial Revolution reverberate around the globe.

The sea and her mastery of it

would help Britain become the greatest economic powerhouse the world had ever known.

Ships were a vital part of the engine

that was driving Britain's economic success,

but the soaring profits that the sea provided led to greed

and a struggle that pitted the power of money against the safety of sailors.

The terrible human cost of shipwrecks

came to shock the Victorian public.

Keeping tally of this soaring humanitarian disaster was Lloyd's of London.

Insuring against shipwreck is a time-honoured trade.

The historic Lutine Bell would be rung to announce that a ship had perished at sea.

-DONG!

-This Grim Reaper's toll

meant a fresh entry into Lloyd's loss book,

a frozen moment in time like the room that now holds it.

This is the loss book from 1799.

And if you open it on any day

you're confronted with wreck after wreck after wreck.

It gives you a real sense of the scale of the problem that they faced.

Imagine if each of these were a plane!

Something just had to be done.

The relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of sailors

collided with another great Victorian force,

the zealous social reformer.

Furious Parliamentary battles were fought by campaigners

like Samuel Plimsoll

to prevent shipowners risking lives by overloading ships.

And as emigration put more women and children aboard,

the search for greater safety inspired key innovations like lifeboat provision,

ingenious inventors...

..and our greatest shipwrights.

With the might of industry behind them,

engineers entered a race to build bigger and ever-stronger ships

in the belief that they would be unsinkable.

It was a race that ended with the most famous shipwreck of all time.

Throughout history

the most dangerous time to be on a ship has always been at the beginning or the end of a voyage.

Even today, most wrecks happen close to shore rather than far out in the deep ocean.

And back in the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of men worked at sea,

the terrible human cost of shipwreck was something that, at times,

played out in front of thousands of horrified onlookers.

A shipwreck could be a very public tragedy.

Often the horrors left only mental scars for the watchers,

but on this coastline in the early 19th century, the shock turned into something else.

In February 1807, the Naval gun brig HMS Snipe was anchored here at Great Yarmouth.

She had her full complement of crew aboard,

as well as a few prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars and some women and children.

When a storm blew up, a damaged merchantman drove into her anchor cable

and the Snipe's crew had no choice but to cut themselves loose.

She ran aground less than 60 yards from shore,

and the people of this town could clearly see the men and the women on the Snipe

struggling against the wind and the waves.

And when she began to break up, they could hear their screams and cries,

and yet they were powerless to help.

60 yards, barely two lengths of a swimming pool,

had meant the difference between life and death.

Among those who stood helpless on the shore at Great Yarmouth

watching the wrecking of HMS Snipe was George Manby,

a former ship's captain.

What was desperately needed

was a way to link the ship to potential helpers on the shore,

but how?

Manby's research led him to a surprising conclusion.

He would fire a cannon at the wreck.

The result of all his research and experimentation

was the Manby Mortar.

The idea was to fire a heavy shot out of this mortar,

and it was attached to a light line that was fired directly over the rigging of the stricken vessel.

The crew would then haul on that light line,

pulling a heavy rope...

..on to their boat.

And it was along that rope that the survivors could be winched to safety.

It was both ingenious and incredibly effective.

George Manby was fiercely proud of his invention.

When he had this portrait commissioned,

he was careful to have the various parts of the Manby mortar depicted alongside him.

Here you've got a stricken ship floundering in heavy seas.

His right hand is resting on a shot

and you can see the rope to which it is attached.

And also a grappling hook which helped it catch in the rigging of the ship.

He was also careful to add a note...

the year that the portrait was painted, 1818,

by then, 137 lives had already been preserved by the Manby mortar.

These three wonderful paintings

are just some of the many images

than Manby had commissioned to show his invention in action.

This was a man who understood the power of art for swaying public opinion.

He wanted the world to know about this new invention.

Mortars were one of the first steps to cutting the carnage of shipwreck.

Around the coast, Manby mortars became a frequent sight

and gave some reassurance to mariners.

Over the years, Manby's concept of firing a rope to a stricken vessel

went through many adaptations.

First, the cannon became the more mobile rocket.

Then, the simple rope became what is called a breeches buoy,

essentially a lifebuoy with a giant pair of shorts attached.

Manby's invention offered some help,

but Britain was facing shipwrecks on an epic scale.

Emigration was rising, with thousands leaving our shores.

But to have a new life in the colonies risked a premature death at the bottom of the sea.

In this era, many people would have known a victim of shipwreck.

Shipwreck is the nightmare that we have forgotten.

When you get on a plane today,

you know rationally that your chances of being killed are very low.

Most planes do not crash.

As far as getting on a ship in, shall we say, 1820 was concerned,

and let's say going to India via the Cape,

it's actually a much more hazardous business.

Across the whole world in 2012 there were less than 30 plane crashes,

but just in the North Sea and only during the winter of 1820,

there were more than 2,000 shipwrecks

that led to the loss of more than 20,000 lives.

That's 50 entire jumbo jets downed in just a single winter.

In the 19th century, the sheer escalation of British shipping

due to the growth of empire and global trade

meant that the number of shipwrecks also escalated greatly,

and this gave rise to some serious sort of inquiries

about how to reduce the number of shipwrecks,

how to make ships safer.

So there's a growing awareness that the shipwrecks must be dealt with

as a problem across the 19th century.

At the same time, because of the sheer escalation of just the volume of sea travel in the 19th century,

the rate of shipwrecks continues to go up.

Though angered at the toll taken by shipwrecks,

the public felt powerless to help.

There were a few early lifeboats in the country's worst shipwreck hotspots,

manned by local men, rarely trained and rarely able to swim.

But the organisation was haphazard and sparse,

and the men rowing these ungainly boats were putting themselves at enormous risk.

It's the early 1820s.

Virtually all ships rely on sail

and lifeboats barely exist.

So when your ship hits the rocks and begins to break up,

and you realise that you're too far away from shore for a Manby mortar to reach you,

you realise that your only hope lies with men onshore.

But they're men who've never been taught how to swim

and they're men whose families will starve if they die.

Do these men have the courage to launch a boat to rescue you?

Unlike today's lifeboats, like this one heading out of Poole harbour,

early lifeboats were very rudimentary.

Then this situation came to the attention of a man full of practical zeal, Sir William Hillary.

His motto was "With courage, nothing is impossible",

a motto he aimed to live by.

Sir William Hillary had witnessed plenty of storms living on the Isle of Man,

a notoriously treacherous sea for mariners.

And one night in 1822, he raced around raising men to rescue the sailors from HMS Vigilant

which was stricken on the rocks.

And then the 51-year-old Hillary, who couldn't swim, rowed out to the wreck

and his brave crew were successful.

Just two months later, another ship, the Racehorse, ran aground close to William Hillary's home.

But it was a very different story.

A lifeboat rescued the crew from the Racehorse,

but on its way back to shore that lifeboat capsized, killing three of the lifeboat men.

These were men with young families

and Hillary was disturbed that the widows and children of these men

would then be forced to live in poverty.

It seemed a terrible price to pay for such bravery.

But to Hillary it seemed morally wrong.

Like other reformers of the period, he believed he had a duty to change the situation.

His rallying call was a pamphlet

calling for a national organisation for the preservation of lives from shipwreck.

It was a stirring and inspirational document,

and I think that it shows Britain and the British at their philanthropic best.

The pamphlet proclaimed that...

"The experience, talent and genius of the most distinguished commanders and men of science

"should be united in the formation of one great institution,

"which would in itself embrace every possible means

"for the preservation of life from the hazards of shipwreck."

700 copies were sent out

and after a slow start the organisation was formed.

But then, after less than nine months, they managed to raise £10,000.

That's half a million pounds in today's money.

And then the organisation took off.

This was the forerunner of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Around the coast, new boats were bought, crews trained, gallantry medals awarded,

and, answering the call that began the campaign, money was given to the families of lost lifeboat men.

Pamphlets, pensions and rowing boats

were not exactly a hi-tech answer to shipwreck.

In the 1830s, as Britain entered the Victorian age,

a new revolution in shipbuilding was taking over, iron.

Ships forged with iron were not as naturally buoyant as wood

and they were harder to repair at sea,

but their tremendous strength would prevent a ship breaching on the rocks,

and it held another attraction for shipping magnates.

The incredible strength of iron

meant that suddenly ships could be built that were larger than any wooden ship ever constructed.

When the SS Great Britain left this dry dock in Bristol in 1843,

she was, by a full 1,000 tons, the largest ship the world had ever seen.

Greater size meant more fee-paying passengers per voyage.

This offered a big business opportunity with more ships being built

to take millions of Britons to the colonies.

This ship represents the coming together of Britain's maritime revolution of the 18th century

with her Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.

She's constructed out of iron, driven by a propeller,

powered by coal and steam,

and her designer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a civil engineer

rather than a traditional shipwright.

In every way, this ship was a revolution.

Brunel's radical design

featured watertight bulkheads

to seal off flooded parts of the hull.

Once, a rock piercing the hull was a fatal blow,

but the SS Great Britain could isolate off such breaches.

Sailing ships had few options in a storm.

Either they would heave to, taking all the speed out of the sails,

or, with passengers' hearts racing, they would run with the storm,

praying rocks didn't get in the way.

A steamship had the power to resist being driven on to the rocks.

However, this vast size meant catastrophic losses

if the new ocean giants went down.

Iron sinks quickly and survivors had less broken wood from the wreckage to clutch on to.

Clinging to one of these giant cogs would save no-one.

But engines and iron also brought a more subtle change.

People came onboard who knew little about sailing.

So as the technology associated with ships was changing,

you had a change in profile of men.

So, for example, instead of having just a crew of sailors,

you might have engineers,

you might have stokers,

you might have people who are regarded really as just ordinary working-class men,

they're not sailors, they're not Jack Tars,

they're just people who will undertake tasks aboard a ship.

And these weren't the only people changing the dynamic of the ship.

These steerage-class cabins seem to us incredibly cramped and uncomfortable,

but for the first time in history ordinary working people could afford international travel.

They could choose to go abroad, they could seek their fortunes, they could emigrate...

Once, you needed wealth to be a passenger,

but, as emigration rocketed, this elitism was fading.

We've become fascinated by this upstairs-downstairs relationship,

between the poor in the steerage class and the rich up here in their private cabins.

But life at sea has always been coloured by class,

and what was really new and revolutionary about the SS Great Britain

and about life at sea in the 19th century,

was not that it brought the classes together,

but, for the very first time, women and children were now travelling at sea in large numbers.

Ships had been something of a stag party at sea,

an all-male event with hard drinking and macho attitudes not unknown.

So what happened to this behaviour when the ship hit the rocks?

It's hard for us to know exactly what happens aboard shipwrecks,

but certainly you get lots of descriptions of quite savage, quite violent, quite panicked behaviour

by men, so you get these wonderful metaphors of being animals,

that the men are stampeding buffaloes,

that they're tigers, that they're hornets...

There's lots of descriptions of men that really don't correspond

to the idea of a sort of chivalrous women and children first.

The pages of a novel had been the closest most Victorian ladies had been to this shipwreck savagery.

But now, for women travellers, it was a stark reality to be faced.

For millions of people and their families, the shipwreck changed from being an abstract concept

to becoming a very real and personal nightmare.

How would Victorian society cope with ever-more women and children onboard?

In early 1852, a troop ship, HMS Birkenhead, sailed south from Britain

with soldiers bound for the new frontier wars in South Africa.

Yet these were not her only passengers.

The Birkenhead was carrying the wives and children of officers serving in the Cape,

and their fate was to change the history of seafaring

and inspire one of the greatest legends of the Victorian age.

HMS Birkenhead was an iron-hulled paddle steamer.

For the troops onboard

she was one of the fastest and most comfortable of her day.

They were racing to South Africa

to reinforce the troops fighting tribes in the Cape frontier wars.

Throughout 1852, the Birkenhead steams down the western coast of Africa,

but her final destination was here, Cape Town.

Her captain Robert Salmond was under real pressure

to get the troops to South Africa as quickly as possible,

so to speed up the journey he plotted a course that hugged the coastline very closely.

Too closely, in fact!

The captain was confident of the accuracy of his charts.

They showed a safe passage.

The 600 men, women and children slept soundly

as the ship steamed on through calm waters.

During the night of 26 February, three miles offshore,

and in just 12 fathoms of water,

the Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock lying just below the surface.

Her hull was ripped wide open and water poured in,

drowning hundreds of the soldiers and sailors in their bunks.

The survivors rushed to the upper deck.

There were only three working lifeboats for the 600 aboard.

Would the women and children be overrun in the stampede?

The soldiers' next actions became legendary.

They let the women and children go first to the lifeboats.

As the ship began to collapse, the captain Robert Salmond

had called out, "Make for the boats!"

The women feared the lifeboats would be swamped by hundreds of troops and all would perish.

Seeing this, the commanding Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Seton, his sword drawn,

ordered his soldiers to stand back.

They held ranks, stunned by fear,

and, if accounts are to be believed, meekly awaited their fate.

One survivor later wrote, "The order and regularity that prevailed onboard

"from the moment the ship struck till she totally disappeared

"far exceeded anything that I had thought could be affected by the best discipline,

"and it is more to be wondered at

"seeing that most of the soldiers were but a short time in the service."

So began the legend of woman and children first,

the custom known ever after as the Birkenhead drill.

The Birkenhead was exceptionally unlucky.

She struck a rock that was uncharted.

Worse, she struck at night.

And, worst of all, was the place she went down.

Today it is famous,

famous for some of the highest density of great white sharks in Africa.

"Nearly all those that took to the water without their clothes on were taken by sharks.

"Hundreds of them were all around us,

"and I saw men taken by them close to me.

"But as I was dressed, having on a flannel shirt and trousers, they preferred the others."

South Africans know great whites as Tommy sharks, based on that brutal night.

The newspapers made out there was something innate within the British character,

an inner bulldog, that made them face death with calm courage.

Victorian Britain was desperate to believe this was true.

Shipwreck becomes a fundamental challenge

to the psychology of that society,

its sense of self-confidence that it is producing people

who can act appropriately in an emergency,

and in acting appropriately can vindicate their sense of civilisation or progress and superiority.

Before the actions on the Birkenhead could be vindicated,

the Navy held an inquiry into what had happened.

Both Lieutenant Colonel Seton, the commanding Army officer,

and the ship's captain who might have been held responsible for the disaster, were dead.

But had they behaved honourably?

The court-martial took place here onboard HMS Victory,

Nelson's great flagship in Portsmouth.

In May 1853,

the surviving soldiers and sailors of the Birkenhead were summonsed to HMS Victory.

Each of them was thoroughly cross-examined and in each case they told the same story...

..that the captain had remained calm throughout,

that the woman and children had been ushered to the lifeboats

and that when all hope had been lost the soldiers remained calm, accepting their fate.

There was evidence for self-sacrifice,

it was not just newspaper hype.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the military court gave a full exoneration.

And that judgment made here on HMS Victory

gave the official stamp of approval to the legend of the Birkenhead,

a legend that was tapping into how Victorian Britain had already come to view itself.

Because so many of the men who died on the Birkenhead were soldiers rather than sailors,

when Queen Victoria ordered this memorial to be built in their honour,

it was placed here at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Pensioners.

This plaque records the names of all of the officers and the non-commissioned officers

of the Birkenhead,

and these plaques record the names of all of the private soldiers onboard the Birkenhead,

together with their regiments.

But this plaque is much more than just a memorial to the dead,

it's a very public acknowledgment of what it describes here

as "the heroic constancy and unbroken discipline shown by Lieutenant Colonel Seton",

the hero of the Birkenhead.

The Birkenhead was used as a shining example to Victorian society.

Now, shipwreck was not just a matter of survival,

but of surviving with manners, dignity and honour.

And Rudyard Kipling would commemorate it all in verse.

"Their work was done when it 'adn't begun

"They was younger nor me an' you

"Their choice it was plain

"Between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw

"So they stood an' was still

"To the Birken'ead drill

"Soldier an' sailor too!"

Holding fast to high moral standards would not save you from drowning.

Instead, the Victorians turned to practical ingenuity

with the cork lifejacket.

Prototype models were little more than buoyant cork fixed to a canvas vest.

One of the pioneers in the 1850s was RNLI captain John Ross Ward.

At first he battled some resistance to wearing lifejackets,

and you can kind of see why!

It's really heavy and really cumbersome,

and these men weren't just standing around on motorboats,

they were rowing, they had to do something as well.

And I think rowing while wearing one of these would be really quite awkward.

But then one event demonstrated just how vital they were.

In February 1861, the people of Whitby awoke to a fierce gale.

At 8.30 in the morning, lifeboat men were called to rescue the crew

of the John And Anne in distress.

They launched again at 10 o'clock,

and then at 11.30 as more ships beached.

Exhausted, the lifeboat men carried on until, during their fifth rescue,

a large wave overturned the boat.

One lifeboat man, Henry Freeman, reached the shore.

Henry Freeman survived and he'd been wearing a sample of the newfangled lifejacket.

All 12 other men perished.

Lifeboat men needed no more persuading.

Lifejackets became compulsory.

It doesn't look like much,

but this symbolises the survival of literally thousands of victims of shipwreck.

Whilst lifejackets could save you in a shipwreck,

a new innovation would stop ships even being in a storm.

In 1859, most thought storms were God's work and impossible to predict.

Admiral Robert Fitzroy was sure it was within science's grasp to predict weather.

He claimed that, given funding, he could not only foresee weather,

but with the newly developed telegraph he could send out storm warnings

to ports around the country.

Few listened until one of the century's most dramatic shipwrecks energised politicians to act.

The Royal Charter was a steam clipper

packed with gold miners returning from Australia.

After two months at sea, they were hours from home,

ready to enjoy their new wealth.

As the ship neared Anglesey

with the barometer plummeting,

the captain was advised to put into Holyhead.

Instead he decided to battle on to Liverpool

without realising a staggering storm was brewing.

It rose from storm force 10 to hurricane force 12.

The Royal Charter's engines were no match for the storm

and she was relentlessly driven on to the Welsh coast.

Just 39 of the 470 people onboard survived.

Many victims had refused to abandon their gold onboard

and its weight dragged them under the waves.

In the annals of weather, it was the worst storm of the century.

In the press furore that followed, Robert Fitzroy spoke up.

In the Met Office archives, I met with Catherine Ross to find out Fitzroy's next move.

What was Robert Fitzroy's reaction to this big gale?

Fitzroy felt very strongly that it could have been predicted,

and that there should have been a warning system in operation

which could have prevented the loss of the Royal Charter

and indeed the other 132 ships which were lost on the same night.

And he produced this report

which was designed to reflect the weather throughout the period of the storm before and after.

-Over how long?

-Two weeks of weather, this report.

And here you can see Anglesey,

and, basically, the length of the line indicates the strength of the wind.

So here we have hurricane-force winds.

Through this report and reports of other similar storms, lesser in extent, but other storms,

he was able to convince Parliament that he could predict storms

and to bring in a storm-warning system.

And would the 1861 storm warning have looked like this?

No. The information was collected from the coastal stations by electric telegraph,

sent to London, and, if they felt a storm warning should be issued,

it was sent back to the location where the poor weather would hit, again by electric telegraph.

That got the information to the port but it didn't get it to the ships

either in harbour or sailing along the coast.

So, as a result, they had an additional system.

Next to each telegraph station was a staff

on which they hoisted a system of cones and drums, which were lit at night...

You've got "Gale probably from the northward,

"gale probably from the southward,

"gale successively". Well, you were in trouble if that hit!

And then these show winds that are going to change,

but they're guessing which direction they're coming from.

Robert Fitzroy won approval for his system.

In the war against shipwreck, weather forecasting was a major victory.

This map led directly to modern weather forecasting as we know it.

In essence, it led to the very first forecast.

Amazing!

Fitzroy's passion had energised Parliament to act,

and MPs had also responded to passenger concerns.

The need to improve passenger safety led to a series of new regulations and laws in the 19th century.

Ships were inspected in dock to check that they were seaworthy.

They were fitted with lifeboats and captains and crew were given better training.

And yet none of these new regulations and laws applied to merchant ships.

There was one set of rules and standards for passenger ships

and another for those that carried cargo.

Of almost 2,500 shipwreck fatalities in 1867,

just 1 death in 20 were passengers.

Few cared about this massacre of merchant seamen

until one man was driven to change things.

In the war against the shipwreck,

one campaigner stands out as commander-in-chief,

Samuel Plimsoll.

In his battle to make ships safer he became a national hero.

Today his fight for social justice has been forgotten,

but before Plimsoll the seaworthiness of ships was a lottery.

Despite advances like iron hulls and steam engines,

much of Britain's merchant fleet was still made out of wood.

Many ships were death traps.

A frail leaky skeleton of a ship would be bought and disguised as a new craft,

a fresh lick of paint would be put over rotten timbers like these,

and the ship would be given a new name and nameplate.

But whatever the plate said, sailors had just one term for these vessels,

coffin ships.

Elderly ships would be disposed of and what would happen...

it was a terrible practice by which people would buy up old ships,

repaint them, rename them and send them out to sea again,

often heavily insured.

The only danger to the owner was that the sailors would lose their lives,

but, if they were recompensed financially, it was alleged to be worth the risk.

DONG!

It was a vast insurance scam.

Shipowners could heavily insure their vessels for far more than they were really worth.

Successfully reaching port was becoming less profitable than the shipwreck.

Shipwrecks were soaring.

Plimsoll reported that in 1869, 177 ships were wrecked

in sea conditions officially logged as no stronger than a gentle breeze.

According to Samuel Plimsoll, one shipowner had lost a dozen ships in three years,

and 105 men.

They were regarded as coffin ships because men knew that if they sailed on them,

there was a very good chance they were going to die.

And the law was against even the men there.

You could not refuse to go aboard a ship.

Once you'd signed the papers, if you refused to go aboard the ship that you'd signed to,

once you took a look at it and realised how overloaded or unseaworthy it was,

you would be arrested and thrown in jail.

The only way you could go was to sail on the ship.

Many men registered their protest and then sailed,

and many men sailed to their deaths as a result.

In one three-year period, over 1,500 sailors were jailed for refusing to crew ships

they believed unseaworthy.

And jail often brought poverty and destitution to their families.

Ever-more sailors were lured on to these coffin ships.

Plimsoll had two main demands.

Firstly, no unseaworthy ship should be allowed to leave port,

and that all freight ships must display a line marking the maximum safe-loading limit,

with harbourmasters being allowed to impound ships not showing a visible line above the water.

Plimsoll was pitting himself against huge vested interests.

When Samuel Plimsoll began his campaign against the overloading of ships,

which had led to so many deaths, he cited a statistic that in the 20 previous years

not a single English ship, not a single British ship had ever been scrapped.

They'd all been patched up and sent back to sea

because it was in the shipowners' interest to keep them afloat.

At the height of Plimsoll's fervent campaign,

an event at sea would lead to a surge of public support for the load line

and greater maritime safety.

This is Bridlington Bay on the Yorkshire coast.

Newcastle's 100 miles up in that direction.

And back in the 1870s it was Newcastle and Northeast coalfields that supplied the coal

that fuelled industrial Britain. That coal was transported by colliers up and down that coast

to London, to the South, even to France.

Coal was a notoriously dangerous cargo.

It was loaded open on deck, and as ships rode the waves it could shift and fatally unbalance them.

Whenever a storm brewed in the North Sea, they needed to find shelter on this coast,

and Bridlington Bay was their favourite sanctuary.

On 9 February 1871, 400 ships, many of them colliers, sought refuge

here in Bridlington from a passing storm.

But that afternoon the skies began to clear and one by one the ships made sail.

A huge crowd of onlookers came down to see the sight of such a large fleet

sailing off to the horizon.

That night, the wind suddenly rose to a hurricane,

it began to snow and the winds whipped that snow up into a blizzard.

As dawn broke the next morning,

a crown of onlookers came down and they were greeted with an appalling sight.

Ships were foundering in heavy seas, being pushed towards the coastline.

Some collier ships tried to steer for the sanctuary of the harbour,

only to be dashed against the breakwaters.

The cries of drowning crew could be heard over the winds.

A rocket was repeatedly fired to get ropes to stricken ships

and the whole town, men and women, came down to the waterfront

to help haul sailors to safety, and tend to the survivors.

Again and again, the exhausted lifeboat men set out through the blizzard

to reach the desperate sailors, but they'd been set an impossible task.

When the sea's fury calmed,

wreckage, cargo and drowned bodies filled the seafront.

28 ships were lost on the coast that night.

Many sailors and six of the lifeboat men perished.

This is the burial register for the Parish of Bridlington,

and it records all the names of the men who died during the Great Gale.

The burials of 14 February take up two full pages of this register.

On this page they run all the way down...

..to the bottom,

where there's this entry

that reads, "Eleven sailors names unknown.

"Drowned in Bridlington Bay."

The deaths infuriated Samuel Plimsoll

who felt most could have been avoided.

What happened with a lot of the ships was that as soon as they got as close into shore as the sandy bottom,

they fell apart.

And it was argued that this would not have happened if the ships had been in proper repair.

There was a great deal of coverage in the newspapers afterwards about the way the ships were loaded

and the condition the ships were in.

So it provided ammunition for Plimsoll's campaign.

Plimsoll now produced a book. Half a million copies were sold,

bringing in new supporters from surprising places with no maritime links.

He even had music-hall sketches written about him.

Plimsoll's campaign was heralded

in town halls, in the pulpit and in music halls.

He was christened the Sailors' Friend and songs were composed in his honour.

But then the backlash began.

Shipowners issued libel writs against Plimsoll's book

and there were personal attacks.

One letter in The Shipping Gazette declared,

"Plimsollism is another word for terrorism!"

This was war.

The front line moved to Westminster.

Records of Plimsoll's struggle can be found stored in the Parliamentary archives.

By the 1870s, public pressure for a new law to force shipowners to mark a safe-load line on their vessels

had grown into a national campaign.

But the men who actually drafted Britain's laws

repeatedly stood in the way of any new legislation.

And there's a reason for that.

Many of those men were themselves shipowners.

Plimsoll was no orator nor was he a genius,

yet his integrity was faultless...

and he was unrelenting.

When one bill was knocked back, he launched another,

and then another.

Plimsoll knew the public was on his side and not that of the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

In 1875 in July at the end of the term,

after Plimsoll had introduced unsuccessfully several merchant shipping bills,

Disraeli deferred the latest one once too often.

Plimsoll lost his temper. By this point he'd had 13 libel cases against him from unhappy shipowners,

he'd sold his own stately home to pay his legal bills...

With all of this behind him, to find that he was thwarted yet again was too much.

He called the MPs in the House "villains who colluded with the murderers outside it".

Plimsoll's outburst shocked both Parliament and the press,

but it was Disraeli's Government that was losing its grip.

American magazine Harper's Weekly

showed Disraeli being menaced by the lion of public opinion.

It had the bold caption,

"Now put your head in, if you dare."

Disraeli teetered on the brink.

Would he risk the nation's wrath?

The Prime Minister trimmed his sails. He needed a law, and soon.

But other MPs were not giving in yet.

This is the House Bill of the 1876 Merchant Shipping Act,

a draft of the new legislation.

It records all of the amendments proposed, accepted and rejected

as it made its way through Parliament,

and it's absolutely full of them.

You can see them scribbled in black ink, in pencil, in red ink,

some are cut and pasted in,

there's even one pinned to the bottom of the page.

You can see that it was a deeply contested and controversial piece of legislation.

This is the record of a great Parliamentary battle.

Eventually, after years of struggle,

Samuel Plimsoll triumphed and every freight ship in the world bears the mark of that victory.

You can even see it clearly on a vast ship like this.

This load line or Plimsoll line marks the safe-loading limit of a ship.

Plimsoll's success meant arrest for any shipowner guilty of risking life at sea.

It saved thousands of sailors' lives and coffin ships were no more.

Samuel Plimsoll had educated the Victorian public

about the existence of a dark side to seafaring.

But more horrors were to come.

In the summer of 1884, an English sea yacht, the Mignonette,

passed through these waters off the coast of West Africa.

She continued her voyage southwards, crossed the equator, into the South Atlantic.

The Mignonette was a racing yacht that was being delivered to a new owner in Sydney by Tom Dudley,

and he took with him three crewmen,

Edwin Stevens as first mate and navigator,

Ned Brooks as a cook and able seaman,

and a cabin boy called Richard Parker,

a 17-year-old boy who, like Tom Dudley, had grown up as an orphan and was illiterate.

And one of Dudley's promises to the boy was that he would teach him to read and write on the voyage.

It was a voyage full of promise for new lives in Australia.

Because the Mignonette was a relatively small yacht,

Tom Dudley, probably wisely, decided to stay closer to the African coast

and to take a more northerly course from Africa to Australia,

but the danger in that was, if anything went wrong, they were far from the shipping lanes

and their chances of rescue were remote.

Just how remote was something fate would reveal to them.

Six weeks into her journey, she was struck by a freak wave and she quickly sank.

The crew escaped to the lifeboat.

The captain, Tom Dudley, knew that their situation was all but hopeless.

In their swift escape, they had managed to save some navigational equipment,

but all they had to eat was two tins of turnips

and, worst of all, they had no water.

On the very first night, they had to fight off sharks with their oars.

Their predicament could hardly have been worse.

They're hundreds of miles from land, they're far from the shipping lanes,

they're in a tiny little dinghy, no shelter from the burning tropical sun,

and no means of making a sail other than the shirts they wore,

which Tom Dudley, the captain, eventually persuaded his men to give up to make a makeshift sail.

Dudley decided their only option was to drift with the wind

towards the South American coast, an ocean away.

In fact, he calculated they were 700 miles from land.

They feared they would become forgotten victims of the sea,

but instead, because of what happened next, they would be infamous across British society.

Dudley had no radio, no GPS, no helicopter to rescue them.

They were days from death.

Experienced sailors knew that if all else failed, they could turn to the custom of the sea.

Lots would be drawn and the loser would lose his life.

One life lost instead of all,

one life to provide sustenance for the rest.

Dudley suggested this, but Ned Brooks refused point blank.

The cabin boy Richard Parker had drunk seawater.

He slipped into a coma.

As dawn broke on the 19th day, Dudley could take no more.

Dudley scanned the horizon, searching for any sign of a ship.

But there was none.

He signalled to Stevens to grab the boy...

..and then Dudley slit his throat.

Richard Parker was now consumed.

Thirst being more urgent than hunger,

the men knew they had to quickly drink Parker's blood

before it would congeal.

Dudley said, "I shall never forget the sight of my two unfortunate companions over that ghastly meal.

"We was like mad wolves who could get the most.

"And for fathers of children to commit such a deed,

"we could not have our right reason."

24 days after their shipwreck, a passing German boat rescued them.

Arriving in Cornwall,

the three men told how they had been forced to turn to the custom of the sea.

As sailors they expected a sympathetic arm,

instead, they got the heavy hand of the law.

They came back to Falmouth and the harbourmaster said,

"Goodness me! You look in a terrible state. How on earth did you survive?"

"Well, we ate the cabin boy, of course!"

was more or less what their response was!

And then they were completely bemused by the fact that they were then charged with murder.

This event happened almost in the middle of nowhere.

Why did Dudley and Stevens admit to killing Parker?

Because they didn't think they'd done anything wrong.

It was the established custom of the sea, at least amongst the maritime community,

that in times of necessity, such as when you are stranded in the middle of nowhere

with nothing to eat and nothing to drink,

that recourse would be made to eating one of the people who had survived,

but normally after the drawing of lots.

Which could be rigged, because there was a tendency for the youngest crewman

or for the passenger rather than the crew

or for the Black rather than the White,

to have the lot fall upon him.

But that was considered to be the custom of the sea.

You don't have recourse to getting food or calling for help, you may never get help at all.

You're stranded in the middle of an ocean where you'll be lucky if somebody comes and picks you up.

I mean, in the case of Dudley and Stevens, they waited almost three weeks,

they didn't kill Parker the first day, they waited three weeks,

until things were dire,

and no hope was on the horizon.

What was the public reaction to this case?

Even Richard Parker's own brother, who was a mariner himself,

came up to them and shook their hands in public.

So could sailors legally kill each other for food?

Anecdotes of nautical cannibalism were widespread,

but this custom of the sea had yet to reach court.

A test case was needed.

Whilst Dudley and Stevens had public support,

was any English judge really going to legalise cannibalism?

A legal balancing act was called for.

The tribunal of five judges

determined that necessity was not a defence to murder.

Consequently, Dudley and Stevens were guilty of murder,

and as a result of that were found guilty by the judges, not by the jury,

and were condemned to death.

But, surprise, surprise, their sentence was very shortly commuted

to what many people thought was an excessive period of time, six months.

How does the Dudley-Stevens case relate to what happened on the Birkenhead?

Well, it was specifically contrasted by Lord Chief Justice Coleridge in his judgment on Dudley and Stevens,

and he said, "The British way is exemplified by the Birkenhead,

"not by what happened on the Mignonette."

In other words, better to die than to kill.

The British Christian way is self-sacrifice, not the sacrifice of others.

Thankfully, fewer and fewer Victorians faced Dudley and Stevens' horrible dilemma,

because shipping was becoming ever safer.

Back in the early-18th century,

to cross 3,000 miles over the Atlantic

meant at the very least a fortnight's endurance,

cramped quarters, no bath and a risk of dying in a shipwreck.

But Victorian engineers made extraordinary leaps forward,

smashing records in speed and size.

By 1880, the journey to New York was cut to nine days,

and barely a decade later to only five.

Faster also meant bigger and more luxurious.

Yet the giants were also safer for passengers who could be reassured by plentiful lifeboats.

From 1894, the Merchant Shipping Bill laid down a legal requirement for lifeboats

based on the ship's size.

The MPs set the maximum at what seemed a vast weight, 10,000 tons.

It seemed that Britain's war against the shipwreck had been won.

Progress meant that soon ships would double and even quadruple this size.

With fewer shipwrecks, politicians saw little need to hinder ships with extra regulations,

and lifeboat numbers did not rise.

As the 20th century dawned, few were concerned.

One ship shattered this illusion...

her name synonymous with broken pride...

..Titanic.

This is the Harland & Wolff Shipyard from where the Titanic was launched

in front of 100,000 spectators.

It was a proud moment for Belfast,

but it was also the crowning glory of a century of progress.

Titanic was not only the largest manmade moving object in the world,

she was as ultramodern as it was possible to be.

Titanic's first-class passengers were treated like rock stars.

A one-way first-class ticket would have cost tens of thousands of pounds at today's prices.

# ..And leaving dear old Ireland without warning... #

Even in third-class steerage, Titanic's passengers had electric light, baths and meals.

Wherever you were, it was the height of modernity.

Progress had overtaken safety.

Titanic, quite legally, only had lifeboats for a third of its passengers.

Titanic's myth continues in part because it was the Birkenhead drill writ large.

As the lifeboats were mustered, the women and children famously went first.

The men seemingly did the right thing and, on the captain's orders, bravely held back.

But Titanic had two versions of the Birkenhead drill.

On the starboard side, the drill was the standard women and children first,

but on the port side Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean women and children only.

He even left empty seats if no women and children were near.

I happened to meet the captain,

and I asked him, "Shall I get the women and children away, sir?"

He just nodded.

There weren't enough boats to take half the people,

and the chances of the other half in that icy cold water

were absolutely nil.

Yet there was never the slightest attempt to get into a boat out of turn.

In fact, with the last couple of boats, it was even difficult to find women to fill them,

though, of course, there was still a good many onboard.

The Birkenhead drill had apparently taught everyone how to act.

Titanic's captain Edward Smith's last reported order was, "Be British."

There were nearly 500 unused spaces on Titanic's lifeboats,

testament perhaps to the moral revolution that had taken place

in British attitudes to shipwreck over the previous 100 years.

Those in the lifeboats were only later saved thanks to a huge technological advance...

radio.

Before radio, a sinking ship had to rely on distress flares to visually signal for help.

Titanic too used these, but they were mistaken for party fireworks,

and it was the liner's radioed SOS call that brought the Carpathia to her aid from over 50 miles away.

When she reached Titanic's last recorded position,

the giant ship was gone,

but survivors were in lifeboats.

Without radio, it's quite possible

all Titanic survivors would have died of hypothermia long before they were rescued.

Titanic might just be one more forgotten name on the list of ships that never reached port.

More than a century after the wreck of the Titanic,

and generation after generation of technological innovation

has cosseted us from its horrors.

Ships now use radar to steer clear of icebergs

and GPS can pinpoint their global position to within metres.

Yet ships still sink,

and the gigantic scale of modern cruise liners seems as hubristic as Titanic ever was.

But while deaths at sea still occur,

the shipwreck as an event has lost that chilling potency that it once had.

So as popular fascination shifts or has shifted across the 20th century

from the ship to the plane to the spaceship,

if you like, that leaves the Titanic, I think, as the last great shipwreck.

I think it's unlikely that its sort of place in the popular consciousness will be challenged,

because we just don't think about ships and shipwrecks in the same way as we once did.

And so the Titanic stands there as a sort of colossal memorial

to how powerful and how important the maritime sphere once was in British society.

My journey in this series began back in the 16th century

when Britain could only dream of ruling the waves.

It's carried me through centuries of destructive chaos at sea on a shocking scale.

Yet despite the huge loss of lives,

the shipwreck helped shape Britain's modern identity,

its national character and change the course of its history.

Without the shipwreck, we simply wouldn't be the nation that we are today.