How to Survive the Age of Sail

Summary

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Dan Snow's History Hit - "How to Survive the Age of Sail"

Release Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Dan Snow (History Hit)
Guests: Dr. Maddy Pelling & Dr. Anthony Delaney (After Dark Podcast)

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

In this episode, Dan Snow teams up with After Dark historians Dr. Maddy Pelling and Dr. Anthony Delaney to explore the gritty realities of the Age of Sail (16th–19th centuries). The trio unpacks the technological marvels, human endurance, grim hardships, and multinational crews that defined seafaring during history’s most transformative naval era. Together, they break down everything from the ships themselves and daily routines to discipline, disease, mutinies, and the brutal realities of battle and piracy—inviting listeners to consider: could you have survived the Age of Sail?

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

1. The Age of Sail: A Formative (and Deadly) Era

• Europe’s Age of Sail restructured the world—culturally, technologically, and geopolitically.
• Dan frames the era as not just one of adventure and expansion, but also "an era of enslavement, colonization, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease and desperation" (01:43).
• Technological feats: Ships like HMS Victory were, "the most complex objects ever created by human beings to that point in history" (05:23).

Notable Quote
"It’s a time with some of the greatest stories from our history. And it’s a time that shaped the world that we still live in today. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was also an era of enslavement, of colonization, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease and desperation..."
— Dan Snow (01:43)

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2. Ship Life: Design, Danger & Human Suffering

• Ship design was a ‘hellish compromise’: balancing speed, cargo, armament, and safety for vastly differing environments—leading to constant tension and compromise (11:17).
• The logistics:
  • 800+ people on a ship
  • 20 miles of rope per vessel
  • Hundreds of oaks used in construction
• Crew faced cramped, rough conditions, minimal comfort, constant physical danger and, as Dan reflects, "unimaginable...because sailing is miserable today...and that’s with GPS, that is with waterproof clothing" (07:16).
• Selection for crews mixed: some volunteered for adventure or social mobility, others were forced (press-ganged).

Notable Quote
"Humans cannot be anymore. And actually...they’re not meant to be out there in a wooden tub in the 16th cent, eating weird food, battered by those winds. We’re not designed for that."
— Dan Snow (09:11)

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3. Press Gangs & Recruitment

• British navy employed "press gangs" to forcibly enlist experienced sailors, particularly during wars (14:18).
• Some men volunteered, drawn by the slim chances of wealth and adventure.
• Differences from the army are highlighted, with anecdotes about shifty recruitment (putting a shilling in beer mugs with glass bottoms to trap men into service).

Notable Quote
"They could just come and knock on your door and drag you away and then you could be at sea for years. Oh God, it is hardcore."
— Dan Snow (14:18)

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4. Daily Life at Sea: Discipline, Booze & Brutality

• Routine under the Royal Navy was highly regulated—but varied by captain and ship reputation.
• Discipline could be brutal: the cat-o’-nine-tails was used for punishment (22:20). Drink was seen as a necessity:
  "Without alcohol, this age of European expansion...was almost impossible. And unless people are drinking alcohol, I think it would have been completely intolerable."
  — Dan Snow (22:23)
• Crew slept in hammocks just 14 inches apart; personal space was nonexistent.
• Leadership and morale: While some captains were cruel, successful ones like Captain Cochrane attracted volunteers due to the lure of "prize money" for captured ships (17:27).
• Mutinies were rare; the Navy was generally professionalizing toward better management.

Notable Quote
"There was a lot of booze involved. I really do think that without alcohol, this age of European expansion...would have been completely intolerable."
— Dan Snow (22:23)

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5. Diversity, Social Structure & Sanitation

• Ships were cosmopolitan, hosting sailors from Ireland, North Africa, Denmark, and beyond—becoming floating microcosms of empire (26:08).
• Life below deck was highly stratified: officers enjoyed fine porcelain while the crew used earthenware.
• Sanitation was crucial on British ships (unlike French counterparts), with strict rules even for urination, to prevent fatal disease outbreaks (27:12).

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6. Disease, Diet & Death

• Scurvy was rampant—caused by chronic vitamin C deficiency from reliance on salt meat and hardtack.
• The consequences were devastating: "Scurvy is really bad...all their old wounds from decades before start opening up, your whole body…I mean, scurvy. Scurvy is really bad." (34:11)
• Accidental death was frequent: more sailors died due to shipwrecks and mishap than in famous sea battles (34:35).

Notable Quote
"You will lose more men in a shipwreck than you do in a battle."
— Dr. Maddy Pelling (34:35, echoing Dan’s point)

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7. Piracy vs. Naval Service, and the Blurred Lines

• Piracy, privateering, and naval service often blurred together, especially in times of peace/war.
• Many sailors alternated between merchant, naval, and even pirate ships, reflecting the fluidity and moral ambiguity of the era (36:21).
• Pirates were more varied and less like Hollywood depiction; the reality was more nuanced and violent.

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8. Battle: Horror Beyond Imagination

• Battle scenes were horrifying, close-range gunfights where ships often touched—causing fire, splintered wood, mass casualties.
• Surgeons performed amputations with crude tools, as in the case of Nelson at Trafalgar (38:41). Yet disease and accident still claimed far more lives than canon-fire (39:19).

Memorable Moment
"Nelson’s carried down at Trafalgar...puts himself in the corner and slowly drowns in his own blood. And the surgeon’s just there, his tools are getting blunt and he’s sawing limbs off trying to save the human life after a limb has been smashed."
— Dan Snow (38:41)

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9. Could You Survive?

• Modern listeners likely could not endure the physical and psychological toll of months at sea: severe sleep deprivation, malnutrition, relentless work, trauma (39:34).
• Skeletal remains of sailors show the toll: "their skeletons were hammered...showing signs of extraordinary hard labour quite early in all" (40:15).

Notable Quote
"I don’t think we can begin [to imagine]."
— Dan Snow (39:51)

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10. The FINAL CHALLENGE: Which Ship Would You Choose?

Each host and guest describes their dream (or nightmare) voyage:

• Dan: Would prefer a frigate under a daring captain like Thomas Cochrane, running independent raids—a life of action and hijinks (40:47).
• Maddy: Drawn to a more discovery-focused vessel, possibly the Beagle (42:17).
• Anthony: For morbid curiosity, would want to invisibly observe the doomed Terror expedition (42:50).

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TIMESTAMPED HIGHLIGHTS

• [01:43] Dan’s overview of the Age of Sail’s contradictions
• [05:23] Ships as technological marvels
• [11:17] The "hellish compromise" of ship design
• [14:18] Press gangs and forced naval service
• [22:20] Discipline, punishment, and alcohol at sea
• [26:08] The diversity & cosmopolitanism of crews
• [33:16] Scurvy and sailor nutrition
• [34:35] Deadliness of shipwrecks vs. battle
• [36:21] Pirates: their reality versus their myth
• [38:41] Naval battle horror and trauma (Nelson’s death)
• [39:51] The psychological distance between moderns and sailors then
• [40:47] What ship would you (dare to) sail on? Final host/guest answers

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NOTABLE QUOTES

• "Humans cannot be anymore. And actually an artificial. They’re not meant to be out there in a wooden tub in the 16th cent, eating weird food, battered by those winds. We’re not designed for that."
  — Dan Snow ([09:11])

• "Without alcohol, this age of European expansion...would have been completely intolerable."
  — Dan Snow ([22:23])

• "You will lose more men in a shipwreck than you do in a battle."
  — Dr. Maddy Pelling ([34:35])

• "Nelson’s carried down at Trafalgar...puts himself in the corner and slowly drowns in his own blood. And the surgeon’s just there, his tools are getting blunt and he’s sawing limbs off..."
  — Dan Snow ([38:41])

• "I don’t think we can begin [to imagine]."
  — Dan Snow ([39:51])

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CONCLUSION

This episode shatters the romantic myth of the Age of Sail, revealing it as a time of desperate endurance, constant danger, fascinating complexity, and human diversity. The hosts drive home just how alien, and often horrific, this world would be to modern listeners. Would you survive the Age of Sail? Listen, then decide—but don’t count on it.

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For more on surviving history’s darkest eras and more seafaring tales, follow Dan Snow’s History Hit and After Dark podcasts.

Transcript

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[Dan Snow]

Hi folks, welcome down Snow's history now long time Listen to this podcast will know that if there's one period in history that I would like to go back to, it would be the Age of Sail, when those European powers sent out expeditions, great voyages across uncharted oceans. It was a time of exploration and settlement, time of pirates and privateers. And corsairs. There was plundering and pillaging and violence. There were great sea battles from the Armada to Trafalgar. It's when our European world became much, much bigger. It was a time of adventure and discovery and sails filling in westerly winds, sheets straining at the clues, spice barrels in warehouses of cannon smoke hanging over the ocean. It's a time with some of the greatest stories from our history. And it's a time that shaped the world that we still live in today. The good, the bad and the ugly. It was also an era of enslavement, of colonization, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease and desperation, of clinging onto the taffrail and hurricane forces off Cape Horn. The ice forming on the yards. It's an age that some people romanticize, but was actually pretty dark and pretty grim. Death by typhus or perhaps taking some grape shot to the neck, well, that was just the tip of the iceberg. So for today's episode, we're going to explore the dark history of the Age of Sail. I'm teaming up with my good friends from the After Dark podcast, Dr. Matty Pelling and Dr. Anthony Delaney. And let me say, as a man who loves the ocean, loves sailing, and I always used to dream about being part of Nelson's fleet when I was a child, or on Cochrane's crew, or epap to Captain Kidd's pirate crew, Particularly when I discovered that he forced his crew to be in bed by 8pm I'm here for that. But anyway, after doing research over the last few years, and particularly for this podcast, I'm really not entirely sure I would have been suitable. So please listen, and then you get to decide if you could survive the Age of Sail. Enjoy.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

T minus 10.

[Dan Snow]

Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No Black, white, unity till there is first some black unit never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Okay, we've done a lot of ship episodes on After Dark. We have done. And I'm gonna list them now and you won't remember.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Okay, go on.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Single one.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I'll tell you if I remember them.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

The Terror in Erebus.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Remember that one?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Okay. Mutiny on the Bounty.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yes.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

The Ghost ship. Mary Celeste.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Not a clue.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Really?

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I remember that.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Wow. Okay. The Batavia. You must remember the Bata.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yeah, I remember the Batavia.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah. And we got a lot of people writing in.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I still get pictures of the Batavia in Australia.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Okay. But today we are joined by the captain of the good ship history here himself, our load star.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Did you make that up yourself? Is it in your notes?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Absolutely did not. This is part of Snow. It's in the notes. It's only bloody Dan Snow. Hello, Dan.

[Dan Snow]

Hey, guys. I have heard many of your ship episodes. I love the Batavia. I thought it was cool.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Everyone loves the Batavia.

[Dan Snow]

And do they do? Well, because if so, I've got, Yes, I promise I've got more of that.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Ships do very well.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

And also the stories of the sort of desperate struggle to survive after the ship sinks. Okay, it will.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

And I think it's like this enclosed world narrative, right, where it's like everything is happening within this wooden world and people are really intrigued by what happens.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

When human nature breaks down.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yes, of course. You just can't be clipped. So, Dan, we're Talking about the 16th to the 19th century, generally speaking, in today's episode. This is a really formative part of life at sea and what we understand of the history of life at sea. But how kind of wild and dark is this particular time period for naval travel?

[Dan Snow]

I mean, it is a formative time, as you say, for life at sea. It's a formative time for our planet. I mean, the reason that the world looks the way it does is because these Western Europeans who played, no, they hadn't been at the forefront of sort of human development at that point in history. We're talking about the Basques, we're talking about the Portuguese, talking about the Bretons, the Normans, the Cornish, the people from Devon, people from Bristol. So these are the peninsulas. On the end of the peninsula of Eurasia, it just explodes and they start making obviously huge cultural attraction elsewhere and borrowing technology and the civic. Out of this sort of milieu of the 15th century comes these gigantic ships capable of ocean travel, which. No, well, the Chinese had evolved. Fascinating. Then sort of turned away from, but capable of sailing around the world for the first time, for example, crossing the Pacific for the first time, for example. And those become these engines of unimaginable transformation. They take smallpox in America and just America's alone. Europeans arrive, 90% of the indigenous population of Americas, as I've heard on your podcast many times, will die over the next 200 years. Right. So that's because of these ocean going ships and the disease they unwittingly travel across in. They are the most complex objects ever created by human beings to that point in history. Look at HMS Victory in the sort of middle of this 1750s, it's laid down and fights the battle of Trafalgar, famously 1805, there's 800 people on board. Imagine the logistics keep them all alive on these long ocean journeys. There's something like 20 miles of rope required, hundreds of oak trees have gone into the construction of that. There is cutting edge science there in terms of guns, in terms of the navigational equipment. So I mean, we are talking technological revolution and copper Sheathing on the bottom, which in turn is an engine for further industrial revolution. This is military, industrial complex stuff. But for the human beings on board to get to the point. Unimaginable. I mean, unimaginable, because sailing is miserable today. Sailing. I've crossed the Irish Sea many times.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yes, absolutely.

[Dan Snow]

And you just wish you were anywhere else in the world. Right. There are seasickness, and that's with gps, that is with waterproof clothing.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

You have done more than just cross the Irish Sea, though. So this is why this is really interesting. Because actually, okay, I know technology has changed. I know the experience is slightly different, but at the baseline, those waves stay the same. And you have gone quite a way around the world. World in some of these things. What does that do to you in terms of your understanding of the world? How does that shift things?

[Dan Snow]

So what it does to me is I find you can study the history. And then usually when you study history and you go somewhere that you guys have been to place. Oh, yeah, I can understand this. Beautiful. I get why this story happened in this community. And this I understand less. Like, I've been in a big storm in the Southern Ocean and I actually go. I have actually no idea. Yeah, no idea at all. How any human being could survive with the equipment they had in the 18th century. Simply unimaginable.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Dan, is that what grabs your imagination about it, though? Because there is that mystery that you can, as a sailor yourself, go out to some of these places and actually you're not getting any closer to the history.

[Dan Snow]

You're getting further away.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah. Is that what appeals?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, I guess so. Cause you read an account of Vasco Dalgama's voyage to India. For the first time, a sort of European ship has left from Europe, sailed around the bottom of Africa and reached India. And I mean, just the weather. The other humans, they have to deal with the issues within the cruise. The equipment failures in the cruise. I mean, the ship sinking, the scurvy. When you get scurvy, no one knows. No one has a clue about this. Yeah. What it is. Your old wounds open up, your teeth become loose in the gums. It's unimaginable. We've got corpses lying next to the barely living. You've got just a handful of men left steering the ship. I mean, just total breakdown. I guess what I find fascinating about it, it's a bit like sort of mountaineering. Or when people say, why are you interested in military history? It's not because you're like a sort of bonkers spitfire passion. You Know, I love a Spitfire, but for me, it's.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Roll it back down.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

People will be writing in.

[Dan Snow]

It's never. You cannot find humans placed in more extreme situations than in those trenches of the First World War or in that front line of Roman union or battling around Cape Horn on the wager that's been the subject to that or the bounty that you guys have talked about. They had a rough time going around the Horn or Drake entering the Pacific. Humans cannot be anymore. And actually an artificial. They're not meant to be out there in a wooden tub in the 16th cent, eating weird food, battered by those winds. We're not designed for that.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Let's talk then about these vessels themselves. Cause you say they're such complex objects, Dan, and that really interests me. And sidebar, by the way, as someone who grew up in Staffordshire and who you know, Reginald Mitchell, homeless spitfire. How dare you? Yeah. And it was a long way from the sea. That's very true. Yeah. I'm someone who can appreciate the sea from the shoreline. Gorgeous. Love it.

[Dan Snow]

Nice feet, nice backdrop.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Don't want to be on the water. No, thank you.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Can you nurse?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

No, Absolutely not. Any circus.

[Dan Snow]

I think I'd like to.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

The only time I want to be on the water is I want to be buried like a Viking and pushed up to sea and stopped. Five, two.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Okay.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Specifically from Lindisfar. So if anyone.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

She's thought about this.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the plan.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Welcome to After Dark, where we think about our funerals.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Of course we do.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, of course we do. I have.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

And interestingly, in a ship. But yeah, the rest of the time. No. But let's talk about some of these vessels, because, Dan, you've been on replica versions of these and of course you mentioned the Victory. Is that at Portsmouth or Southampton? Portsmouth.

[Dan Snow]

How could you? Only someone from Staffordshire could ask that.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, sorry, I know Portsmouth.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

We're getting regional now, guys.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

It's all just the south to me.

[Dan Snow]

The south?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, it's just the south.

[Dan Snow]

That's monstrous.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

But you know that. I mean, that's. I have been there and I have been on Victory, and it's such an incredible space telling that the thing I found most interesting was the officers quarters and the interiors, the furniture. Like, that's what interested me.

[Dan Snow]

Beautiful.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

And the. Yeah, the complete beauty. The complete giving over to aesthetics in a space that is otherwise completely functional. That fascinated me.

[Dan Snow]

Designed to inflict murder. It's bizarre.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, exactly. But let's talk about these vessels, though, because you say they're designed to inflict Murder. They are designed in this really complex way to keep a whole community of people alive. They are also war machines. They are for going across the globe, getting to places that in lots of instances, people have never gone to before. Certainly not Western Europeans. So what is it about these objects that is so remarkable?

[Dan Snow]

They're a product of hellish compromises, because you can build a boat that goes fast. You can build a boat that's safe in big storms. You can build a boat that can carry lots of goods and make lots of money when you get home, or you can build a boat that can put lots of cannon on and rain death down on your enemy. And you can build a boat that's designed to go to uncharted territory with shallow draft and a thick built keel, so if you do bump on the old coral reef, you get away with it. Or you can build a boat which you're very confident in where you're going, and you just want to get there to and fro very quickly. And so what you get in this period is this mad melange where everyone's just going, well, I have a bit of this. Everything's a compromise. It's a nightmarish compromise. As you know from the Bounty, they're trying to stick all this breadfruit in. You got the crew all packed in, all falling out with each other. So Captain Cook chooses a. For his trips of the exploration to the Pacific, he chooses these colliers, these ships that were designed to carry coal from, roughly speaking, Newcastle to London. And if you choose the wrong ship, you're in big trouble. You're trying to design for all of these different jobs and all of these different conditions. You sail from Portugal to India. You're leaving the North Atlantic. You are going through the doldrums, the place where there's no wind and it's incredibly hot on the equator. You're crossing the line, you're going to go. Then you're going around the tip of southern Africa. It could be gale force winds, hurricane force winds, and then you're going up into the monsoon of India. So, I mean, how on earth are you building a ship that's capable of.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

How do you plan for that?

[Dan Snow]

How do you plan for that?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

And I suppose as well, people on board these ships often don't agree what the function of them is. I'm thinking about Cook's voyages when Joseph Banks, the botanist on board, is like, I want to bring all of these plants that we found. And everyone's like, no, there's no way you can bring some of them, but not quite that many.

[Dan Snow]

And the owners are always saying to the skippers, like, we want you to make more space for all these goods. We're going to make more profit on the nutmeg. We're going to bring back from the Easter skips, like, yeah, but I've got to take more supplies for my crew. And the owner's like, don't write the crew, come on, there won't be that many left by the time you get back. And the mortality on these ships, it is simply extraordinary to me why anybody went on these ships. You know, Magellan sails around, though he doesn't make. He's killed in Southeast Asia. I mean, a handful of the hundreds of men that leave.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

You say this, you say this, but you know, you'd be on one too.

[Dan Snow]

As a 17 year old. I probably wouldn't because. And I think it's the same reason that we send young men into battle because they, at certain stages, Passchendaele, for example, later on, you know, there's gonna be horrific casualties. And I think every One of those 18 year olds think, it's not gonna.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Be them, it's gonna be them.

[Dan Snow]

There's a naivety to it and I think if you're a second son, if you're an island and you're being beasted by the Protestants, you think, actually, I might just escape. There's an escape and like. So the algorithm feeds you the success, right?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yes.

[Dan Snow]

Dead men don't tell tales. What he is the local lad that's made good. Everyone knows who Sir Francis Drake is, comes from a very modest family, becomes one of the richest men in Tudor England because of his buccaneering piracy. Call it what you're on the high seas and so you're all thinking about Drake. You are not thinking about the hundreds of men that follow Drake. Hundreds of men who know only watery graves.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Let's talk about then, this idea of, you know, we're talking about these people who choose this and who go on this as a form of maybe adventure or escape or whatever it might be. But there are also things called press gang and press ganging. Tell us what that is. And this could never be me, by the way. I would want comfortable lodgings if I was going to sea. That would be on my rider, if I was going. But this isn't exactly what we're getting with Prescott.

[Dan Snow]

This is the opposite of riders. Yeah. So the British government realised, British Imperial Project realised, that defence of the ocean around Britain is so essential that you will allow the navy to Breach the God given rights of an Englishman, which are obviously only partially implemented and there's a lot of hypocrisy. But there was an idea on the continent, if you're a divine right ruler on the continent, you're a sort of tyrant. You grab anyone you want, sit them in the army and throw them to the front line. In Britain, you're not allowed to do that. You have to actually recruit people. You have to take the King's shilling. Now, there's all sorts of skullduggery in the army. You go and you get them drunk and they sign up, they realize. So look, it's in practice, I think it may have looked quite similar, but the navy were literally allowed to round people up. They could just come and knock on your door and drag you away and then you could be at sea for years. Oh God, it is hardcore. But typically how this was used was the hot press, which was, we're just going to take everyone. And that was in times of emergency, the outbreak of Napoleon at war, for example. Typically what you do is you don't want landsmen on board, you don't want people that don't know the ropes. That expression, because it's incredibly dangerous.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I've just gotten that expression.

[Dan Snow]

I mean, when you go on one of these tall ships, there is a forest of ropes. Each one has a very precise purpose.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Don't know the ropes, of course.

[Dan Snow]

That's great. Grab the halyard of the fore staysail.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

I'd be like, stop yelling at me. I don't know what to do.

[Dan Snow]

Then you get hit with a little whip thing as well. But anyways, so actually you want mariners, so what they do is go to. You'd go on the quayside, you go to sailors pubs and you'd burst in and just drag. So typically you're taking them from the merchant fleet. So it's not the case on the whole that they're like breaking into your house, up country farming canoes, they're just like, sorry, lads you're all coming to see. But there are some examples of people getting caught up in the press.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Wow. And this, it's so telling that this happens for the navy and not necessarily the army, as you say. There are other forms of pushing people into the army. At home I have an auction. It's an old pewter mug. I think it's from a regiment that was in India in the 19th century and it has a glass bottom. And the idea was that you take the King's shilling. So if someone would pop the Shilling in your drink. And you'd be drinking, and then when you got to the bottom of it, you'd be like, oh, somebody's giving me this. And the glass was to check that nobody had done that to you. Yeah. Which. So, you know, there were other ways to do that. But I think the fact this is happening to the navy shows how important the British Navy is in this moment. Right. That it just needs a constant supply of men because so many of them are going to die out there.

[Dan Snow]

Well, many of them gonna die. They just require huge manning. The peacetime navy was smashed because it always pay any tax, so it's reduced to a shadow of itself. And then in wartime, you have to. To take all the wrappers off all those ships that are anchored there in the Medway or in Rochester or elsewhere, and then you just have to surge crew on board them. So there's no sort of ta, no reserve, no National Guard. It's really, really intense. But there is a lot of volunteering, I should say. Captain Cook famously volunteered. He left the coal trade and volunteered in the Navy, So it could be a route to wealth and a social escalator for men like Captain Cook, who was born and illiterate in Yorkshire. So to a working family. So the navy could be. But. And also a captain's success was Captain Cochrane. He was famous for being lucky and he would often stumble across enemy vessels and you got prize money. You got a share of that. Even the crew got a very small share, but they got a share of that prize money. So he never struggled to get recruits, so people would sign on, serve with him.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

This is sort of like celebrity captain. Yeah, you bet.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

I love that idea. Okay, so we've been press ganged. We've made it onto a Royal Navy ship.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Speak for yourself. I definitely have not been press ganged.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

I'm less happy about it than others.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I'm like the surgeon on board or something. I have to have some form of comfort.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

I just think you have a choice in there.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I don't know.

[Dan Snow]

They wouldn't.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Look, come on. If you were press ganging, would you come for me? No.

[Dan Snow]

You know, I think you're. Whether you're doing this on purpose or not, the famous character from Master and Commander, who's the Irish surgeon played by Paul Bettany. So I'm seeing you the sort of handsome, chiseled rather.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

You can stop there, Dan. That's fine. You've said enough.

[Dan Snow]

Slightly uncomfortable in the maritime world around him. An intellectual. Yeah, sure.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I'll Take all of that. That's what I will be. I'll be the shark.

[Dan Snow]

I'll tell you later what the serpents do in battle. This is Dan Snows his More off the Bis.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway as winter approaches. Make sure you set aside some time for self care now through December 2nd. Get great savings on personal care essentials when you shop in store or online. Buy two participating self care items and save $3. Shop for items like Tresemme Shampoo, Dove Shampoo, Dove Men's Care Body Wash, Dove Body Wash and Axe Shower gel and save $3 when you buy two or more items. Offer ends December 2nd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Dan Snow]

Oh hey, welcome to gift wrapping.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Whoa.

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

So is Saldana.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Hey, can you wrap these please?

[Dan Snow]

Wow. IPhone 17s.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

You splurged at T Mobile. You can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new center Stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.

[Dan Snow]

I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Well, it's better than socks.

[Dan Snow]

So I have to trade in my old phone, right?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

No AT T Mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.

[Dan Snow]

Incredible.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Forget that.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Aunt Liz will be jealous.

[Dan Snow]

Sounds like my family drama.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Oh I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with hey where are you going?

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

To T Mobile.

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

The Hollow holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible port inside essentials for well qualified customers bought on pay + taxes, fees and $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact US Finance agreement 256 gigabytes 830 required.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Okay, so we're on the ship. Obviously we don't know the ropes necessarily. Well, you might do if you were an experienced sailor already, but we certainly don't. What is life gonna be like aboard? What's our daily routine?

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so if we're on the let's go Royal Navy.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yep.

[Dan Snow]

And let's go sort of, roughly speaking, the sort of famous age of cell that people be familiar with the era of Nelson and things. So things are getting sorted out. This is a long way, actually from the age of Drake, where it was all quite freelance y and just utterly chaotic. I mean, again, how anyone survived in the sixth century, actually, I almost don't know. And Drake indeed did in fact die at sea, but he almost died very early in his career in a particularly rough crossing with having been ambushed by the Spanish very early on. Anyway, so if you're in the sort of age of Nelson, you're being paid, there is food provided for you. Historians like to argue about this. As you'd expect a lot of it different from ship to ship. There were some brutal captains, no doubt sort of traumatized or just psychopathic. So some crews were quite famous, some ships quite famous being sort of flogging ships. The cat nine tails would come out, which is a whip with nine strands to it, knotted strands, and there would be nine. So cat nine tails. And you'd be flogged for a whole range of misdemeanors. There was also just arbitrary punishment that got banned as you go through the 8th century, which is senior rates could just sort of whack you with a little whip occasionally. If you just need as long as.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

It'S a little whip, then it's exactly.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Just needed a little bit of encouragement.

[Dan Snow]

Remind you of your duties? Yeah, there was a lot of booze involved. I really do think that without alcohol, this age of European expansion, which would rewrite the demography of the planet and the political strategic balance of the planet, I think was almost impossible. And unless people are drinking alcohol, I think it would have been completely intolerable.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Isn't it so depressing, though? Can you imagine waking up the next morning with a head on you like a hammer, where you're going, oh, my God, I'm stranded in the middle of. I don't even know where I am. The world that I thought I knew in, you know, Portsmouth or wherever it is, whatever little harbor town, the south, the general south, is totally gone. And here I am with a pounding headache in some kind of a hammock or in some kind of like a wooden slat thing, depending on what the accommodation was. That's not where I am.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

I'd be used to it, I guess. Us, after a few days, he'd be like humans.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yes, true.

[Dan Snow]

14 inches, by the way. If you have it. You're bumping up against people all the time. I thread to Drake again. Drake lied to his crew, said he wasn't going around the world. They all thought they were going to the Eastern Mediterranean. So he sails past Morocco and they all start going.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

When are we going home? Because I'm tired.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

But I do think that's really interesting, though, that you are at the whim of the person in charge of the ship, often thinking about Mutiny on the Bounty and Captain Blyon. Obviously that doesn't go that well for him in the end, but he's someone who has a very strict idea of what discipline should be aboard the ship and how he's gonna run it, and is incredibly unpopular from the get go. And if you've been press ganged into maybe an infamous ship where, you know, the crew is brutally punished, the person in charge is someone who's well known for being violent and meting out these things. I mean, it's not an appealing life. And if you suddenly end up on a ship like that and you realize what you're doing, where you're going, what's happening, you can't turn around, there's no jumping off.

[Dan Snow]

Nope.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

You're just stuck in that situation.

[Dan Snow]

And yet there's very few examples of mutiny in the Royal Navy in the era of nuns. There are a few. There's some famous examples around. Weirdly, pay mostly in the 1790s. But there are examples of sort of mutinies that happen on a ship like the Bounty, and there aren't many where the crew just go, I'm absolutely done with this guy. You know, this guy is completely bizarre. The Royal Navy by that period is pretty professional. There is an understanding that actually the best way to get a crew to sail fast and for everyone to win here is to sort of, roughly speaking, work with the grain. Now, listen, there are different periods of time, different places. There are obviously slave ships that are just a point where they take and slow down Africans across the Atlantic to be sold in the Caribbean and the Americas. Conditions on those unimaginable huge numbers of enslaved men, women and children dying and being and left in amongst their fellow prisoners, shackled. They couldn't sit up, they couldn't stand up below deck. So there are all sorts of different types and the crews on those ships were fantastically cruel. And I think in turn their officers would have been. But by this period in the Royal Navy, you're getting a sense that good leadership, there is beginnings, a little bit of hr, There's a little bit of sort of managing the crew. And also if you don't want the crew to just jump overboard when you do arrive at a port and abscond, which would happen as well, you do think I might try and keep them a little bit. Sweet. Promising something.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Recent scholarship has said that actually modern humans wouldn't be able to cope with it. It's a brutally hard life, but punishment wasn't the worst feature of it, probably for me.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I think this idea that you're talking about of, of being rowing together in more cases than not. It's certainly what we encounter. Obviously, when we cover these ship histories, something usually goes wrong. So actually it's an exception in those cases, and we're very aware that it's an exception. But when you're talking down about like press ganging and bringing groups of people together who may not necessarily encounter one another in everyday life, otherwise I'm imagining that it can still be quite tension filled, bringing and potentially that there's like danger, dangerous elements, individuals that are brought on. Do we have accounts of that happening?

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, definitely. So everyone who goes on board a ship at this time says it was an extraordinarily cosmodern place. You hear Danish, there are people from North Africa, there are people of color. There are a lot of Irish. Yes, vast number of Irish.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

We tend to get undersea.

[Dan Snow]

If we can get everywhere you go, an astonishing portion of Nathan's feet at trial. Wow. Astonishing.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

So we don't know that in Ireland. You know, we're very difficult with those histories.

[Dan Snow]

That's difficult history. And so Waterloo, as you know as well, the land armies, famously these Irish units and Irishmen serving in English units. Anyway, so that's why it was thought rich. And you're all living within unbelievably confined space. So yes, there is a lot of focus on troublemakers. Dealing with troublemakers. They might be lash. I suspect you'd get rid of a troublemaker. You'd say actually get rid of them at the first port of call if there's a sort of socialist revolutionary on board. Anachronistic. Which you do see in some of these mutinies in the 1790s. See kind of individual leaders described as troublemakers. But they got quite political and disciplined apart from anything else. So less even than the harmoniousness of the ship. Weeing and pooing is a massive issue.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Because in the middle of the night it's howling gale up above, you know.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

And you actually, what, inches from the night?

[Dan Snow]

I might just go and have a quick wee down the side ship and French ship for famously unhygienic point of view. But the Brits were obsessed with cleanliness because they'd learned from bitter experience. I mean you're talking fleets get wiped out by disease. There's a French fleet in the 18th century Seven Years War that survives back in Brest just. And then passes on that sort of plague basically to the people of Bress. I mean, wipes out French naval. Well, it further undermines the French naval capability in that first out war. And so the Brits were really, really strict on that. So there were serious punishments even for having a little wee down the side where you think no one will notice in there. It's dark, pitch black in there. Bear in mind. Right, yeah. And no, you had to use the heads. You had to go up to the head of the ship and use the heads and that. They're where the water would. The seawater would spray and wash off the. Whatever it was, you know.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Do you think? I suppose because these ships are floating microcosms of the British Empire, they embody these values. We have the men below decks with their sort of earthenware mugs and then you've got, you know, beautiful blue and white porcelain in the officers quarters. Like everything is coded according to the structures and hierarchies of the world back in Britain. Do you think it's fair to say with the exception. I mean, you've referenced the 1790s mutinies. I'm thinking of Spitheaded. Nor in particular, which obviously happened somewhere in the south. I don't know, it's just the south, somewhere near there, being very close to home. Whereas do you think it's fair, Dan, to say that the mutinies that occur, the famous ones, at least in this period, are happening when ships are getting further and further away from that centre of empire? In that, I think a little bit, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

When the elastic stretched. I mean, there are no. There are times when if a ship's company arrives back in Britain and they're expecting either leave or to be released from Paris and they literally. That day. Sorry, turn around, lads. You're all transferring now onto hms. You know, Tonnan, we're leaving port tomorrow and there were issues.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

That still happens in the army today.

[Dan Snow]

Well, exactly. Well, exactly. But if you're not there because you want to be, then yeah.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

If you haven't chosen it.

[Dan Snow]

But on the whole, yes. If you're by yourself on the other side of the world and things get a bit loose, you can imagine the Bounty is a great example of that, I think. Again though, I want to say that the nature of the sea in the army, posh people can buy a command with absolutely no experience. There's various theories around that. One is that you want posh people in command of an army because they're revolutionary entities. You have experience of all of Cromwell in Britain, Ireland. You do not want normal common people or being in charge of an army that can march into London, take over power and execute the king. So in army you want posh people also. All they have to do, really. There's an old expression in the British Army. Sergeants teach men how to fight, officers teach men how to die. If you just get your gear on, stand up straight back in front of the men as the French are advancing and don't flinch when the bullets start. That's sort of the job of that's.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

How you're gonna do it.

[Dan Snow]

Most people can do that, right, if you want to.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Probably not me, but most other people.

[Dan Snow]

You give someone the keys of a naval ship, these are the most expensive thing the British state is building at this point. You want somebody who knows what they're doing. Now there is patronage, surprise, surprise. Well connected and posher people tend to rise to the top. But there are exams that you have to pass, there is an apprenticeship, you have to serve, you have to do years at sea. People like Captain Cook can move up the ranks. So there is a meritocracy there and therefore they are in all the panoply of the Georgian state. There are people who knew what they were doing in charge of these ships and they knew how to run a crew. They'd gone to sea at 14. Some of them didn't need to use the lash. Some of them were good at keeping that very heterodox, crazy, multi confessional, multi ethnic ships company all pointing in the same direction. I think that's just experience. These were really, really good sailors. This is Dan Snows history. There's more on this topic coming up.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. As winter approaches, make sure you set aside some time for self care now through December 2nd. Get great savings on personal care essentials when you shop in store or online. Buy two participating self care items and save $3. Shop for items like Tresemme Shampoo, Dove Shampoo, Dove Men's Care Body Wash, Dove Body Wash and Axe Shower gel and save $3 when you buy two or more items. Offer ends December 2nd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Dan Snow]

Oh hey. Welcome to gift wrapping.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Whoa.

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

So Saldana.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Hey, can you wrap these please?

[Dan Snow]

Wow. IPhone 17 you splurged at T Mobile.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

You can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new Center Stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.

[Dan Snow]

I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Well, it's better than socks.

[Dan Snow]

So I have to trade in my old phone, right?

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

No AT T Mobile there's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.

[Dan Snow]

Incredible.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Forget that.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Aunt Liz will be jealous.

[Dan Snow]

Sounds like my family drama.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Oh I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with hey where are you going?

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

The holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible board ins on essentials for well qualified customers. Auto pay + taxes, fees and 35 device connection charge credits and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact US Finance at griben256 gig $830 required. Visit t mobile.com.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, the fact that so many of them have gone to sea so young I'm thinking of is It Thomas Raffles, Joseph Raffles, who goes to Singapore, he was born on a ship, so his mother literally gave birth to him at sea. And so there's so many people like that who are just knocking around the system, who.

[Dan Snow]

Son of a gun.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

We were talking about all of these things. Order is important and it's actually relatively common and sometimes inspiringly so, depending on who's at the helm and all of those things. But some things you don't have control of or to a lesser extent, and I'm talking specifically about one of the big things that we all hear about when we talk about these ships history and that is scurvy. You know, for me it's I think limes, I think vitamin C deficiency. But what does that actually look like if you are on board all of these ships?

[Dan Snow]

It's a hellish thing. They didn't know. So no, you can't transport fresh vegetables. So food is salted beef, salted poison pork, bit of dried fish sometimes, and it's vegetables for the first few days and then hardtack. So bread that's baked super hard and will last. And you whack it till we get the weevils to come out of it and then you soak it in.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

What's a weevil?

[Dan Snow]

It looks like a little caterpillar.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Oh, they're actual insects.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, they're insects, yeah. Oh, so you whack it. Some people ate the weevils for protein.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Not for me, but okay.

[Dan Snow]

And you dip it in your bra and then you try and gnaw into it. Your molars would get torn out. And so that is a diet without vitamin C. And that is why on long journeys, life like dog garmer, like Magellan, like the wager. Like anyone you can mention. Oh, like Anson going around the world, he takes load of Chelsea pensioners with him. These old guys can't find enough people. So he takes old people from the. From the army's retirement community and all their old wounds from decades before start opening up your whole body. I mean, scurvy. Scurvy is really bad.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

That's quite zombification.

[Dan Snow]

Zombification, Yeah. I actually don't know why my kids don't get scurvy. Because they avoid cultural outbursts.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Do you know someone in my university hall's got scurvy?

[Dan Snow]

Really?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

It was a boy, obviously.

[Dan Snow]

That's white toast every day.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, yeah, white toast and like cans of Coke. I think that's like, literally. That's insane.

[Dan Snow]

That is insane. So no, and that's Hellish. And then of course, you've got shipwrecks as well, which is loss of life at sea. I mean, you will lose more men in a shipwreck than you do in a battle.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

You will lose more men in a shipwreck than you will in battle.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so more people battle Trafalgar. People have heard of more Brits are killed when the Royal George capsizes off Portsmouth than in the Battle of Trafalgar. More people were killed, killed when Queen Caroline, HMS Queen Caroline, in fact, blew up by mistake, then were killed in the Battle of Nantes. I mean, so these are mass casualty events when these ships sink. And then in the 19th century, you got the complication of they're trying to use all this new technology and incorporate steel and iron and heavy guns and things on all these ships. So you get HMS Captain when it's the highest, the most number of naval personnel killed in an instant. Between Napoleon War 1815 ending and the First World War, something like 800 people just gone in an instant flash in the most hellish death you can imagine. Capsizing, trapped below, boilers exploding, steam fragments obliterating people anywhere nearby in complete darkness. And the ship sinks to the bottom of the sea in the Bay of Biscay. So these are horrific events. And again, there are ships lost with all hands regularly through this period.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I want to talk before we kind of wrap up about one aspect of this shipping history that we recently went to Royal Museum's Greenw and we were looking at some of the pirates exhibition.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

There was this, the Royal Week. I was thinking, I didn't do this.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

No, Dan and I. Oh, Dan and you.

[Dan Snow]

Right, okay.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

And the Royal we as well, I refer to myself in the third person for now, always. But what struck me about that exhibition is just the variety within piracy and what that actually looked like and where it was coming from and the different worlds in which pirates were operating and functioning in different ways as a result of that. Talk to me about that, that pirate life, say in the 18th, early 19th century. Is it what we see in Pirates of the Caribbean is a treasure island, or is it something far more nuanced?

[Dan Snow]

There were a few less ghosts involved, but. Well, although, depending on your point of view, I think Pirate the Wind was a very, very, very fine line between pirates, merchantmen and naval officers and also naval ratings. And actually, in times of peace, you've got the navy just fires all of it. Lots of its sailors and lots of its experienced senior sailors and like ships, petty officers and things. And a lot of them would Go and work in the merchant fleet. And part of the merchant fleet might be sailed past a Spanish ship and there was a war going on. And you might, you know, there was a fine line between trading and sort of buccaneering, I think. And you see that, you see it from Drake onwards. So as you say, it's everything. It's, you know, the dirty world of the transatlantic slave trade. You're down there, you're a ship, you've got some Africans on board, there's another ship trading, you go and take their Africans and sort of kill a few crew members. It's just another little twist in the tale of what is just a sort of monster, monstrous scene going on generally. And so smuggling, where does smuggling tip over to piracy? You're bringing excise free, you know, tax free brandy into the coast of England and sort of shots are fired occasionally with some excise men. You're branded a pirate, you know, whatever. So it's a very, very diverse world. But what's amazing as I suddenly thought as I was saying this, is that we haven't even talked about sea battles yet because everyone's perception will be the mass calculus. We talked about disease and discipline and ships lost at sea. But of course we haven't even talked about the horror that would be in a sea battle where you basically the idea is Nelson's to get as close as you can to the enemy and bombard them at not point blank range, actually at touching range. So much so that when enemy ships catch fire, you have to start throwing buckets of water on your own ship because you're worried the fire's gonna spread. I mean, you're interlocked with the enemy ship and you're firing are people jumping over them, People jumping over. One famous Irishman at the Battle of Trafalgar, climbed up the rudder, climbed up the rudder of a French ship and sort of fought his way through the main. It was full Hollywood. It's an extraordinary story. Yeah, it's full, but yeah. And at one stage I think it's the Temeraire. A British ship curiously crashes into the redoubler French ship. And the French crew had been gathering on the bows. They knew they couldn't beat HMS Victory in a cannon battle. They began to jump onto HMS Victory and take it over by force, hand to hand. And Temeraire just comes out of the smoke, out of nowhere, crashes into and just fires these carronades, these cutting edge, state of the art guns that just annihilate, I mean, first world war levels of casualties of this French Crew just supersonic pieces of iron just scream through these men, shattering limbs, tearing people. When they do hit wood sprinters as well, they gouge, splinter. So you've got foot long, sharp splinters of wood just sort of flipping through the air, ripping people apiece. And that's where the surgeon comes in because he's sort of vaguely, vaguely hiding. And then I'll emerge, he's down the depths of the ship and they're carrying people down these long queues. Nelson's carried down at Trafalgar and everyone goes, the admiral's here. And Nelson says, there's nothing the surgeon can do for me. I don't want to jump the queue. And he just puts himself in the corner and slowly drowns in his own blood. And the surgeon's just there, his tools are getting blunt and he's sawing limbs off trying to save the human life after a limb has been smashed. So those are the battles that people know about. They can be terrible enough but more people die of disease.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

Isn't that crazy? Whether the stories in the Seven Years War where they're working the sails in subzero conditions outside Louisburg on the coast of Canada, you can imagine the stuff, places that we can hardly go today in the winter they're there trying to work sails and ropes. I mean it's just wild.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I think that's one of the things I'm going to take away from this conversation is that there's actually very little way that we can really imagine what this would have been like. I think that was a really good point to go. You think you might be able to. Oh, I feel a bit seasick. Oh, we're very close together.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

We've seen so much Hollywood depiction.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Because also we don't know just what the months of sleep deprivation, of that kind of diet, perhaps some shortages of food, of the trauma that we've witnessed. Like we. I don't think we can begin. You can go, I've climbed a mast and I've in sub zero temperatures and certainly.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, but then you in your modern gear, then you had hot chocolate.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

The kind of soul destroying thing the.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Psychological and the physical effect is.

[Dan Snow]

And we know from bones of sailors, for example, the Mary Rose sailors is their skeletons were hammered. You know, they were showing signs of extraordinary hard labour quite early in all.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Dying at 32 or something. Ridiculous.

[Dan Snow]

Grind down.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Okay, my final question before we go is this. If you had to pick one ship.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, like how can you ask me this?

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Because it's a podcast and I've been asked to ask questions.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

No.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

If you had to pick one ship that you could go on the voyage, be that a battle, be that piracy, be that exploration, whatever it might be, what ship would it be on?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Why?

[Dan Snow]

It's too cruel. Like asking truth to your children. But I think there's a. You'd want to be on a frigate so fast free ship operating by itself. You don't want to be in a big battleship where you're being ordered around by the Admiral and lots of other battleships around all the time. You're waiting for a battle to occur. So it's 99% boredom, 1% absolute carnage. You want to be on a ship and you're just raiding, so you're just causing trouble. So people might have heard of Thomas Cochrane, Lord Cochrane. He's a character, in fact, who the master in commander of film and book books are based on. His job is just go around the coast of Europe and just make an absolute nuisance of himself. And he lands in the middle of the night and he captures French shore batteries and blows them up. And he captures ships full of wine and silver and he pretends he's Danish and attacks a convoy. He's just naughty and brilliant. And he goes on to have this extraordinary career. And he at one stage creates a big floating bomb and sails it towards a French fleet at anchor with a gale rising. He sets the power powder thing, jumps off the back of this ship. They row away into this huge storm. The ship blows up and all the other ships go in and try and attack the French. I mean, it was just sun up to sundown. In fact, beyond that, hijinks. Yeah. So that is the ship I'd like to.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

We are overdue a period drama of this. I know there's the film, but they.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Only made the Disney can do something or something. And who is your favorite child?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yes.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Well, no, no. Okay, we won't make you answer that one. Right. Maddy, do you want to take us out on this one?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Sure. Yes. Do you not want to answer about the ship yourself?

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Oh, I wouldn't know enough about ships.

[Dan Snow]

To know the only ships you've covered on this podcast. They've all ended. Very, very.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

I will say I am a ship history converse. Before I started doing After Dark, I was like, I don't care about ship histories. But actually since doing this, I love them now. It's really. And actually I was talking to you the other day. I'm thinking about writing about a ship history at some point in the future. They really this world on the sea fascinates me, this little enclosed thing, so I don't have enough broad knowledge to say, but maybe something like the Beagle, where it's a discovery ship and it's, you know, like that kind of a thing. I'm a little more gentler.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

And what about you?

[Dan Snow]

Do you have one?

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Well, I have one in mind, but it's gonna be a future book, so I will not. But if I could be not an active participant, but fly on the wall where I don't die and I don't have to partake of the diet or the punishments or anything, it would have to be the terror. I'd wanna go and see those men.

[Dan Snow]

What went wrong there.

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

Except you never be able to come back and tell us.

[Dr. Anthony Delaney]

Well, no, I'd have like a hot water bottle and like a coat and I'd be fine. I'd just be observing and they wouldn't be able to see me. Like, I just like to see what happens.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, yeah, definitely. Thank you so much to my guests, Dr. Anthony Delaney and Dr. Maddy Pelling. You gotta go and check out their podcast After Dark. Wherever you get your pods. It's a phenomenon. And if you'd like more episodes like this, for example, how to survive an era or a battle or an event, let us know. You can email us on ds hhist historyhit.com Let us know what we need to look into surviving. See you next time. Oh, hey. Welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa.

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

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[Dan Snow]

Wow. IPhone 17s, you splurged at T Mobile.

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[Dan Snow]

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[Dan Snow]

So I have to trade in my old phone, right?

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[Dan Snow]

Incredible.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Verizon Advertiser]

Forget that.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Aunt Liz will be jealous.

[Dan Snow]

Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with. Hey, where are you going?

[Dr. Maddy Pelling]

To T Mobile.

[Gift Wrapping Assistant]

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