The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

In 1920, in the Cammell, Laird & Co. shipyard in Birkenhead, a ship was built that would change the shipbuilding industry and shipyards forever. ss Fullagar was the world's first fully welded ocean-going ship. For generations, ships' iron and steel hulls had been held together with rivets, put in place by specialist teams of riveters. In 1920 electric arc-welding was not a new technology but hitherto had only been used for repair, rather than construction. Fullagar changed that forever, though the technology was adopted slowly. No longer would vast teams of highly skilled and well-paid riveters populate the dockyards. This was a moment when technology took away the livelihood of thousands and changed forever the techniques of shipbuilding and the culture of the shipyards. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Max Wilson, head archivist of Lloyd's Register, the maritime classification society that surveyed and classed Fuallager, overseeing this novel design and pivotal moment in maritime history.

This episode continues our work bringing you some of the finest original historical material, written by the people who were actually there. Today we bring you the war diary of the U-boat commander Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, commander of U-20, from May 1915, when he sank the transatlantic liner Lusitania, full of civilian passengers. 1193 people died.On Friday 7th May 1915, Kapitänleutnant Schwieger found himself in the middle of a conundrum. Heading towards him was a large, four funnel ship. He knew that the British often commissioned four funnel warships as auxiliary cruisers. In his mind, his duty was clear, without warning, he loosed a torpedo, which hit the ship. After the first hit there was a subsequent large explosion, which resulted in the ship listing seriously, and eventually going under.Schwieger seems to have been appalled by the result of his attack and recorded "It looks as if the ship will stay afloat only for a very short time. [I gave order to] dive to 25 metres (82 ft) and leave the area seawards. I couldn't have fired another torpedo into this mass of humans desperately trying to save themselves." It appears that only then did he appreciate that he had torpedoed the Lusitania, which, in his favour, was known to be a potential Armed Merchant Cruiser. Schwieger was born in 1885 and in 1903 joined the Imperial German Navy aged 18. He chose the submarine service early and by 1912, he was appointed to command U-14 and was appointed to U-20 shortly after the outbreak of war. Allegedly, he had the reputation of shooting first and asking questions after. He was killed in U-88 on the 5th of September 1917, which probably hit a mine. During his wartime career, Schwieger captained three different submarines, on a total of 34 missions. He sank 49 ships, measuring 183,883 gross register tons (GRT).The fallout from the torpedoing of the Lusitania was very serious. The US President Woodrow Wilson (determined to keep out of the European War) was seriously displeased at the death of American lives and as a result of his representations, Kaiser Wilhelm gave immediate instructions to cease the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign. The resumption in 1917 after the Battle of Jutland directly caused the American declaration of War in 1917.Over the years, there have been many takes on the sinking of the Lusitania from conspiracy theories about Winston Churchill to hidden arms shipments. As always, the presentation of contemporary documents help us to understand the elements of history.

This episode links together one of the most important inventions in all of maritime technology with one of the most notorious murders in history. In 1910 Dr Hawly Crippen killed his wife Cora in their London home and buried her dismembered body under the floor of his basement. As the net closed in, Crippen ran and he sought his escape by sea, aboard the ss Montrose, a fairly run of the mill steamship, but crucially one that was equipped with the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi’s new and world-changing invention, wireless telegraphy. To put the necessary ingredients of this fabulous story in order, Dr Sam Willis travelled to the archives of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation to meet their head archivist, Max Wilson.

The Battle of the Nile of 1798 was one of the most important naval battles that has ever been fought. This episode presents an introduction explaining the context of the battle and is followed by a reading of an account written by Captain Samuel Hood of HMS Zealous. The battle was fought at a key moment of French expansion. The French army, led by Napoleon, had been landed in Egypt by a huge French flotilla, protected by a powerful naval force. A British squadron, led by Horatio Nelson, caught them at Aboukir Bay and inflicted a devastating defeat. The result was that Napoleon's army was stranded and Nelson's fame burned more brightly than ever.

This is the extraordinary history of a single ship - a Baltimore clipper.Once she was the Henriqueta, a slave ship; but subsequently she became the Black Joke, a hunter of slave ships.In her former life she trafficked over 3000 captives across the Atlantic; in her new life she became the scourge of Spanish and Brazilian slavers.To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with the maritime historian Stephen Taylor who has captured and explored this story in his latest excellent book ‘Predator of the Seas’In the research to illuminate this ship’s curious double life Stephen has explored the lives and experiences of both slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew. We hear about the business of slavery in Africa and Brazil run by the Portuguese; the Royal Navy’s preventative squadron that purchased the ship in 1827 and turned her against her former masters; and about the British seamen and Liberian Kru.

This episode presents an astonishing and tragic story from the American Civil War with great relevance to the present day.It’s the story of a black teenager called David Henry White who comes from Delaware and has done all in his power to create a life for himself – he has signed onto a merchant ship for work with the prospects of pay and promotion. Life has different plans for him however. When war breaks out he finds himself crossing paths with the USS Alabama, a confederate commerce raider of immense power blazing a path of success. White’s ship is taken and he also is taken and forced to work on the confederate warship, captained by Raphael Semmes.White works on board until his fate is sealed in battle and the Alabama sunk. Semmes survives but White does not. He drowns. After the war Semmes writes his memoirs which paint the world in which White lived and died a very different way to how it appeared in reality.It's a story of the life and tragic death of a disempowered black boy, of an entitled racist naval officer, and of the profound and lasting power of written propaganda. After listening to this podcast you will burn with the light of the true historian, and never believe anything you read again without checking who wrote it, and more importantly WHY.To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Andrew Sillen, author of the new book that unpicks this remarkable tale in the finest detail: Kidnapped at Sea.

This episode explores one of the world’s greatest historical collections relating to the golden age of ocean liner travel. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with John Sayers, a man who has dedicated his life to creating the most wonderful collection. In the early 1950s John’s parents took him across the Atlantic on the Cunard Line’s RMS Franconia eastbound to the UK, and RMS Queen Elizabeth back westbound to America. Shortly after that he came across five souvenir ocean liner lapel pins at a Sunday morning antiques fair and from that moment on his career as a collector began. What started with lapel pins and then souvenir spoons and napkin rings soon moved onto ephemera - printed bits and pieces relating to everyday life on board ship - a crucial source of historic material that helps us reconstruct the lived experience of those aboard, both passengers and crew. That collection, which includes posters, tickets, brochures, sailing schedules, letters written on board, passenger lists, menus, advertising material (the list really is endless) – is now held in the John Johnson collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and to illustrate it John has written a fabulous new book: Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners.

Bombay, now Mumbai, was a major shipbuilding centre for the Royal Navy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The ships were magnificent, built from the famous Malabar teak and by the hands of a highly skilled Indian workforce. This episode explores that fascinating history through one particular aspect of a sailing warship’s construction: the figurehead. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Clare Hunt, a Senior Curator for the National Museum of the Royal Navy based at their site in Hartlepool. Clare has been charged with the care and management of HMS Trincomalee since 2016, a frigate built just after the end of the Napoleonic wars in Bombay dockyard.

In this episode we explore the fascinating history of Europeans working in the complex maritime world of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular we find out about ship surveyors working for the classification society Lloyd’s Register, and how those employees influenced the global perception of maritime safety and risk management. This group has never previously been studied so everything you hear in this episode is 'new' history that helps us understand not only the functioning of ship surveyors in China at that time but more broadly the encounter and connections between Imperial Britain and China, a meeting that was rapidly intensifying, socially, culturally and economically. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Corey Watson, from the Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures at the University of Portsmouth.