Back when I was a boy, I had to learn a little poem,
and I expect you did as well.
It went, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."
I can't remember any of it after that,
but it doesn't actually matter, because those first two lines
cement the salient pub quiz fact in your head.
It was 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain,
he discovered America, hopped ashore at Long Island,
and rewarded himself with a nice, fat hot dog.
But there must actually be more than that
to this rather enigmatic character.
Why, for example, is he celebrated as a national hero
in a country he never even visited?
'So, join me, viewers, as I set out to discover that.
'The age of the Great Explorers
'was one of the most dramatic in history.'
BOOMING EXPLOSION Oh-ho-ho-ho!
'When men risked their lives...'
Cast off and set sail. Whoa!
Take up on the peak. Argh!
'..to seek new lands.'
We're somewhere north of the dog's arse.
Where the camera gone? Hello.
They crossed thousands of miles of treacherous ocean,
they built floating fortresses, they mapped the stars,
they developed whole new branches of science.
Eurgh! Absolute pish.
'But were these explorers really heroes,
'or just a bunch of chancers?'
It's a miracle he found anything, really.
Completely made up. Man was a charlatan.
'And is their legacy one of triumph...'
Ooh! '..or destruction?'
Crikey. Now it's turning a little bit dark.
'I'm doing a bit of discovering of my own...'
BANG Unbelievably terrible.
Medieval satnav 2.0 - a stick.
'..to learn how these explorers conquered the oceans...'
Look at that. I love it.
Nobody panic yet.
It's not just a map, it's a weapon.
'..and changed the world forever.'
Whoa! Dial out!
Ah, gold!
If you were in the navy, the French would definitely have got us.
CHUCKLES
CLUNK
'Columbus's world-changing voyages began in southwest Spain,
'which is nice, because I get to have a lovely scenic stroll
'for your viewing pleasure.'
I think we got it, the walking shot.
'All good voyages start with a map, and here's the one Columbus had.'
Now, very easy for me to say this in the 21st century
after a very agreeable lunch, but it's a bit crap.
Apart from that there are a lot of things missing -
Australia and New Zealand for example -
look at the shape of everything!
Look at Africa. Look at the shape of that.
It's ridiculous.
Back when Columbus was a lad,
the most exciting part of the world was Asia.
This is where all the shiny and aromatic stuff
that Europeans coveted came from, carried along the Silk Road.
But... unfortunately, in 1453 -
this is when Columbus was still an infant -
Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans,
which caused a bit of a Silk Road block.
The Europeans no longer had access to all those lovely silks
and spices and jewels.
They were just stuck with their mud and turnips,
as if they were all living in Norfolk.
Something had to be done,
and what had to be done was to find a sea route from Europe
over to the Indies, as Asia was then called.
This is how The Great Age of Exploration began.
Forget the space race, this was the spice race.
The Portuguese were the hot favourites to get there first,
but it was a hazardous voyage over 10,000 miles south,
around Africa, and off to the east.
'Enter a man with a plan.'
Those steps are really annoying. LAUGHS
'Not me, Columbus.'
Rather in the way that young men these days are obsessed with, say,
magazines about Airfix models,
the young Chris Columbus was obsessed with maps.
And he had a brother who ran a map shop,
so he could get high on his own supply.
Historians have long believed that Columbus was an Italian from Genoa,
but recently, some have claimed
that he may have been a Spanish Jew from Valencia.
While they fight it out,
what we do know is that he spent a lot of time on boats,
and he knew that daring sailors were rewarded with great riches.
He became obsessed with finding a quicker route to Asia,
and with, of course, the glory that would follow.
So, after several more years of sailing and calculating
and map-bothering, he'd come up with a plan.
He would absolutely slash the journey time to Asia
by simply going west.
This was revolutionary - sailing off the edge of the map.
But if he could pull it off, fame and fortune would be his.
With fevered excitement, he travelled to the courts of Europe
and pitched his plan to their kings and queens...
..who all told him to sod off, sailing west was madness.
But Columbus, whether stubborn or simply delusional, persevered.
He tried schmoozing. He tried "map-splaining".
He tried boring them witless. He tried for years.
Finally, and at the grand old age of 41, he got a bite.
Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain had just won a very expensive war
expelling the Moors from their country,
and they needed a bit of a cash injection.
They also probably quite liked the idea of sticking one over
on their great rivals, the Portuguese.
And it's also possible
they were simply sick to death of Columbus nagging them.
It was game on.
Europeans would be sailing over the horizon to the west.
The Crown found backers to pay for crews and three small ships,
and they sent Columbus here, to Palos de la Frontera,
to collect the lucre.
In the 15th century,
the streets of Palos would have been rammed with boat builders,
ropemakers and drunken sailors.
Columbus met with the bravest of the ship-owners,
who lived in this house and laid out his plans.
In just a few short weeks,
he would be in Asia - except for one slight snag.
Let's have a look at Columbus's workings
to see where it went so horribly wrong.
As our high-tech demo will show,
it starts with a philosopher in ancient Egypt
whose name is very easy to say (!)
STRUGGLING: Eratos...thenes.
He noticed something a bit strange about shadows.
This is the spinning celestial dust mote that humanity calls home.
The sun is represented by this torch on a stick.
In reality, it is much bigger and much further away.
This is how they do things at the Griffith Observatory (!)
Here is Egypt. Now, here is a camel.
And if I put the camel down there, you can see
that the shadow of the camel is directly below the camel.
If we now move the camel further north...
..you can see it casts a shadow that way.
Clever old Eratosthhh...whatever
measured the different angles of the shadows,
did a spot of trigonometry
and worked out the circumference of the Earth.
He was accurate to within 1%,
which is an absolutely phenomenal result.
Unfortunately for our hero Christopher,
he based HIS reasoning on the work of a different ancient, Ptolemy,
who, in turn, had based his work on the assumptions of some other bloke,
and they were miles out.
The moral of this story is don't copy other people's homework.
Ptolemy's estimate shrank the world by 28%
Columbus had backed the wrong camel.
I shall extinguish the sun.
Getting the girth of the Earth wrong could have fatal consequences
for the sailors on the voyage.
Right, let's go back to that 15th century map of the known world,
reproduced here in handy laser-cut wood.
His idea was to go west
and approach the Indies from the other side.
So, we'll rearrange the map.
Erm... Hang on. How does it look?
Something like that? Bear with me.
With the 28% shrinkage, he was already off to a bad start.
But then Columbus made a series of other errors.
Most notably, he confused the Roman mile
with the bigger Arabic mile,
and that made the Indies apparently there.
Columbus's whole plan was based on an idea of the world
that was 58% too small.
He calculated that that would be four weeks' sailing away.
The truth, however,
is that Asia is all the way over there,
or twelve weeks' sailing.
Columbus's mistakes,
and the mistakes of those around him all the way back to antiquity,
spelled certain death for a crew on that voyage.
If only he'd had the plastic Chinese globe, the bicycle light,
and the knock-kneed plastic camel with Blu-Tack on its feet,
he'd have known.
And, of course, there was another thing he didn't know yet.
There was something else here.
JAMES MAY: Welcome back, viewers, to 1492.
After ten years of persistent nagging,
Christopher Columbus has finally convinced the Spanish Crown to pay
for his frankly insane voyage sailing west to Asia.
There was just one thing he'd forgotten -
to check if a ship could actually sail there.
Well, he was in luck.
Sailing technology had recently made a major leap forward,
thanks to a new type of sail.
'Time for a demonstration.'
Permission to come aboard, skipper.
'Now, if you're expecting fancy CGI or re-enactors in dodgy wigs,
'this is not the series for you.
'But if you're expecting me with dodgy hair
'investigating exactly how it all happened and why...'
Morning.
'..well, you're in luck. Join me aboard 12ft dinghy Skiffy.'
This sail setup is known as square rig, for obvious reasons.
This is what most European ships would've had.
But the Portuguese, especially in the 1400s,
noticed another type of sail, a triangular one.
And what we're going to do today is demonstrate the difference
by sailing to a buoy just over there and back again.
I've got the skipper on board, who is Alan.
Aye, aye. Aye, aye.
And he's here to take control if necessary,
and to make sure I don't accidentally sail to the Caribbean.
Are you ready, skipper? I am.
In three, two, one. Go! Go.
If you just slacken off that. That's it. Right.
Goodbye, cruel world.
'The first leg is downwind, plain sailing all the way.'
Oh, God, there's the buoy. Bring it round.
'But next comes the upwind leg.'
CREW MEMBER: Going in the wrong direction!
Where are you, camera? ALAN LAUGHS
Come over here. I need to talk to you.
The point about the square sail is that it's really just like
a big bin bag full of wind.
It's great when you're going downwind,
the wind is roughly behind you,
it fills up, and it thrusts you along.
But when you want to go towards the wind, it's a bit problematic.
'Whilst it's all very easy downwind,
'upwind, the ship has to do something called tacking -
'basically, catching what wind you can
'to zig-zag to where you want to go.'
For this reason, sailors were quite nervous
about sailing away from the shore downwind,
because their fear was that they'd never be able to get back.
They'd be lost at sea forever, rather like we are.
SONG: 'Drunken Sailor'
We want to go over there.
'But tacking with a square sail is not easy.'
Ready about?
Ready about. OK, here we go.
We ARE moving.
ALAN LAUGHS Just the wrong way.
Well, that's three metres
in about 15 minutes. ALAN LAUGHS
It'll take us a while to find the New World at this speed.
'After about half an hour of getting nowhere fast,
'or rather slowly,
'we admitted defeat and got a tow from the crew
'back to the start line.'
Right, that square sail was frankly rubbish,
but let's see how we get on with the triangular ones,
which were an absolute game-changer.
'In the early 15th century,
'sailors had noticed a different sail used in the East.
'On the River Nile, for example, the wind mostly blows south,
'but boats could still sail north just fine.
'Triangular sails were the key,
'and they would revolutionise where sailors like Columbus could go.'
Ready? Righty-ho.
'Just like with the square sail,
'the downwind leg is easy-going, a gentle beeline towards our buoy.'
Right, we're going to come round, up towards the wind now.
'But as we round the buoy, we're not being blown backwards.'
We're pretty much going in the right direction.
That's where we want to go.
But we're only, sort of, 30 or 40 degrees off.
It's a huge difference.
The sail is now acting like an aerofoil.
When the wind rushes over it,
it creates an area of low pressure on the curved side, the outer side,
and high pressure on the inside.
It's great.
'And the finish line's in sight.'
Victory! Yay!
We've done it.
What a craft Skiffy is with triangular sails.
A nice, neat zig-zag,
and home in time for cocktails and a debrief.
And that was deeply significant because it shortened journey times,
and it meant the sailors weren't quite so scared
of being lost at sea.
All because of triangular sails. It's fantastic.
'A simple change in the shape of a sail
'meant that Columbus could now change the shape of the world.
'But to go with his sails, he needed ships.
'And for ships, he needed to go to the Palos Port,
'the Cape Canaveral of its time.'
Here is a replica of Columbus's fleet.
In the middle is the Santa Maria.
Not really very big,
when you consider what it was going to achieve,
but it is at least "plumptious" in the hold,
so it can bring back all those spices and treasures from Asia.
Ha-ha! Either side, there is the Pinta and the Nina,
based on Portuguese designs.
Small, sleek, fast.
The whole lot could be expected to bimble along
at a very vigorous four knots or so, roughly a brisk walk.
Ships like these
were one of the greatest feats of engineering of the age,
floating fortresses that harnessed the wind
to transport you to lands afar.
Now, if anybody watching this is thinking,
"Ooh, that would be an adventure, going off on an old sailing ship,"
you might want to think again.
Come aboard, and I'll show you what I mean.
You have to bear in mind that there were 90 blokes on these three tubs.
They stayed in the same clothes for the entire voyage
in their own slime and filth.
They slept in shifts,
and you slept simply in a convenient place on the deck,
probably curled up on an old sack or something.
The smallest of the lot was the Nina,
a proper little leaky tub, God above!
It's about 60ft stem-to-stern.
And I don't know if you've watched any of those YouTube videos
called things like Container Ship In Heavy Atlantic Swell.
HOWLING WIND
They're absolutely terrifying.
But now imagine doing that in this,
which is really just a bit of a GCSE woodwork project.
It's unthinkable.
This would be bad enough on a trip along the coast,
but the renegade Columbus would be sailing these ships west
into the blue beyond.
I don't know what he's smiling about.
Believe it or not, it wasn't that easy
to persuade men to go on these voyages,
and one way they got around this problem
was to offer an amnesty to criminals.
Murderers, for example.
"We'll let you off,
"but you have to go on Christopher Columbus's voyage." Hm.
To sum up, this was a death cruise on a rickety tub,
sleeping on a sack with a bunch of stinking murderers.
No wonder he couldn't get the staff.
I know some of you are wondering, and no, there were no lavs onboard.
You just had to let it hang out over the side.
But at least the food was terrible.
Somehow, Columbus managed to scrounge up
a motley crew of 87 sailors, and they would need feeding.
Food rotted quickly in the hot, damp ships' holds,
so almost everything he took was dried to preserve it.
Right, well, here is a selection of the sort of things
Columbus's crews would've had onboard.
There's salted fish, some hard cheese,
salted pork, peas, raisins, lentils, and some nuts.
They would've also had lots of liquid things, thankfully.
Delicious red wine and beer.
But half of their calorie intake would have come from something
called ship's biscuits, or hard tack,
and we're going to make some of that right now.
OK, this is not really very different
from making something like a chapati,
but don't get your hopes up.
'It's a very basic recipe.
'Two types of flour, boring old wholemeal
'and a delicious, fibrous green flour made from peas.'
Mm, very nice (!)
'Add some salt, because even sailors deserve flavour in their biscuits,
'and bind it all together with water.'
Now, I've worked on a cooking show, and I know that we're now going
to skip ahead to a point where I've already made a lovely ball of dough.
That's how cooking shows work, even in the 15th century.
SHORT BEEP
Weirdly, that we're talking about explorers,
this has worked out to look more like a map of Tasmania,
but anyway, that comes much later.
'Now, one essential requirement of ship's biscuits
'was that under no circumstances
'were they allowed to be light and fluffy.'
They made a series of holes in it,
going all the way through with a fork
to stop exactly that happening.
So, anyway, that's basically the gist of it.
And now, again, by the magic of television,
we will skip forward to a point
where a whole load of these have been baked.
SHORT BEEP Look at those.
Let's see what it tasted like, being an explorer.
Oh.
It's quite difficult to articulate how horrible that is.
It's extremely boring, very dry.
I mean, almost wantonly miserable.
Now, those were once-baked biscuits,
but the fact is, they baked them a lot more than that.
The point was to remove all moisture from them
because moisture would encourage the growth of mould.
So, here are some I made even, even earlier.
These are twice-baked. Let's see what the effect is.
Oh, God!
So hard to chew. That's only twice-baked.
OK, four-times-baked ship's biscuits.
SLIGHT CRUNCH, HE LAUGHS
Oh!
You need a machine tool to get through this.
CRUNCH Oh, a bit came off.
CRUNCHING
That's unbelievably terrible.
Oh, excuse me,
I'm gonna have to have a bit of beer to get rid of that.
'The sailors soaked the biscuits in water to soften them.
'But once a day, if the weather was calm enough to cook,
'they got to dip them in a bowl of this stuff.'
Ta-da! Salt pork and pea stew.
That is a pre-softened ship's biscuit.
I can't do it, I'm sorry.
How long has that been soaking for?
CREW MEMBER: About an hour. An hour?!
'Best resort to a spoon if I want to keep my teeth.'
Mm. That is delicious.
But it might be delicious because I've been eating ship's biscuits.
It's a bit like being beaten up, and then when it stops,
you think, "This is nice."
But it isn't really nice. It's just normal.
Columbus's very, very baked biscuits might have been mould-free,
but there wasn't much he could do about these little fellas.
These are weevils,
and these got into absolutely everything.
Now, they're perfectly harmless to eat.
They also help to weaken the structural integrity
of the ship's biscuit by burrowing through them.
But nevertheless, they are weevils.
To demonstrate just how different
their enthusiasm for ship's biscuits is compared with mine...
Oh, yeah, they've gone absolutely mad for it!
SHORT BEEP They're also escaping.
CREW MEMBERS: Oh, no!
Some of them have actually jumped out.
They're very agile.
So, now, as a poor sailor, miles from home,
hungry, probably cold, you're faced with stark choice.
It's a protein-enhanced,
unchewable ship's biscuit, or...
a nice glass of red.
Thank you for watching.
Mm! SHORT BEEP
Oh, God. There's one in there!
Finally, Columbus's ships were packed with everything he needed -
sailors, biscuits, wine, weevils, and a very badly wrong map.
All that was left to do was pray.
The night before the voyage,
Columbus came and prayed fervently to the Virgin Mary,
because he knew that what he was about to do was terrifying.
Even for a seasoned sailor,
it was a highly dangerous leap into the unknown.
"O mare o l'e male," went the ancient Genoese saying.
"The sea is evil."
Early the next morning,
after four months of preparation and decades of planning,
the three tiny little ships weighed anchor
and set off that way, over the horizon, into the unknown.
JAMES MAY: Welcome back to the dawn of the age of exploration.
Christopher Columbus is finally setting sail for Asia.
And it's lucky he had all these sea gods looking out for him,
because he'd misplaced it by around 10,000 miles.
He'd set off, had a brief stop at the Canaries
to stock up on more delicious hard tack and wine,
and headed west, roughly speaking.
Very roughly speaking.
This is the satnav of Columbus's era, the astrolabe.
It basically gives you the height of the sun above the horizon,
and that allows you to calculate your latitude,
how far north or south on the globe you are.
Now, this is a piece of tourist tat from a gift shop,
and it is completely useless,
but the one Columbus had was completely useless as well.
And in any case, he didn't like using it.
He said, "For my voyage to the Indies,
"I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps."
At that rate, it's surprising he made use of a ship.
So, how exactly was he navigating his way to Asia?
Let's find out.
Sailors would use something called "dead reckoning".
Which is nothing to do with being dead -
although that was highly likely
if you were a sailor in Columbus's time -
but it's to do with your relationship
to something that is dead in the water.
Typically, a piece of seaweed.
If I toss this over the side, that's dead in the water.
There it goes. We're going that way.
It can also tell you how fast we're going that way.
'Time to reckon with dead reckoning with a little challenge.'
Right, what we're gonna do now
is attempt to sail a perfect equilateral triangle,
in which each side
is half a nautical mile long.
'We'll navigate our triangle course Columbus-style.
'Skipper Ben is in charge of the seaweed dispersal.
'Skipper Alan is in charge of direction.
'And Skipper Me is in charge of time
'and bossing the other skippers about.'
I'm going to count how long it takes the seaweed to go
past the boat, all the way to the stern.
They didn't have any reliable way of measuring seconds back in the day,
so they had to do it by chanting, which is what I'll do.
OK, skip, are you ready with seaweed? Aye.
And go!
One mea culpa, two mea culpa, three mea culpa, four mea culpa.
Four seconds. Four seconds is a boat speed of four knots.
So, to do a nautical mile will take us...?
Seven-and-a-half minutes. Seven-and-a-half minutes, OK.
By the way, the reason the chant for the piece the seaweed going past
is "one mea culpa, two mea culpa" is because, well,
these days, we'd say "one potato, two potato",
but potatoes hadn't been invented yet.
SKIPPER LAUGHS
About a minute to go until the new heading.
'On Columbus's voyage,
'the crew made careful records of speed and direction every hour.'
Nobody panic yet.
'But for our exercise, we have to do it on each new leg of the triangle.'
Ready to go about. And go!
That's gonna go with a bang, guys. Yeah.
Helm over. OK, jibe ho!
Cor! And yes, go!
One mea culpa, two mea culpa, three mea...
It's just under three seconds.
Six knots, five minutes. Relax, everybody.
And next, we will turn back for the final leg
of our perfectly-sailed equilateral triangle.
'After one more tack...'
Here we go.
OK. '..one more speed check...'
Four mea culpa, five mea culpa... Three-and-a-half knots, six minutes.
'..and five-and-a-quarter more minutes...'
We've got about 45 seconds to go, crew,
and then we will be back exactly where we started.
Keep on saying it, and you'll be right!
ALL LAUGH Does it look like where we started?
Well, the point is, it does look like where we started,
because it looks like the sea, that's part of the problem.
Yes, yeah. And hang on, here we go.
Three, two, one. There we are, we are back where we started.
Perfect. In the ocean.
Right, let's have a look at the actual GPS plot of what we did.
Right. Our triangle.
There you go. That is absolutely woeful.
BOTH LAUGH It's not...
It's not even vaguely triangular. It's actually more of a rectangle.
'If we went this badly wrong over just three nautical miles,
'imagine how wrong Columbus was going over 3,000.'
We were a bit rubbish then, but in fairness to us,
so was Christopher Columbus.
Everything he did was wrong.
It's a miracle he found anything at all, really,
and didn't just go round in a circle.
In truth, the ships were lost at sea,
heading in the direction not of China, but Papua New Guinea,
and that would have been a whole other story.
The weeks were ticking by,
and the crew were getting more and more worried,
because sooner or later, their supplies would run out,
if indeed they were still edible.
Which brings me back to Spain and onto my favourite subject.
Now, I've said this many times before,
but this is an excellent place to say it again.
Woodwork... is important.
WHIRRING
Good woodworking was a matter of life and death for sailors,
not just because their ships were made of wood
but because of what is being made here - barrels!
These people are coopers.
'What a polite man.
'I don't think he actually needed that bit.
'In case you haven't noticed the racket in the background,
'there have been a few updates
'since the handsaws and planes of Columbus's day.'
Each vertical piece, or stave, as it's called,
is quite a sophisticated component in its own right.
It is of itself barrelled, to use the engineering term,
it's fatter in the middle than at the ends.
It's also hollowed out on the inside,
and it's slightly chamfered on both edges.
'Now, like me, you're probably thinking
'that these barrels are love poems
'written in the language of exquisitely curved oak.
'But no, this is some high-grade tech,
'engineered with precision
'to perfectly preserve Columbus's food and wine... and weevils.
'They are the tin cans of the 15th century,
'just a lot more beautiful.'
Your half-finished barrel is soaked in water
to make the wood more pliant.
And then it's brought over here and put on a bonfire.
Whoa!
Thank God he put it out.
Look at the inside.
'The fire leaves behind a layer of carbon that helps seal the wood.'
It's a thing of beauty.
It's still not finished.
Getting that end in is a little bit like
getting the tyre back on your bicycle after a puncture.
Gracias. Did you see the end-over-end bit?
That's why the barrel is the shape it is.
It's a very, very manoeuvrable object.
Skilled people can just flip them around,
spin them around, roll them over there,
even when they're full.
MUSIC: 'The Blue Danube' by Johann Strauss II
You find yourself slightly in fear of being run over by a barrel.
So, there is the completed barrel.
A thing of beauty, but also vital,
because all the provisions that went onboard
would have gone in these, liquids and food.
That horrible hard tack,
the ship's biscuits that we made earlier on,
they would have been stored in these.
So they had to be perfectly sealed, otherwise liquids would run out
or seawater would get in and make those biscuits,
believe it or not, even more unpalatable.
So, this really is a matter of life and death for sailors.
The cooper is as important as the captain and as the shipwright.
So, I'm gonna say it again, woodwork is important!
Now, while these beautiful barrels
would have perfectly preserved Columbus's dried foods,
as his voyage went on,
his drinking water would have started festering
with deadly diseases.
Time to visit a lab with my own mini water barrel,
presumably made by a mini cooper.
Now, four weeks or so ago,
Jason, our Spanish fixer, filled this with water,
well water, fresh but untreated,
exactly the sort that Columbus would have had on his journey.
And Chris thought the voyage would last for four weeks.
So, let's see what four-week-old barrel-stored water is like.
Here we have a sample pot, and we need 100 millilitres.
Oh, dear. It's disgusting.
It's sort of stale and definitely a bit brown.
If only we had lab technician called Melania
to do a proper analysis of that for us.
Gracias.
'Melania is going to extract the filth from our water
'and grow a culture from it to see what's lurking.'
That now goes off for analysis in the lab.
She'll also do a second batch
that factors in the sailors' hygiene onboard.
Last time I was left alone in a chemistry lab
with a Bunsen burner was in about 1976.
Didn't end very well.
So, now do I get to look down a microscope?
'In the great tradition of television,
'here's one Melania made earlier.
'First, the four-week-old well water, straight from the barrel.'
Oh, that looks disgusting! What is it?
IN SPANISH:
'The bacteria in this water
'could cause food poisoning, pneumonia and sepsis.
'Bad news for Columbus's crew. What about the second sample?'
Now, what Melania did is sort of simulate water
that would have been drunk by people from a communal scuttle bucket
with their personal drinking cups - tankards, if you like.
And, of course, the sailors didn't live
particularly clean or wholesome lives,
so things like sweat and faecal matter
would have been introduced.
And I'll look at it underneath my magnifying lamp.
Eurgh! It's got a face!
This sample actually has E. coli in it.
So, what that means is if you were a sailor in the 15th century
and you wanted to go on a voyage of exploration,
you had to be prepared to drink Tom Bowling's turds.
Thank you, that was... delightful.
Back to 1492, nearly a month into Columbus's journey.
He'd thought that by now he'd be enjoying a slap-up supper
and a hero's welcome in Asia.
But he was still lost in the blue beyond.
Four weeks passed and then five weeks.
Supplies were dwindling. There was still no sign of land.
The crew were becoming edgy, and they wanted to turn back.
Columbus's crap sums on the back of an envelope
were leading them further and further into nothingness.
The water must have been disgusting by now.
But maybe God was on Columbus's side.
Because after five and a bit weeks at sea,
and at almost exactly the point where he said they would find land,
they found... land.
But it wasn't Asia.
JAMES MAY: 'You rejoin me at an exciting time, viewers.
'An utterly inept sailor...'
Boom!
'..not me - Columbus - had somehow crossed an ocean and made it to...
'not Asia, some mysterious islands that we now know as the Bahamas,
'Cuba and Hispaniola in the Caribbean in the Americas.
'Try telling him that, though.'
'He was certain he was on some islands just off Japan.'
Now, it's probably fair to say that the people of Spain
weren't exactly on tenterhooks waiting for news of Columbus.
He'd been gone for seven months.
Most people thought they'd never have to be bothered
by Columbus again.
But then a letter to the Queen arrived,
sent by Columbus on his safe return to Europe.
I've got a copy of it here.
It's all written in miniscule Old Spanish,
but this is the 21st century, so I have a translation app.
And he wrote that, "I arrived at the Indian Sea..."
Ha-ha-ha.
"..where I discovered many islands inhabited by many people.
"I took possession of all of them for our most illustrious King
"by public proclamation and unfurling of banners,
"with no-one making any resistance."
Really?
The letter was shared all over Europe, accompanied by -
brace yourselves, viewers, for the next best thing after woodwork -
woodcut prints.
CHORAL MUSIC
This is a 15th-century version of a tabloid front page.
The first thrilling pictures of the new lands to the west
and of the local Taino people,
who Columbus said welcomed them with open arms.
Also, here's one in colour as a treat.
"They traded with us and gave us all they had,
"graciously and willingly.
"Your Highness may believe that in all the world,
"there can be no better people.
"They love their neighbours as they love themselves.
"They have the sweetest manner in the world,
"and they are gentle and always laughing."
Now, we should probably take a moment to enjoy that record
of a rather beautiful bit of human interaction,
because pretty soon, things are gonna get a bit bloody.
The ships returned, minus the Santa Maria,
which Columbus, ever the skilled navigator,
had crashed into some rocks.
And he got a bit lost too.
But when they finally arrived,
the nation was in fevered anticipation
to see what they'd brought back.
The two ships arrived back in Spain seven months after they'd departed,
and they were full of marvellous and exotic things,
the likes of which had never been seen in mouldy old Europe.
To start with, exotic fruits.
Here is a selection of things that weren't available
in the local greengrocer up until then.
This one deserves a particular mention.
It is a fruit. It is a chilli pepper.
And people discovered that if you ate these,
they set fire to both ends of your alimentary canal,
but they did change our eating habits forever.
There were fun new pets.
Talking parrots became all the rage,
whether you were a prince or a pirate.
This one came from the visitor's centre.
There were things to swing in.
The hammock would go on to revolutionise sailing
and the health of sailors.
There was... oh, dear, tobacco.
The sailors tried this,
and the weird thing was that once they tried it once,
they found they couldn't stop trying it.
And there was one other thing that was even more addictive.
That...
..is gold.
Forget Asian silks and spices,
this was the stuff explorers' dreams are made of.
The word "gold" appears in Columbus's diary
of his first voyage 142 times.
In truth, he only managed to scrounge a piddling amount
from the Taino people,
but that's not what he told the Queen.
He said they had "vast mines of gold"
and that she could have as much gold as she desired.
That little white lie was the sweetest sound to a monarch,
because gold means power.
Gold! We've always believed in it.
Humans have been obsessed with it. And why?
Well, the Aztecs thought it was produced
by the life-giving force of the sun.
It's also in limited supply, which means it can be controlled.
Even today, it is believed that all of the world's gold reserves
would fit in one big block between the legs of the Eiffel Tower.
'Here, old gold is melted down and refined in one of these, a crucible,
'by one of these, an Adam.'
How long will that take to warm up? About five to eight minutes.
'The Taino gold was in the form of beautiful jewellery and keepsakes,
'but to Columbus, it just meant cold, hard cash.'
It's things that were once incredibly precious to people,
but they're probably now dead.
Just remember that when you retire
and you're given your gold watch or your solid gold letter opener,
one day, you will turn to dust, and it will turn to scrap.
There it is.
That's upbeat, isn't it? THEY CHUCKLE
The crucible is now as red as a Spanish sailor
exposed to too much Caribbean sun.
This is your last chance to reclaim that wedding ring,
gold sovereign, watch band.
No? OK, chuck it in, then.
It's all gone in the pot. It's all coming out as an ingot.
I love the colours of the flames. Look at that green there.
Gone.
'While our gold melts,
'let's look at how Columbus managed to persuade his new acquaintances
'in the Caribbean to part with their gold.'
Now, the Taino people on the islands didn't have this technology.
They didn't have furnaces.
What they would do was find nuggets in the streams and rivers
and simply hammer them into shape.
But what really impressed them was the work of the Arawak people
on the mainland, because they did have furnaces.
They melted gold, and they alloyed it with rich red copper
to give them something a bit like what we would call rose gold.
They called it "guanin".
Now, fortuitously, Columbus's men had with them
a great deal of another copper alloy, brass,
which is made from copper and zinc.
And it was in the form of trinkets, really,
like these little hawk bells.
And the Tainos really loved these, because they looked like,
and just as importantly, even smelled like
the guanin from the mainland.
So the sailors were able to trade these virtually worthless trinkets
for handfuls of real gold.
The sailors couldn't believe their luck.
Neither could the Spanish Crown.
Right, here is the big moment, the pour.
I am going to press the button.
Are you ready for me to press the button?
Ready. Here it comes.
Ah! Gold!
We talk about people dripping in gold.
This actually is dripping gold.
Looks like a slightly... bar of toffee at the moment.
Just don't lick it.
'Columbus said that gold is the greatest treasure
'and that he who possesses it can do all he wishes in life.'
I like it!
'Gold, simply put, meant greatness.'
Gold, like the love it so often represents, has been quenched.
Last thing now, to clean it.
And it's heavy... because it's gold!
Oh-ho-ho! There it is.
Even in that state, it's worth, I would guess,
what, £350,000-£400,000?
Yeah, give or take.
So, really, it's that or a pretty decent house.
That's what the Spanish went mad for.
It drove them insane.
Is your security quite good here?
Columbus was the court's new golden boy.
He was granted a second voyage post-haste,
but this wasn't just a gold grab -
or at least it couldn't be seen as one.
Isabella wanted souls too, to convert the Taino people
from their gods to her Christian one.
This time, Columbus set sail with 17 ships
full of sailors, obviously,
but also soldiers, priests, woodworkers, stonemasons, miners,
everybody you needed to set up a whole new society.
And his instructions from the Crown were twofold -
convert souls and find gold!
JAMES MAY: 'Welcome, viewers, to 1493.
'And Christopher Columbus is now a pretty big queso
'after finding land to the west
'glittering with the promise of gold.'
I am walking on television.
'But now he has to do it again.
'And all of Europe is watching.'
Now, as we know, he's a terrible navigator.
Look, he's dropped the chart,
and that globe's probably just a drinks cabinet.
So, how the hell is he going to pull it off it a second time?
Well, it was actually a bit of a breeze.
This bucket o' ice represents the cold of the North Pole,
and this bucket of hot water represents the heat of the equator.
Science again!
My handy smoke stick will show how wind is formed.
And you will see that the flow of cold to warm
will make it go down that tube to the equator in a second.
Yes! Look at that!
That's really quite fabulous, isn't it?
Anyway, if I can just give that to an assistant
so I don't burn down Christopher Columbus's old headquarters.
That steady airflow, AKA wind, is pretty handy for sailors.
If we look at the globe again, that means the wind would blow...
Whee! ..south towards the equator.
But of course, the world is spinning.
So if I make the wind blow and the world spin
at the same time, look what we get.
That was almost spot-on, actually.
Columbus had stumbled upon God's own transatlantic conveyor belt,
the trade winds.
And this is still used by modern sailors.
They say things like, "If you want to go to America from Europe,
"sail south until butter melts, and then turn right."
Now, any old idiot could sail to the Americas,
but next came the difficult part -
establishing Spain's first New World HQ.
So, a man who was bad at maths but got lucky
was now tasked with setting up a whole town
on an island 4,000 miles away.
1,200 people would be travelling with him,
and they would need housing, and before that, of course, feeding,
and that meant taking animals.
'Columbus packed cows, mules, some of these cute little fellas...'
He's surprisingly heavy for a little pig.
'..and, of course, a herd of TV's least co-operative contributors.'
Hello, goat. They are largely buggering off.
Now, all of the animals they took
were completely alien to the people of the Caribbean.
The only animals they had domesticated so far
were dogs and guinea pigs, which were for -
children, look away - eating.
Columbus's ships were the New World Noah's Ark.
His animals would go on to populate the Americas.
Every time the Spanish passed an island,
they'd drop off a couple of pigs, a boy and a girl, obviously,
so that they would multiply and become a future food source.
It's just cupboard love, isn't it? GOAT BLEATS
You just want goat snacks.
Chomp, chomp, chomp!
Goats like these ran wild and feral all over.
And if you'd never heard one, you might have found their bleating
quite intimidating or even terrifying
until you work out that goats are actually just complete halfwits.
Aren't you?
But there was one animal
that would truly captivate the people of the New World.
Imagine if you'd never seen a horse before,
or, more importantly, seen someone riding one
going faster than any human could go on their own legs.
The horse would become incredibly important
to the indigenous people's culture,
because they could ride them for transport.
They also used them for warfare and for hunting.
And most importantly,
if you'd never seen a horse before and you didn't have horses,
you would never have seen that level of cuteness.
That foal is one week old.
Took me years to learn that,
standing up and... wagging my tail.
Oh. CREW: Hey!
Riches from Columbus's new colony
would soon start arriving back in Spain,
and the palace in Seville became the operations centre
for all New World exploration.
Spain was so delighted with its new lands,
it wanted the world to know about them.
And the way to get the world's attention back then
was with a painting.
Wow!
This is The Virgin Of The Navigators.
This painting comes from an era when art was largely functional.
It was there to dispense quite clear messages.
And the one in this painting seems to be that Columbus's journeys
were really more like missions, it was about spreading Christianity.
And the painting is surrounded by saints.
It's all pretty clear.
It's not about conquering lands or anything tawdry
like, I don't know, gold.
Even then, spin was alive and well,
and there's a second lie hidden in the painting.
You will notice at the back, barely visible,
the indigenous people gratefully sheltering
under the loving embrace of the virgin,
just as Queen Isabella herself felt that she was.
Isabella had told Columbus,
"Treat my Indians well and kindly and do not upset them in any way."
Well, guess what?
Thanks to the trade winds,
Columbus had arrived back in Hispaniola,
which he still insisted was Asia.
He built a rudimentary camp, called it La Isabela
and waited for the gold to roll in.
So, this story so far has been really rather upbeat,
nice sailing ships, making barrels and so on.
And now it's turning a little bit dark.
He immediately ran into a problem.
The settlers he brought with him weren't collecting enough gold.
But that was OK, because he had the answer as well.
He'd get the local people to do it.
So, he decided that
the Taino people would deliver him one hawk's bell full of gold
every three months, or they would be punished.
Now, I have to warn you that these next pictures are horrifying.
It was brutal.
There were floggings and maulings by dogs,
women were raped, people's hands were cut off
and they were left to bleed to death.
There were mass suicides,
and hundreds were sent to Spain as slaves,
to the horror of Isabella.
It was all presided over by Columbus, and all for gold.
Now, none of this stuff is mentioned
in the famous 1492 ditty, unsurprisingly.
Word got back to Spain, but Columbus would still make two more voyages.
It was only when the Spanish settlers complained
about him flogging them too
that Ferdinand and Isabella could no longer turn a blind eye.
Spain's national hero was brought back in chains
and banned from the colony he'd founded.
But that wasn't the end of the regime.
In fact, it was only the beginning.
Pretty soon, Isabella was sending anybody who had a ship
over to the Americas,
and they would take their crops, their animals,
everything they needed to set up a new society.
And they also took death, because they took disease.
This handsome building is St Bart's Hospital in London.
It's home to their Pathology Museum,
which is home to these interesting-looking jars,
which are home to...
..oh, dear, bits of people.
This is one of the few places in the world
where you can still see the hideous effects
of the sort of diseases that were rife in the time of Columbus.
Here, for example, is what smallpox does to you.
It causes the end of your foot to drop off and land in this jar.
This is what bubonic plague does to your kidneys.
Typhoid does this to your...
I think that's probably someone's appendix, or was.
And then syphilis does terrible things to your skull,
and it does particularly terrible things to your "thumbs".
Now, the point here is that Europeans had lived
with a lot of these diseases for a very long time,
so they'd built up a certain immunity,
they had antibodies to act against them.
But the indigenous Americans didn't have them.
So when the Spanish sailors arrived,
they brought quite a lot of this stuff with them
to devastating effect.
So far, so horrifying, but the history is worse.
'Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock is not the sort of doctor
'who can help you with your plague
'but the sort who can help us understand
'what the indigenous Americans were experiencing.'
This is an image of the 1520 smallpox epidemic
which took place in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
You can see how people experienced it.
The woman here is caring, they're speaking.
That's what that little scrawl means.
She's caring for this person here.
This is smallpox? This was new to them?
They didn't have it pre-Columbus? It was. It was new.
It's the first of three enormous epidemics
which sweep across Mexico in the 16th century.
Within 150 years of Columbus's voyage,
disease, made worse by famine and war,
would kill a staggering 80% of the indigenous American people.
And for those who survived, more horrors awaited.
You have accounts of people who are being enslaved
and transported across the Atlantic even, some into the Caribbean,
some all the way as far as Spain and Portugal.
I hadn't really quite appreciated that.
So, the indigenous Americans,
they were actually enslaved in Europe? Yes.
But it's a really unknown part of this colonisation.
And so perhaps a million people are enslaved in Mexico alone
in the first 100 years after the invasion.
Maybe tens of thousands are shipped across the Atlantic,
far more into other parts of the Americas.
Wow. I didn't know that.
The better-known transatlantic slave trade is, of course,
the one shipping African people to the Americas.
And it turns out that's embedded in the disease story too.
In the Caribbean especially,
the Spanish work to death so many people,
and so many die of disease, that they start needing more labourers.
So they begin to think in terms of importing people
across the Atlantic to replace the indigenous communities.
Right. Wow.
Some of the darkest chapters of human history
seem to have followed in Columbus's wake.
In your opinion, Columbus, goodie or baddie?
Was he a product of his times,
and therefore we shouldn't judge him for it,
or is he culpable?
I mean, as you'd expect from a historian, I'm gonna hedge,
because I don't think goodie or baddie
is a great way to measure history.
He was a product of his time,
but he was also the largest single trader
in enslaved indigenous people during this early period.
He saw the slave fortresses that the Portuguese had built
on the West African coast, and he is inspired by that
and thinks he can do the same thing in the Americas.
He literally says to Ferdinand and Isabella,
"We can take as many of these people as you want."
And it's all very well to say he's a man of his time,
but Isabella is also of her time,
and she keeps saying, "Stop enslaving these people.
"I've told you not to."
Yes. Very good point, yes. Hmm.
It's 1506, viewers, and after four journeys to the Caribbean,
Christopher Columbus has been banned from the colony he'd helped found.
I bet you're gagging for me to tell you about Columbus's fifth journey,
the one where he finally discovers America,
what would become the USA and where he is so widely celebrated.
Well, there wasn't one,
because he never went there and he never set foot there.
Instead, he went to bed in a sulk, in ill health,
and in a fury over his fall from grace,
and then he died.
Historians speculate that the cause of death could have been anything
from heart disease, a tropical disease, arthritis,
an intestinal parasite or even an STD.
Whatever, as the old sailors used to say, he had gone aloft.
And he's probably buried here in Seville's cathedral.
I say probably because we can't be entirely sure.
He was dug up and reburied six times.
An explorer, even in death.
So, Columbus's legacy.
This map was made the year after he died.
But what are those two weird streaky bits on the left?
Hint, they're not called Columbus Land.
While Columbus maintained right to the end
that he had been in Asia,
a rival explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, had two continents named after him.
North Vespucci, and, of course, South Vespucci (!)
'Soon, anyone with a ship was heading to the Vespuccis,
'or the Americas, as they're sometimes called.
'From now on, there would be a constant flow
'of all sorts of strange and wonderful goods
'to European shores, from the exotic...
The pineapple!
So highly prized, if you were having a posh dinner party,
you could rent one to impress your mates.
'..to the delicious...'
Where would we be in Europe without the potato?
No crisps, no chips, no delicious Sunday roasties.
'..to the nutritious...'
Tomatoes, we had courgettes, we had avocadoes.
Life for the European vegan was about to become very exciting.
They'd been stuck with the parsnip cutlet for centuries.
'..to the frankly world-changing.'
Very easy to grow, doesn't require much irrigation.
And potatoes and maize together
would cause a European population boom.
The exact opposite, in fact, of what was happening in the Americas.
And as the Spanish took over more of the new world,
spreading disease as they went,
they finally got hold of what had eluded Columbus -
great big boatloads of gold.
Right, the exact figure is hotly debated in academic circles -
ie pubs - but we believe that prior to Columbus's first voyage,
the amount of gold in the known world came to 297 tonnes.
We don't have that kind of props budget,
so we're using a scale of one gram to one tonne.
That is your 297 tonnes in the world.
Within 60 years of Columbus's first voyage,
the Spanish had extracted from the New World
a further 100 tonnes.
Oh, look at that!
But that is actually nothing
compared with what happened to silver.
Because it is thought that before the Columbus voyage,
the world's silver reserves was 3,600 tonnes,
which is represented by...
There it is in silver scrap.
How much do you think they extracted from the New World?
Phwoar!
25,000 tonnes of silver.
For all Columbus's obsession with gold,
it was silver that changed the world.
This is what funded the building of magnificent European cities,
a golden age - or silver age - of art and literature
and the rise of European empires
which would go on to colonise yet more lands.
Columbus's voyages enriched the Old World
beyond their wildest dreams, to the cost of the New World.
So, let's go back to the spot whence he set off.
An obsessive map-botherer, a crap navigator
and a bloodthirsty gold-looter
who took a punt on the trade winds and changed both worlds forever.
I'm now charged with coming up with some meaningful conclusions
about the voyages of Christopher Columbus,
which feels like a open goal to self-cancellation.
Because for hundreds of years,
Columbus had a sort of historical whitewash.
There were countless positive tomes written about him.
He's got the little poem. In 1934, he was granted his own day.
But in the last 50 years,
we've started to examine these things a little more closely.
And over the last five years, we've put them right under the microscope.
40 or so statues of Columbus have been removed around the world.
But I think the way to approach this
is to look at it through the lens of technology.
This statue was erected to the courage of the navigator,
and, of course, once the sailing ship had been invented,
it was going to happen.
To explore is an imperative.
It still is, and we're still doing it.
We're going to do it into space.
We will do it to the bottom of the ocean.
Maybe the important thing is that in the modern age,
we've become a little better at exploring inwardly.
So, let's remember that there are continents,
there are countries, and there are peoples,
but there is only one humanity, and it's work in progress.
'Next time...'
Good morning, m'luds.
'..Sir Walter Raleigh.'
Imagine making your way here.
You may position yourself
where you can vomit discreetly into a flower bed.
This is medieval satnav version 2.0 - a stick.
I've got no training, I've had no practice,
I'm going to be busking it.
He touched the Queen? Yeah, yeah.
Crikey.
This is a Tudor license to kill.
CANNON BOOMS Oh!
So much for the great explorer, eh?
This is the West Country of England, famous for seafaring,
and, of course, for seafarers.
And out there, there has always been
the prospect of adventure and discovery,
and quite possibly fame and wealth to follow.
By the mid-16th century, the New World was already on the map
and the Spanish Empire was sending home galleons stuffed with treasure,
and that was all that one young Devon lad could dream about.
This is the story of a man who rose from a relatively obscure background
to dazzle Elizabethan England.
It's a story of deceit, chicanery, flattery,
not to mention treachery and murder.
He's most famous for things he didn't actually do.
But, hey, let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story!
The story of Sir Walter Raleigh.
The age of the great explorers was one of the most dramatic in history.
HE CHUCKLES
'When men risked their lives...'
Cast off and set sail...
Oh! Take up on the peak.
Like that? '..to seek new lands.'
We're somewhere north of the dog's arse.
Where's the camera gone? Hello.
They crossed thousands of miles of treacherous ocean.
They built floating fortresses. They mapped the stars.
They developed whole new branches of science.
Ew! Absolute pish.
'But were these explorers really heroes or just a bunch of chancers?'
So, miracle he found anything at all, really.
Completely made up. Man was a charlatan.
'And is their legacy one of triumph...'
Ah!
'..or destruction?'
Crikey. Now it's turning a little bit dark.
'I'm doing a bit of discovering of my own...'
Unbelievably terrible. Medieval satnav, 2.0, a stick.
Oh, has he just shat on my trousers?
'..to learn how these explorers conquered the oceans...'
Look at that.
I love it.
Nobody panic yet.
It's not just a map. It's a weapon.
'..and changed the world forever.'
SHOUTS Oh, gold!
If you were in the Navy now, the French would definitely have got us.
HE LAUGHS
Before we set off on this story properly,
I should first admit to a bit of a soft spot for the name Raleigh,
because my first bicycle, aged three,
was a Raleigh, a Raleigh Mayflower, and I loved it.
Obviously, I grew bigger.
I made my way through numerous Raleigh bicycles,
and I learned about Sir Walter, and I liked the association
because my Raleighs were the ways that I went off
on great voyages of discovery.
But by the time I got to my Record Ace,
with its 12 speeds and 531 frame,
I discovered that the bicycle and the swashbuckler
are not in any way related.
And maybe this shattering of my youthful fantasy
was a bit of a taste of things to come,
because it turns out that
the true story of Sir Walter Raleigh is quite difficult to pin down.
In popular legend, Raleigh cuts a rather dashing figure,
throwing his cloak over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I,
penning great tomes of poetry and prose,
and gallivanting off on adventures to the New World.
We're told he created England's first American colony,
kickstarting the British Empire, and brought home tobacco and potatoes.
It's enough to make anyone a national hero,
but I suspect a lot of it might be utter bollocks.
How much of the Raleigh folklore is actually true?
Let's start with what we do know.
Around 1553, Walter Raleigh was born here in this house
just outside the Devon village of East Budleigh.
Now, the family had been wealthy landowners
with a massive manor house and what have you,
but they'd fallen on hard times.
And to make things worse, Walter was the fifth of five sons,
so there was no inheritance coming his way.
'So how did this Devonshire lad go from country bumpkin...'
That's very quaint.
'..to one of the most powerful men in England
'and an intrepid explorer?'
This is all uphill, you bastards!
Step one, go to war.
17-year-old Raleigh, an ardent Protestant,
went to fight the Catholics in France
and proved himself a worthy soldier,
willing to die for the Protestant cause.
But young Raleigh was ambitious.
He wanted wealth, influence,
and the glory of asserting England's power overseas.
For that, he needed to win favour
at the royal court of Queen Elizabeth I...
..and the wily Walter knew just how to get there.
In 1574, he came here, and the things he would learn
would change his fortune and the course of world history.
Now, as you can tell from this important music,
we are at an important location.
Middle Temple in the heart of London's Inns Of Court.
It was, and still is, where the brightest student barristers
honed their skills in front of the country's top legal minds.
Good morning, m'luds.
Probably should have brushed my hair.
This place has resonated to over 500 years of rhetoric,
the art of presenting a compelling argument.
A cornerstone, really, of the English legal system,
which is really just the ultimate battle of wits
between barristers, prosecution versus defence.
It's also a stark reminder to stay on the right side of the law,
because you really don't wanna go up against an institution
that can produce this much wood carving and portraiture.
But Raleigh wasn't here to become a bigwig m'lud.
He was here to learn the skills he'd need to stalk the corridors of power
and talk his way to the top,
skills that barrister
and King's Counsel Benet Brandreth teaches today.
The Inns Of Court were not just great places for learning.
Sometimes described at that time as the third University of England
alongside Oxford and Cambridge,
they were also incredible networking opportunities.
So, Raleigh coming here was because he wanted to learn the techniques
of having influence at the very highest level?
Absolutely.
Raleigh was schooled here in rhetoric,
and his mastery of it would shape his entire life.
It's all about how to win an argument,
so listen up because it might be handy next time you're down the pub.
Rhetoric is the art of discerning in any particular topic
the available means of persuasion.
It's about the power of language to move the minds of others.
And to learn it, Raleigh studied writings from Ancient Greece.
Aristotle first codified all the means of persuasion,
the modes of persuasion, into three groups.
So, ethos are the arguments from authority.
Why should I listen to this person on this topic?
Then you've got logos, the facts.
It's the ruthless statistics and the logic.
And then we have pathos. Pathos is the argument from emotion.
OK. Ethos, logos, pathos. Exactly.
To demonstrate how Raleigh honed his skills, we need a good debate.
Top barrister Benet will go head-to-head with...
me, a sheer novice who's absolutely winging it.
I've gotta think in terms of my ethos, logos, pathos...
Yeah, but you have the gold there, you have the core.
Why should I be heard? Why am I right?
Well, I am right. Does it matter?
That confidence is excellent. There you go.
The question is, how can you convey that confidence?
OK. Can I have ten minutes to think about that?
By all means. Thank you.
The power to persuade was a crucial skill in the Elizabethan age.
Get it right and you could win the ear of the Queen.
Get it wrong and you could lose your head.
It's a bit daunting, this,
because obviously I've got no training, I've had no practice,
and I've had no real time to think about my arguments
so I'm going to be busking it,
which I think is not an accepted practice in law.
Time to enter the debating chamber where Raleigh's future was moulded.
And as if the rows of portraits and coats of arms
weren't intimidating enough...
..my rhetoric skills will be judged by these three -
a board of top Middle Temple barristers.
Gulp!
The debate is, is the pen mightier than the sword?
And we will start with the argument for the sword.
Right, so we're actually going to just do this for real?
Let's do this for real. Yes. What shall I talk about? OK.
Well, I'm positively ululating with the facts at my fingertips
and my extensive research. I dismiss the pen.
I mean, I refute it thus,
as evinced by my failure to bring any notes or a notebook of any type.
The privilege of writing what we all perceive to be the truth
is gifted from history by people who have used swords.
And I give you the example above your heads of Charles I,
whose head was severed from his body, if not by a sword,
at least by a bladed weapon.
And I have a minute left,
but to be brutally honest, I'm spent.
'That went well.'
And now the argument for the pen.
My lord, my ladies, though I have been both a soldier
and a barrister, it is the pen that I chiefly know.
I confess I did not hear my learned opponent indicate
what experience he had of the sword at all.
'I'm doomed.' A sword can destroy a life,
but a pen can destroy a whole way of life.
A sword can only destroy, but a pen can build whole worlds,
whether in fiction or through philosophy.
And I ask you, in your own lives,
which has been the more important, the sword or the pen?
He's done this before! LAUGHING
We have decided that the pen has it.
A pox upon me. But they would say that, wouldn't they?
I just thought that might be something an Elizabethan might say.
Right, Benet, I'll see you outside. Bring your pen.
CHUCKLING
Well, OK, I lost at debating to a man who does it for a living,
but at least this exercise has shown us
that our Sir Walter was an absolute master of the art of persuasion
through words. I think he once said,
"Men's fortunes are oftener made by their tongues
"than by their virtues."
That's exactly what I would have said.
As it turned out, though, Raleigh would use both the pen
and the sword to get to the top.
Now, if you've ever lost a pub quiz, it might be
because one of the questions was, what was England's first colony?
And you put North America.
Wrong because England's and Raleigh's first colonial ambitions
were visited on a country right next door.
England's invasion of Ireland had started in the 12th century,
and by the late 1570s,
the Irish were really pretty BLEEP off with it.
An Irish rebellion rose against the Queen's forces,
and she wanted some soldiers to crush it.
So our Walter, of course, interpreted this
as an excellent opportunity for a scrap with some Catholics.
He used his influence and his connections to raise a detachment
to quell the rebellion and turn Ireland into a subservient colony.
At this point, I'm afraid the image
of our witty and urbane national hero takes a bit of a beating,
because at the Siege Of Smerwick in 1580,
he personally oversaw the massacre
of 600 soldiers, women and children.
Rather depressingly, this was not unusual behaviour
for Tudor English soldiers.
Elizabeth quietly approved, and it got Raleigh noticed.
He composed some rhetoric-filled letters to the Queen's minions,
and in 1581 was invited to court to discuss the conduct of the war.
This was his shot at the big time.
Welcome back, viewers, to 1581,
and a momentous time in Walter Raleigh's life.
So momentous, in fact, I'm spinning in circles with sheer excitement.
Imagine beginning your life in sleepy little East Budleigh,
but then making your way here to Hampton Court Palace,
the sometime seat of supreme English power,
the court of Elizabeth I.
If a social media meme had existed at the time,
it would have been something like, "How it started, how it's going."
'The Virgin Queen, by now on the throne for over 20 years,
'had started funding voyages of exploration to the New World.'
I keep walking...
'For a young, dashing upstart - no, not me, Raleigh -
'power, influence and cash for expeditions
'were there for the taking, if you played your cards right.'
I'm still going.
'Because I am but a lowly commoner to navigate this royal minefield,
'I need some insider help...'
It's beautiful.
It smells of old stuff, doesn't it?
'..from Tudor expert Dr Joanne Paul.'
Would our Walter have come in here? Oh, probably. Probably.
This is where the court, when they were at Hampton Court,
would celebrate the mass, and everyone was expected to attend.
But Elizabeth would have been up there looking down at everyone.
Her Royal Pew was glassed off,
and she had little, sort of, windows that she could open to listen.
She was reading letters, conducting royal business up there
during the mass.
So you have Elizabeth up there
behind a piece of glass doing the crossword or whatever... Yes!
..but she can at any moment make decisions about,
"Yes, you can have some money.
"No, you can't have a head anymore."
Um, and then she receives complaints
like, "The Earl of Walsingham called me a bellend," or whatever.
And this all goes on in here? Absolutely.
Can we actually go up there? I think we can.
For Raleigh, this was the ultimate goal -
climbing the staircase to courtly success.
This is the Royal Pew. It's very exclusive.
It's very intimate.
This was a personal monarchy,
which meant that physical proximity to the monarch was power.
That was how you rose in the court.
And looking down,
imagine it's like a high school cafeteria.
You've got your different cliques down there. You've got your poets.
You've got your jousters, your explorers.
And Raleigh's gotta find his seat at one of these tables.
I bet he goes for the explorers. Do you think?
Yeah.
And might you be invited up?
I mean, might you say, "Come hither, boy"?
Yeah. She might send down one of her ladies, for instance,
to bring someone up. And of course, you'd have to genuflect
and do all the etiquette things in order to impress her.
And everyone would see you go up, right,
that would be a huge mark of favour.
Massive points, isn't it? Yeah.
Huge bragging rights.
"He's been summoned up to the Queen's pew."
Wowzers! It must have been quite scary, actually.
I once had to go and see the Director-General of the BBC,
and I sort of polished my shoes on the back of my trousers a bit.
But imagine going to see, effectively, God. Yes.
'Now that Raleigh had an audience with the Queen,
'he had to make an impression.'
It's chuffing freezing in the rose garden, isn't it?
Yeah. God!
For Elizabeth,
part of holding power was holding the hearts of her courtiers.
They were meant to be in love with her.
How did the young Walter Raleigh
secure an audience in the rose garden?
The story goes that he put his cape over a puddle for her,
but that probably never happened.
It seems that they were writing very soon after he arrived,
and he was spending a lot of time with her.
Other men in the court must have been a bit "jelly"
of Walter Raleigh cos he was getting all the Queen's attention.
Absolutely, yeah. His rivals were really annoyed,
and he was rising as her new favourite very quickly.
And writing poetry. And writing poetry.
Despite a 20-year age gap,
young Walter wasn't satisfied with just having the Queen's ear.
He wanted to win her heart, too.
I have come armed with some of the rapier-like poesy of Walter Raleigh.
You may want to position yourself where you can vomit
discreetly into a flower bed.
"Fortune hath taken away my love,
"My life's joy and my soul's heaven above.
"Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess,
"My world's joy And my true fantasy's mistress."
There you go. This is like some lovestruck teenager.
This is Elizabeth's rejoinder. Right.
"Ah, silly pug, wert thou so afraid?
"Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed
"It passeth fickle fortune's power and skill
"To force my heart to think thee any ill."
Oh, very nice, very nice. He is well and truly dismissed.
Do you know, I used to write poems to people when I was, uh,
a much younger man. Were they better than this?
To be honest, I think some of them were, but I never got one back.
Oh! So you see,
He's already doing quite well, isn't he? Yes.
What actually made the Queen fall for Walter Raleigh?
Because, to be brutally frank, he's not that good.
He's a bit birthday card-ish.
Yeah, I don't think it was the poetry.
I think he was a bit rough, a bit rugged.
But most importantly, he was a very frank speaker.
He spoke very directly to the Queen,
but in a way that she could kind of get on board
with these wild things that he was saying.
The Queen became so enamoured with the handsome Raleigh
that their racy behaviour almost caused a scandal.
Warning, please cover the ears of any children in the room now.
When Raleigh was invited over to sit with her,
and he sits down and the Queen moves to rub some dirt off his face,
which is a very intimate thing to do. God, yes.
And what's worse is that Raleigh stops her hand
and wipes it off himself.
He touched the Queen. Yeah. And stops her in what she was doing.
And she could have said, "Off with his head" at that point.
But she didn't. No. She was absolutely fine with it.
All that sizzling romantic tension
made Raleigh Elizabeth's new favourite,
and it was about to pay off, literally.
The boy Walter done good. The Queen gifted him a mansion in Dorset
and the poshest house in London,
and monopolies on wine and woollen cloth.
He was made Lord Warden of the Stannaries,
that is, all the tin mines in the West Country,
and captain of the Queen's Guard.
Oh, and he was also gifted 40,000 acres
of other people's land in Ireland,
which he promptly turned into a very lucrative plantation.
The Devon boy had arrived.
However, there was a vital piece of paper standing between him
and changing the course of England's and the world's history forever.
Walks off mysteriously.
Vast wealth, tick. The Queen's ear, tick.
Now the West Country lad could tackle his greatest ambition -
becoming an explorer.
But for English seafarers at the time,
the line between exploration and piracy was a very blurred one,
and Raleigh had a distant cousin who knew all about that,
fellow Devon lad and captain of the most famous English voyage yet,
Sir Francis Drake.
This is a replica of his ship,
the Golden Hind, the first English ship
to circumnavigate the globe, and of such repute
that it was also the subject of the first ever Airfix model.
Anyway, that circumnavigation at the time
was billed as a voyage of discovery of learning.
In actual fact, it was a raid because Drake sailed off
round the western side of South America, looting Spanish gold.
Drake not only returned with
around half a billion pounds' worth of loot,
he earned himself a knighthood.
For the younger, ambitious Raleigh, this was a man to aspire to,
but first he'd have to tackle some English bureaucracy,
because if you wanted to discover new lands
and plunder Spanish ships en route, you needed a permit.
This is what you needed -
a chitty, a docket, a letter from the Queen.
There is her name writ large, giving you permission as a privateer,
ie, a state sponsored pirate, to loot any ship or raid any port,
providing they were owned by enemies of the Crown.
This is a Tudor licence to kill, and any loot collected
would be split between the privateer and the Queen herself.
Now, the Queen issued these in some secrecy,
usually through her counsel, because that way if the voyage was a success
and she got some more treasure, she could go hurrah for England!
But if it went wrong, if it caused, for example, a war with Spain,
she could completely distance herself from it.
Raleigh wanted a piece of all this,
and he also had a much bigger prize for the Queen in mind.
Raleigh knew the perfect spot to capture a Spanish treasure ship.
By now, Spain had conquered much of the Caribbean and Central America.
Their ships' holds, bursting with gold and silver,
would travel north up the American coast
before catching the trade winds home to Europe.
Raleigh wanted to capitalise on this by setting up a piracy HQ
in North America, from which he could launch his attacks.
This was a golden opportunity for Walter, quite literally.
A new world base would give him
freedom to plunder as many Spanish ships as he wanted,
and he could also provide land, people and souls for his queen
to baptise in the Protestant faith.
It would be England's first New World colony.
Raleigh had a plan and he had a patent.
All that stood in his way was 3,500 miles of open ocean.
You rejoin us, viewers, in 1584,
a very exciting time for Walter Raleigh.
He's won a permit from the Queen
to establish England's first New World colony.
But how's he going to find his way to the right spot?
3,500 miles across the Atlantic,
in a time of rather rudimentary navigational know-how.
"Second star on the right and straight on till morning."
Those were Peter Pan's instructions for reaching Neverland.
And to be honest, up until the invention of satnav in the 1990s,
navigation at sea was pretty much like that.
It's that time in the programme
when we get in a boat and do some sailing.
Permission to come aboard, skipper.
Our task is to test
the leading navigational instruments of Raleigh's day.
And the most common device at the time
was one that had been around since antiquity.
It's called an astrolabe. Normally made of brass,
this is a laser-cut wooden replica made for us by Alan,
who is our vintage navigation correspondent.
It's like a miniature map of the heavens
that you can carry around with you.
This side will tell you all sorts of stuff about stars,
but most importantly, this side will allow you to measure the angle
of the sun above the horizon.
And if you do that at midday, you can work out your latitude,
how far north or south you are. Now, that all sounds very simple,
but actually it's very tricky cos I've gotta try and allow it
to hang vertically from there...
and arrange this so that the sun shines through that hole,
which is a bit like a camera obscura,
and form a little shiny disc on that one.
Let's give it a go, anyway.
Hang on, I've got the little dots.
Yep. It's hanging vertically and it needs to go that way.
Hang on. This is almost impossible.
'And this is on a calm day.
'Imagine trying to do this in a Mid-Atlantic swell!'
Oh, there it is. There it is. Oh, yeah.
Well, I saw the little dot, and I make that 38 degrees.
38 degrees.
'Now, as responsible mathematicians we'll do a few readings
'and take an average. This should be easy now I've had a practice.'
This is impossible. This would be difficult on land.
There's my dot. That time I made it 34 degrees.
OK, that's a few degrees difference.
Shall I do one more?
37 degrees. Somewhere in the middle.
Well, we know roughly where we are.
Which is interesting because we haven't moved. Yes.
Time to head below and check where the astrolabe thinks we are.
That comes out at a latitude of 48.5 degrees.
48... Oh, it's right at the bottom. Northern France, near Brest.
Right. So that's quite a long way off, isn't it?
Because we're actually here.
'The astrolabe has located us around 140 miles
'from our actual location in Cornwall. Oh, dear.'
And that's just the latitude.
We've got no idea about longitude at this point in history.
So all we think is that we're on a line that goes
around the globe there. Yeah.
'So, the astrolabe definitely has room for improvement.
'Luckily, there was an alternative navigational tool,
'something that could make Raleigh's expedition
'across the Atlantic far more accurate -
'a super high-tech, precision engineered piece of kit.'
Right. This is medieval satnav, version 2.0.
A stick, but a very clever stick. This bit slides along.
It's called a cross-staff because it's cross-shaped.
And if I put it up to my face and get the top of that cross piece
at the bottom of the sun and then the other end on the horizon...
Hold on.
This is a lot easier,
and it makes a lot more sense than the astrolabe,
but it's still pretty difficult.
I mean, apart from that you burn your eyeball out,
it's very difficult to hold it steady.
The sun is so bright when you actually look at it.
This is why pirates ended up with eye-patches
going, "Ooh-ah, ooh-ah" all the time.
Lock it off. And then on the side there is a scale
that I can read in degrees,
and it's roughly 33.5.
Right. Let's see if Raleigh's newfangled stick beat the astrolabe.
So, the cross-staff gives us a latitude of 50.5 degrees.
That doesn't sound quite so bad.
So we're actually... we're actually on a line of latitude that is north
of the end of Cornwall, actually heading up towards Padstow.
But it is in Cornwall. It is in Cornwall.
It is in England.
The cross-staff is only 30 miles out
compared with the astrolabe at 140.
For Raleigh, this improved accuracy would be a godsend.
We're used to navigating in cars
and they can be accurate down to a couple of metres.
But, you know, for the 15th and 16th centuries,
getting the right end of a whole country, that's not bad.
It's not bad. With a wooden stick. With a wooden stick.
So, in April 1584, armed with a wooden stick,
two ships prepared to set sail
on a reconnaissance voyage for Raleigh's New World HQ.
For Walter Raleigh, this, his first great expedition,
would be the culmination of years of expensive planning and fundraising
and writing his ridiculous, flattering poetry.
But it would be a voyage of discovery,
of adventure, of conquest, and of gathering treasure.
Except he wasn't allowed to go.
His fawning and flattery of the Queen had been so successful
that she now couldn't bear to be parted from him.
She ordered Raleigh to stay at court
while his fleet set sail without him.
So much for the great explorer, eh?
While Raleigh was held at Her Majesty's pleasure,
his ships followed the trade winds to the Caribbean,
before sailing north to a chain of islands
along the coast of today's North Carolina.
After six weeks of exploring, they found what seemed like
the perfect spot for Raleigh's American base -
a small island named Roanoke.
This first attempt at a New World colony
would be the catalyst for a powerful force
that would come to dominate the globe - the British Empire.
Now, this, I'm sure you recognise it,
is the British Museum, and it is, depending on who you ask,
either a stunning collection of artefacts
charting human history from all over the globe,
or the world's biggest lost property office.
What it definitely is, is a testimony to the far reach
of the British state,
otherwise known as the British Empire.
'And Raleigh's little expedition
'would be the first faltering step in its creation.'
Do I keep going?
'I'm going behind the scenes at the museum
'to see the treasures that came back from a 1585 voyage to Roanoke.
'Not gold or silver but watercolours.'
Now, the reason these pictures are so incredibly precious,
apart from because they're beautifully done, is that,
of course, this was how the story of this amazing new world was told.
There was obviously no TV or radio or even Pathe newsreel.
It was people bringing back pictures.
Pictures that they'd drawn and painted.
'For the first time, the people of England
'got a glimpse of North America.'
When Raleigh's men arrived,
they encountered a village a little like this one.
They shared food. They shared words.
They wouldn't have understood each other, obviously.
And the locals apparently took to the English and looked after them.
They fed them, they sheltered them, they protected them
from other groups in the area.
And later, one of the captains of the expedition would write,
"A more kind and loving people there cannot be found in the world."
Not that they'd seen the whole world yet, obviously,
they hadn't even seen all of America.
Well, it all appears to be absolutely delightful.
I bet you it doesn't last.
A qualified hand replaces this watercolour
with the next one for our consideration.
I'm obviously not allowed to touch them.
Now, this is probably Wingina, the leader of the Secotan people.
'Legend has it that when the colonists first asked him
'the name of his country, he replied "Wingandacoa".'
Which actually means, in the local language,
something like, "Ooh, look at you with your fancy clothes!"
'Despite confusing a fashion compliment
'with the name of his beloved homeland,
'the explorers won Wingina's trust.'
Very significantly, Wingina decided that he would send back
with the English two senior people from amongst his clan.
And they arrived in England safely,
and Raleigh put them up in his big posh house on The Strand.
He dressed them in Elizabethan finery,
and they caused an absolute sensation.
He was using them as a marketing tool.
Here they had real living people to say,
"Hey, this new place is going to be fantastic.
"Why not fund a second expedition?"
And they did.
'Investors opened their purses
'and planning for another voyage began.
'Raleigh was headline news.'
In January 1585, Walter Raleigh was knighted.
Soon after that, he also assumed
the title Lord and Governor of Virginia,
naming the new colony after his beloved Virgin Queen.
Sir Walter must have been chuffed to bits.
He had a knighthood. He had a lordship.
He had fame. He had immense fortune.
He had the Queen of England eating out of his hand.
But despite being the first Governor of Virginia,
he still wasn't allowed to go there.
But there was a new danger on the high seas.
Catholic Spain had had enough of the English looting their ships
and backing Protestant rebels.
Open war was about to break out.
Raleigh's second expedition now faced the prospect of sea battles,
and his new colony would need a heavy defence
against the threat of Spanish attack.
His answer? Call in the big guns.
Half of Raleigh's 600-strong expedition
were soldiers packing heat.
Raleigh ordered £400 worth,
that's about £100,000 in today's money,
of gunpowder from the Tower of London.
That was enough to fill around 120 barrels.
120 wooden barrels of gunpowder stored on wooden boats,
where people cooked over an open fire,
lit candles and what have you.
And there wouldn't have been a risk assessment,
because in those days, that would have been considered
ye right load of oldy nonsense.
And they brought guns, lots of guns.
'With the help of my glamorous assistant,
'ballistics expert Charlie, and his high-tech diagnostic kit,
'I'm putting the weapons Raleigh had in his arsenal to the test.'
He's going to fire the weapons for me because, unfortunately,
I've injured my wrist, so...
We need to talk about black powder.
Can I dispense a little bit?
You can. Yeah.
Look at that.
This revolutionised warfare forever.
Potassium nitrate was the vital ingredient,
is actually made from urine and faeces.
So we were actually shooting at the Spanish
with our own piss and shit.
'The most common gun used by Raleigh's men was the matchlock,
'which works by touching a burning wick to the gunpowder to ignite it.'
So, you've got to make it land in the pan, haven't you? Yeah.
'These hadn't changed much since they were first introduced
'in the late 1400s, and they had some serious shortcomings.'
In battle, that would be left smouldering,
which would be quite risky,
cos when you were loading up with black powder,
you could easily blow yourself to bits.
OK, let's load her up.
Straight down the barrel.
The wadding will give you a gas tight seal.
Then we put our ball in.
It is a faff, isn't it?
I mean, to be honest, a good enemy could just run up
and kick you in the bollocks while you're doing this. Yeah.
'But once we're loaded...'
Safety on.
'..the time for faff is over.'
Oh.
It's a bit anti-climactic, Charlie.
Cor. Whoa.
'Let's see that on Charlie's monitor.
'The ball hurtles out at around 300 miles an hour.
'But only once you finally get the powder lit.'
That's actually a bit hopeless, isn't it?
By the time you've faffed around, someone's just wandered up
and casually cut your head off.
Yeah, not for me.
'Luckily for Raleigh,
'a new gun technology had recently been invented.'
OK, does it need a little prime in the pan?
'Using a flint spark to ignite the gunpowder.'
And I think we're ready to fire it.
'This protected it from the rain and the high seas.
'And you could fire it twice as fast.'
Ooh-hoo-hoo-ooh.
I like that, because you can be pretty certain it's gonna work.
Compared with the matchlock.
'So, we've tested Raleigh's small arms firepower.
'But that's not all he was packing on board.
'He would need something much bigger to take on a Spanish fleet.'
Why are we in a tunnel?
Our next experiment requires an enclosed environment.
Right. Is it the sort of projectile that could go a long way?
That kind of carry on, yeah. Right.
If you're wondering what we're talking about, viewers.
Well, it's at the other end of the tunnel outside.
Follow us.
'What we're about to test was one of the most powerful,
'yet mobile, weapons so far invented.'
I'm very excited about it going off.
It's a cannon!
More specifically, a falconet.
So called because the main cannon that they used on the ships
was called the falcon.
This is a small version which is designed to be portable.
You can take it ashore.
You can install it in a fort you've built.
'Perfect for the busy explorer who enjoys a scrap on the move.'
It takes a one pound projectile
and uses half a pound of black powder.
This is the cannonball.
I wonder what that would be worth in a game of marbles at school?
Hundreds and hundreds.
Can I shove that up the spout?
You can shove that up the spout.
That is seated.
Ball, please. Ball.
The target is ready.
Anyone in the tunnel?
There you are, that's health and safety satisfied.
Right. Let's, as they say, retire to a safe distance.
Earplugs in, everyone.
DOG WHIMPERS
Stand by.
Firing. Three, two, one.
Ooh-hoo-hoo-ooh.
That's a proper bang.
Hang on, you've completely obliterated it.
Where's the target?
It's smashed it.
That's a one pound cannonball.
That's a small one, a falconet.
I think that was a pretty good shot, to be fair,
considering it was a cannon.
JAMES CHUCKLES It's tremendous.
'Charlie's team are on the case with an action replay
'that Raleigh could only have dreamed of seeing.'
That is a state-of-the-art Tudor weapon.
This is state-of-the-art 21st century analysis,
including slow motion.
Wow.
Ooh.
A piece of wood finds out.
What velocity was that? 230 metres per second.
So that was by far the fastest thing in the world...
in Raleigh's time, wasn't it? Yeah.
I mean, by a long, long way. By a long way.
That's really absolutely...
Ronnie Scott-ed it, hasn't it?
'Such was the terrifying power of Raleigh's new weapons.
'But that terror would not be reserved just for the Spanish.
'Raleigh's new colony would descend into chaos and violence.'
Welcome back, viewers, to 1585.
Sir Walter Raleigh is held at court by his doting Virgin Queen,
but he's about to send off his second voyage
to the land he's calling Virginia.
This time, Raleigh sent seven ships
full to bursting with supplies and weapons.
They swung by the Caribbean for a spot of plunder,
before heading north to set up base on Roanoke Island.
But just as they arrived, the ship, carrying all the food,
ran aground on a sandbank and their supplies were lost.
Unable to feed themselves, the starving settlers began bullying
the locals into sharing their precious food stores.
Unsurprisingly, Chief Wingina soon got fed up
with his English house guests.
The situation called for a tactful diplomatic response.
So what did the settlers do?
When a cup went missing, they burned down a local village.
And when Chief Wingina withheld provisions as a protest,
they shot him, and then cut his head off for good measure.
Relations with Wingina's tribe had now descended into violence,
and the colonists were still starving.
When a passing English ship stopped by to check in on them,
the settlers jumped aboard and fled for home.
Raleigh's New World colony was an utter fiasco,
and his reputation was in tatters.
Well, it should have been...
..but the facts were no match for his skill at spin doctoring.
Raleigh hastily commissioned a book giving a behind-the-scenes peek
at his fantastically successful and glamorous colony.
He talks about all the fine things that are available there,
like cedar, wine, oils, furs, copper, pearls.
It's just abundant with great stuff, and especially food.
And they talk about beans.
They loved the beans, the English, and said,
"They were in taste, the equal of our English peas."
So, Raleigh's thinking essentially, was that he wanted to make
this new place exciting, exotic, alluring, an adventure.
But he also wanted to emphasise that it was safe and friendly.
A bit like saying, you know, back in the 1960s,
come to the Costa del Sol, it's warm, it's fantastic.
But don't worry cos you can get egg and chips.
He seems to have left out the bit about the starvation
and the chief they'd beheaded,
and put in a bit about the Secotan people
that says a lot about England's ambitions.
It says that the people may be quickly brought to civility
and true religion.
Uh-uh. And here's a very telling passage.
Now, this is what the indigenous people were thinking.
"That there were more of our generation yet to come
"to kill theirs and take their place."
That was the fear of the locals.
And they were right, weren't they?
They were right to fear that.
'Raleigh's propaganda attracted
'eager new colonists in their droves.'
And seduced by his PR, 117 civilians,
men, women and children, signed up for it.
And in 1587, the third expedition set sail.
And guess what? Walter Raleigh again was not with them.
At first, things went well.
They fixed up the old colony's abandoned wooden fort,
built some huts, and there was even a new baby -
the first English child born in the Americas.
Aww! It didn't last, though.
After a couple of months, it was the same old, same old.
The settlers were starving. The locals were hostile.
So John White, the settlers' leader, hot-footed it,
if that were possible back then, back to England
to organise supplies and equipment for a relief mission.
But there was a problem.
Open war had finally broken out with Spain, and in 1588,
they sent the Spanish Armada to invade England.
This would be one of the biggest naval battles
the world had ever seen,
and every last English ship was needed.
The fledgling colony, 3,500 miles away
and desperate for relief, would have to wait for three years.
When an English ship finally made it back to Roanoke,
they found it completely deserted.
There was no sign of the families, the children, even the garrison.
All they found was the word "Croatoan"
carved on a piece of wood.
Now, Croatoan was another tribe on an island some 50 miles away.
Time for a rescue mission.
But then a storm blew up and they thought,
"Well, sod this for a game of sailors",
and they went back to England.
If Tripadvisor had been around in the time,
well, Raleigh's resort would have probably scored
something like one out of five and the comment,
"Verily, forsooth, I would not recommend ye place."
But even despite all this,
Walter Raleigh still came up smelling of potatoes.
Now, let's put aside for one minute things like Virginia and the Armada
and concentrate on the things for which our Wally is properly famous.
Which means, of course, spuds.
The story goes that fresh from Virginia,
Raleigh brought home the nation's very first potatoes.
With a new, reliable and calorie-packed crop
to power the nation,
the flea-ridden masses danced with joy.
Well, it wasn't quite that simple.
The trouble is, in the 16th century,
nobody really knew what to do with them.
At first, they actually thought they were poisonous.
They called them "the Devil's apples".
And then they decided that they gave you leprosy.
And finally, they decided that potatoes would fill you with lust.
Which is why in The Merry Wives Of Windsor
by William Shakespeare,
Falstaff cries, "Let the sky rain potatoes,
"let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves",
which I think was him saying that he expected
to get his card stamped that night.
Potatoes had a bit of a PR problem.
Solution, put them in England's favourite dish of the day, the pie.
Elizabeth was apparently a pie fan.
Hooray! And her subjects were chucking any old thing into pastry.
So, why not a newfangled potato,
along with dates, lemons, nutmeg and, er... bone marrow?
They had this rather weird pie recipe.
A potato pie, spelt P-Y-E, for supper.
Gadzooks!
Ooh.
Right, I'm going in,
as they've said in every action film ever made.
That's the stodgiest thing ever created.
You couldn't eat that whole slice, you'd explode.
And the idea that that might fill you with bodily lust
because it's got potatoes in.
I can't imagine a bigger passion killer, to be honest.
It's worse than massive pants.
'So, it might not be the sexiest of vegetables,
'that's obviously the aubergine,
'but the potato is undeniably the most delicious.'
Mmm.
'And once we realised spuds could also become lovely things
'like roasties and jackets and mash, the nation went potato crazy.'
The peasants started growing potatoes in their millions.
They were easy to grow, we all know that.
They were cheap.
The government hadn't cottoned on to a way of taxing them.
But of course, the government did eventually notice
how popular potatoes were,
and they used the potato to build up the population and to feed armies.
So in a roundabout way, through the good offices of the potato,
Sir Walter Raleigh did have a hand in empire building.
Except that's not actually true, because he had absolutely sweet FA
to do with the discovery of potatoes.
They were probably, to be honest, brought to England by the Spanish.
And in any case, they didn't grow in Virginia.
They grew in Colombia, where he also hadn't been.
For once, Raleigh isn't actually responsible for his own spin.
It was the empire-loving Victorians who couldn't bear the thought
that our beloved spuds were brought to Europe by the Spanish.
So they picked out a handy national hero to pin it on instead.
So, empire, fail. Potatoes, fail.
But there was one product of the new world
that he did have a hand in.
For this next bit, viewers, health and safety requires us
to move outside to the fire escape.
This is tobacco, of course.
Virginia was absolutely thick with the stuff.
We don't know for sure that Raleigh personally introduced tobacco
to England, but he definitely made it famous.
Apparently, he encouraged the Queen to have a puff.
It was said, actually,
that the first time Raleigh smoked a pipe back home in England,
his servant threw a jug of ale over him
because he thought he was on fire.
Which I suppose he was, technically speaking.
Oh, and he didn't just propagate the use of tobacco.
He absolutely loved the stuff himself.
After his death, his tobacco pouch was found
and it had inscribed on it,
"You were my friend when I was in need."
'Finally, something Raleigh actually succeeded at.'
So I suppose you could argue, actually,
that our hero has ultimately been responsible for...
tens of millions of deaths and bronchial disorders
and smelly jumpers.
But, you know, if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have.
Just like tobacco,
Raleigh's celebrity status spread like wildfire.
Despite his own failure,
he had ignited English excitement for a North American colony,
and he was still riding high at Elizabeth's court.
But then he made a grave mistake.
He fell in love.
Ah, the rose garden.
What better place to discuss romance, love
and a treacherous betrayal.
So, what actually happened?
Well, Raleigh had a relationship
with one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting,
named Bess Throckmorton.
She ended up pregnant, and the two married secretly.
'Raleigh had to accept he wouldn't be marrying the Queen.
'But with Bess, he got pretty close.'
So, trying to keep something like that secret from the Queen
is a bit of an ask, isn't it?
Especially in a court filled with gossiping people.
Mm. She does find out eventually.
She feels betrayed by her favourite.
She felt that she owned him,
but also his choice of one of her ladies-in-waiting.
Her crush has gotten off with her younger, hotter, close friend.
Yeah, well, he's gonna regret that in a couple of seconds
when I appear outside the Tower of London.
Because hell hath no fury like a virgin monarch scorned.
CAWS
The Queen was absolutely livid.
She barred him from court and locked him... in the Tower.
He wasn't there for long, though.
You rejoin us, viewers,
at a troubling time for our faltering hero.
It's 1592. Queen Elizabeth has locked Raleigh in the Tower
for secretly marrying one of her ladies-in-waiting.
But luckily for Raleigh, one of his raiding fleets
arrived home with the biggest single haul of pilfered treasure
ever known, which proved too enticing to the ship's crew,
who started disappearing with bits of it,
including the Queen's share.
So, Walter was let out of prison to go and round up the missing loot,
and because he was still barred from court,
that meant he could actually go on a real adventure.
Potentially the most lucrative of his life.
Raleigh had heard a tantalising tale,
the greatest legend of the Age of Exploration, in fact,
that, if true, could make him the richest man in England.
A rumour was doing the rounds.
One of a city of pure gold.
The legend of the lost city of El Dorado.
Raleigh was determined to find it, so he raised £60,000,
that's about 10 million quid in today's money.
And because he'd fallen out of favour with the Queen,
he was going to go himself.
The clock was ticking,
as the Spanish were also rumoured to be looking for El Dorado.
In 1595, he set off from Plymouth, charting a course from the Canaries
to the mouth of the Orinoco River in present day Venezuela.
Finally, Raleigh was on an expedition.
He knew, as he put it, that people found him too easeful
and sensual to undertake a journey of such great travail.
So he marched up the Orinoco River
and gave some Spaniards a good shoeing.
And he also found gold. Or at least that's what he wrote to the Queen.
"This area hath more gold than the best of the Indies," he said.
What he'd actually found was iron pyrites - fool's gold.
The Queen was not amused.
Elizabeth clearly wasn't going to fund any more expeditions.
But Raleigh didn't give up that easily.
He would raise it from the gullible public instead.
This is Walter's version of fake news.
His book, The Discovery Of The Large, Rich
And Beautiful Empire Of Guiana.
It's beautifully written. It's lavishly illustrated.
It's complete bullshit.
It's really a sales pitch, because what he wanted to do
was persuade people to invest in his voyage,
because of this marvellous land that would await them if they took part.
And I'm going to read you a bit from it cos it's fantastic.
It says, "More rich and beautiful cities,
"more temples adorned with golden images,
"more sepulchres filled with treasure than either Mexico or Peru.
"And the shining glory of this conquest
"will eclipse the Spanish nation."
Now, let's have a look at some of the pictures.
The land was filled with exotic and very friendly animals,
including this one which had a nice, soft, furry body,
long claws, and the head of Iain Duncan Smith.
He also talked about a people who didn't have heads.
They had their faces in the middle of their chests like this.
All lies, though. All of it completely made up.
The man was a charlatan.
It might have all been complete tosh,
but it was page-turning tosh.
Raleigh was now a best-selling author and explorer
and an A-list celebrity.
But then a plot twist.
The Queen died. In an instant, the Tudor era was over,
and the new kid on the block was an entirely different proposition.
BAGPIPES PLAY
James I, a Scot...
..an absolutist monarch who wanted peace with Spain.
And he immediately started annoying Parliament
with his high-handed speeches and his constant demands for money.
Pretty soon, rumours of plots started to circulate
throughout his court, and James decided
that he had to take down anybody
who might pose a threat to his precarious rule.
Over the years, the flashy, outspoken Raleigh
had rubbed most of the court up the wrong way.
His rivals seized their chance
and began turning King James against him.
Soon, Raleigh was implicated in a plot to overthrow the King.
James had him arrested and put on trial for treason.
This would be the ultimate test of Raleigh's silver tongue.
Time to roll out the rhetoric.
So, our Walt is now at the point where he's essentially arguing
for keeping his head on.
He's on trial for his life.
He's got to deploy all of the skills and knowledge that he has gathered
over the years in an attempt not just to persuade the jury,
but also the court of public opinion.
'We don't know if Raleigh had been plotting against the King,
'but the Crown's case was extremely shaky.
'Resting on the evidence of a single witness,
'Raleigh repeatedly demanded that his accuser
'be brought before the court for questioning.'
And when that was refused him, he drew attention to it by saying,
"If you proceed to condemn me without an oath,
"without witnesses upon a paper accusation,
"you try me by the Spanish Inquisition."
And this enraged the prosecutor who said,
"This is treasonable speech."
And Raleigh replies, "It is no rare case for a man
"to be falsely accused, aye, and falsely condemned, too."
Ooh, I like that.
'Everyone in the courtroom was spellbound
'by Raleigh's performance.'
One commentator said that before the trial,
he would have ridden 100 miles to see Raleigh hanged.
But after hearing him,
he would have ridden a thousand miles to save his life.
That was the power of the rhetoric that he deployed that day.
The public didn't get a vote, though, and the trial was fixed.
Raleigh was found guilty and condemned to death,
but his defiant performance had elevated him
to national hero status, and fearing public outcry,
King James was forced to spare him the axe.
He was simply commuted to life imprisonment,
and it's because of that powerful impact
that his presence in the courtroom had.
So the pen did turn out to be mightier than the sword then.
On this particular occasion, absolutely.
But while Raleigh may have weaselled his way out of a beheading,
he was still thrown in the Tower of London.
Bet you he can't talk his way out of this one.
Welcome back, viewers, to 1603 and the Tower of London,
where King James has locked up Sir Walter Raleigh for treason.
Raleigh, the great adventurer,
spent 13 years here in the Bloody Tower,
and presumably it didn't take him very long to explore his two rooms,
so he resorted to what had always helped him in the past.
He wrote another bloody book.
And it seems he may have been a little overambitious,
even for a man with absolutely nothing else to do,
because this pile of books here represents the volume of writing
in Sir Walter Raleigh's History Of The World.
This number of words is greater
than the entire JK Rowling Harry Potter series,
and it doesn't even include any flying cars or owls.
It did, however, include some light roasting of the monarchy
with zingers, such as describing a previous King, Richard III,
as "a spectacle of shame and dishonour".
So scandalous was its tone that it became a bestseller...
until the King got a copy for Christmas.
This, of course, annoyed James, and he had it banned,
saying that it was "too saucy in censuring the acts of princes".
Crikey.
I mean, I've sat in a few historic prison cells,
and many of them are smaller and damper
and more windowless than this one.
But even so, what has he got?
A grimy window and his boring book to write for 13 years.
Thirteen years?
I'd have cut my own head off.
But as befitting a man of national hero status,
Raleigh's prison cell also came with a small garden,
which he swiftly realised he could use to claw back some influence
by reinventing himself as a pharmacist.
He grew plants from the seeds he collected on his travels,
and he turned a small hen house into a laboratory
where he concocted potions to cure,
amongst other things, sore eyes, piles and diarrhoea.
And quite by chance,
some of the recipes are here in the herb beds.
Here, for example, is the simple remedy for ye piles.
"For the piles, take the oil of shoemaker's shreds
"made by boiling them in water.
"Beat this oil with the herb mullet and apply it.
"Also, if you burn frankincense and set it in your stool,
"that the fume may come to the fundament..."
ie, go up your jacksie.
"..it cureth them or the emerods."
And believe it or not, these were very popular.
Even James' wife, Anne of Denmark, was a customer...
..because, clearly, she had the "emerods".
'And so it seemed Raleigh would live out his remaining days in the Tower,
'curing piles for the ladies of the court.
'But, no, he had one last audacious con up his sleeve.'
King James had fallen out with Parliament so badly
that he'd suspended it, and as a result,
had completely run out of money.
Now, Sir Walter Raleigh, in his prison cell, got wind of this
and wrote to the King, offering to help with promises of gold.
And like many desperate people before him,
the King fell for Raleigh's patter
and decided he would do something with this offer.
Raleigh had done it again.
He was released from prison, given a fleet of ships,
and off he went to find El Dorado.
There was only one rule.
Impoverished James had made peace with the Spanish king,
and on no account was the fervently anti-Spanish Raleigh
to rock the boat.
Raleigh set sail, but this time, things didn't go so smoothly.
The fleet was blown off course by storms,
hitting South America 700 miles east of their destination,
and they were forced to crawl up the coast to the Orinoco River.
Then Raleigh came down with a terrible case of the ague
and was laid up in his cabin when the fleet arrived.
He sent his men upriver to find gold,
but instead, flouting the explicit orders of King James,
they looted and burned a Spanish outpost,
killing three of its inhabitants.
King James was furious and accused Raleigh
of trying to start a war with Spain, and there was, of course, no gold.
It was a colossal cock-up, and it sealed Raleigh's fate.
This time, unfortunately,
his silken tongue could not save him.
And so it turned out, before Raleigh could write another book
or perfect a medicinal cure for flatulence,
he was beheaded just over there,
the other side of St Margaret's Church,
and he was buried here as well.
Or most of him was, because even in death he could create a story.
His devoted wife, Bess, carried his severed head around with her
in a bag for the next 30 years.
And just like his severed head, Raleigh's influence lived on.
His king-bashing books and defiant speech from the scaffold
would inspire future anti-monarchists,
particularly Oliver Cromwell, who 30 years later,
would behead King James' own son, Charles.
Raleigh's genius rhetoric would strike its final blow
from beyond the grave.
But what did his voyages achieve?
Was Sir Walter Raleigh a great explorer?
Well, it seems he didn't go on half the expeditions.
And although I've said he was the catalyst for the British Empire,
most of his attempts at colonisation were a bit dismal, let's be honest.
It was while Raleigh was locked up in the Tower that England's
first real American colony was established - Jamestown.
But at least Raleigh's naming of Virginia stuck.
And what did he discover?
Well, not potatoes, as it turns out. Not tobacco, not a city of gold.
And even the bicycle isn't named after him.
Most of those fantastical images of Raleigh
were just made up rubbish,
inventions of an era that loved a bit of colonial propaganda.
I think he might have been a bit of a wideboy,
a bit of an arch manipulator
with an unhealthy taste for violence.
The trouble with this, though, is that the popular legend
of Walter Raleigh is a rather lovely one.
Here's this bloke poncing around in his doublet and hose
with his ruff and his neat little beard,
winning the heart and the ear of the Queen,
and writing poetry and saving the nation through spuds.
It's one of those stories that's too good to check.
The trouble is, I have checked it, and now I've spoilt it.
So all I can do, really, viewers, is apologise. I'm very sorry.
Join me in the next episode when I spoil Captain Cook for you.
'Next time...'
Cast off and set sail.
'..Captain James Cook.'
He would chart the final unknown third of the globe.
This was a massive boost to our scientific esteem.
Look at that.
Everybody on board was absolutely "gangplanked".
This chart that he produced, it's a weapon.
MAN: Fire!
The British invented time. It's ours.
WOMAN: Right, James, put some effort into it.
Wah!
I think the dog does better than this.
Captain Cook was the son of a humble farmworker
and because of the class system,
almost certainly destined to become a humble farmworker himself.
But he was a bright boy, and he was going to smash the system.
Now, his dad's boss noticed that the lad had promise
and he arranged for him to have an apprenticeship in a shop.
So now it seemed that Cook was destined to spend his days
weighing out cheeses and herrings.
But he also spent time listening to stories from the old seafarers.
And legend has it that one day, one of them paid him
with a shiny, South Sea shilling
and that was the call.
BRIGHT MUSIC
'The Age of the Great Explorers was
'one of the most dramatic in history.'
Ooh!
'When men risked their lives...'
Cast orff and set sail. Whoa!
Take up on the peak! '..to seek new lands.'
We're somewhere north of the dog's arse.
Where the camera gone? Hello.
They crossed thousands of miles of treacherous ocean,
they built floating fortresses, they mapped the stars,
they developed whole new branches of science.
Eurgh! Absolute pish.
'But were these explorers really heroes or just a bunch of chancers?'
It's a miracle he found anything at all, really.
Completely made-up, the man was a charlatan.
'And is their legacy one of triumph...'
Ooh!
'..or destruction?' Crikey.
Now it's turning a little bit dark.
'I'm doing a bit of discovering of my own...'
Unbelievably terrible.
Medieval sat-nav 2.0, a stick.
Oh, has he just shat on my trousers? PIG SQUEALS
'..to learn how these explorers conquered the oceans...'
Look at that.
I love it.
Nobody panic yet.
It's not just a map, it's a weapon!
'..and change the world forever.' Whoa!
Dial out! Ah, gold!
If you were in the Navy now, the French would definitely have got us.
HE LAUGHS
SHATTERING
GULLS CALLING
'You join me at an exciting time, viewers - the 18th Century.'
It was an age of wonder.
The mysteries of science were being revealed,
the Industrial Revolution was just around the corner.
And into this knowledge-hungry world
stepped a sailor of extraordinary abilities.
His voyages would bring massive advancements
in geography, navigation, biology, medicine.
He would chart the final unknown third of the globe
and he was also the last great explorer of the Age of Sail.
He was Captain James Cook.
'Today, he divides opinion
'and in some parts of the world, he's known as "Captain Crook".
'But back in 1746,
'he was just a 17-year-old shopkeeper, longing to go to sea.
'And Whitby docks in England's North East was
'the right place to be.
'Cook wangled himself an apprenticeship on the coal ships
'and moved into the attic of a local ship owner
'where he stayed up late each night, poring over his books.'
Now, in Cook's time, Whitby was a sort of a mariners' university town,
or it was referred to at the time as the "nursery of the sea".
And considering how young these apprentices would have been,
they did some remarkable homework.
'Being a sailor wasn't all hauling ropes and guzzling rum -
'you had to be an A-plus student.'
It's full of very complicated geometry,
mathematical calculations about sailing and direction.
It's incredible.
And then right at the back, when all else has failed -
geometry, astronomy - there is a psalm.
A psalm for you to sing. Psalm 28.
'O Lord my rock to thee I cry in sighs consume my breath.
'O answer or I shall become like those that sleep in death.'
I didn't write that in the back of my exercise books when I was a boy.
I drew pictures of flying cars with machine guns on them.
'Young sailors of a delicate disposition would not last long
'working the coal boats on the perilous North Sea shore.'
This coast is strewn with rocks and reefs.
Throw into that frequent fog, wild storms, dangerous currents,
this is some of the toughest sailing in the world.
Cook spent nine years here
learning to be an expert sailor and navigator.
'But the coal run wasn't enough for young Cook.
'He was envious of the dashing, bewigged, naval officers he saw,
'fresh from adventures in the Pacific South Seas.
'So, in 1755, aged 26, he signed up for the Navy.'
Winston Churchill famously said
that life in the Royal Navy was all "rum, sodomy and the lash",
and Dr Johnson said that a man at sea was effectively in prison
but with the added risk of drowning.
"A man in prison," he said, "had more space, better food
"and, commonly, better company."
'Right. All aboard.'
'This is the Bessie Ellen. Roughly the same length as Cook's ships,
'but a mere youngster at 120 years old.'
Right, crew, chop-chop.
OK, Tommy, go out on the bow sprit and take off the gaskets.
'After nine years at sea, Cook was able to command a ship himself.
'But that meant diddly squat in the Navy.
'He had to start from the bottom, like me.
'My commanding officer is Nikki Alford...'
C'mon, Kim, put some effort into it. '..and she runs a tight ship.'
So, hierarchy on board,
er, the captain, that's you, is the boss. Yeah.
But it doesn't matter who's on board.
If the king was on board,
you're still the boss. That's true.
Yeah. Can you have Tom, the director, flogged,
is that possible? Well, possibly.
Right. It's not a democracy.
So, when Cook made that massive decision
to go and be just a lowly able seaman, he was 26 years old,
so I mean in Navy terms, that's quite middle-aged, isn't it?
Yeah. Yeah, it was. But it must have been quite hard
for him being an old, knowledgeable, already master of his own ship. Yes.
And there were quite strict punishments.
Yeah, afraid so.
Hanging for insubordination.
Flogging... Yes.
Cat o' nine tails. It was a pretty mean life.
Erm... DOG BARKS
Where did the dog come in the hierarchy?
Most important crew member on board.
I'm talking to you and asking you a lot of questions
because I suspect that when this exchange ends,
you're going to give me some... seaman-like jobs to do.
Enough chatting and let's get this boat sailing.
'I've filibustered all I can.
'Time to impress the captain with my naval know-how.'
OK, so, this is the mainsail
and the mizen is the... No, no, no, no, no.
No? Come on, wake up.
I do motorboats. Engines. Brilliant invention.
We'll make a sailor of you before the end of the day.
Right. And we'll get you on the halyards.
They're over there, aren't they? Well, I hope so.
'Suddenly, a spot of rum, sodomy, and the lash seems preferable...
'especially as I really ought to be in the sick bay.'
I need to explain that a few days ago,
I fell off my bicycle and slightly spaffed this arm,
which is... a great excuse.
Right, landlubber. You can do this easy one.
Jump up there, and undo the knot.
'Cook, of course, could have done all this in his sleep.'
Right, this one? Crew, stand by.
'Me, not so much.' Right.
'First, you have to release the flappy white thing.'
Whoa! Weyy. Take up on the peak.
'Then yank on a rope to get it up.'
God, have we got to pull it all the way to the top? Yeah.
'Good teamwork is vital.' I'm not really doing anything here.
CREW LAUGH
Put some effort into it. Sorry.
I think the dog does better than this.
'Mainsail raised...'
Four fifths of the way there.
OK, make fast the throat. Carry on on the peak.
'..next up is the jib. Speed is of the essence.'
James, take hold of the knot. Now pull it.
There you go. Oh!
Look at that. Now keep pulling.
If you were in the Navy now, the French would definitely have got us.
'With all Cook's skills, suddenly being back near the bottom rung
'must have been pretty humiliating.'
I've done a double gunner's daughter and a half shank.
I'll look that one up. SHE LAUGHS
'Able seamen had to muck in with everything.
'There were no bogs or running water,
'so if you wanted to drink, wash or cook,
'you needed one of these...' There we go.
Oh, shot. Yeah. It's lunchtime,
so we have to pull up a bucket of seawater
and start chopping potatoes.
'Nikki's finally found a job more my level.'
DOG GROWLS No, Bracken.
Whoa, look at that! Bounty!
You can choose what you want for lunch.
Well, it looks like it's gonna be potatoes and onions.
DOG GROWLS
What's wrong with the dog? SHE LAUGHS
Why does it? Why does he hate that bucket?
He just hates buckets.
James, if you get the potatoes and start peeling,
we'll get another bucket. Aye-aye.
Bracken! Enough!
He's really angry.
GROWLING
'Now, I've proven myself a bit of an unable seaman,
'but Cook, of course, was the very model of a modern master mariner.'
Within two years, he was a ship's master,
which meant he was in charge of navigation
under the direction of the captain.
That was a big job and a very, very important one.
Trouble is, Cook's career then sort of ran aground a bit
because only the posh kids could become commissioned officers,
and obviously, he wasn't a posh kid.
So he'd arrived at the class glass ceiling.
He'd gone as far as, effectively, being a non-commissioned officer.
Bit quicker on the potatoes.
'But you can't keep a good swot down.
'Cook was destined for far greater things.'
GROWLING No! Bracken!
'That's quite enough shore leave, viewers. Get back to work at once.'
Hurry up, we haven't got all day!
'Dreaming of the Pacific South Seas,
'young James Cook had joined the Navy.
'But he wasn't going to the South Seas on his first trip,
'he was going to war.'
Fire!
Now, you join me below decks with some charts.
And the year is 1759.
Britain is having a massive scrap with France over Canada.
And the French held Quebec.
And the British wanted to mount an assault,
but doing it was proving extremely difficult.
'The Brits were desperate
'for a sneaky way to attack Quebec and take Canada.
'And Cook was about to find them one,
'using his superpower - geometry.'
Cook went off and charted all this.
He charted all the elevations, he did depth sounding,
all this stuff to produce
really a fantastically, magnificently accurate chart.
'Using Cook's chart,
'the British ships sailed all the way upriver past Quebec,
'the soldiers mounted a sneak attack,
'and the French - quelle surprise - surrendered.'
So, this chart that he produced,
it's not really just a map, it's a weapon!
And it made Cook famous, his name became a buzzword in London.
And pretty soon, he was asked to go and chart all of Newfoundland,
which he did.
And remarkably, here, on this acetate sheet,
I have a modern map of Newfoundland.
Now, that's been established
with satellites, satnav, geo-positioning,
all that sort of stuff.
If I lay the modern one over Cook's work...
..it is astonishingly accurate.
This actually isn't a chart, this is a love poem in geometry.
Pretty bloody good.
'Cook's charts were so accurate,
'they were in use for a further 200 years -
'and we'll see later on just how he did it.'
Cook was granted the title of "King's Surveyor".
That was the highest office of surveyor you could attain
unless you were gonna become God's Surveyor.
But his greatest adventures still lay before him
because a third of the globe... still needed to be charted.
Aah!
'Sorry, I'm absolutely ruddered on rum.'
'At the other end of the social spectrum, meanwhile,
'was another young science bod looking to make his name...'
This is the Chelsea Physic Garden,
where a young man called Joseph Banks came to study botany.
Now, he wasn't a typical student,
he was a very wealthy playboy roustabout type
who'd inherited a fortune from his father.
But he was very passionate about his subject,
he was very meticulous, and he bloody loved a pot plant.
'Banks saw thrilling new plants from all around the world
'turning up here at Chelsea,
'and he decided to make a name for himself
'by going and finding some of his own.'
So, what he did, since he was well minted,
was to buy his way into an expedition
that had been organised by the admiralty
and the Royal Society to the Pacific.
He contributed £10,000 - about 1.5 million in today's money.
Now, other young men of the time
were embarking on the accepted grand tour of Europe,
but Banks said that this was for blockheads.
"My grand tour," he said, "will be of the world."
'The official purpose of this voyage
'was to travel to the South Pacific island of Tahiti
'and study a rare astronomical event -
'Venus passing in front of the sun.
'But there was a second, top-secret mission.
'The bigwigs at the Admiralty had much grander plans
'that would only be revealed later on.
'Plans that would need a captain who was especially talented at charting.
'Cook was finally going to the South Seas.
'Now, what vessel would he be taking on this historic voyage?
'A sleek Merchantman, perhaps? A 24-gun naval frigate?'
KAZOOS PLAYING
No, it was one of these, his old mate the Whitby coal ship.
Blunt nosed, purposeful.
If they'd been around at the time,
somebody would have called it the Land Rover of the Seas.
Top speed, eight knots, eight nautical miles an hour.
Average speed more like four knots.
Cook would be going around the world, 25,000 miles,
at a brisk walk.
Something like this.
All the way to Tahiti.
'This ship is just a replica,
'but the same size as the real Endeavour -
'just 105 feet for 95 sailors.'
The great thing about using a coal ship is that
if you're not required to carry the coal,
there is a great deal of space on board for stuff.
And they brought a lot of stuff.
Permission to come aboard, skipper?
Thank you.
BEEP By the way, if you're still running,
Endeavour didn't have a door in the side like this.
You'd have to go, you know... This is not accurate.
'Nor is this cafe bit. Keep moving. Four knots.'
Up here, aft, below the poop deck...
'That's better. Except it looks far too tidy.'
Banks brought along tons of books, hooks, nets,
hunting equipment, big barrels of preserving fluids,
salts, waxes, everything you need for all that botanical guff.
And it's said that the value of his kit
was roughly twice that of the ship itself.
'Banks immediately demanded use of the Captain's quarters
'for his science-ing.
'Cook told him they could share.'
But of course, Banks was a toff,
and he'd also done a great deal to finance the whole expedition,
so he couldn't really turn him down.
Although I would have been tempted.
'Cooped up on a ship, tempers can easily fray.'
He already sounds like an irritating BLEEP, Joseph Banks.
LAUGHTER
'So, Cook took it upon himself to make sure
'all his sailors were as happy and jolly as jolly sailor boys can be.'
Cook clearly cared about the welfare of his men.
In the Royal Navy, the jolly sailor boys
worked four hours on, four hours off.
But Cook's crew enjoyed four hours on, eight hours off.
He insisted that they ate their greens,
that they aired their bedding,
that they washed themselves in lovely, fresh, salty seawater.
And he was also very keen on vigorous exercise.
And to make exercise more "fun", he brought along some musicians
and made the sailors dance the hornpipe.
THEY PLAY 'BARNACLE BILL'
'They had to do this every day.'
'Every. Single. Day.'
Bravo.
You have to remember that for the people of England,
things like yoga and Pilates of the Caribbean hadn't been invented yet.
That's a shit joke. No it's not, it's really good.
'I'm here all week, folks. Try the sea biscuit.'
'Ah, this is more like it.
Even more vital to on-board morale
'than the incessant shrieking of Satan's own song
'was alcohol - and lots of it.'
Details of the amount of booze on board the Endeavour
are, unsurprisingly, a bit vague.
And I say "unsurprisingly" because, as you'll see in a moment,
everybody on board was absolutely gang-planked.
For the men, there was a ration of half a pint of rum twice a day,
once at noon, once at 6pm.
They could instead, or maybe as well as, have eight pints of beer.
And if you were a "hossifer",
you could have a pint and a half of red wine.
'And that's just a normal day.
'On special occasions, they got completely barnacled.'
The very polite Captain Cook says,
"Yesterday being Christmas Day,
the people were none of the soberest."
Joseph Banks, on the same day, says, "All hands got abominably drunk.
"Wind, thank God, very moderate
"or the Lord knows what would have become of us."
And I sort of get it, to be honest, because if you woke up every day,
knowing you'd have to spend it with the same crew,
you'd wanna get pretty keel-hauled.
By the way, I should explain that
I've had a bit of an accident and fractured my wrist,
but it's OK because the nurse who set it for me
did it in the beer-drinking position.
So, it only remains for me to say,
ow, "Cheers, me hearties."
BEEP Have you definitely cut?
Yeah. Right. I'm gonna have a few of these pints.
Actually, I'm the officer, I'm having the wine.
You lot can have the beer and the rum.
'So, science stuff - check.
'Hornpiper - check.
'Enough alcohol to drown a hornpiper - check.'
'Just one last thing...'
Cook, of course, was not yet a captain.
He had to be hastily commissioned so that he could give orders.
And give orders he did. The orders were to 'cast orff and set sail'.
95 permanently sloshed sailors did that,
and the Endeavour would be their home for the next three years.
'BARNACLE BILL' PLAYS
'Dear God.'
'At an average four knots, they bimbled their way
'to Rio in Brazil for some repairs,
'saw their first penguins off the Falklands,
'and rounded Cape Horn into the mysterious Pacific Ocean.
'Finally, in 1769, after eight months at sea,
'the Endeavour reached Tahiti.
'The paradise beaches were a dream come true for the sailors -
'not least because they'd heard rumours from a previous voyage
'that it was full of beautiful women
'who would offer sex for the price of a single iron nail.'
Cook was very worried about his sailors
spreading sexually-transmitted diseases,
and he gave them all a stern talking to,
like that rather awkward one you got
from a teacher at sixth form college.
There was another problem as well.
The last ship to arrive, HMS Dolphin,
had quite literally started falling apart
because the sailors had nicked so many of these.
'Cook's little talk didn't work.
'Some of the sailors seemed to think
'they were on a particularly thuggish stag do.
'The Tahitian people remained friendly,
'but there was another friction point.'
The ship's tools and equipment kept going missing.
Even Cook himself had a pair of his socks stolen from under his head
while he was having a crafty kip on the beach.
But to the people of Tahiti,
European ideas about possession and ownership
were completely meaningless.
But to try and get his stuff back,
Cook did things like held canoes to ransom.
But unfortunately, the marines were rather less patient than him,
and when a musket was taken,
they immediately shot the perpetrator dead.
And that set a rather unfortunate pattern
of things to come on Cook's voyages.
'Cook got down to business,
'building a mini-observatory to study the transit of Venus.
'But when the moment finally came,
'Venus's thick, gassy atmosphere blurred the outline
'and made their measurements useless.'
The mission had been a complete failure.
But it didn't actually matter
because all that stuff about Venus was a load of old bollocks,
it was just a cover story, really.
'It was time to reveal the real mission -
'top secret orders from the Admiralty.'
'There is reason to imagine that a continent,
'or land of great extent, may be found to the Southward.
'You are hereby required and directed to put to sea
'to make discovery of that continent.'
The hunt was on.
'It's 1769.
'James Cook and the Endeavour are on a top-secret mission
'to find new land in the South Pacific.'
And it's that way... roughly.
'All the nations of Europe believed
'there was a vast undiscovered continent
'in the southern hemisphere.
'And whoever got there first
'would be rich and powerful beyond imagination.
'100 years before, Dutch explorer Abel Tasman
'had spotted the tip of a promising landmass,
'but no European had ever set foot there.
'Cook was about to "discover" New Zealand,
'to the surprise of everyone already living there.
'For the scientists onboard, this new land was a dream come true.
'Cook studied the landscape
'and Banks the miraculous flora and fauna.
'And of course, they met the people.'
Cook was, very obviously,
the first European to meet the Maori people
and the first person to see a haka,
which probably scared the crap out of him.
And it gets a bit worse from thereon because when Cook's men went ashore,
they were approached by a local leader called Te Maro,
and one of the sailors got into a bit of a panic
and shot him... dead.
And then another Maori was apparently reaching for his weapon,
so the ship's surgeon also had a bit of a panic
and shot him... dead.
A bit of a pattern was emerging now,
namely panicking and shooting people dead.
And it so happens that actually, Sean, our cameraman,
is in fact, a Kiwi and has Maori ancestry.
So we can ask him, is Cook a popular figure in, well, your family
and in New Zealand in general?
I grew up in a Maori community,
and it was known that our grandparents suffered.
They weren't allowed to speak their own language at school.
My grandfather was beaten for speaking
his own native language. Really?
Where I grew up, there was a statue of Cook, but it's been taken down.
'Six months on, Cook set sail again,
'following his nose to the east coast of Australia -
'another first for any European.
'Banks was in his element.
'He saw his first dingo, lorikeet, and mudskipper,
'and found so much botany that they named a bay after it.
'The Indigenous Australians, probably quite wisely,
'mostly avoided the strangers on their shores.
'But for the Europeans, this voyage would go down in history
'as one of the most remarkable ever made...
'as long as nothing terrible happened.'
One night, the Endeavour was sailing serenely along
just off the northern coast of Australia.
Captain Cook was sound asleep in his bunk.
Suddenly, the ship came to a juddering halt.
Men were throwing from their hammocks, there was absolute chaos.
They had hit the Great Barrier Reef and become stuck.
'The hull was ripped to pieces on the sharp coral,
'but the crew managed to wrap a sail under it
'to slow the water coming in and make it to shore,
'where they would undertake the most important repairs of their lives.'
Most expeditions went with multiple ships, but Endeavour was by herself.
So if anything went wrong, the crew faced a stark choice -
mend it or perish.
'Dunno about you, but I'd choose mend it.
'Especially as it involves two of my favourite things -
'wood and tools.'
WOOD PLANE SWISHING
We have scaled down the Endeavour for the purposes of demonstration.
This is a wooden-hulled boat, exactly as she was.
'I'm helping boatbuilder Jordan Kimpton
'replace a plank on the good ship Shrinkle.'
Good afternoon. Hello.
'We'll do it just as the Endeavour's crew did.
'And with just as much urgency.'
I've got this exact plane.
It's a beautiful bit of kit. These are lovely.
Oh, mine's got the screw adjuster though, instead of the lever.
Oh, right. I always find it difficult
working with the blade in the front position
because unless you hold it down firmly...
Er, can we talk about the boat? BEEP
Now, this is, er, similar to the damage to the Endeavour,
not quite as critical because it's not down below the waterline,
but the principle is the same.
We have to replace and blend in this plank.
Yeah, that's right.
And has a slight curve to it. Does it have a slight taper as well?
Er, a very slight taper, very slight curve,
and a couple of little bevels on it.
'The wooden shipbuilding technique of Cook's era
'is still much the same today
'and involves a tool I haven't seen before.'
This must have a name in boat building.
It's a spiling baton. Spiling baton. I love it.
Fancy stick.
Well, navigation was done with fancy sticks
for a long time, so there's no reason
why building the boat shouldn't be.
'The fancy stick is tacked on so we can mark our measurements
'for the new plank using callipers to...
'Oh, hello.'
They're rather nice, aren't they? They're lovely.
If you go back, well, only 50 years,
the country was full of tools like this. I mean...
Sorry, anyway, I was slightly side-tracked there.
You carry on, sir.
'The Endeavour's crew had to replace
'seven planks that had been ripped through by the sharp coral...'
You take dimensions from the top and the bottom of the gap
and then mark the dimension on the spiling baton.
'..a bit of a reminder of how fragile their floating world was.'
We now have to join those marks a bit like a dot-to-dot,
to form a curved line that'll be the guide for sawing,
and then we can get it banged in. Yeah.
SAW WHIRRING
'After some fine adjustments...'
Is that a number four or a four and a half? It's a four.
'..comes an absolutely riveting bit.'
Right, we're about to do some riveting.
'Backing the nails with roves pulls the new plank in tight.'
That is lovely.
'In theory, Cook could replace every single part of the Endeavour.'
We come up against the paradox of the ship of Theseus here, don't we?
Because at what point is it no longer the original boat?
It's the age-old conundrum.
But, I mean, every cell in your body changes every seven years.
Are you the same person? Exactly. Mm, no. I'm not.
But in spirit, this will always be the same boat
even if eventually, you replace the whole thing.
It will have a history of continuous use and development.
Yeah. So it is still Shrinkle.
'Right, if you're of an excitable disposition, cover your eyes.
'There's one final magnificent tool.'
We use a Japanese saw. Ohh!
Which, er, we can get nice and tight onto the transom.
'I should probably be explaining how Cook would have used iron nails
'rather than copper,
as the corrosive effects of saline water
'from ferrous metals were only analysed by the navy in the 1790s,
'but let's just watch instead.'
Beautiful.
Thank you.
After seven weeks, all the planking on the Endeavour was mended,
and she was ready to set sail for home.
And not before time, actually, because, as Joseph Banks observed,
"The men were beginning to sigh for roast beef."
So men, even engaged on
perhaps the greatest adventure that humankind had yet campaigned,
were still thinking about supper.
Amazing.
'The first voyage was something of a triumph.
'Cook had explored parts of the world totally unknown to Europeans,
'and he had charted them.'
We're going to talk about how Cook managed to map so much of the world.
But basically, it's all about triangles.
Now, I have here... You would call this a...
A hand-bearing compass. A hand-bearing compass.
Essentially, I'm going to take three points...
Over there is the lighthouse.
And if I sight the lighthouse first...
'Cook loved geometry so much that he divided the world up into angles.
'And I'm doing the same - taking a compass bearing to a landmark...'
And that is zero, three, five.
'..and drawing a line along that bearing on the chart.
Zero, three, five.
'We are somewhere on that line.'
Pendennis Castle is...
zero, zero, four.
'And if we do this three times...'
The beach. OK.
Two, eight, one.
'..where the lines meet must be where we are.'
So now you can see, we are in the triangle here.
We're somewhere in there.
Reasonably accurate, really, for a handheld device, isn't it?
'And this is exactly what Cook did. Except, the exact opposite.
'O-level trigonometry maths fans - this one's for you.'
Now, Cook, of course, did not have this handy chart.
He was drawing the chart,
but the way he did it is similar to what we just did.
It's all about triangles.
Let's say there is a coastline here.
We don't know the shape of it yet, we can't draw it.
Cook's ship is here
and he picks, say, three points on the coastline over here,
He then takes bearings, like this,
so he knows where they are relative to his ship,
but he then sails his ship forward,
so, say, a quarter of a nautical mile to here.
And then he does those sightings again,
so he's building up a series of triangles
that will tell him exactly where all those points are.
And he does this time and time and time again
on thousands and thousands of points along the coastline
until he can eventually determine the shape of the coastline.
It was very, very meticulous work.
'And Cook was a meticulous man.
'He would chart 4,500 miles of coast on this voyage.
'But these were no mere geometrical love poems.
'They would make Britain a superpower.'
So, what does this coloured piece of cloth on a stick actually mean?
Well, let's consult Cook's rather verbose instructions again.
Er, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
"You are, with the Consent of the Natives,
"to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country
"in the Name of the King of Great Britain.
"Or, if you find the Country uninhabited,
"take Possession for his Majesty
"by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions."
So what this is really is a land grab.
It's an act by an Empire hellbent on world domination,
and a warning to the people like the Spanish and the French
to bugger oeuf.
But, quite obviously, a lot of the places
where this flag was planted weren't uninhabited.
And the following years of various shootings and other mishaps
suggest that the consent of the natives thing
wasn't quite what we were expecting.
In the following decades, more ships arrived,
helped, obviously, by Cook's excellent charts.
And they brought with them European disease, war, settlement,
and the systematic destruction of whole civilisations.
'It's 1771,
'and after three years away at sea and exploring two new countries,
'Captain Cook and the ship's scientist, Joseph Banks,
'returned to a hero's welcome.
'And what everyone was desperate to know was -
'what had they brought home with them?
'Time for a visit to the hallowed halls
'of London's Natural History Museum.
'Because these explorers didn't care about gold...'
'..their treasure was scientific knowledge,
'and it's kept in the museum's murky depths.'
I'm sure this one just moved.
'Even the most hideous residents are beautiful
'to fish mortician and senior curator, James Maclaine.
'And some of his favourites were brought back
'on board the Endeavour.'
I think the estimate's about 500 fish specimens
were collected during the first voyage.
'Many of these had never before been seen by Europeans
'and were brand new to biologists.'
So, when somebody describes a new species for the first time,
forever after, those specimens then represent that species.
So these are all incredibly important for science,
so, some of them are very bizarre as well.
So, there's a really nice thing here which is called a box fish.
You're actually gonna get it out? I'll be very gentle with it.
Look at that!
And it's got this like very hard, box-like, er, shell to it.
Let's see if I can... It's got a face like a dog.
Joseph Banks touched that and thought, "This is very hard,
"this box-like fish that we'll call a box fish."
He touched that, and now I'm touching it.
That's really weird, isn't it?
Possibly my favourite of all the things here are these.
So, these are called frog fish.
And they have a lure on their forehead.
Oh, yes.
That there is its little fishing rod.
It will attract some little fish over
and then they can sort of inflate their whole head
and then the fish just gets sucked in.
If part of this falls off, I'll be just...
We'll delete the footage if that happens.
Delete myself.
'Frog fish intact and safely stowed away,
'which is more than can be said for Banks' collecting methods.'
They can be very vague.
This thing here, it just says "Islands of the Pacific Ocean".
That's precise (!)
I've read that the whole business of collecting on board was quite untidy
because Cook and Banks shared a big cabin.
But Banks would bring all his specimens
and string them out to dry or dissect them on the map table,
so the whole thing was just covered in slime.
Well, I think there was, yes, so much going on.
The sailors got very much involved with the collecting as well.
So they'd be in the middle of something
and then some guy would run in, "I've just caught this."
And, er, I mean, I've been on a collecting expedition myself,
and it does get very excitable when the net comes in,
and everyone sort of gathers around.
'The liquid the fish were preserved in
'got the sailors quite excited too.'
They used to use something called spirits of wine,
which was completely drinkable.
I think on one of the voyages,
there was an issue with the rum running out.
The preserving alcohol
would suddenly be of great interest to the sailors.
'The best way to stop the sailors drinking it
'was to stick a load of dead fish in it.
'And those dead fish changed the course of science forever.'
When all these came back,
the scientific community of Europe
must have suddenly flocked to London to see all this stuff.
This... this was a massive boost to our scientific esteem,
wasn't it, having all this stuff? Oh, absolutely.
It laid the groundwork for so many of the things that followed,
like the Beagle with Charles Darwin and the Challenger expedition.
So our ideas about evolution and the origin of species...
..are all linked into these yellow-topped jars
that Cook and Banks had in their cabin
and chucked in a big barrel of alcohol.
Very much, yeah.
'And they still have a place at the cutting edge of science today.'
There are many, many, many uses for a dead fish in a jar
and some of them you just cannot predict.
So recently, somebody wanted a bit of shark skin
so that they could design a tyre for use on the surface of Mars.
So you just cannot tell
what people are gonna want to do with a dead fish.
'Now, delightful as our fishy friends are,
'they all look a bit drab.
'Preserving dulls the colours...
'which is why art was an all-important part of science.
'And why ship's scientist Banks
'brought an artist on the expedition to capture things in the moment.'
This is the work of Sidney Parkinson, artist to the expedition.
This is actually the photography of the era, isn't it? Yes.
'And Library Collections Manager Andrea Hart
'is giving me a peek at the negatives.'
Oh, cripes!
'While Banks was onshore collecting an astonishing 30,000 specimens,
'Parkinson was back on the ship with cramp in his drawing hand.'
They had very small cabins,
there's reference in Banks' journal to,
especially some times when there were particularly foul seas,
that his pots would go leeward.
And then also in Tahiti,
it was very, very warm so they were plagued by mosquitos.
There was reports of flies eating the paint
before it could dry on the paper.
'More than 1,300 of Parkinson's artworks came back on the Endeavour,
'which is more than can be said for Parkinson.'
Tragically, Parkinson died
six months before the voyage returned to England.
What actually killed Parkinson? Dysentery.
Oh, dear.
But he did record all this stuff, which is a remarkable legacy,
something that's advanced science
and our understanding of a completely new world.
And to do all that before you shit yourself to death
is... is quite an achievement.
'Just before his final visit to the khazi,
'Parkinson also painted Sean's family album.'
This is literally recounting the discovery of my tribe.
This is where my guys are from. Really?
Yeah. This is actually quite a cool moment.
Sorry, I'm gonna bathe in it for a sec.
'Once we get our cameraman back,
'we can film some of Parkinson's rather special last drawings.'
Ahh.
They are the first European drawings of a kangaroo.
Are they? Mm.
So I expect the first time somebody said, "I've seen this animal,
"but it only hops around on its back legs
"and it looks a bit like a giant mouse
"and it's got a little version of itself and..."
they'd have said, "Don't be stupid."
And probably given him 50 lashes.
'The kangaroo looks lovely and peaceful, doesn't it?
'There's a reason for that.'
To be able to draw any living species,
there was an element of having to shoot them.
And that is part of the scientific process.
So this is... this is the first European record
of what a kangaroo is and looks like.
And it would have been the first time -
probably an hour or two after this -
that Europeans knew what a kangaroo tasted like.
Exactly.
Which is a bit like chicken, obviously.
SHE LAUGHS
'Parkinson's drawings caused a sensation,
'and Joseph Banks became a very influential man.
'But while he clearly loved nature,
'he was no peace-and-love, plant-based hippy.
'Like many of his day, he was a firm believer
'in colonies, plantations, and slavery.'
And here he is, look, unceremoniously dumped
in a corner of the Chelsea Physic Garden, rendered immortal in...
Oh, actually, it feels a bit like resin.
He hasn't actually been cancelled yet, but give it another few years,
and he'll be completely overgrown with Santolina villosa.
'Not long after the voyage, there was a crisis in British prisons.
They were bursting at the seams with convicts.
'And Banks suggested shipping them off
'to a lovely little spot he knew -
'Botany Bay, Australia.
'Within 100 years, 160,000 prisoners had been shipped.
'Britain would pave paradise and put up a penal colony.'
A whole new and obviously completely alien society emerged,
and the Aboriginal Australians,
who had lived there presumably untroubled for 60,000 years,
found their land seized
and their ancient culture just torn apart and cast aside.
All that happened in just a century, one and a bit lifetimes.
Cook's little voyage left quite a big wake.
'And that was only his first voyage.'
'Welcome to Greenwich in the mid-18th century.' Lovely.
'Captain Cook is home from his first voyage to New Zealand and Australia.
'New lands down under!
'But now the Admiralty wanted newer lands under down under.
'They believed in a mysterious Great Southern Continent,
'still out there, waiting to be discovered.
'And in 1772, Cook was given two new ships and sent to find it.'
But there was a problem because sailors at sea
still couldn't work out exactly where they were.
Latitude - how far south or north you are,
that's not such an issue because it's a matter of observation.
You can simply see
how high the noonday sun is above the horizon.
But longitude - how far east or west you were,
that's altogether more difficult.
And that was the great navigational challenge of the day.
'Until now, longitude was essentially an educated guess.
'It was an age-old problem,
'and back in 1675,
'the Royal Greenwich Observatory was built just to try and solve it.'
This is the prime meridian.
It is, if you like, longitude ground zero.
This is the line from which all other lines of longitude -
east and west - are measured and established.
It's here, because the British invented time, it's ours.
'Right, viewers, strap in for science.
'Longitude is inextricably linked with time.
'In 24 hours, the Earth turns a full 360 degrees through the sun's beam.
'And in one hour, it turns through 15 degrees. Everyone with me?
'So if, onboard your ship, the midday sun is at its highest
'one hour later than midday back at Greenwich,
'you must be 15 degrees west.
'Two hours later, then you must be 30 degrees west, and so on.
'Now. if this is all making your brain ache, you're not alone.
Sir Isaac Newton said that longitude was the only problem
that had ever made his head hurt.
And he invented gravity.
'The obvious way to know what time it was back home
'was to bring a clock on the ship.
'But it wasn't that easy.'
CLOCKS CHIME
'Nor it turns out, is filming in clock shop.'
CLOCKS CHIME
And, action!
The problem was that pendulum clocks like this one wouldn't work at sea
because...
if you're at sea, you get swell.
Pendulum has stopped,
beat of the clock becomes irregular.
That isn't going to work.
But then, of course, you have this sort of mechanism.
But all of these intricate parts
would be subject to extremes of heat and cold at sea.
They would expand, they would contract.
Moisture would get in,
salt would form crystals, bung up the mechanism
and cause the steel parts like these shafts and arbours to corrode.
'And a slow clock would mean a major cock-up for Cook.'
Your ship's clock only had to be a couple of minutes out
for you to miss an entire island.
And then no rum for you,
lost at sea just because your clock's wrong.
CLOCKS CHIME
'Clocks were not the answer.
'The longitude problem drove men mad.
'The government offered a huge reward
'to anyone who could come up with a longitude solution.
'And I've got special access to see some attempts...
'under strict supervision from these two.'
I'm now privileged to be in a very special place,
the top secret storeroom of the Royal Museums, comma, Greenwich.
This is the place where they hide the bits of maritime history
they don't want you to know about.
Follow me.
TENSE MUSIC
'These dusty vaults hold long-forgotten inventions,
'enough firepower to sink the Bismarck,
'and what appears to be a private army of nautical daleks.
'I'm under strict instructions not to touch anything,
'which always makes me want to touch everything.
'I think they can probably tell.'
I'm very used to putting those on cos I wear them a lot at home.
Great.
LAUGHTER In the workshop! Come on!
Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Fine.
This is Louise, who is Senior Curator of the Royal Observatory
and therefore a curator of time itself.
'Time Lord Louise is showing me the leading longitude contenders.
'There's a very fiddly one that used the differences
'in the Earth's magnetic field...'
The magnetic compass doesn't always point true north
compared to the North Star, Polaris.
Sometimes, it varies by about four degrees or ten degrees.
And the idea was that you could match up your compass with a chart
and figure out where you are. It's beautifully made.
It requires quite a lot of arithmetic...
'Fraid so. Yeah. ..doesn't it?
'There's a rather complicated one
'that used the position of the moon relative to the stars...'
What they used to do is send that data from the observatory
to a whole network of mathematicians,
known as human computers.
They number-crunched all the data, sent it back,
and then this book gives you the position of the moon
every three hours, every day for the year ahead.
This must have taken months and months to compile.
'And there's a rather intriguing one that we can demonstrate with...'
An orrery. Correct.
Orrery. Is that right? Yes.
So you've got the sun in the centre with Mercury, Venus.
You've got Earth and its little moon. Yes.
But I really like it because it shows Jupiter with its four moons.
So, back in 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo
used a newly-invented telescope like this one here to look at Jupiter.
And he noticed four little dots of light.
And if you look at the model,
you can see that sometimes, the moons go behind,
and sometimes, they go in front of the planet.
And Galileo realised that if you knew
the configuration of those moons at one location
and you compared it to what you could see at your location,
you could work out the difference in time and longitudes.
'The simplicity of the theory is irresistible.
'As is the orrerrerr...erry.'
Am I allowed to touch that one? I'm afraid not.
That's absolutely fabulous, yes. Am I allowed to touch that?
No. Now, this is all great
because it's based on very, very sound scientific reasoning.
But once you take it to sea,
you come face-to-face with what is sometimes called,
in scientific circles, the crapness of reality.
'Over to Bessie Ellen for that reality check.'
Ow. Where's the end?
BLEEP
'Yes, it is a bit crap.'
Where's the camera gone? Hello.
'I have not come to exterminate you.
'I'm demonstrating the reality of viewing
'Jupiter's moons at sea...'
This is absolutely hopeless.
'..using this model of a celatone,
'inspired by a Galileo design to help
'sailors keep their telescope steady.'
I mean, obviously this wouldn't work in the day, it's got to be at night.
But it's not gonna work anyway
because it's absolutely bloody useless.
One report said that at best,
you could hope to hold Jupiter in your sights for about a second,
which is nothing like long enough.
I mean, apart from it making you look like a total berk,
it simply didn't work.
Ow!
'In the end, the answer to the biggest headscratcher
'of the sailing age was straightforward.
'Just make better clocks.
'And someone did.
'A genius carpenter called John Harrison replaced the pendulum
'with swinging balances, anti-friction bearings,
'and the grasshopper escapement.
'And I think he deserves a phwoarrr.'
'It took him almost 30 years,
'and four goes to achieve perfection in the H4.
'You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Captain Cook.
'Well, for the first time in history,
'the Navy were on to a solution -
'and they needed their top navigator to test it
'on his round-the-world voyage.'
Wow, look at that!
That is actually what you need, to know where you are at sea.
That is Cook's actual sextant, absolutely immaculate.
And this is K1,
which is an exact copy of Harrison's H4.
They took the original apart, measured it precisely
and then made a new one, and it's absolutely fabulous.
I mean, imagine having that in your pocket, and somebody saying to you,
"Have you got the time on you?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have. And it's exactly right."
Can I really not touch this?
'This time, they've sent in the big guns.'
Sorry! Can you touch it for me, please?
This is fantastic. I never thought I'd arrive at a time in my life
when I had someone to touch things on my behalf.
Ooh, look at the back. Oh, yes!
Can you open it?
Go on! SHE LAUGHS
Well, thank you for touching it for me. It's appreciated.
After hundreds and thousands of years of people being lost at sea
and perishing horribly and being consumed by monsters
and all the rest of it, you just need that -
that elaborate school metalwork project
and the world's most valuable clock.
That's it. Job done.
'And there's one final Cook treasure that I can't touch.'
This is Cook's actual logbook.
Look at his writing. It's so neat!
And this was written on a ship, remember, pitching about.
And his most famous quote is on this page. Here it is, look.
"I had ambition not only to go further than anyone had been before,
"but as far as it is possible for man to go."
Another captain later on put it a little more succinctly -
"to boldly go where no man has gone before".
BRIGHT MUSIC
And on Cook's second voyage, he would do just that.
'Welcome back to 1772, Cook's second voyage,
'and the search for the Great Southern Continent.
'Now with new-fangled, cutting-edge navigational instruments...'
There is the sun.
'..for superbly accurate longitude calculation.'
We're somewhere north of the dog's arse.
'For the first time, Cook knew exactly where he was.
'But unfortunately, where he was was the Antarctic.
'This isn't authentic 18th century footage,
'but the misery of sub-zero sailing transcends time.'
It was utterly crap.
The ropes turned to solid ice, the sails turned to sheets of steel,
the animals froze to death, the crew had to stay below deck
and were miserable and moaned constantly, as crews often do.
But Cook fought bravely on.
He went below 70 degrees south,
and he became the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle.
'Cook had gone further than any man had gone before.
'And it sounds bloody awful.
'The ships pushed on south,
'through howling gales and stormy seas.
'But thick fog and a great wall of sea ice blocked their path,
'and the Great Southern Continent eluded them.
'They didn't see land for four months,
'which meant they were stalked by a terrible maritime menace.'
Scurvy had been the sailor's scourge
since the first ocean crossings were attempted.
In fact, on one naval expedition to the Pacific during Cook's time,
two thirds of the crew died from it.
Here are some pictures of the symptoms for you to enjoy.
"Those affected have skin as black as ink, rictus of the limbs,
"a strange plethora of gum tissue sprouting out of the mouth,
"which immediately rotted
"and lent the victim's breath an abominable odour."
Wow!
'While we all know a lack of vitamin C was to blame,
'back then, there was just a vague idea
'that it was something to do with diet. But what?
'Cook decided to use his sailors as human guinea pigs.'
Now, here on the counter in front of me,
'I have a range of possible cures.
'So I'm going to test Cook's cures with some...'
Dichloro...phenolindophenol.
'Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious,
'it's just an inky blue liquid
'that goes clear when you add enough vitamin C.
'Scientists of the day recommended lemon juice,
'which had been boiled down to preserve it.'
One, two, three.
'Sadly for the sailors...' Oh, dear.
'..boiling kills off most of the vitamin C.'
That's hopeless. Right, sauerkraut.
'Fermented cabbage sounds promising.'
No, that's not looking good for the jolly sailor boys.
'Unfortunately, they boiled that too.'
OK. Carrot marmalade.
'Delicious! But that's vitamin A, wrong vitamin.'
Point nine. It's just rubbish.
'It seems most of Cook's cures had only very low levels of vitamin C.
'And yet, not a single one of his sailors would die of scurvy.
'He believed it was all thanks to this final cure -
'an unfermented beer called wort.'
"He took a quart of the wort.
"This gave him three stools in the 24 hours -
"plentiful, loose and offensive.
"The discharge became less putrid, his pains went gradually off.
"Not a man in the ship was more in spirits
"and lively than him."
'Delightful. Let's see.'
Greatly championed by Cook.
He thought this was the mother of all cures.
One, two, three, four, five...
'Cook was right about most things...'
68, 69.
Absolute pish!
Better off just drinking the beer.
'..but wort wasn't one of them.'
There is no vitamin C whatsoever in the wort.
'So, how to explain the mystery of no-one carking it?'
Cook, being a fastidious man
and being very concerned about the welfare of his crew,
insisted on gathering fresh plants to eat every time they went ashore.
That would have made a difference.
The other thing he did
was insist that the men washed up the pans from the cooking
very, very thoroughly because if they didn't,
there was a residue of animal fat in them,
that would get into people's guts,
and that would impede the absorption of vitamin C.
'Cook's crew might not have been getting much extra vitamin C,
'but unlike other sailors, they could properly digest
'the tiny amounts of it in their normal food.
'Cook was clueless, though.
'He reported back to the Navy that the miracle cure was wort.'
So, in reality,
Cook probably set the war on scurvy back by a number of years.
Sorry.
'When he finally arrived home in 1775,
'Cook was celebrated as the greatest captain of the age.
'He could retire a happy man.'
Cook was famous, the first person on Earth to cross the Antarctic Circle.
He was splashed on front pages, he dined with nobility,
his portrait was painted by the great artists of the age.
But he was now 46 years old,
that was a ripe old age for a mariner at the time.
So he decided on a gentler command.
He came and he took charge
of the Naval Hospital for Retired Sailors here in Greenwich.
That lasted for three months.
'You just can't keep a good salty seadog down.
'One last challenge awaited Cook.
'Off he went, via his old haunts of New Zealand and Tahiti,
'in search of the Northwest Passage -
'a sea route linking Europe with Asia
'over the top of the frozen north of Canada.
'But by this third voyage, something was different about Cook.
'He was becoming a bit of a tyrant.'
His temper became violent and uncontrollable,
and the punishments he dished out grew in severity.
12 lashes became 24 lashes, then 48 lashes and then 72.
And he had some bloke's ears cut off because he'd nicked something.
And on one island, he burned a whole village to the ground
over a dispute about two stolen goats.
'There are various theories
'on illness or infection affecting Cook's behaviour.
'And whilst it's in no way an excuse,
'spending most of your life at sea
'must have sent you off the deep end a bit.
'Let's ask the scariest captain I know.'
Out in the middle of the ocean,
has either of you ever gone a bit mad?
You know, thick fog for days, cold and fog.
You're restrained to your quarters, it's miserable.
I think on the longer passages,
everyone is gonna go a little bit mad.
Yeah. It's like you almost feel
like you're in a goldfish bowl.
Except that you know that no-one's looking in.
I mean, if you were with just your film crew,
how long would it take you to go mad with them?
About 15 minutes usually. Yeah, exactly.
So can you imagine, you know, three weeks in a sort of...
Yeah, but what about three years?
'Royal Navy physicians of the time calculated that
'sailors were seven times more likely to go mad than landlubbers.
'And for captains, it was even worse.'
I suppose command is lonely anyway, isn't it?
Because you have to maintain a distance
to maintain your authority.
Yeah, they do call it "the lonely burden of command"
and the responsibility on your shoulders
is a great deal more than when you're just a deckhand.
And you don't sleep
because you are responsible for everybody and the boat.
But I haven't gone mad yet... I don't think.
It's not really for you to judge, though, is it?
No, not really. I suppose not. Good point.
'Cook's displeasure cruise finally reached the Arctic.
'He pushed his crew hard - to the very edge of mutiny -
'and once more, went further than any man had gone before...
'..but no further.
'Only 50 miles south of where the North West Passage begins,
'ice forced them to retreat south for winter.
'And handily, they'd stumbled across the Hawaiian Islands -
'another first for Europeans.
'But a last for Cook.'
At first, it was just like the early days in Tahiti.
The Hawaiians welcomed these weird sailors
and fed them and threw great parties for them.
And when the ships finally departed, everybody was the best of mates.
But then a mast broke, and the ships had to return,
and this time, the reception was not quite so friendly.
And soon, all the old tensions started to emerge.
One of Cook's rowing boats disappeared,
and in one of his increasingly violent and unreasonable rages,
he set off with a party to a local village to try and kidnap the king.
'There was panicking, and there was shooting.
'Blades were brandished, bullets were fired,
'and four marines and dozens of Hawaiians were killed.
'Cook was stabbed to death and his body burned.'
Cook's powdered wig would never be found.
'How to sum up a man of so many contradictions?
'A son of a farmer, who rose to the greatest heights of celebrity?
'A conscientious captain, on whose watch terrible things happened?
'A symbol of national pride or of the evils of Empire?'
Captain James Cook is a British legend.
SOMBRE MUSIC
Here is his statue looking out over Whitby
where he learned so much of his craft.
Elsewhere in the world,
in Australia and New Zealand and some of the islands where he landed,
he's sometimes referred to as "Captain Crook".
And many of his statues have been pulled down
for all the usual reasons.
But hang on a minute. It has been said that
we should live in the present for the sake of progress,
but with an eye to the future for the sake of humanity.
And I think that's how Captain Cook lived and worked.
I mean he... he enormously advanced the sciences of navigation,
map-making, surveying, even crew welfare.
But at the same time,
his diary is riddled with self-doubt about what he's doing
and the effect it might have on people.
In truth, I don't think Cook was interested in wealth or power,
he was a nerd.
Look at his work, look at his journal,
look at his books of navigation homework.
Captain Cook's legacy is enormous.
He completed our view of the world
and with it, perhaps, our view of ourselves.
Right. Let's explore fish and chips.
'BARNACLE BILL' PLAYS