As his Endurance sank in the Weddell Sea in late 1915, Shackleton restated his determination that he would lose no man under his command. He confided to his diary, “I pray God I can manage to get the whole party to civilisation.” Then he added, “and then this part of the expedition will be over.” This second thought may be a reference to the fact that there was another part of the expedition, an equally courageous team who were working independently thousands of miles away in pursuit of Shackleton’s goal of crossing the continent.

Amid all the celebration of Shackleton’s astonishing heroism, tenacity and skill as he saved the crew of Endurance from death, history has overlooked the tragedy that befell their support team, the Ross Sea party.

A great leader

Ernest Shackleton was a magnificent leader in a crisis on the ice. Years later, an Antarctic comrade of Shackelton’s, Raymond Priestly, famously wrote, “when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

Shackleton was, however, not at his best in the build-up to an expedition. In fact, it seems to me that Shackleton had to be superhuman on the ice, because his chaotic planning, patchy equipping and eccentric recruitment methods made some kind of crisis inevitable. The scramble to get two ships ready for the Trans-Antarctic Expedition was haphazard. Money was short, promises were made and broken.

While Endurance was to head down, with Shackleton aboard, to the Weddell Sea to disembark the team to cross the continent, the Ross Sea party were to head to the other side of Antarctica and lay a series of food depots that would sustain Shackleton and his party on the journey from the South Pole to the far coast.

To lead the Ross Sea group, Shackleton had wanted Dr. Eric Marshall, a proven veteran on the ice. But Marshall simply didn’t trust Shackelton’s plan and refused. So Shackleton signed up Aeneas Mackintosh, who had lost an eye on a previous expedition south.

Readying the Aurora

Shackleton’s Ross Sea party: the crew of the Aurora, photographed by Frank Hurley.

Image Credit: via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Mackintosh was sent to Australia with hardly any money, a completely uncertain arrangement over their ship, Aurora, and a crew mainly formed of excitable novices. Victor Hayward, for example, was a London finance clerk seeking adventure. He had once worked on a ranch in Canada and Shackleton thought that was experience enough.

They had to rely on the charity of friends and supporters in Australia to get the Aurora fitted out and supplies embarked. Somehow, the expedition left Sydney in mid-December 1914. A witness said, “it was difficult to imagine a state of greater confusion.” They knew that Shackleton was on his way to the Antarctic already and for all they knew, he might be on his way across the continent by early 1915.

Shackleton had, unforgivably, neglected to tell the Aurora team that he was running late and would be unable to make the crossing during the Antarctic summer of late 1914 to early 1915. As such, they felt a terrible burden to lay down supply dumps on which Shackleton’s men were depending.

They could not know that on top of departing late, Shackleton had not even made it to the coast of Antarctica at all and that by late January 1915 he was frozen into the Weddell pack ice, moving slowly north, away from Antarctica, with his ship inevitably squeezed to death.

Effectively by February 1915, Shackelton’s dream was completely destroyed, but there was no way of communicating this to the Ross Sea party. As a result, everything that followed, all the hardships, death and disaster, were all for nothing.

Aurora adrift

On the opposite side of Antarctica to Shackleton’s planned destination, the Ross Sea party desperately shuttled supplies inland, despite inadequate equipment, training and expertise. They faced a slew of problems from the outset and throughout. A motorised tractor had failed. All their sled dogs had died.

In May 1915, the Aurora was torn from its moorings and dragged miles offshore by the pack ice into which she had frozen. 10 men had not been aboard when the gale struck and so were marooned at Cape Evans on Antarctica, with only the clothes they were wearing, and a stack of supplies intended for Shackleton.

Aurora was stuck in the ice for months. In February 1916, she was freed, but because of a damaged rudder returned to New Zealand rather than rescuing the stranded men on Cape Evans.

The men left behind

Interior of Captain Scott’s hut, Hut Point, McMurdo Sound, Ross Sea, Antarctica. 2008.

Image Credit: Nature Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Trapped in Antarctica without a ship, the 10 beleaguered men searched Hut Point, which had been used by both Captain Scott and Shackleton during previous expeditions. The Ross Sea party rifled through the supplies left behind there and found extra clothes and food.

They survived the first winter, through the middle of 1915, and heroically set up towards the end of the year to lay more food depots for Shackleton who they now assumed must be coming across in the summer of 1915-1916. The Ross Sea party experienced appalling conditions as they dragged supplies out, spending 198 days on the ice, a record at the time.

One of their number, Spencer Smith, died of scurvy. Others, including Mackintosh, became incapacitated by injury and cold, only making it back by being dragged on sledges by their companions. After a gruelling journey, the depot-layers reached Hut Point, but were still cut off by sea ice from the four members of the party who had remained at Cape Evans.

Driven to desperation, after recovering a little strength eating seal flesh, Mackintosh and Hayward disappeared into a blizzard announcing that they were going to walk to Cape Evans. Neither was ever seen again.

The rescue

A rescue operation was launched. There was no money and so the British, Australian and New Zealand governments reluctantly took control of the Aurora, replaced the crew and sent it south in December 1916. Shackleton had by this time reached safety in the distant south Atlantic and arrived in New Zealand just in time to beg that he should accompany the expedition. He was allowed to sail only as a supernumerary officer with no executive authority.

When Aurora arrived at Cape Evans in January, the survivors were astonished to see Shackleton on the deck: they had expected him to come from the interior of the continent, not New Zealand. It is hard to imagine what they would have felt when they realised that all their hard work and sacrifices had served absolutely no purpose.

It can be easy to forget that not everyone did come home from the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They deserve to be remembered as much as their brethren on the Endurance.

Read more about the discovery of Endurance. Explore the history of Shackleton and the Age of Exploration. Visit the official Endurance22 website.

What follows is a gigantic and ever growing list of tit-bits, facts, snippets that I have been told, many of which now feature in History Hit’s Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds, our new book published in September 2023. I have enough weird, wonderful, quirky, vital, tragic, funny stories and facts tucked away in notebooks and phone apps to last a few years yet, and thanks to the huge privilege I have of interviewing the world’s best historians, I hope to fill many more.

Lots of these will be contested, some will be wrong. Research will have moved on, or more likely, I noted them incorrectly. Some were gathered in the pub after filming where mistakes of all kinds are to be expected. Some were relayed to me in shouted conversations on dive boats in the teeth of a gale or the back of a pickup truck, careering over indecipherable roads as the light faded in a place where it was best to be home by dark.

I am grateful for your thoughts and corrections. It will make the list more robust and remarkable. If you have a correction or suggestion, please let us know!

1. Dictators together

In 1913 Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito all lived in Vienna for a couple of months.

2. Colonial background

The first British officer killed in World War One was an Englishman, born in India, in a Scottish regiment, commanding Senegalese troops in Togoland.

3. Record breaking vaccine

The record for a vaccine to be developed and licensed was four years. The record holder was the mumps vaccine which was licensed in 1967. Following the UK government approval of the Pfizer vaccine for Covid19 in early December 2020, that record is now just under 11 months.

4. Absent monarch

Richard the Lionheart only spent six months of his ten-year reign in England.

5. ‘Day of Fate’

Important events in German history have frequently occurred on 9 November, dubbed Schicksalstag, ‘Day of Fate’. In 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. In 1923, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis attempted the Munich Putsch, and in 1938 they attacked Jews on Kristallnacht. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

6. The biggest shark attack

When the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on 30 July 1945 survivors were left in the water for four days, during which time around 600 men died of exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks. Experts believe it may be the single greatest concentration of shark attacks on humans in history.

7. Loss of horse power

Napoleon took 187,600 horses with his army as he rode into Russia in 1812, only 1,600 came back.

8. Race at war

In World War One, France’s black soldiers suffered a death rate 3x higher than their white comrades, because they were so often given suicidal tasks.

9. Police state

The Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 criminalised a range of nuisances. Knocking on a door and running away, flying kites, singing obscene ballads, sliding on ice in the street. Technically all of these activities are still offences within the Metropolitan police area of London. You can be given a fine of up to £500.

10. Japanese superstitions

Before battle, Japanese samurai painted their faces, horses and teeth, and left a hole in their helmet through which the soul could escape.

11. Illegal drunkenness

Since 1872 it’s been illegal to be drunk in a pub.

12. Mammoth constructions

When Egypt’s major pyramids were being built, there remained a small population of woolly mammoths on Wrangel island in the Arctic.

13. Mr Loverman

The total number of children fathered by Genghis Khan is unknown, but estimates range from several hundred to over a thousand. DNA evidence has suggested that one in every 200 people in the world today is a descendant of Genghis Khan. That’s around 16 million people.

14. Sheep at the White House

American President Woodrow Wilson and his wife Edith kept sheep at the White House during World War One to keep the lawn neat and reduce gardening costs. The sheep’s wool was also auctioned off to raise money for the Red Cross.

15. Can’t stop laughing

In 1962, a mysterious epidemic of laughter broke out in a girls’ school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). The laughter quickly spread to other schools and eventually to the surrounding villages, affecting thousands of people. The epidemic lasted for several months and was so severe that many schools were forced to close.

16. Thomas Crapper’s toilet

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flushing toilet, though his name is often associated with it. Crapper did play a significant role in popularising the flushing toilet and developed related inventions like the ball cock. However, the word ‘crap’ does not come from his name; it has Middle English origins and first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1846.

17. Army on the streets

The last time the British Army deliberately killed anyone in Britain, (as distinct from Northern Ireland which is obviously a very different story), was in August 1911. Two civilians were shot in Liverpool during a rail strike, and a few days later in Llanelli two civilians were shot and killed again during a strike.

18. Commitment to the cause

Colonel Sourd, Napoleon’s 2nd Lancers, fought all day on horseback at Waterloo. He’d had his arm amputated, no pain relief, the day before.

19. Hidden talents

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical doctor, bestselling author and Spiritualist advocate. He also played as a football goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club under the pseudonym A. C. Smith. The club was amateur, and disbanded in 1896. Portsmouth FC, the now professional club, was founded in 1898.

20. For King and Country

The last survivor of the defence of Rorke’s Drift, Frank Bourne, lived to be 91. He died on 8 May 1945 – VE Day.

21. Missed

In 1800 George III survived two assassination attempts in one day. On the morning of 15 May he was shot in Hyde Park, but the bullet narrowly missed and hit a civil servant, who survived. That evening the king was shot at again at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, by a mentally disturbed army veteran, who also missed. George insisted that the play go on. 

22. Smell test

A 17th century King of Arakan chose wives by making women stand in the sun and then doing a blind sniff test on all their sweaty clothes. The ones he didn’t like he sent to lesser nobles.

23. Rodent reprobates

In 1510, rats who destroyed a field of barley were summoned to face trial. Their defence lawyer, Bartholomew Chassenee, argued that attending court would put his clients at risk from local cats and dogs. A reasonable fear of death was a sufficient reason to excuse a human from court. If rats were to be subject to the same laws, surely the same mitigation had to apply? The judge postponed the trial indefinitely.

24. Self-mummification

A 1,000-year-old Chinese Buddha statue was taken to a Dutch hospital for a CT scan in 2017. The scan revealed a mummified monk inside the golden figure with its internal organs missing. The monk was believed to have self-mummified before being encased in the statue.

25. Troops massing

In 1939, the US army numbered 190,000. In 1945, it numbered 8.5 million.

26. Not so golden age

In her later years, Queen Elizabeth I‘s teeth were black from too much sugar.

27. World’s first skyscraper

The story of skyscrapers often begins in New York and Chicago from around 1884 with increasingly tall buildings. However, what is technically the world’s first skyscraper was built in Shropshire in 1796–7.

Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings may not look like a skyscraper, but its Main Mill was the first building in the world to have an iron frame supporting the weight of the structure, the formula for every skyscraper ever built, so that it has been dubbed the ‘Grandparent of Skyscrapers’.

28. Ancient astronomers

Of the eight planets in the Solar System, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were observed by Babylonian astronomers as early as the 2nd millennium BC. The Greek Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 bc) also correctly observed the position of Earth in relation to the planets – known as the heliocentric model.

29. Doggy defence

King Henry VIII of England had a suit of armour made for his dog.

30. What is a quarantine

The word “quarantine” comes from quarantena, meaning “forty days” in 14th century Venetian. The Venetians imposed a 40-day isolation of ships and people arriving in their lagoon during the Black Death.

31. Surrender? Never!

Lt Hiroo Onoda served with Japan’s army in the Philippines during World War Two. He was ordered not to surrender, so he didn’t, until 1974. His wartime boss was sent to get him. He returned home a hero.

32. Ungentlemanly conduct

In 1759 the French besieging Madras strongly complained that the British defenders had fired at their HQ. The British immediately apologised.

33. ‘Blackening the bride’

In rural parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, a tradition known as ‘blackening the bride’ was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Just before a wedding, friends and family would cover the bride and groom with all sorts of messy substances, such as soot, mud and feathers. This custom was believed to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck to the couple.

34. Oll Korrect

The origin of the phrase ‘OK’ dates back to a fad for intentionally misspelled abbreviations in 1830s Boston. When witty Bostonians began spelling ‘all correct’ as ‘Oll Korrect’, newspapers picked up on the joke.

In 1840, US President Martin Van Buren, originally from Kinderhook in New York, adopted the phrase for his re-election campaign and his supporters set up ‘Old Kinderhook’, or ‘OK’, clubs across the country. The term quickly made the transition from slang to legitimate use.

35. British invasions and conflicts

According to research, out of the 193 countries that are currently United Nations (UN) member states, Britain invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171 countries, which accounts for approximately 90% of the total.

36. The Halifax Gibbet

The Halifax Gibbet was a Yorkshire invention, and was essentially a large axe attached to a wooden block, 200 years ahead of the guillotine’s adoption in Revolutionary France. The town of Halifax adopted it to punish even lowly crimes like petty theft, and it remained in use until the mid-17th century. It inspired another device – the maiden – first used in Scotland during Mary Queen of Scots‘ reign.

37. Soviet perspective

In 50 days on the Eastern Front of World War Two in July and August 1943 the losses suffered by the Germans and the Soviets were greater than those sustained by the USA and Great Britain combined, for the whole of the Second World War.

38. Quick!

In England, in 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant.

39. Prediction of death

Mark Twain kind of predicted his own death. In 1909, he said: ‘I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt, “Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together”.’

He died of a heart attack on 21 April 1910 – one day after the comet had come again and appeared at its brightest. Halley’s comet only passes by Earth approximately every 76 years, and has been the subject of a string of predictions since 1705.

40. Dartmoor delights

The highest concentration of Bronze Age remains in Britain is on Dartmoor, South Devon. In the 400 square miles of national park, every type of monument above can be found, including 18 stone circles and 75 stone rows.

41. An iconic moustache

As a young man Hitler wore a larger, bushier moustache; he trimmed it to its iconic shape so that it could fit under a gas mask during World War One.

42. Surprising the sexists

Suffragist life partners, Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, both qualified doctors, attempted to join the armed forces medical services on the outbreak of war in 1914 but were not allowed to serve because of their sex. So they set up an independent hospital to treat wounded soldiers, with all-female staff, surgeons, anaesthesiologists and nurses. It rapidly became regarded as the best in the UK.

43. Two significant car crashes

On 13 December 1931, Winston Churchill was struck by a car while crossing Fifth Ave in New York City. He had looked the wrong way before crossing the street and was dragged for several yards, sustaining bruises, sprains and cuts.

In the same year, a 19-year-old British aristocrat named John Scott-Ellis was driving a red Fiat in Munich and almost hit the future Führer, Adolf Hitler. Scott-Ellis jumped out of his car and apologised, and Hitler only suffered minor bruises. They shook hands, and Scott- Ellis later remarked, ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. . . [Hitler] was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world.’

44. Outcast

DH Lawrence was thrown out of his village during World War One because he was allegedly signalling to German U-boats with laundry on his clothes-Iine!

45. The Cousins’ War

The ‘Wars of the Roses’ was a series of rivalries and disputes that took place between 1455 and 1487 among the English nobility, largely between Lancaster and York, with many switching sides. However, it was not called the ‘Wars of the Roses’ at the time.

Although roses feature in imagery from Tudor times onwards, the moniker first appeared in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein in 1829. The name the Cousins’ War was first applied to the conflict in the 20th century.

46. Handy brandy

Rather than bury Nelson’s corpse at sea after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was preserved in a cask of brandy stored in the hold of HMS Victory for a London burial.

47. Havoc!

One of the few known medieval battlefield orders is the cry of ‘Havoc!’. Havoc released the army from any formation and gave freedom to loot, and was an order only ever to be given when it was utterly certain that a battle was won and discipline was no longer required.

It was considered so dangerous that it was expressly forbidden without permission from the army’s commander. A wrongly timed cry of havoc could cost a battle and there were severe punishments for crying havoc without permission – sometimes extending to beheading. 

48. Happy Birthday Queen Vic

On 1 January 1886 the British government gave Queen Victoria an extravagant birthday gift: Burma.

49. A sparse audience

Fewer than ten people witnessed the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers on 17 December 1903.

50. Old McDonald’s

The oldest operating McDonald’s is located in Downey, California, and was opened in 1953. As it was franchised from the McDonald brothers, not Ray Kroc, it did not modernise alongside the McDonald’s Corporation until its acquisition in 1990, when it was the only remaining independent McDonald’s. 

51. Coronation confusion

When William the Conqueror was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066, his guard mistook a shout of acclamation for a defiant roar and massacred bystanders.

52. To the last man

Pavlov’s House held-out for two months at Stalingrad. The Germans lost more men attacking it than taking Paris.

53. The Churchill myth

Of Winston Churchill’s most famous 1940 speeches: ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ ‘Fight them on the beaches’, ‘Finest Hour,’ ‘The Few,’ only one, ‘Finest Hour’ was actually broadcast on the radio at the time. All of them were delivered to the House of Commons, but only after his ‘Finest Hour’ speech did Churchill record a version later for the BBC. The other speeches he only recorded in 1949.

54. Taking your time

Homosexuality has been legal in Italy since 1870, England 1967, Scotland 1980, Northern Ireland 1982, Isle of Man 1992 and Tasmania since 1997. It has now been legal in 14 US states since 2003.

55. Telephone greeting

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the first practical telephone in 1876, decided that the correct salutation on answering should be ‘Ahoy.’

56. Repetitive plotting

There were more than 600 plots to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Castro was targeted by a range of foes, including political opponents, criminals and the USA. Tactics included an exploding cigar and a poisoned diving suit. 

57. Dancing mania

In July, 1518, Frau Troffea began dancing in chaotic fervour on the streets of Strasbourg. She danced for a week straight, and soon others joined her. Within a month, the Dancing Plague of 1518 claimed between 50 and 400 victims. Historical sources make it clear the victims danced, but why they did remains unexplained.

Mysterious outbreaks had occurred before: in 1020s Bernburg, Germany, a Christmas Eve service was disturbed when revellers inexplicably danced around the church. In Aachen, 1374, a large-scale outbreak was recorded that spread to Cologne, Flanders, Hainaut, Strasbourg, Utrecht and other towns. In 1428 in Schaffhausen, a monk even danced himself to death.

58. Duelling Prime Minister

On 27 May 1798, Prime Minister William Pitt fought a duel on Putney Common with George Tierney, MP, Treasurer of the Navy, President of the Board of Control. Both men missed.

59. Rare pilots

There have been more astronauts than pilots who have flown the Concorde, which is now out of service.

60. Tallest tsunami

In July 1958 the tallest tsunami ever recorded crashed through the quiet fjord of Lituya Bay in Alaska. At 1,720 feet, the megatsunami was higher than the Empire State Building.

61. Moving statues

The only statue from classical Rome to remain largely unmolested and on public display for nearly 2,000 years is the Equestrian statue of emperor Marcus Aurelius. Erected in the late 2nd century AD, it was finally put inside a museum in the 1980s.

62. Unsinkable stoker

Arthur Priest was a stoker on the Titanic. Stokers were among the unlikeliest crewmen to survive a sinking ship, or even a badly damaged one. Sea water would flood their compartments first, drowning them. The rest of the crew would scramble to shut watertight doors to save the ship, trapping their comrades in the compartments below.

Somehow though, in chronological order Priest survived: a collision on RMS Asturias’ maiden voyage, 1908; a collision on Titanic’s sister ship, RMS Olympic, 1911; the sinking of RMS Titanic, 1912; the First World War sinking of HMS Alcantara, 1916; the First World War sinking of Titanic’s other sister ship, HMHS Britannic, 1916; the SS Donegal First World War sinking, 1917

63. Keeping it in the family

The first time the Roman imperial crown passed from father to son, with the son being born in the Emperor’s lifetime, was when Commodus succeeded his father Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD. The pair had reigned jointly since 177. This was over 200 years after Augustus had first established the role. 

64. Reign of Terror

While the guillotine is commonly associated with the brutality of the French Revolution, the Nazis also used the guillotine during the 12 years they were in power. In October 1936, Hitler secretly ordered 20 guillotines to be distributed to prisons in cities across Germany. According to Nazi records, they were used to execute approximately 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945, including resistance fighters and political protesters – a similar number to the French Reign of Terror.

65. DIY country

In 1820 Gregor MacGregor invented the fictitious country of Poyais in South America. He issued bank notes and sold land for 4 shillings an acre.

66. Accidental invention

The microwave oven, invented in 1945, came about accidentally, after engineer Percy Spencer found radio waves emitted by a radar set he was working on melted a chocolate bar.

67. Bulgaria stands alone

For one day only, on 8 September 1944, Bulgaria found itself at war with all four major belligerents of the Second World War in Europe, the USA, USSR, UK and Germany.

68. Blacked-out roads

More Brits were killed in road accidents on blacked-out UK roads for the first six months of the Second World War than were killed in the armed forces.

69. A chilly year

In 536 AD a series of volcanic eruptions sprayed so much soot into the atmosphere that the temperature of Europe dropped by 2.5 degrees Celsius. This is a drop of halfway to the temperature of the Last Ice Age in one year.

70. Changing metropolis

The world’s biggest city in 1AD was Alexandria; 500: Nanjing; 1000: Cordoba; 1500: Beijing; 2000: Tokyo.

71. Hitler’s half-nephew’s service in the US Navy

The son of Adolf Hitler’s half-brother, Alois, William Patrick Hitler was born in England in 1911 but moved to Germany in the 1930s. He was something of a problem for the German Führer, and in July 1939 he published an article in Look magazine titled ‘Why I hate my uncle. . .’ He moved to America in 1939.

It has been reported that in 1944 he appealed directly to President Roosevelt to join the fight against his uncle and the FBI deemed it sincere. Though he never saw combat, Hitler served until 1947. He changed his name to William Stuart-Houston and died in 1987.

72. Oldest toilets

The Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae (c.3,000 BC) had drainage systems believed to be toilets attached to each interconnected dwelling. The Queen’s Toilet at the Palace of Knossos in Crete (1,700 BC) contained large earthenware pans connected to a flushing water supply. 

73. Bad nominations

Among the nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize are Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (both 1939) and Joseph Stalin (1945 and 1948). Hitler’s nomination was submitted by a Swedish MP, while Mussolini’s came from an Italian professor. Stalin’s nominations were made by a British MP and a group of Norwegian politicians. 

74. Prohibition myths

It wasn’t illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition – the 18th Amendment and subsequent Volstead Act prohibited the production, sale and transport of ‘intoxicating liquors’ within America, but their possession and consumption were never outlawed. Any alcohol already stashed away could be enjoyed in people’s own homes. 

75. Stop looking for war dead

The British government halted the search for war dead on the Western Front in September 1921 when they were still finding 500 bodies a week.

76. Britain’s last witch

Scottish medium Helen Duncan was one of the last people to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 – in 1943, on the grounds of fraudulent spiritual activity. 

77. A city for cars?

LA is so sprawling thanks to trains, not cars. A century ago it was served by the largest electric railway ever built: the ‘Red Car’ system.

78. Flatulent flair

The role of a jester in the medieval royal court was to entertain the king. Henry II had a particular fondness for his fool, Roland, who had a special talent for flatulent performance. Each Christmas he performed an act known as ‘One jump and whistle and one fart’. Henry was so delighted with Roland’s farting that he gave him a manor in Suffolk, with 30 acres of land.

79. The Tower’s last prisoner

Having flown to Scotland in May 1941 in an attempt to negotiate peace with Britain, Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the German Nazi Party, was briefly interned at the Tower of London in May 1941. He was the last state prisoner to be held there.

80. Out of this world

Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in France, made it illegal to land a flying saucer in the town in 1954. 

81. Cold War reaches boiling point

While the world watched the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, they didn’t know just how close they came to destruction.

The US Navy dropped harmless depth charges on a submerged Russian submarine off the coast of Cuba to try and force it to surface. The crew, believing that World War Three had begun, argued whether they should launch the nuclear torpedo that they had on board, and came close to a unanimous vote to launch.

Luckily, Senior Officer Vasili Arkhipov cast the one vote needed to stop the impending destruction.

82. God’s gun

The 1718 Puckle Gun was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Heathens to teach the “benefits of Christian civilization”.

83. Covert baguettes

During World War Two, the baguette became a symbol of resistance against the German occupation, with bakers secretly baking baguettes containing messages or supplies to aid partisans.

84. Every little counts

In 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000 by removing one olive from each salad served in first-class.

85. Luckiest man in the world?

Japanese engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Two.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the first atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945. Despite being only three kilometres away from the blast, Yamaguchi survived, though was seriously burned and temporarily blinded.

The following day, he began the journey back to his hometown of Nagasaki, arriving on 8 August. On 9 August, he was a little over a mile from the epicentre of the second atomic bomb when it dropped on Nagasaki. He survived, but was injured again, along with his wife and infant daughter.

86. An unnatural royal death

Edward II is said to have probably died in captivity, with later, unreliable accounts suggesting he was murdered by having a red-hot poker inserted into his rectum, September 1327. 

87. The oldest prosthetic

In 1997, an excavation near the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes revealed the oldest prosthesis ever discovered: an engraved wooden toe, fitted to the right foot of an Egyptian noblewoman who lived 3,000 years ago. The ‘Cairo toe’ was practical, modified over time to accommodate the woman’s gait. But it was also designed with aesthetics in mind, intended to be worn in open-toe sandals, not concealed.

88. Downfall by chicken

Having adopted the identity of John Palmer and posing as a horse trader in Yorkshire, highwayman Dick Turpin instigated his own demise by murdering hunting associate John Robinson’s game-cock on 2 October 1738. When Robinson angrily responded, Turpin threatened to also kill him, which brought the incident to the attention of three local justices.

89. Shortest war

The shortest war in history is the Anglo-Zanzibar war, on 27 August 1896. It started at 9.02 am and ended at 9.40am. 1 British soldier was injured. It followed the refusal of the Zanzibari Sultan to step down after the British issued an ultimatum. British warships then fired on his position and the Sultan surrendered.

90. ‘Groaning ale’

In early modern Europe and colonial America, a ‘groaning ale’ would be brewed when a woman became pregnant. The ale would mature over the course of the pregnancy, imbibed by mother and midwife as labour began, and then the remnants of the sterile, 8% liquid washed over the newborn.

91. Wrestler president

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was a skilled wrestler and reportedly won 300 bouts and had only one known defeat.

92. Out with their eyes!

Henry I gave permission for two of his granddaughters to be blinded and have the tips of their noses cut off after their father blinded the son of another baron. Their mother, Juliane, was so enraged she rebelled against Henry and attempted to kill him with a crossbow. She missed, leapt off her castle tower into the moat and made her escape.

93. Extraterrestrial prize

The (dwarf) planet Pluto was named by an 11-year-old schoolgirl who won the naming competition.

94. Stalin’s eldest son died in a German concentration camp

Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, was raised by an aunt and didn’t meet his father until he was 14. During the war, Yakov fought as a Russian soldier and was captured by the Nazis. After he was revealed to be Stalin’s son, the Nazis attempted to use Yakov as leverage, but Stalin refused to negotiate, stating: ‘You have in your hands not only my son Yakov but millions of my sons. Either you free them all or my son will share their fate.’

Yakov died at Sachsenhausen concentration camp while attempting to climb the camp’s electric fence. 

95. A fortunate escape

In 1865, a train carrying Charles Dickens crossed a viaduct which collapsed and fell into the river. He escaped with the manuscript of the novel Our Mutual Friend.

96. Largest palace ever built

In 200 BC, Emperor Gaozu of Han requested the building of Weiyang Palace complex north of modern Xi’an. Weiyang Palace has a claim to being the largest palace ever built on Earth: it covered 4.8 km2 (1,200 acres), which is nearly seven times the size of the current Forbidden City in Beijing or eleven times the size of the Vatican City, though little remains today.

97. Emu war

In 1932 the government of Western Australia declared war on emus, a native bird species that was damaging crops in the region. The government sent soldiers armed with machine guns to hunt the emus, who proved elusive.

Despite firing thousands of rounds of ammunition, the soldiers were able to kill ‘only a few’ emus before the government declared peace after less than a week.

98. Slow down!

On 28 January 1896, Walter Arnold drove his ‘horseless carriage’ through Paddock Wood, Kent, at a reckless 8mph – four times the 2mph speed limit. He also had no man with a red flag preceding him, as required by law. Arnold was chased down by a police officer on a bicycle, and later fined £4 7s, of which 10 shillings was for speeding – the world’s first recorded speeding ticket. 

99. Christmas is cancelled

A Christmas themed one from the brilliant Joanna McCunn on that old chestnut, did Cromwell ban Christmas…

In 1644 the Puritan parliament declared every last Wednesday of the month would be a legally mandated fast day. Christmas Day fell on the last Wednesday of the month so no feasting was to be allowed that year. Time should be spent in even more solemn humiliation, repenting of your sins for making Christmas a time of carnal and sensual delights in the past.

In 1647 they went the whole hog, banning all celebrations of Christmas and Easter for good! (Charles II reversed this when he came to the throne in 1660).

100. Knights and headwear

Never, ever refer to what I now know thanks to over one million social media corrections is OBVIOUSLY a crocheted knights helmet as a ‘knitted knight’s hat.’

Some of these facts plus many more are featured in History Hit’s Miscellany: Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds, published by Hodder & Stoughton, on sale now.

Today, it can take three flights to reach Lofoten from London and, once on the Norwegian archipelago, it can feel as though you are on the edge of the world. But in the Viking era, it was quite the opposite: the islands were actually knitted into trade, social, business and political networks that spread right across northern and western Europe.

In fact, Lofoten was home to the biggest Viking house that has ever been found. Uncovered by archaeologists on the island of Vestvågøy in 1983, this longhouse is thought to have belonged to successive Lofoten chieftains. A reconstruction has since been built 40 metres from the excavation site, and forms part of the Lofotr Viking Museum.

This article is an edited transcript of Vikings of Lofoten on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 16 April 2016.

The biggest Viking house ever found

The reconstructed longhouse that forms part of the Lofotr Viking Museum. Credit: Jörg Hempel / Commons

The excavated remains and the reconstruction reveal the house to be enormous – it measured 83 metres long, nine metres wide and about nine metres high. The building’s size is unsurprising given that it served as the home of the archipelago’s rich and powerful chieftains, with the last occupant believed to be Olaf of Lofoten.

The chieftain would have lived in the house with his family, as well as his most trusted men and women – around 40 to 50 people altogether. But it wasn’t just people who lived there. Half of the house served as a large barn that was home to horses and cows. A gold-plated horse harness was excavated from the site of the original barn – an indicator of the chieftains’ status and wealth.

The original house on the site was built in around 500 AD but later made bigger and longer, and rebuilt and restructured a couple of times. The house on which the reconstruction is based was built in around the year 900 – around 100 years after the start of the Viking era.

At that point, Vikings from Scandanavia were attacking as far as England and Ireland, and on the verge of settling Iceland and even places across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Olaf of Lofoten – and Iceland?

The last Viking chieftain to have lived in the house – Olaf – is thought to have left for Iceland, and there is a possible reference to him in one of the Icelandic sagas:

“There came a man from Lofotr, Olaf was his name.” 

“Lofotr” was the former name of Vestvågøy but later given to the whole of the island group. In English, however, the archipelago is referred to as “Lofoten”.

To have travelled to Iceland at that time and to have conquered new land, a Viking would have needed to have been rich and powerful. They would have needed a ship, horses and enough money to fund resettling there. As the Lofoten chieftain, Olaf likely would have had all of that. So the chances are very good that he did indeed go to Iceland.

Inside the reconstructed chieftain’s house

The reconstruction enables visitors to get a feel for a Viking chieftain’s house, albeit minus the livestock. Vast and echo-y, it’s a dramatic space and has a sort of grandeur to it. Plastic and metal are nowhere to be seen, with both the building itself and the furniture made of wood.

The walls, meanwhile, are covered with sheep and reindeer skins, giving the building a cosy feel despite its vastness. It’s easy to imagine spending a Viking winter there, coming in from the terrible weather outside when there would have been a fire going, the smell of smoke and tar mixing with the smell of food cooking in the air, and the sounds of craftspeople working all around.

A resourceful people

Whether they were building ships or remarkable buildings like the chieftain’s house on Lofoten, the Vikings proved themselves to be extraordinary craftspeople who were phenomenally good at working with wood, textiles and metal. And they had to be in order to survive some pretty tricky weather.

They also had to make use of the resources that were to hand or relatively easily accessible. Wood wasn’t plentiful on the Lofoten Islands, but the Vikings didn’t have to travel too far by boat in order to import the big trees needed for the kind of work seen at the Lofoten chieftain’s house, which includes huge pillars decorated with beautiful hand-carvings.

When it came to metal work, the Vikings made – among other things – jewellery and sword grips that were rich with ornaments and so detailed that, even if they had been produced today, you might find it hard to believe they were handmade.

Meanwhile, unlike today where we see water as representing a barrier, the Vikings on Lofoten were at the centre of a trading network. As seafarers, they could travel extensively and reach London or central Europe in just a few days; in some respects they were actually at the centre of the world.

Of course, back then, Lofoten was still at the top of the world. But it was a very rich part of the world when it came to resources. So it’s easy to understand why people decided to live there. There was plenty of fish in the sea, as well as other marine life to live off. There would have been game in the forests and lots of other natural resources available that would have been greatly sought after in other parts of the world.

I have been fortunate to gain their unique insight and learn coping strategies for life’s many challenges – how to keep going in the face of adversity, how to have faith when all seems lost, how to forgive, how to be a good parent or husband. Preserving their stories is one of the best things about the work I have been lucky enough to do. But a few years ago I met one veteran who left a particular impression. Without his advice I would not be writing this, without whom there may very well be no History Hit at all.

Alastair Urquhart was just 19 when he was conscripted to serve King and Country in 1939. The young man found himself on a ship to the Far East. He was to be part of a British imperial force which would hopefully dissuade the Japanese from striking through South East Asia into the resource rich European colonies of the East Indies. The deterrence did not work. The Japanese invasion came and caught the British by surprise.

February 1942: British troops surrender to the Japanese in the city area, after the unconditional surrender of all British forces following the successful invasion of Malaya and Singapore.

Two mighty naval battleships were sunk and British forces quickly found themselves pushed back to the fortress of Singapore, the rock of their East Asian empire. Alastair told me of the surprise they all felt. They couldn’t believe the Japanese could inflict such a string of defeats upon the British. Then the unimaginable happened and Singapore surrendered.  80,000 British and imperial troops went into captivity.

For Alastair this was just the start of a horrific experience that would leave him traumatised for decades to come. Like many others he was then sent to work on the infamous Burma Railroad. With insufficient food they hacked their way through the most inhospitable terrain, beset by tropical diseases, whilst being continually beaten and humiliated by their captors.

I met Alastair in his cosy house on the east coast of Scotland in 2015. He played me his favourite music and even did a little dance, clutching two walking sticks. After the war he became a champion ballroom dancer. A world far, far removed from the nightmare in Burma. He described his captivity graphically and the effect it had on his mental state.

After a few months he stopped making friends because of the pain of seeing them die of disease or watching them beaten to death. His coping strategy was one of remaining absolutely alone. He remembers clearly that never once in the camps did he hear laughter, and went for years without hearing a bar of music. He caught cholera while working at Hellfire Pass, one of the biggest cuttings on the Death Railway.

Hellfire was so-called because it was lit by flaming torches which cast a ghoulish light on the bent and broken malnourished labourers that hacked at the living rock. He was sent back to Singapore to be transported to Japan where the demands of total war created an insatiable demand for manpower.

He embarked on one of a fleet of ships known as ‘Hell Ships’. They were the worst part of his time in captivity he told me. They were shoved into the hold of a cargo ship and men fought for floor space to lie down on. “We were reduced to animals,” he told me. The ship was sunk by an American submarine the crew of which had no idea of its human cargo. By pure luck he was one of a very few survivors.

After days clinging to wreckage he was picked up, covered in oil by Japanese fisherman who beat him unconscious. Once in Japan he was sent to a camp near the city of Nagasaki where he was worked relentlessly. Then, in August 1945 while he was cleaning the officers’ latrines he saw a searing flash and was blown across the room. The Americans had dropped their second nuclear bomb and within days the war was over.

Alastair was liberated and taken down through the wasteland that had been Nagasaki to the docks where he was hosed down with sea water, his first wash for three and a half years. Once aboard the US aircraft carrier he heard music again, it was Glenn Miller’s Sentimental Journey.

Alastair told me that he was still a captive. The memories besieged him 70 years later. He was in his nineties but his survival was miraculous. He had suffered from multiple cancers, possibly as a result of his exposure to radiation. The tropical diseases caused many enduring complications to his health and his mind had also never fully healed.

By coincidence when I met Alastair I had been feeling a bit sorry for myself. I knew my time as a broadcaster for major TV channels was coming to an end. I felt helpless and a bit hopeless. I did not know what the future would hold. I was gripped with a rising panic that a career and lifestyle that I loved might be coming to an end. I knew I wanted to start a podcast, launch a website, maybe even a TV channel, but I didn’t have a clue where to start or who to go to for help.

I ended up telling Alastair about it all. My small, stupid, egotistical worries instantly faded as soon as I articulated them to him. But beyond that, Alastair gave me some advice. He simply said that what got him through everything, during the war and since, was a determination never ever to give up. I left his house feeling a little ashamed that I was anxious about the future when compared to Alastair’s experiences I had literally nothing to worry about. But I also felt a calm resolution. I was not going to go without a fight. I was not going to give up. I was going to persist, and if necessary fail, but I was not going to give up.

Alastair Urquhart died less than a year later. His example, his writing and his wisdom have changed the lives of so many people, and they changed mine too. It was one of those chance meetings that can transform our lives. Years later my ambition to build History Hit is a reality. Luck has played a bigger part than I’d like to admit, but thanks to Alastair Urquhart I kept at it, and for that advice at that time, as well as for so much else, I will remember him.

On 10 June 2022, the dramatic discovery of a royal shipwreck from 1682 was revealed to the public for the first time. Four years of searching over 5,000 nautical miles culminated in discovering the location of HMS Gloucester, which ran aground while carrying the future king James Stuart. It’s arguably the most important maritime discovery since the Mary Rose.

HMS Gloucester was built as the modern British navy was itself being forged. It was laid down by the victorious military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. He knew that his new Republic was vulnerable to foreign invasion, and an army landing on the coast would have the heir to the executed Charles I in its baggage train, Charles Stuart, the penniless prince who wandered through western Europe looking for a backer to seize back his father’s throne. So Cromwell’s British state maintained a mighty army and built the best navy yet.

Men of talent captained ships irrespective of their birth. Ships were built and maintained in dockyards that were funded properly by the standards of the time. Gloucester played its part in the wars that sprang from Cromwell’s religiously inspired foreign policies. It was Britain’s destiny to wrench the New World from the papist Spaniards and Gloucester sailed to the West Indies in an expedition which enjoyed very mixed success and showed God’s will was slightly more ambiguous than Cromwell thought….

When Cromwell died Prince Charles was summoned as an alternative to war or anarchy and placed on the throne of his father as Charles II, Gloucester was quickly renamed HMS Gloucester, its identity rebranded with the stroke of a pen. It would go on to fight the Dutch, in a series of battles between neighbours over control of the trade that flowed into Europe from Asia and the Americas. After three tumultuous decades Gloucester’s career came to an end, not in battle, but while carrying a crew of VIPs to Scotland including Charles’ brother and heir, the Duke of York, the future James II.

The Wreck of the Gloucester off Yarmouth, 6 May 1682, by Johan Danckerts.

Image Credit: Public Domain

The weather was reasonable on the morning of 6 May, 1682. But the sea is treacherous on that coastline even in good conditions and at 0530 Gloucester slammed into a sandbank. Within an hour she had gone down and perhaps 200 people were dead. Naval administrator (and secret diarist) Samuel Pepys, who witnessed events from another ship in the fleet, wrote his own account.

He described the harrowing experience for victims and survivors, with some picked up “half dead” from the water. The Duke of York made it off, as did John Churchill the future Duke of Marlborough (who would betray James in 1688) but men like Robert Ker, 3rd Earl of Roxburghe, would not.

A spectacular archaeological discovery

It was the end of the story of the Gloucester until the Barnwell brothers made it their business to find her. For four years they searched, trailing a magnetometer, a maritime metal detector, behind their boat looking for a metal signature on the seabed. In 2007 they picked something up a signal, kitted up and went diving to check it. There on the seabed they found a mass of 17th century cannon.

Brothers Julian (L) and Lincoln (R) Barnwell with the ship’s bell.

The Barnwell brothers are that classic sort of British enthusiast that makes your heart swell with patriotic pride. Passionate about history and their corner of the country, more at home on the water than on the land, and eccentric enough to spend every spare moment and pound of cash in a hopeless search for a lost ship. But they did it. In the years that followed they found the all important ship’s bell which definitely identified the wreck as Gloucester.

It is a spectacular archaeological discovery and will give us an unparalleled insight into the world of the 17th Century navy, the crucible for the almost unbeatable Royal Navy of the 18th Century. On top of that, the objects on board include some of the oldest intact wine bottles we have. Corks still in! Glass seals on bottles was the fancy new fashion and every aristocrat aboard seemed to have his own stash. Fascinatingly one of the bottles bears a glass seal with the crest of the Legge family – ancestors of George Washington, the first US President. That crest features the stars and stripes, so a forerunner of the American flag and Presidential insignia.

For anyone who loves maritime archaeology, this is a huge find and the excavation is only just beginning.

The fact that a few days later a desperate band of 18 survivors made it to the Spanish coast in one of the surviving open boats did little to detract from the sense of catastrophe. In a flash around 470 men had died, more than had perished in the great sea battle against Napoleon’s fleet off Trafalgar. Just as tragic was the fact that, as The Times lamented, “this wreck is that of one of the finest ships in the world.”

It was supposed to embody the giant technological lead enjoyed by Victorian Britain. It was a moment of drama and hubris. HMS Captain was built to extend the Royal Navy’s long era of hegemony into a new industrial era of iron built ships and gigantic guns. It had been the subject of debates in Parliament and column inches in newspapers. The navy had agreed to the building of Captain after a genuinely popular campaign. Now only months after it was commissioned, Captain was gone. 

Conditions in the Bay of Biscay

Four days before this news spoiled the breakfast of readers across the country, the British combined Mediterranean and Channel Squadrons had been cruising off Cape Finisterre – pretty much the north-west tip of Spain. A part of the ocean infamous for the autumn gales that scream in off the Atlantic, driving mountainous seas whipped to a particular frenzy by the rapid shallowing of the seabed as it soars from the deep Atlantic to the shallower coastal plain of Biscay.

Over thousands of years the Bay of Biscay has ruined ships, and the ambitions of men. Many Armadas and fleets that had left port with certain prospects of victory have been smashed to matchwood in Biscay. 

The wind increased throughout 6 September. None of the hybrid ships, some of iron, others of wood, with an assortment of weapon systems, had powerful enough steam engines to drive them through rough ocean weather and they relied on sails, flying from towering masts. HMS Captain, the newest addition, launched in 1869 but only fully commissioned in spring of 1870, was no exception. As the wind increased her crew scurried aloft to reef and furl sail. The heavier the weather, the less canvas is needed to harness the wind. 

HMS Captain at Chatham 1869

Design decisions

The squadron’s commander in chief was aboard Captain to see how his new ship performed. He summoned his barge and rejoined his flagship, his decision perhaps influenced by the Captain’s wild heeling from side to side and the white water that crashed across its deck.

HMS Captain was built unlike any of his other ships. She was low in the water, sleek, with huge guns mounted – not all along the edge of the ship in checkered gun-ports – but in armoured turrets that could swivel around. Her designer, and the chief lobbyist for her construction was Captain Cowper Coles. He believed, rightly, that the future of naval gunnery was in these big turret-mounted monsters, but he was wrong to think that future had arrived. The ship still needed masts and miles of rope rigging to hold the structure aloft and work the sails.

To operate the guns without shredding the rigging, he took the hugely controversial decision to mount these turrets below the level of the main deck. The Admiralty had objected. Cowper Coles had launched a national campaign to get them to change their minds. The public, journalists and MPs were thrilled at the prospect at a miraculous new super ship, and the Admiralty was forced to allow Cowper Coles to build it in a private yard on the Mersey. But, they said, on his head be it. 

HMS Captain, 1869, on deck

A violent squall

In the first minutes of 7 September, Captain Cowper Coles was worried for his head. He was aboard his precious Captain and she was heeling violently from side to side. Other ships in the squadron recorded that a particularly violent squall blasted the fleet just after midnight. Wind speeds reached over 60 knots, as mountainous 50 foot waves lifted and rolled her iron hull. The ship’s captain, Hugh Talbot Burgoyne had won a Victoria Cross for valour as a young man, and he needed all his courage in the face of an enemy more terrifying than any human foe.

The squall caught the few scraps of canvas his ship still had up and heeled her over. He roared at his men to let go the sheets of the topsails and let them flap but it was too late. The ship passed the point of no return. It kept heeling over until the black water surged across the starboard guardrail, swamping the deck. Men in the rigging were plunged into the water, instantly entangled in a spiderweb of rope. She kept rolling, down plunged the masts into the darkness. 

A handful of lucky men ran up her upturned hull as she turned the other way and clung to the keel. She had spun 180 degrees. For a few moments air pockets inside kept her afloat. Their crewmates trapped a few inches below them in a world of darkness, turned upside down. For up to 10 minutes Captain bobbed inverted, an instant between life and death, before she sank to the seabed. 

Only a few pieces of rigging and the ships boats, small tenders torn from their deck mountings, remained on the surface. 18 men clambered into one and survived a further ordeal before they reached safety. 

The sinking of HMS Captain as featured in The Illustrated London News, volume LVII, 24 September 1870

Image Credit: Edwin Weedon in The Illustrated London News, volume LVII, 24 September 1870 / Public Domain

Naval inquiry

Among the dead were sons of the First Sea Lord and a senior government minister, a reflection of the prestige that serving aboard the ship commanded. Alongside them The Times reported a further high profile victim. “The loss of Captain Cowper Coles in the ship which was the final result of his genius is at once the most melancholy and the most disastrous element in this calamity. Captain Coles was, practically, the inventor of the greatest naval improvement of modern times.”

This last sentence must have caused some of their Lordships at the Admiralty to choke on their morning kipper. Many professional naval officers and architects had been deeply suspicious of this ship, indeed they tried to stop it being built at all.

The naval inquiry issued an unprecedented and stinging rebuke to… the British public. The ship, they found, had not been stable, it had been a death trap. The navy had been forced to acquiesce to its build “in deference to public opinion expressed in Parliament and through other channels, and in opposition to views and opinions of the Controller and his Department.” An era of technological transformation had got everyone carried away. In future, shipbuilding should be left to the professionals. 

150 years later, a team is now looking for the Captain. Dr Howard Fuller, guest on a recent episode of Dan Snow’s History Hit, is leading a team from the University of Wolverhampton. They have identified a possible wreck and are raising money to send an underwater vehicle down to check it out. If you want to learn more, or support the work of Dr Fuller’s team, please head to www.findthecaptain.co.uk 

The most senior German naval officers were desperate to prove themselves before the start of Hitler’s giant invasion of the Soviet Union later in the summer. As soon as their newest battleship, Bismarck, the world’s biggest and most powerful commissioned warship, was ready it was sent to sea. Its mission was to scythe through Britain’s vulnerable supply lines from the rest of the world – ships carrying the food, raw materials and oil to keep Britain’s people fed, and its war industries running.

Britain sent the battleships of its Home Fleet to sea, and scrambled to redeploy resources all over the Atlantic from Gibraltar to the coast of the Americas. Ever since Renaissance princes like James IV of Scotland and his southern rival Henry VIII had placed cannon on ships, battleships had dominated the world’s oceans.

The mighty clash at Jutland in 1916 saw a clash of the two most powerful fleets of battleships ever assembled as Britain and Germany fought for control of the seas. Many survivors of that clash were aboard the ships that now, once again, were at war. This time around revolutionary new weapon systems, in their infancy at Jutland, were now capable of changing the course of war at sea.

The first sighting

Bismarck was located from the air. A reconnaissance Spitfire flew over the Norwegian fjords in which the battleship and its accompanying vessels, like the cruiser Prinz Eugen, were anchored on 21 May. It was electrifying news – the commander of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow despatched two of his battleships, Hood and Prince of Wales to beef up the British presence in the North Atlantic, and placed his other ships on standby.

The German flotilla left Norway and passed through the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. On 23 May, the smaller British ships Norfolk and Suffolk picked up the scent and shadowed the Germans, radioing in their positions. Norfolk got too close in the freezing fog and Bismarck fired her guns in anger for the first time. The British cruiser was ‘straddled’ by giant shells (landing either side of the ship) and was lucky to escape only with superficial damage.

The following dawn was beautiful. The sea was, briefly, relatively smooth, and reflected the glorious pinks of the sunrise. Watching seamen felt it an appropriate backdrop, because the Royal Navy’s battleships had found the Germans and were closing to intercept – battle was inevitable.

‘The Mighty Hood‘ and the Prince of Wales

Hood was feted as the most powerful warship on earth, but it was old, and due an upgrade to her deck armour. Prince of Wales was conversely so new that civilian engineers were still aboard trying to finish her. Admiral Holland, aboard Hood, thought the best thing to do was close the range as quickly as possible and batter Bismarck, which together they outgunned.

At 0552 the British guns roared sending three quarter of a ton high explosive shells over 14 miles to the German ships. Steaming hard into the wind the spray blinded some of their range finding gear and the rear turrets could not be brought to bear.

Aboard Bismarck the admiral, Lütjens, seemed temporarily paralysed. He had hoped to avoid fighting British capital ships and here was the mighty Hood charging into action. Bismarck’s Captain Lindemann took matters into his own hands and ordered his gunnery officer to open fire saying, “I will not let my ship be shot out from under my arse.”

The Germans scored hits on the British, in return the Prince of Wales managed to send a shell slicing through Bismarck’s forecastle, not exploding but causing significant damage. Unfortunately for the British the impact of that damage would be measured in hours and days, whereas the fate of this battle would be decided in seconds.

At 0559 Holland felt he had closed the range enough and ordered his ships to turn and present their full broadsides to the Germans. As Hood responded to his command, she steered straight into the path of a salvo from Bismarck. One shell crashed down through the deck armour, into the bowels of the ship and seems to have detonated in a magazine – this caused an astonishing chain reaction which saw Hood torn apart by a gigantic explosion.

The shattered remnant of her hull sank within seconds taking 1,415 men to the bottom. Just three survivors were later picked up.

German battleship Bismarck firing at HMS Hood

Image Credit: Alamy

Prince of Wales now faced Bismarck and Prinz Eugen’s fire alone. One shell smashed into the bridge and killed or wounded nearly everyone present. Another punched through its armour and came to rest in the depths of the ship. It failed to ignite, had it done so the ship may have joined the Hood. Within a couple of minutes the Prince of Wales put down a smoke screen and made its escape.

Hunting down the Bismarck

The British were appalled, while in Germany Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, made the most of this stunning victory. Churchill described the next few days as the toughest of the war so far. Bismarck managed to give the shadowing British ships the slip, and threatened to take a terrible toll on the convoys that represented Britain’s lifeline.

Every ship available was redirected to hunt down and destroy the German battleship. An ancient British battleship Rodney had been on its way for a refit in America – it was turned around, and other ships were told to abandon their convoy duties and join the hunt.

Bismarck in fact was not hell-bent on destroying merchant ships but was heading for a friendly port, in occupied France, to repair the damage caused by the Prince of Wales. The problem for the Royal Navy was that she had managed to give her pursuers the slip under cover of darkness.

Map of the Operation “Rheinübung” and Royal Navy operations against the German battleship Bismarck, with approximate movements of ship groups and places of aerial attacks.

Image Credit: Wikimedia: Citypeek / CC

A grim 24 hours followed for the British until, thanks to intercepted radio messages, decoded by Bletchley Park, and a flying boat operating out of Northern Ireland, Bismarck was found. She was 700 miles northwest of Brest and would be under protective Luftwaffe shore-based fighter cover within a day. The only British asset that might be able to stop her was the contingent of torpedo bombers aboard HMS Ark Royal steaming up from Gibraltar.

The sinking of the Bismarck

At dusk on 26 May, in mountainous seas and a full gale, canvas Swordfish biplanes carrying torpedoes clawed their way into the air and headed around 50 miles to attack Bismarck. Flying so low the wind blew sea spray into the cockpits, the Swordfish made their heroic attempt. Bismarck fired its main armament, sending up giant walls of water which further drenched the aircraft and crews.

Two torpedoes found their targets, one caused some minor flooding as it hit Bismarck’s heavily armoured hull, the other, by absolute fluke hit the German giant’s Achilles Heel, her unprotected steering gear. The rudders were disabled, the port rudder remained jammed at an angle, despite everything the crew could do to free it up.

That night the German admiral reported that his ship was unmanoeuvrable, but “We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.” Neither Bismarck nor the Führer had long to live.

All that night small destroyers harassed Bismarck, denying its crew any respite or sleep. On 27 May, two British battleships emerged out of the gloomy dawn. They had been able to close the gap with the disabled Bismarck and now closed for the kill.

The German was still a terrible threat, she straddled Rodney with one of her first salvoes. But unable to steer properly, battered by giant waves, her aim deteriorated. British shells started to smash into her superstructure. After 20 minutes of battle a shell blew up on her bridge and the German admiral, captain and their staffs were killed. After further terrible punishment, at 0930 the senior surviving German officer ordered his men to abandon ship.

Bismarck was a shambles, its superstructure carved into a grotesque, smoking ruin, fires throughout, scenes of carnage on board that defy description. Aboard one of the British battleships a chaplain took the highly unusual step of begging the senior officers to ceasefire. He was politely told to back off.

Eventually the battleships, dangerously low on fuel and nervous about the submarine threat, broke off the engagement and it was left to the smaller HMS Dorsetshire to fire torpedoes into Bismarck from point-blank range. The pride of Hitler’s navy sank at 1040.

Drawing of the sinking of the Bismarck

Image Credit: Alamy

Britain undefeated

Britain had despatched the greatest threat to its control of the Atlantic. It had required the biggest naval effort of the war thus far and had cost the totemic Hood, with damage to others. But Churchill was determined to demonstrate the commitment and capacity of the Royal Navy to the Americans, who he was actively encouraging to enter the war, and the destruction of Bismarck allowed him to do just that.

Conversely Hitler was furious, he restricted the flow of supplies to his fleet, denied them freedom to operate as they wished and turned his back on a maritime strategy. He was to become absorbed in his invasion of the Soviet Union, due to be launched in a few weeks’ time. But he would turn east with Britain undefeated in the west, her supply lines to the rest of the world intact.

But archaeologists have analysed the stone and discovered that its carvings are far from arbitrary. The etchings depict the route of the Odet river and its many tributaries, making it the oldest cartographical representation of a known territory in Europe.

Overlooked

When the slab of rock was discovered in 1900, during an archaeological excavation of a prehistoric burial ground in Finistère, western Brittany, it was largely overlooked.

The rock formed one of the walls of a little stone coffin-like box used to hold the corpses of the dead. The engraved surface was facing the inside of the tomb. The team who recovered it, led by local archaeologist Paul du Chatellier, must have been unimpressed. The slab with some scratches on it didn’t make the grade. It was put into storage in the cellars of Mr Chatellier’s castle, the Château de Kernuz.

Lifting and positioning the Saint-Belec slab in the cellar of the Château de Saint-Germain-en Laye.

Image Credit: Clément Nicolas, Yvan Pailler

Rediscovery

Recently, the slab was re-found, and re-examined by a team that included Dr Clément Nicolas from Bournemouth University. Clément explained to History Hit that they used high-resolution 3D surveys and photogrammetry to try and get a sense of what the engravings depicted.

When the results came back, it was clear that there were repeated symbols engraved in the slab, joined by lines. To Clément and his team, it looked strangely like a map.

But that would surely be impossible? A Bronze Age map, on a 4,000-year-old stone, would pre-date Europe’s oldest known maps by thousands of years. They rushed to get a contemporary map to act as an overlay. To their amazement, it matched.

Finding meaning

Dominant on the map is about 18 miles of the river we call the Odet. Its tributaries are also shown. Clément told History Hit it was stunningly accurate, perhaps even 80% so.

The Saint-Belec slab

Image Credit: Musée Archéologie Nationale

As a result of all their work, the team are able to say that this is the earliest known European map. It is a stunning indication of our ancestors’ geographical knowledge and sophistication. The map’s creators were people with a far more advanced understanding of topography than we had ever given them credit for.

What was it for? Was it of practical use? Was it decorative, used by a chief or king to show off the extent of his territory? It is impossible to know.

Onwards

What is exciting is that, according to Clément, there are symbols on the map that make no sense in the modern landscape. These could be the site of burial grounds or settlements which are lost to the modern eye. Clément is going to use the next year to explore that part of Brittany to see if the map can lead us to any Bronze Age sites, nearly four millennia after it was created.

Photographing the Saint-Bélec slab.

Image Credit: P. Stephan, Clément Nicolas, Yvan Pailler

Mel Gibson and Daniel Day Lewis both led historical epics set during the American Revolution, while the period’s naval battles have found cinematic treatments in Master and Commander (2003) and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extraordinary, Oscar-winning film The Revenant (2015) depicts a terrible encounter on the North American frontier. And one of the most ambitious film projects ever undertaken, Waterloo (1970), presents a gigantic depiction of the essential battle that determined Napoleon Bonaparte’s downfall.

Join me as I review battle scenes in movies set in the Age of Revolutions.

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The Patriot (2000)

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The Patriot depicts the Battle of Camden, where the Americans attempt to fight the British on level terms. It shows the two lines getting close and exchanging musket volleys. You also see an ambush scene, which I think is slightly overblown.

But it does give you a sense of the advantage that the Americans sought by using rifles. They used their skills as marksmen to prey on isolated British detachments.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

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Pirates, really like the Vikings before them, want to attack where the enemy is weakest. Attacking the heart of British power in the Caribbean, Port Royal – that would be crazy. It’s expensive and difficult to repair your ship if there’s battle damage, and you don’t want to lose casualties. It’s tough recruiting people.

As a result, this scene is pretty unrealistic. The pirates were much more likely to have sailed along the coast, looking for settlements that were undefended, and pounce on ships that might be carrying valuable cargoes. Pirates of the Caribbean: great fun, not super accurate.

The Revenant (2015)

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This attack is one of the most extraordinary scenes in history. The group of fur trappers in the opening are heading upcountry towards the Rockies to hunt for beaver. Beaver skins were miracle goods of the 19th century: everyone wanted them for hats and to keep warm.

Leonardo DiCaprio is playing a character based on a historical figure. We think he’s called Hugh Glass. There are a few accounts of his life; many of them are probably wound up with mythologizing and folklore, but it seems that he was abducted by pirates, had to serve on a pirate ship, swam ashore, then had various adventures on the frontier including one very near death experience with indigenous people which saw his mate killed in front of him.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

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There would have been so-called frigate actions like the one depicted in Master and Commander fairly regularly through the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve never seen a better depiction of fighting at sea.

We don’t know exactly what happened, but I think they’ve gone through the sources, looked at technology that was available, and come up with a pretty convincing portrayal of what it would have been like.

Replica ship at Baja Studios

Image Credit: Comisión Mexicana de Filmaciones, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

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It’s a true historical event that Last of the Mohicans depicts. The French are advancing from Canada, besieging the British garrison of Fort William Henry at Lake George. In the film, no one knows the siege is taking place which I think isn’t actually the case.

The Last of the Mohicans is a wonderful film, however, even if the ambush which takes place didn’t quite go down like the way it depicts.

Waterloo (1970)

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This is an unbelievable scene depicting Napoleon’s last roll of the dice. The French cavalry ride across the battlefield to encounter massed British and allied squares, bayonets pointed outwards, though there are probably slightly too many squares here.

The cavalry swirl around them, unable to rout the troops. This is an impressive battle scene, and Waterloo itself is one of the most ambitious film projects ever undertaken.

The Endurance22 team have carried out minutely detailed laser scans, filmed the wreck with high-resolution 4k cameras and broadcast those images to the world.

The wreck is in an astonishing state of preservation, at the absolute upper limit of what the Endurance22 team were hoping to find. The cold water temperatures mean that no wood-eating organisms live in this part of Antarctica. The paintwork is glistening, the nails still shine, the planks look like new. The name Endurance on the stern is still in its original colours.

As we watched the footage from the seabed there were amazed exclamations. After weeks of searching, and several false dawns, we had found Endurance.

The elusive ship

Shackleton entered the Weddell Sea in 1914, despite warnings from whalers on South Georgia that it was a record ice year and attempting to sail through the Weddell Sea to the Antarctic mainland would be impossible. As predicted, Endurance was caught in the ice in January 1915.

Endurance, stuck in the ice of the Weddell Sea, 1915.

Image Credit: GRANGER / Alamy Stock Photo

By October 1915, Shackleton and his men were forced to abandon her as the ice snapped her beams and tore off her rudder. On 21 November 1915, her stern swung into the air and she descended into the black water. Within minutes the pool that she left froze over.

Rediscovered

I came aboard the South African icebreaker Agulhas II in early February 2022 with the Endurance22 expedition. We left Cape Town and spent 10 days negotiating the swells and winds of the Southern Ocean.

By 5 March 2022, we were into our last week searching for the wreck in the Weddell Sea. The temperature was plummeting, ice was building and we could have been forced to abandon the search at any minute.

Then the AUV pilot and monitoring team saw something. It was big, and it had height, sitting well clear of the seabed. In a vast area of featureless seabed, it looked manmade.

The bow of Shackleton’s sunken Endurance. Weddell Sea, Antarctica, March 2022.

Image Credit: Endurance22

Finding Endurance

As the AUV went in for a closer look, a wall of wood appeared out of the darkness. It was Endurance’s port side. The paintwork was still intact, the planks looked like new, held in place by twinkling nails. All hell broke loose.

I was overwhelmed by a wave of relief, of deep gratitude that we would not be going back empty-handed. That the hard work and belief of so many people would be rewarded.

The drone was recovered and recharged. People worked fast, the deck fizzing with energy. Back into the water went the drone, every pass over the target yielding stunning images and data. Endurance lay on her keel, as intact as she had been in the last photos of her by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. There were smashed plates on the deck, hatchways and ladders clearly visible.

The water was clear, with a visibility of 30m at least. It felt like time travel. It was overwhelming. As the drone was piloted around the stern of the ship, we got the view we hadn’t dared hope for: the five-pointed star, and above it, the letters spelling out Endurance, still bright gold.

The sunken stern of Endurance, with the gold star and lettering visible. Weddell Sea, Antarctica, March 2022.

Image Credit: Endurance22

Celebrations

In the hours that followed, the crew headed onto the surrounding ice flow to celebrate. We played football and watched penguins. I took myself off with my copy of Shackleton’s book. I read the passages about the loss of Endurance.

I kept thinking about those 28 men who watched Endurance sink, metres away from where I sat. At the time, the idea that one day humans might be able to reach down and inspect the wreck was absurd. Subsea operations were in their infancy. The primitive submarines being used in World War One were tested to depths of 50m. Some scientists had managed to broadcast moving images but certainly not from underwater. Yet here we are just over 100 years later able to watch a live feed from the seabed kilometres below us.

I think they would have been thrilled that the story of Endurance had not come to an end that day in November 1915. The story of Endurance is still being told.

Read more about the discovery of Endurance. Explore the history of Shackleton and the Age of Exploration. Visit the official Endurance22 website.