HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-09-28T09:59:35.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/maritime-history/feed/atom James Osborne <![CDATA[Was the British Empire really built on drugs? The unlikely rise of an imperial superpower]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/was-the-british-empire-really-built-on-drugs/ 2026-09-28T09:59:35.000Z 2026-09-25T13:25:05.000Z Lin Zexu was a Chinese official acting on the behalf of the Qing dynasty emperor. In 1839, he set about attempting to suppress an illegal trade, and started to demand that foreign merchants surrender their opium at Canton, now Guangzhou, in southern China. More than 20,000 chests were handed over and destroyed. The British government responded with military escalation, beginning a conflict that would end three years later in 1842 – the First Opium War. The fighting ended with China compelled to open additional ports to British trade and cede Hong Kong Island.
Why go to war over such a specific issue? Because behind the confrontation was a deeply ingrained (and lucrative) system of British-backed pan-Asian commerce that connected Indian cultivators, Asian merchants and British imperial finances.
This system was so interlinked that, argues historian Benjamin Robert Siegel, “you couldn’t have had the British Empire if you didn't have opium. And this is not just a bold assertion. The numbers back it up.”
An Asian commodity
Britain certainly didn’t introduce opium to Asia. “Opium is an Asian story, first” Siegel explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Derived from the opium poppy, it had long been used across the continent for its medicinal and otherwise intoxicating effects. “It’s an important cash crop, a commodity that gets traded in the Mughal Empire and the Ottoman Empire.”
The Mughal Empire had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent. The Ottoman Empire, centred on modern Turkey, connected territories across western Asia, southeastern Europe and north Africa. Opium circulated through established commercial networks within and between these regions.
- Read more | What caused the First Opium War?
But British imperial expansion changed the level of opium production, and its political significance.
“It becomes very clear that this is a powerful substance, not just for what it does in the body, but for what it means economically, what it means at a global scale.”
This was due to the substance’s overlapping functions.
“Opium is a medicine, it's a vice, it's an important tax base, it's a diplomatic weapon.”
From fields to auctions
The principal institution behind Britain’s expansion in India was initially the East India Company: a commercial corporation that acquired new territory, collected taxes and maintained armies.
As its power spread from Bengal during the later 18th century, it developed a monopoly over opium production and sale in the territories under its control. The purpose of this monopoly was to allow “the expanding British state in India to manage the flow of opium,” Siegel says. British Crown rule, established in 1858, inherited the system.
The crop’s cultivators received advance payments tied to producing the crop and had to deliver it to the government at fixed prices. The opium was processed and sold at auctions in Calcutta, now Kolkata. Private merchants then carried it towards overseas markets.
This was an extensive agricultural operation. Research identifies more than a million farmers under contract annually, involving more people across their households. Siegel describes these cultivators as “often working in very difficult conditions, often against their will,” though he points out that “historians of the 19th century debate this”.
The returns to government were considerable. One research estimate puts opium at roughly 15 per cent of colonial revenues in India at its mid-century peak. This was revenue for the Indian administration, rather than 15 per cent of all British imperial income.
Enter China
China offered a large market for opium, although its government prohibited the trade. Foreign merchants and Chinese intermediaries nevertheless brought opium to consumers through smuggling networks.
For British commerce, the trade also helped address a persistent imbalance. Britain operated at a significant trade deficit with China, importing Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, though Chinese demand for British products remained limited. Opium sales helped finance purchases that would otherwise require substantial exports of silver.
- Read more | Your guide to the Opium Wars
For Chinese officials, consumption and the outflow of silver were pressing concerns. Lin’s intervention in 1839 – his attempt to stem the flow of the banned substance into the country – brought those concerns into direct conflict with foreign commercial interests.
After the conflict was triggered – and resolved – Britain fought again in the Second Opium War, from 1856 to 1860, this time alongside France. The conflict involved wider demands for diplomatic access and commercial privileges, but opium remained central to the relationship. The resulting settlement opened further opportunities for foreign trade, and opium imports became legal under tariff arrangements.
As Siegel puts it, Britain went to war “to keep the Chinese market open”.
Indian opium merchants
However, British officials weren’t in control of every opium route. In Malwa, a region of central India, Indian rulers, bankers and merchants developed an alternative trade, shipping opium through Bombay, now Mumbai.
“There are princes, merchant families, bankers, and they come up with a system that rivals the British trade that the British really can't control,” Siegel explains. “They get called smugglers.”
Their activity challenged the East India Company’s effort to manage supply and prices. Eventually, British authorities accommodated the trade and collected duties from it.
“They brought those Indian merchants into the system,” Siegel says, “and many of the Asian fortunes of the 19th century start from that trade that Britain eventually had to contend with too.”
Opium therefore supported both colonial revenues and private fortunes. Its economy included Indian commercial initiative as well as the restricted choices of cultivators.
Medicine, vice and contraband
By the late Victorian period, opposition to the trade of opium become organised and vocal.
“There are missionaries, women's activists, reformers who all say, ‘This is a drug trade. We can't be involved anymore,’” Siegel says. But the dispute was complicated by opium’s accepted medical uses. Critics could oppose its non-medical consumption while supporting its availability as a medicine. Where to draw that boundary involved commercial interests and moral judgements as well as medical evidence.
- Read more | "Sodomy was a very widespread phenomenon": the secret sex lives of China's most infamous pirates
“Is it a medicine? Is it contraband?” Siegel asks. “This is never a scientific line [established].”
A Royal Commission appointed in 1893 reported in 1895. Siegel summarises its practical outcome as: “It's a bad system, but we're going to keep it anyway.”
The commission’s own position rejected central claims about the harm of Indian consumption and supported retaining the existing arrangements. Opponents challenged its evidence and independence in a contentious parliamentary debate.
It wasn’t opium alone that financed the empire. But its vast contribution and interconnectedness do help explain why ending the trade proved so difficult. It connected the Indian government’s accounts to merchants’ investments and Britain’s position in China. By the time reformers demanded its abolition, those connections had become too embedded in the operation of imperial rule.
Benjamin Robert Siegel was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[D-Day could have ended in disaster – but one Scottish hero changed everything]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-a-weatherman-really-save-d-day-from-disaster-how-5-forecasts-changed-the-course-of-history/ 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z 2026-09-21T15:00:26.000Z 1. A national warning
A ruinous storm in 1859 gives rise to the Shipping Forecast
On 25–26 October 1859, the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century raged. “The wind screamed like a living thing,” was how one witness described a night when winds reached hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The storm took 800 lives and 133 ships. As it progressed, twice as many people were lost at sea around the British Isles than in the whole of the previous year. Yet out of the devastation was born one of the most significant innovations in the history of meteorology.
The weather event was dubbed the Royal Charter Storm after a famous steam clipper. On the last leg of a journey from Melbourne to Liverpool, Royal Charter was driven ashore on the north coast of Anglesey with the loss of around 460 lives, including all the women and children aboard. In the era of the Australian gold rush, a cargo of gold insured for the equivalent of £35m in today’s money was also lost. There were only 40 survivors, most of whom owed their lives to the heroism of Maltese sailor Joseph Rogers, who managed to get ashore with a rope. The disaster remains the highest loss of life in any single shipwreck on the Welsh coast.
Unsurprisingly, given the death toll, public attention soon focused on the need to prevent a similar tragedy. Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, founder of the Meteorological Office, which had been collecting observations from around the British coastline since 1854, believed his department could provide this service.
FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle on the circumnavigation that helped shape Charles Darwin’s thinking, was an experienced mariner who understood how to forecast changes in the weather based on observations of pressure, wind speed and direction. Analysing the Royal Charter gale and others, he proved that weather observations could be obtained using the new electric telegraph and undersea cables, creating the ability to forecast poor weather. Along with new weather forecasts, he proposed a national storm warning system.
A first warning was issued on 6 February 1861. It read: “Caution: Gale threatening from south-west and then northward. Show signal drum.” The warnings used a combination of canvas cone and drum shapes by day and lights by night, which were hoisted on a staff to warn ships of an approaching gale.
Yet not everyone took heed. On 9 February, a severe storm struck the north-east coast of England. Around 200 vessels, which had put to sea despite the warning, were lost. The Whitby lifeboat capsized with the loss of all but one of the crew during its sixth rescue.
However, further warnings were heeded and the number of lives lost around Britain fell by about a third. The reliability of FitzRoy’s methods was such that Queen Victoria requested weather forecasts before sailing to her retreat on the Isle of Wight. The warning system, believed to be the world’s oldest national forecast service, is now known as the Shipping Forecast.
2. Battlefield intelligence
Meteorologists power British advances at Passchendaele in 1917
The reply was unequivocal bordering on tetchy when the Meteorological Office offered its assistance to the military in 1914. “The Army does not go to war with umbrellas,” noted the War Office. But after disastrous losses in the air, artillery misfires and the introduction of gas warfare, attitudes changed. The Meteorological Field Service, universally known as Meteor RE, was established in 1915 and operated from the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters at Montreuil, France.
Meteor initially provided frontline warnings when conditions were potentially suitable for the deployment of poison gas by either side, or when observations could be made from balloons to improve the accuracy of artillery. Later, aircraft of the Meteor Reconnaissance Flight improved the quality of these observations and provided forecasts for the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC).
But forecasting really came to the fore towards the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916. Engaged in a conflict of static trench warfare in waterlogged terrain and with winter approaching, commanders realised that an understanding of expected weather conditions had to play a key part in military planning.
The earliest known operational military forecast provided by the Met Office was written by the British meteorologist Major Ernest Gold on 24 October 1916. Soon the forecasts included charts and a selection of observations. At first, the charts were hand-drawn, which limited their production and distribution. However, their value became so evident that ‘clay copiers’ were introduced, enabling them to be shared far more widely.
This enhanced technology truly came into its own during the battle of Passchendaele – the opening stages of which were fought in exceptionally wet weather. In Ypres across the 31 days of August 1917, 127mm of rain tumbled from the skies, around 60mm more than average. With trenches immediately filling with water and parts of the battlefield turned to swamp, combat operations were severely compromised.
When the weather finally improved in late September and October, the British were ready to strike, thanks, in part, to the Met Office’s forecasts. The drier weather of September hardened the ground and brought early morning mists, which gave cover to advancing British infantry. When the mists cleared during the morning, German counter-attack formations were revealed to air and ground reconnaissance.
Armed with this intelligence, the British were able to launch offensives at the Menin Road Ridge (20–25 September), Polygon Wood (26 September–3 October) and Broodseinde (4 October). Together, these engagements led to British possession of the strategically important ridge east of Ypres – before the rain returned in October.
Ernest Gold’s diary includes notes from meetings and telephone calls with General Plumer, commander of the Second Army, and his chief of staff, General Harrington, warning them of deteriorating weather. Perhaps the British Army could fight the war with umbrellas, after all.
- Read more | The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived
3. A storm before D-Day
The Met Office saves thousands of soldiers’ lives in 1944
After long months of preparation, the Allied invasion of western Europe was set for 5 June 1944. The only thing that could delay D-Day was bad weather.
Timing was crucial. The invasion had to coincide with the Soviet summer offensive in the east to ensure maximum pressure on German resources. But moon and tide conditions were favourable on only three days: 5, 6 and 7 June. The odds of even broadly acceptable weather were at least 13-1. The requirement for a full moon at the same time as the desired weather roughly trebled the odds.
Enter Dr James Stagg. He was the Met Office official charged with negotiating the meteorological minefield that confronted the Allies in the nerve-shredding countdown to D-Day. Stagg’s job was to bring together the differing perspectives of meteorologists from the US Air Force, UK Met Office and Admiralty in order to provide accurate forecasts to General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. It was, to put it mildly, a fiendishly difficult job brief.
In terms of data, the Allies had a significant advantage. By June 1944, German forces had not only been pushed back in the air and at sea, they had largely failed to crack Allied codes. This meant that German forecasters likely lacked critical weather observations from the Atlantic. The chief meteorologist of the German 3 Air Fleet advised of poor weather conditions on 6 June. German commanders decided not to trigger their warning system, which had been designed to alert troops defending Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Atlantic Wall to potential invasion. Reassured, Rommel himself returned to Germany for his wife’s birthday party.
Thanks to the work of the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Allied forecasters had access to all of the German weather observations. But that didn’t mean they could agree on what the weather would bring. Initially, the American team strongly supported a favourable forecast for 5 June but the Met Office and Admiralty believed the weather would be bad. Following significant disagreements, Stagg briefed Eisenhower to expect poor conditions on the French coast – and so the invasion was postponed. The forecast was correct and thousands of lives were saved. Stagg was now under intense pressure to find a weather window on 6 or 7 June. In his diary, he wrote: “I am now getting rather stunned, it is all a nightmare.”
On 4 June, observations from the Atlantic had begun to indicate a brief window of better weather two days hence. Stagg’s diary again reflected the knife-edge nature of the decision when, responding to praise for his forecast from Admiral Creasy, he wrote: “I wonder. He should wait till he sees how things go.”
As it turned out, conditions were marginal. But finding that elusive weather window enabled Stagg and his forecasters to give the Allies the element of surprise. And as the greatest amphibious assault in history got under way, that element of surprise would prove crucial.
4. Forecasting by numbers
In 1965, meteorology enters the computer age
As a pacifist who drove ambulances during the First World War, Lewis Fry Richardson spent his breaks working out how to use mathematical equations in meteorology. Published in 1922, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process was years ahead of its time as it showed how to use mathematics and physics to predict the weather from a starting set of observations – and how this could be done for more than one location at the same time by splitting up an area into a chequerboard design to create gridded forecasts.
Richardson was the first to propose this form of forecasting, although his work was nearly lost when a draft of it was sent to the rear lines during the battle of Champagne and went missing, only to be unearthed months later under a heap of coal.
He calculated that to complete his forecasts in real-time he would require 64,000 “computors” (people carrying out calculations). Richardson imagined a “forecast factory” rather like a theatre in the round and full of boxes representing the grid squares. Computors in each box carried out calculations and passed on their results, all under the direction of a central conductor keeping everything moving on schedule. Conceptually, he was essentially describing the working of a supercomputer.
Experiments in the 1950s and 1960s built upon Richardson’s work to create a simple mathematical model of the atmosphere. The first operational computer forecast using numerical weather prediction (NWP) arrived on 2 November 1965. The technique enabled the Met Office to produce twice-daily forecasts at three levels in the atmosphere across the North Atlantic and western Europe. Even with today’s more sophisticated forecasts, Richardson’s basic equations are still present.
Using computers to produce weather forecasts dramatically enhanced forecasts to extend further into the future. It gave earlier warning of severe weather events, as well as allowing forecasting for different parts of the globe. Some of the earliest impacts were seen in aviation forecasting. As early as April 1966, NWP showed that deep low pressure would bring strong high-level winds in the mid-Atlantic and heavy snowfall to much of the UK, including London. Pilots and airlines were alerted to the risks associated with these conditions.
Models have constantly improved. When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, meteorologists took just 48 hours to extend their forecasting model into the South Atlantic. These days, the Met Office supercomputer is based in the cloud and can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second. A far cry from Richardson’s original design, but nevertheless an evolution of his original idea.
5. Hurricane? What hurricane?
In 1987, a BBC forecaster issues an infamous denial
On 15 October 1987, BBC forecaster Michael Fish delivered Britain’s most infamous weather forecast. “Earlier on today,” he said, “a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.” He was correct, but he was talking about a storm over the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He said it wouldn’t reach the UK and it didn’t. However, a rapidly deepening area of low pressure from the Bay of Biscay did.
Forecasters had flagged the risk of severe weather days in advance, but early models showed the worst of it staying just south of England. As things played out, though, a clash between unusually warm tropical air and cold polar air forced the warm air upward, creating a deep area of low pressure. The sharp temperature contrast produced a particularly intense weather system.
Several ingredients made the Great Storm so memorable, but its track was probably most significant. Hitting the south coast, it pushed north and east, reaching the Humber estuary at about 5.30am on 16 October. This path included densely populated areas.
Gusts exceeded 100mph, uprooting 15 million trees, tearing roofs from houses, flattening vehicles and severing power across much of southern England. One family in Kent recalled waking as “the house shook as though grabbed by a giant hand”. Roads were blocked, trains halted, entire counties were plunged into chaos and 18 people died. The highest gust recorded over the UK was 115mph at Shoreham in Sussex at 3.10am. A Guardian article, “Mayhem brings London to halt”, described how power supplies, telephone connections and transport infrastructure collapsed. It also reported that Woolworths had sold 25,000 brooms and 50,000 candles as people tried to cope in the aftermath.
The apparent mismatch between the forecasts and the storm’s severity sparked national debate. The Great Storm became a catalyst for investment and improvement in the science, technology and communication of forecasting, which has since transformed the way the UK understands and responds to severe weather.
After 1987, the Met Office created the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) to give government, industry, emergency responders and the public a clear, coordinated system for severe weather alerts. The warnings help people prepare. Back then, alerts were sent by fax and email to emergency services and media outlets for broadcast on TV and radio. Today, most people get forecasts and warnings through apps, social media and the web. Since 2015, storms have been named to provide a shared reference point.
The Great Storm stands as a reminder that accurate forecasting saves lives and that, when the worst weather hits, it enters national folklore. Just ask Michael Fish.
Catherine Ross is the library and archive manager at the Met Office
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA["Sodomy was a very widespread phenomenon": the secret sex lives of China's most infamous pirates]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sodomy-was-a-very-widespread-phenomenon-the-secret-sex-lives-of-chinas-most-infamous-pirates/ 2026-08-31T10:31:04.000Z 2026-08-31T10:30:58.000Z The busy, tropical sea off southern Imperial China in the 19th-century was the maritime home of one of the most dominant pirate organisations in world history. At its height, Guangdong Pirate Confederation operated with hundreds of vessels, and tens of thousands of people.
This pirate fleet made its name as China's Qing dynasty was at the height of its pre-Opium War power. The Qing state ruled an enormous empire, but policing the long and fragmented coastline of Guangdong and neighbouring provinces was persistently difficult, leaving space for the fleets of the Guangdong Pirate Confederation to organise a highly complex and ordered system of piracy.
But for all that the world of the Guangdong Pirate Confederation is that of typical pirate violence and aggression – terrorising coastal communities and plundering their loot – there seems to have been one facet of life within these criminal fleets that might be more unexpected.
Historian Dian Murray, author of Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810, was studying official records relating to captured pirates. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, she recalled examining around 89 cases concerning pirates apprehended in the South China Sea.
"In around 54 of them, sodomy or homosexual relations were mentioned. I found that to have been a very widespread phenomenon when I did my research," she says. In other words, in most cases where pirates from the Guangdong Pirate Confederation were captured and charged, homosexuality was mentioned among the pirates’ transgressions.
Were romantic and sexual relationships between men genuinely commonplace aboard Chinese pirate vessels? Were these encounters consensual? Did they reflect the overwhelmingly male environment of ships that often spent long periods at sea? Or could sex instead have been used to express hierarchy, domination or initiation within pirate crews?
The records studied by Murray don’t give a straightforward answer. Indeed, Murray stresses that "we don't know". But these records do undoubtedly open an intriguing window onto sex and intimacy in a maritime society very different from our own – and raise a broader problem for historians attempting to understand homosexuality in the past.
What was life like aboard the pirate ships of the South China Sea?
Piracy had long existed along China's southern coastline, but around the turn of the 19th century it expanded dramatically. One of the most important figures in this transformation was Zheng Yi, a pirate leader who helped bring previously competing pirate fleets into a much larger confederation in the first years of the 1800s. He helped forge agreements between major pirate fleets, which were often distinguished by coloured flags. The resulting loose coalition allowed previously rival commanders to cooperate and coordinate operations without surrendering all their independence.
His wife, Zheng Yi Sao, would become even more famous. After Zheng Yi's death in 1807, she played a central role in maintaining the confederation, working closely with another pirate commander, Zhang Bao. So, life within this world was overwhelmingly male, but not exclusively so.
"There were provisions about families on board ships, and certain women were allowed," explains Murray. "If females were captured and held for ransom, some of them could be purchased by the pirates, or they could live with them on board ship," she says.
Precisely how such arrangements operated in practice is much harder to establish. Pirate codes and official accounts can tell historians what was supposed to happen, or what authorities claimed had happened, without necessarily revealing the realities of individual lives. Nevertheless, what is clear is that women were present aboard at least some pirate vessels, and in Zheng Yi Sao’s case, held significant power. That makes the evidence of frequent homosexuality more complicated than a story in which men formed sexual relationships when no women were available.
One particularly important same-sex relationship took place within the complex family at the heart of the pirate confederation.
Zheng Yi’s relationship with Zhang Bao
Zhang Bao became one of the most powerful figures in the South China Sea pirate world. He had originally been captured by pirates as a young man and was eventually incorporated into the family of Zheng Yi and Zheng Yi Sao.
"When Zhang Bao was taken into the family and adopted, he also had a homosexual relationship with Zheng Yi," says Murray.
Following Zheng Yi's death, Zheng Yi Sao formed a partnership with Zhang Bao. Partly, this was politically expedient: Zheng Yi Sao possessed authority, experience and connections within the confederation, while Zhang Bao commanded the loyalty of a large body of fighting men. Their partnership helped prevent the organisation from fragmenting after Zheng Yi's death. But it was also personal. They had a child together and ultimately married, while Zhang Bao assumed an increasingly prominent position in the pirate confederation.
As Murray describes, this is an incredible transition. “Zheng Yi Sao ultimately, upon the death of her husband, took over the relationship and had a child and was associated with Zhang Bao for the rest of his life."
The resulting family structure might seem unusual to modern eyes. But retrospectively applying modern categories too rigidly can obscure rather than clarify what was happening. A pirate in early 19th-century China having sexual relationships with both men and women does not necessarily tell us how he understood his own sexuality.
What did sex between male pirates mean?
So, homosexual relationship appears to have been sufficiently common to leave a striking footprint in the surviving legal evidence, but "what did all this mean?" Murray asks.
"Did it mean a love relationship at sea, which was not an uncommon thing? Or, did it mean some kind of power drive on the part of a superior vis-à-vis an inferior? Did it mean a kind of initiation?"
"We don't know," Murray says.
A reference to "sodomy" in a legal document tells us that an act was alleged or recorded. It doesn’t automatically tell us what the participants felt about one another, how consensual their encounter was, or what identity – if any – they attached to their sexual behaviour.
This same challenge with understanding the sexualities of the past presents itself elsewhere in history.
In parts of the Classical Greek world, sexual relationships between men could exist within recognised social frameworks, often shaped heavily by age and status. The categories governing those relationships were not equivalent to modern ideas of homosexuality.
Pre-modern Japan likewise had well-documented traditions of male-male sexuality in particular social settings, including among samurai and within Buddhist institutions. Again, such relationships existed within their own cultural systems rather than mapping neatly onto the identities used in the 21st century.
Neither of these examples clarifies the complicated sexual world operating within the overwhelmingly male world of South China Sea piracy. Like a ship drifting through mist and fog, these relationships are obscured by distance, and remain just out of sight.
Dian Murray was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[The captain's wife who took command]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/captains-wife-who-took-command-podcast/ 2026-08-26T08:51:46.000Z 2026-07-10T12:33:59.000Z In the middle of the 19th century, the world's fastest ships raced across oceans carrying cargo, and the fortunes of ambitious young sea captains. In this episode, author Tilar J Mazzeo explores one voyage that produced an unlikely maritime legend.
Speaking to Elinor Evans, Mazzeo shares the remarkable life of Mary Ann Patten, who found herself commanding a clipper ship after her husband fell gravely ill during a perilous passage around Cape Horn.
]]> Jon Bauckham <![CDATA[How to find a billion-dollar shipwreck]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-to-find-billion-dollar-shipwreck-podcast/ 2026-04-17T12:37:13.000Z 2026-04-17T07:49:54.000Z In 1708, the Spanish galleon San José was sunk by a British warship off the coast of Colombia, vanishing beneath the waves with a treasure trove of unimaginable riches. The wreck's exact location remained a mystery for centuries – until a maritime archaeologist named Roger Dooley made it his life’s mission to find it.
In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Julian Sancton tells Jon Bauckham about Dooley’s incredible search, set against a backdrop of secrecy, sacrifice and Cold War tensions.
]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[The battle of the Arctic: the forgotten crucible of WW2]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/battle-arctic-ww2-podcast/ 2026-04-06T10:49:04.000Z 2026-04-06T10:48:53.000Z The US and UK supplied the USSR with vast amounts of military materiel during the Second World War via the Arctic convoys.
In this episode, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore speaks to David Musgrove about the importance of this campaign in shaping the outcome of the war – and details the many horrors faced by the merchant sailors who made the difficult and dangerous journey from Iceland to Russia.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1756-a-young-englishwoman-was-taken-hostage-by-barbary-pirates-this-is-her-story/ 2026-10-18T14:31:45.000Z 2026-01-09T15:00:12.000Z The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered.
The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself.
The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July.
- Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of pirates
Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children.
Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side.
African captivity
After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots.
Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife.
Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem.
Before the acting sultan
In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives.
At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”.
Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.”
Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account:
“Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion.
“The shock of this pronouncement was severe... I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery.
“The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.”
Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives.
Release and return
The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart.
Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease.
Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story.
Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account
This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-krakens-to-serpents-5-fearsome-sea-monsters-from-history/ 2026-01-02T14:15:12.000Z 2026-01-02T15:30:11.000Z 1. Armed and dangerous
The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust
Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered.
Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”.
One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.”
British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup.
Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species.
Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.”
The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”.
2. A feminine fantasy
Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms
Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions.
In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”.
Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.”
In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later.
Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin.
3. Terror in the deep
For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors
It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him.
“Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance.
As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth.
For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote.
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The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia.
4. The theory of de-evolution
Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past
To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people.
Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth.
Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human.
For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents.
By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature:
“For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned.
‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play,
Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned.
Leviathan pursued his placid way!”
5. Visions of Atlantis
Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells
“A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.”
In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries.
Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful.
Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis.
Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character.
The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian.
This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did?
Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025)
This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Roger Moorhouse <![CDATA[Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/terror-in-the-deep-how-hitlers-u-boats-pushed-britain-to-the-brink/ 2025-11-03T09:01:03.000Z 2025-11-03T09:00:20.000Z On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness.
As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind.
Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position.
Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear.
The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later.
A bloody exception
It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.”
Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime.
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Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters.
Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism?
Licence to kill?
At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit.
Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience.
It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence.
Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind.
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For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing.
In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy.
Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether.
The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”.
That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.”
Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one.
Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy.
Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units.
This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side.
We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east.
The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities.
Moral outrage
Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism.
Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.”
He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his.
The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton.
Biological hatred
In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality.
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This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just.
The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors.
The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception.
Britain's near-death experience
How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation
During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign.
Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat.
Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war.
The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic.
Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were
strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission.
In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow.
How the Allies turned the tide
A timeline of the war against the U-boats
3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses
March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe
This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[The place where TIME began | A history of GMT]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-place-where-time-began-a-history-of-gmt/ 2025-10-25T15:28:03.000Z 2025-10-25T15:27:20.000Z Long before smartphones and digital clocks, time was a local affair, creating chaos, confusion and even danger. On location at Royal Observatory, Greenwich in southeast London, HistoryExtra's Elinor Evans unpacks how astronomers, mathematicians, and global powers collaborated to create Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Joined by Louise Devoy, Senior Curator of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we investigate the milestone innovations in this story, including the story of the Observatory Time Ball, the Shepherd Motor Clock, and George Biddell Airy's meridian Prime Meridian.
From solving longitude at sea to defining timezones for the entire planet, this is the story of how we learned to master time.
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Find out more about the history of time, space and navigation and plan a visit to the Royal Observatory
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