History's Toughest Heroes: Robert Smalls: Last Chance for Freedom

History's Heroes

BBC

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.8 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For an enslaved man like Robert Smalls during the American Civil War, there was only way out of Charleston: through the harbour and past hostile Confederate forts. He just needed a ship...

In History's Toughest Heroes, Ray Winstone tells ten true stories of adventurers, rebels and survivors who lived life on the edge.

Robert Smalls was born a slave in the American South. His one chance at escape and freedom hung on a key act of bravery on a single night. He’d have to sail right under the noses and massive cannons of the Confederate ships and forts . If he hoped to survive with his fellow fleeing slaves, he’d have to be bold, be a great actor, don a cunning disguise and have nerves of steel to pull it off. A BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. Producer: Michael LaPointe Development Producer: Georgina Leslie Executive Producer: Paul Smith Written by Imogen Robertson Commissioning editor for Radio 4: Rhian Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:05.0	They call themselves Evil Corps, a cybercrime gang accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:13.0	And at the center of it all, one of the FBI's most wanted.
0:17.0	They ran their operations out of the back of an Italian restaurant in Moscow.
0:22.0	How does a man hunted by the world's top law enforcers still manage to grow an empire?
0:26.6	These guys were going to town on small businesses across America.
0:30.9	They anger, the frustration, the fear.
0:33.5	Cyberhack, Evil Corps. Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:40.4	You're about to listen to History's toughest heroes.
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0:46.6	But if you're in the UK and you can't wait,
0:49.3	you can listen to the latest episode a week early.
0:51.5	First on BBC Sounds.
0:55.0	He knew it had to be tonight.
1:01.3	It was 3 o'clock in the morning on the 13th of May, 1862.
1:07.8	The harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, was in deep darkness.
1:15.6	Fog muffled the few sounds of the night, the lapping of the water against the wolf and the creek of ropes. Ten miles out in the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean, a fleet of Union ships were on the watch.
1:23.6	America was in civil war. Union forces have blockaded the arbor, trying to stop supplies passing through Charleston into the slave-owning Confederate states beyond.
1:36.9	I mean, they were so desperate for basic living items. The Charleston Mercury, their newspaper, had stories about how to make your own soap.
1:47.2	But for enslaved people like Robert Smalls, trapped in the Confederacy, the ships promised something else.
1:55.9	A chance of freedom. It was so close, but so far. So since his marriage at the age of 17, Robert had been
	...

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