How to Survive the Age of Sail

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What was life really like aboard the great wooden ships of the Age of Sail? Dan joins After Dark hosts Anthony and Maddy to step aboard these creaking vessels and uncover who served at sea, what drove them to enlist, and just how slim their chances were of making it home alive.

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history.
0:12.5	Now, long-time listening to this podcast, we'll know that if there's one period in history that I would like to go back to, it would be the age of sail.
0:22.1	When those European powers sent out expeditions, great voyages across uncharted oceans,
0:28.4	it was a time of exploration and settlement, time of pirates and privateers and corsets,
0:33.4	it was plundering and pillaging and violence.
0:36.5	There were great sea battles from the Armada to Trafalgar.
0:40.3	It's when our European world became much, much bigger.
0:44.3	It was a time of adventure and discovery and sails filling in westerly winds,
0:48.3	sheets straining at the clues, spice barrels in warehouses of cannon smoke hanging over the ocean.
0:56.9	It's a time with some of the greatest stories from our history, and it's a time that shaped
1:00.3	the world that we still live in today. The good, the bad and the ugly.
1:06.2	It was also an era of enslavement, of colonisation, of unimaginable violence and sickness and disease,
1:13.6	and desperation, of clinging on to the taffrail and hurricane forces off Cape Horn, the ice forming on the yards.
1:22.6	It's an age that some people romanticised, but was actually pretty dark and pretty grim.
2:00.8	Death by typhus, or perhaps taking some grape shot to the neck, well, that was just the tip of the iceberg. So for today's episode, we're going to explore the dark history of the age of sail. I'm teaming up with my good friends from the AfterDart podcast, Dr. Maddie Pelling and Dr. Anthony Delaney. And let me say as a man who loves the ocean, loves sailing, and I always used to dream about being part of Nelson's fleet when I was a child, or on Cochran's crew, or he perhaps Captain Kidd's pirate crew, particularly when I discovered that he forced his crew to be in bed by 8pm. I'm here for that. But anyway, after doing research over the last few years, and particularly for this podcast, I'm really not entirely sure I would have been suitable. So please listen, and then you get to decide if you could survive
2:05.6	the age of sale. Enjoy.
2:10.1	T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity
2:16.7	till there is first in black unity.
2:19.2	Never to go to war with one another again.
2:22.0	And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the power.
2:28.5	Okay, we've done a lot of ship episodes on After Dark.
2:31.1	We have done, and I'm going to list them now, and you won't remember.
	...

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