Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is a story of a night of terrible losses

for the Royal Navy, a disaster for English sea power and much else besides, because this

was a defeat not the hands of the enemy, but the hands of the weather. The reason we

talk about it now is because a survivor has emerged from the sands of the English channel.

This is the story about the great storm of 1703 and HMS Northumberland.

In early December 1703, the barometer plunged and a cyclone smashed into central and southern

England. In London, something like 2000 chimney stacks were knocked over, the roof was

bluffed Westminster Abbey. Queen Anne took shelter in the cellar of St James's palace.

Hundreds of ships were smashed together on the Thames and left in a great heap. Thousands

of homes were flooded along the River Thames, hundreds of windmills were destroyed.

Renidious folks obviously declared that this was a sign of God's fury with the sinful

state of the nation. Daniel DeFoe who wrote an entire book about the storm, blamed it

on God being angry that England wasn't doing well enough in the war of Austrian succession.

But the greatest damage was done to the fleet of the Royal Navy, the ships anchored off

the coast of England. Many of which were in very, very secure anchorages, shows just how

hard these hurricane force winds were blowing. The Royal Navy is thought to have lost

around 13 ships down the Phoses at about a fifth of the entire fleet, so far more catastrophic

than really any battle in terms of losses that Royal Navy has fought since then. Over

a thousand semen were drowned, and among the ships lost, in the supposedly secure anchorage

off Kent, the Downs, was HMS Northumberland. Everybody aboard was killed, and for 300 years

it has lain covered up by the sands of the Goodwin, obscure to the eyes of divers. Until

now. Recently, shifting sands have unveiled the Northumberland.

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